FFXIV Daily Roulettes Guide: Which Roulettes Are Worth Running

Daily roulettes are the engine that keeps FFXIV ticking. You pick a category, the game drops you into a random dungeon or trial you've already unlocked, and you walk out with a fat once-a-day bonus piled on top of the normal loot. Do that across a handful of categories and your jobs basically level themselves, your tomestones stack up, and your gil account looks a lot healthier.

The catch is that there are around a dozen roulettes, and most players fall into one of two traps. They either skip the ones that matter, or they try to grind through every single one each day and burn out inside a week. Neither is great. So here's the short version of what each roulette pays, when it unlocks, and which ones genuinely deserve a spot in your daily routine.

How Roulettes Work and Unlock

The core idea is simple. Each roulette category is a grab bag of duties you've personally unlocked. You queue up, the Duty Finder picks one at random, and when you finish the run you collect a daily bonus. That bonus is a mix of experience, gil, Grand Company seals, and Allagan Tomestones, and the exact blend depends on the category. The bonus only fires once a day per category, though. Run the same roulette again and you're getting the thin base rewards with no extra topping.

Everything refreshes at the daily reset, which lands at 3 PM GMT sharp (10 AM Eastern, 7 AM Pacific). So if you play evenings in North America, your "daily" roulettes actually carry pretty deep into the night before they flip over.

One thing people trip on early: the experience goes to the job you queue on, not whatever you swap to once you're inside. Want to grow your Warrior? Queue as Warrior. Sounds obvious, but it's worth saying plainly because a lot of folks swap jobs at the wrong moment and wonder where their XP went.

Now the part that really confuses newcomers. Roulettes don't just pop open when you hit a certain level. You have to earn them by clearing duties. Every category wants a minimum number of duties in its pool unlocked and finished before the roulette itself becomes available.

| Roulette | Rough unlock | What you need | |---|---|---| | Leveling | Level 16 | Clear Sastasha and The Tam-Tara Deepcroft | | Guildhests | Level 10 | Unlock at least 2 guildhests | | Trials | Level 50ish | Unlock 2 or more trials in the pool | | Main Scenario | Level 50 | Clear Castrum Meridianum, The Praetorium, and The Porta Decumana | | High-level Dungeons | Level 50 | Unlock 2+ level-cap dungeons, item level 45+ | | Normal Raids | Level 60+ | Unlock 2 or more normal raids | | Alliance Raids | Level 50 | Unlock 2+ alliance raids (Crystal Tower comes first) | | Level Cap Dungeons | Level 100 | Clear all dungeons in the pool, item level 720 | | Expert | Level 100 | Clear every current endgame dungeon, item level 750 | | Frontline | Level 30 | Have a Soul Crystal (your job stone) equipped | | Mentor | Level 100 | Be a qualified Battle Mentor, item level 755 |

So when a roulette shows up greyed out, it's almost always because you haven't unlocked enough of the duties inside it yet. Keep pushing the main story, knock out the side quests that open dungeons and raids, and these will unlock on their own. A fresh character won't have most of them, and that's completely normal.

The XP Heavy Hitters

If you're trying to push a job from, say, level 50 all the way to 100, a small handful of roulettes do most of the heavy lifting. These are the ones you want to queue first thing when you log in.

Leveling Roulette is the daily workhorse, full stop. It pulls from every leveling dungeon and leveling trial across all the expansions, and the daily bonus is a big slab of experience that scales with your current level. The further below the duty's level you are, the bigger the boost you get on top. For a job sitting in its 30s or 40s, a single Leveling run can be worth close to half a level. If you're actively growing anything, this one is pretty much mandatory.

Alliance Raid Roulette has quietly turned into one of the best experience-per-minute deals in the whole game. You collect a flat pile of XP just for finishing the run, plus extra experience for every boss you drop, and these duties tend to be quick. Land on the Crystal Tower series and 24 people will blaze through it in maybe 15 minutes. Even the longer alliance raids feel painless because there are 23 other players carrying their weight alongside you. For the time you spend, the payoff is hard to top.

Main Scenario Roulette hands out the single biggest experience dump of any roulette in the game. The trade-off is your time. These are the old Castrum Meridianum and Praetorium duties from the end of the A Realm Reborn story, and they run 30 to 45 minutes with big chunks of unskippable cutscenes. That's exactly why people nickname it the Netflix roulette. You queue it, then go watch a show. If you've got the time and you don't mind the dead air, the experience is fantastic. Got only 20 minutes to spare? Skip it and come back later.

A quick word on squeezing more out of these. Queue on the job you want to grow, eat some food for the small experience buff, and remember that the Armory Bonus doubles your experience on any job below your highest level. That last one is huge for leveling alts, and it stacks with the roulette bonus. Knock out Leveling plus Alliance Raids first each day, since those two move the needle more than anything else, then slot in Main Scenario whenever you've got a long stretch free.

Tomestone Farming Roulettes

Once you're parked at level 100, experience stops mattering and tomestones become the whole prize. These are the currencies you trade for endgame gear. In Dawntrail the two current endgame tomestones are Allagan Tomestones of Aesthetics, which are uncapped so you can hoard as many as you want, and Allagan Tomestones of Heliometry, which cap at 450 a week and buy the strongest gear available. Sitting underneath both of those are Allagan Tomestones of Poetics, which cover gear from every older expansion and never cap at all. Don't get too attached to the names, by the way, since the capped and uncapped labels rotate with each even-numbered major patch.

Here's the detail that trips people up. The endgame tomestones only pay out if you're actually at the level cap. Queue these roulettes on a level 100 job, or you'll just get experience and Poetics instead. Poetics you can collect at any level, which is exactly why they're so handy for grabbing old glamour sets and relic weapons while you're still leveling.

Expert Roulette is the daily anchor for tomestones. It draws from the two newest level-100 dungeons, the runs are quick and consistent, and it pays 60 Aesthetics plus 40 Heliometry per day. If you're chasing that 450 weekly Heliometry cap, this is your first stop every single day. Eleven days of Expert alone basically fills your week, and that's before you count any other sources.

Level Cap Dungeons Roulette is Expert's older, roomier cousin. It pulls from the level-100 dungeons that have already rotated out of Expert, so there's way more variety and you're far less likely to get bored of the same two pulls. It pays 100 Aesthetics and 15 Heliometry, meaning more of the uncapped currency than Expert gives you, with a bit less of the capped stuff. A nice second daily when you want to stockpile Aesthetics.

Alliance Raid Roulette pulls double duty here, which is why people love it. On top of all that experience, it drops 120 Poetics, 120 Aesthetics, and 50 Heliometry. That's a genuinely huge pile of currency for something that's also fast and fun. Probably the best all-around value the game offers right now.

Normal Raid Roulette gives 80 Poetics, 60 Aesthetics, and 20 Heliometry. The eight-player normal raids are short and pretty forgiving, so this is an easy add when you want more tomestones without much effort or stress.

Trials Roulette pays 60 Aesthetics and 15 Heliometry, plus a chunky 12,000 gil on top. Trial fights are single-boss and over fast, so even though the raw tomestone count looks smaller, the tomestones-per-minute are decent.

If currency is the goal, the order shakes out like this. Run Expert first for the weekly-capped stuff, then hit Alliance Raids and Level Cap Dungeons for big uncapped piles, then fill in with Trials and Normal Raids as time allows.

Roulettes You Can Skip

Not every roulette earns a spot in your daily loop. A few of them pay so little that the queue time ends up costing you more than the reward is worth. Here's where you can cut without feeling any guilt.

Guildhests Roulette is the big one to drop. The payout is tiny, around 1,120 gil and 530 company seals, with no tomestones at all. The only honest reason to touch it is the Challenge Log, which asks you to clear a few guildhests each week for a separate bonus. Outside of ticking that box, skip it. As a DPS the queue can drag on forever for almost no return, and even as a tank or healer the payoff just isn't there.

Frontline, the Daily Challenge, is the PvP roulette. It does pay 50 Aesthetics and 20 Heliometry, plus a nice stack of PvP rewards the first time each day, namely 600 PvP experience, 1,500 Series Malmstone points, and 1,000 Wolf Marks. That's actually a pretty good haul. The catch is you have to actually enjoy large-scale player versus player combat. If big 72-person brawls are your thing, fantastic, run it daily. If they aren't, there's no shame in letting this one sit untouched.

High-level Dungeons Roulette, the old level 50, 60, 70, 80, and 90 duties, is mostly a Poetics and glamour farm. The experience is weak compared to real leveling dungeons, and some of these runs drag. It's perfectly fine if you specifically want old gear for glamour or you're just bored and want variety, but it's not earning a daily slot if pure progress is what you're after.

Mentor Roulette only exists for players who've qualified as Battle Mentors, and even then it's more of a community service gesture than a reward play. You can land in almost anything, from easy dungeons to old Extreme trials, so the length and difficulty are completely unpredictable. Don't queue it expecting a smooth, consistent daily grind.

The takeaway here is plain. Doing every roulette every single day is a fast road to burnout, and most of them aren't paying enough to justify it. Pick the two or three that match whatever you're chasing right now, whether that's leveling, tomestones, gil, or just a good time, and let the rest go. Your play sessions will feel a whole lot better.

Adventurer in Need Bonuses

There's a separate reward layered on top of everything else called the Adventurer in Need bonus, and it's one of the better-kept little tricks in the game for quietly making gil.

Every roulette category tracks which role, tank, healer, or DPS, is shortest on players at that moment. Queue as the role that's needed and you collect a bonus on top of your regular daily reward. You can see it right on the roulette tile in the Duty Finder, marked with an "Adventurer in Need" tag and the matching role icon.

Here's the part most people miss. That bonus stacks with your daily reward, and you can collect it every single time you run the roulette as the in-need role, even after you've already burned your once-a-day bonus for that category. So if tanks are needed for Leveling and you keep queuing tank, you keep pocketing the bonus, run after run after run. It's repeatable in a way the daily bonus isn't.

The role gets locked in the second you queue, too. Even if the demand flips to a different role while you're sitting in the queue, you still get paid for what was needed when you signed up.

So what's it actually worth? At Leveling, the in-need bonus is roughly 12,000 gil, 4,200 company seals, plus a Cracked Novacluster and two Cracked Prismaticlusters. Those clusters trade in at your Grand Company for materia, which is real money in the game economy. Expert throws in about 7,200 extra gil. Trials add around 4,320 gil. Alliance Raids chip in about 7,200 gil plus clusters. None of these numbers are life-changing on their own, but they stack up fast when you're running several roulettes a day.

And here's the real draw. Tanks and healers are almost always the in-need role, while DPS almost never are. So if you play a tank or a healer, you can basically farm a steady trickle of gil and seals just by doing the roulettes you'd run anyway. A lot of long-time players fund their entire daily habit this way and never think twice about it. Even as a DPS it's worth a quick glance at the Duty Finder before you queue. When you do catch your role showing up as in-need, grab it fast, because that window doesn't stay open for long.