Flying mounts enable players to take their adventure to new heights. Two types of flying mounts were revealed at the Fan Festival, a flying black chocobo and single-rider airships, both making it easier to explore the floating lands that will be featured prominently in the expansion.

Heavensward also introduces two new beast tribes, the Vanu Vanu and the Gnath, as well as their primals, Bismarck, and Ravana, respectively.

Zones in Final Fantasy XIV are already huge — they’re designed to fit within 2km by 2km boundaries — but there are new scenarios to consider since Heavensward will introduce flying mounts (including flying chocobos and single-rider airships) for the first time. Flying mounts will get you around approximately three times faster than ground-based mounts, but Yoshida’s team is making sure to include surprising elements and discoveries within each zone to keep players exploring.

There will be around 1.5 times as much area to explore in Heavensward’s new zones — while there may be fewer zones, there will end up being just as much traversable area in Heavensward at launch as in A Realm Reborn.

If you already own A Realm Reborn and you get Heavensward, you’ll be able to at least enter Ishgard. The new jobs added in Heavensward are not tied to the main story, so those are accessible as well. In terms of the story, if you want to enjoy the Heavensward story arc, since it’s tied to the upcoming 2.55 patch, it’s a prerequisite to have finished that content. If a player had stopped playing around patch 2.2 or 2.3, it's recommend choosing one of the new jobs and leveling that up while catching up on the story, then transitioning into Heavensward.

There will be changes applied to each job.

One common change is that the job quest will continue from where it left off starting around level 52, so you’ll obtain new skills, spells and weapon skills. So when you go into combat you’ll have a wider range of selection in what kinds of actions you can take during battle. For example, if you play as a DPS job and you learn a new skill or spell, you can implement that into the command set you have built, or build a new one from scratch and strategize how you can apply these new skills. With some of the boss characters in Heavensward, you actually can’t fight them using your older skills — they might require you to know new skills that are only available after the level cap has been raised. This will create an opportunity for players to get together with the community to strategize how to beat these monsters. It’s safe to assume that you’ll be experiencing a new gameplay experience with the raising of the level cap.