Starting a general information Chocobo thread. Now that we can raise Chocobos to R20 they might turn out to be fairly useful. Stealing Seravi's formatting because I'm lazy.
Chocobo Basics:
There are three types of Chocobo currently:
Attacker
Tank
Healer
Achieving rank 10 and spending 10 ranks worth of points in a single skill tree will earn you the one-time reward of Job Specific barding. Resetting a Chocobo's skill tree via Regan Pepper and leveling another tree to R10 will not net you a different barding.
Chocobo Stance Basics
There are 4 stances you can choose from for your Chocobo:
Free
Attacker
Healer
Tank
Attack, Healer, and Tank stances will restrict your Choco to only using skills learned in the respective tree and may restrict even auto-attacks depending on the stance.
Free stance allows your Choco to use any abilities that they have learned, though seemingly less effectively. An example of this is if you have a healer Chocobo in Free stance it will still use Choco Surge / Choco Cure / Choco Regen, but it will wait until you are at a lower HP% to start casting. It also seems to prioritizing attacking over curing you while in Free.
The upside to using Free stance is that you can receive light cures while your Chocobo still has access to more powerful attacks / dots (Attacker Tree) or a small amount of tanking ability (Tank Tree).
Rank 10 abilities are mostly useless. I suggest bringing your Chocobo to R10 once for the barding you like and then spending 20 Allied Seals on a Regan Pepper. Once reset you can level your Chocobo to back up to R9 in your main tree and R4 in another tree, or I believe you can also do R7/R7 split at R10 cap (I haven't tried, I use R9/R4).
Training Your Chocobo
Food-------------- Normal Effect------------------------- Favorite Effect
Curiel Root--------Companion EXP Up----------------- Companion EXP Up II
Sylkis Bud---------Companion Attack Up --------------Companion Attack Up II
Mimett Gourd---- Companion Healing Up------------- Companion Healing Up II
Tantalplant ------ Companion Maximum HP Up ---- Companion Maximum HP Up II
Pahsana Fruit----- Companion Enmity Up ----------- Companion Enmity Up II
At R10 feeding my Chocobo a Mimmet Gourd yields ~13,120 EXP.
Any more data on EXP by rank would be appreciated.
R10 And Higher
If your chocobo is Rank 10 or higher, you will need to give it Thavnairian Onion. Each Thavnairian Onion increases the maximum rank of the chocobo by 1.
Thav. Onion being fed as a reward yielded the same EXP as I get from Mimmet Gourd.
Using a Thav. Onion will not automatically level your Chocobo up to R11, it merely unlocks the 1,485,000 EXP you need for R11.
By breaking R10 cap you open up the ability to receive bardings from other trees. I have not tried resetting my skills since using a Thav. Onion, but it was mentioned in an interview that we are supposed to use the AP we get at R10+ towards ranking up other skill trees aside from our main R10. Achieving a 2nd and 3rd R10 tree will allow us to get the respective bardings.
Quick mental math suggests R18 would be the earliest we can be R10 in every tree (please someone check to make sure I'm not retarded).
I highly suggest making Curiel Root your Chocobo's favorite food once you're trying to reach R11+. The healing potency is obviously very nice, as is DPS increases, and will inevitably be the goal. But leveling up is just so fucking tedious, any bit helps.
Preferred Actions
At R6 in every tree there is a Critical Hit Rate +15% skill. I believe they stack, but short of an in-depth parse I'm not 100% sure.
For good DPS from your Chocobo I suggest going after the STR+X% that are available in each tree as well as the Attack Speed +X% available to attacker. These buffs seem to persist despite the stance (testing needed for confirmation).