Final Fantasy XIV (Guide in first post)

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Valorath

Trakanon Raider
908
1,442
Been leveling up SAM recently. I really like the job. It just feels good to play; the animations and sound effects are great, and the whole job just seems really well put together.

It seems to be more “busy” than I’m accustomed to with other jobs (I haven’t played NIN or MNK). The Kenki gauge in particular is what makes it seem busy to me. Seems like I’ve always got gauge to spend on oGCDs. Is it my imagination or is it just a lot of oGCD spenders for that kenki gauge. Between powering up the Iajatsu’s (sp?), and using the single target/AoE spender, it seems like fully a third or more of my cooldowns I’m weaving an oGCD in there. It’s really fun, I’m definitely not complaining here.

One thing I’m particularly curious about: should I be empowering my kenki spenders? Im not used to weaving two oGCDs together, but I’m curious if it’s worth doing. Right now I’m just using the empower move to amplify my seal spenders: stronger DoT and stronger Midare, as well as the extra midare and the level 80 move that spends the three dots on the gauge. Any tips, tricks, or thoughts welcome! Thanks in advance.
 

Pyros

<Silver Donator>
11,018
2,233
Been leveling up SAM recently. I really like the job. It just feels good to play; the animations and sound effects are great, and the whole job just seems really well put together.

It seems to be more “busy” than I’m accustomed to with other jobs (I haven’t played NIN or MNK). The Kenki gauge in particular is what makes it seem busy to me. Seems like I’ve always got gauge to spend on oGCDs. Is it my imagination or is it just a lot of oGCD spenders for that kenki gauge. Between powering up the Iajatsu’s (sp?), and using the single target/AoE spender, it seems like fully a third or more of my cooldowns I’m weaving an oGCD in there. It’s really fun, I’m definitely not complaining here.

One thing I’m particularly curious about: should I be empowering my kenki spenders? Im not used to weaving two oGCDs together, but I’m curious if it’s worth doing. Right now I’m just using the empower move to amplify my seal spenders: stronger DoT and stronger Midare, as well as the extra midare and the level 80 move that spends the three dots on the gauge. Any tips, tricks, or thoughts welcome! Thanks in advance.
It is somewhat busy, although you run into plenty of times you don't have oGCDs I think. But yeah you're saying a 3rd or more and that sounds about right. It's similar for a bunch of classes imo although some favor an "ebb and flow" type gameplay, like Ninja which is "fuck all for 40seconds, then ALL THE FUCKING oGCDS for 20secs".

You cannot empower kenki skills. Kaiten only works on "weaponskills", which are GCDs, oGCDs being abilities(generally speaking, a few classes have a couple of exception to that rule). You are meant to only empower Iaijutsu, but you're meant to empower all of them without fail. This is a much higher priority than spending them on the other spenders. You should also always have 50 for when the big spenders cool down(Guren and Senei depending on the situation/level) and you basically only use Shinten when you don't need it for the other cases and you're gonna cap out.

That also means you shouldn't be using Kaiten on Shoha, the 3dot thing, because it does nothing, besides empower your next GCD(which is likely just one of your basic combo stuff).

The class is overall somewhat simple, but it gets complicated once you start optimizing the rotation. You have to do some weird ass shit because it doesn't line up properly with raid buffs which I personally dislike and hope they'll fix next expansion. You can ignore it but you just kinda end up drifting off the raid window which will affect your parses. Obviously if you're not doing savage, this doesn't matter at all(and to an extent even if you do, it doesn't matter that much with the gear difference nowadays).

If you're really interested in learning classes, the best is to just go to the balance discord and check the guides there. You can also find them usually linked from saltedxiv.com. The guides will basically explain everything, from the basics to the more complicated parts and are generally well explained with clear examples including images and/or videos. Just skimming through the basic stuff like the rotation and opener and not reading all the details is enough to grasp the basics.
 
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Cybsled

Avatar of War Slayer
16,295
11,938
Nothing official, no. Mostly just people who watched the live letter and were able to glean some shit from it


 

Malkav

French Madman
2,686
1,583
I'm surprised they actually made RPR a job on the more complicated side with a lot of spinning plates (and as usual, somehow they didn't include some of the plates in the job UI for some reason).

I'm not looking forward to all the shit RPR in DF.
 
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Pyros

<Silver Donator>
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I don't think it's that complicated, there's a bunch of ressources, but they only slightly interact with each other. You build soul, then you use soul to build the other, and once you have 50 you go into the burst phase. The burst phase just mixes the 2 other systems, and that's roughly it. You have a "dot" to maintain which is just a dmg increase debuff and you have a 2mins cd that provides you with a lot of ressources.

It isn't really that complex, although the burst phase looks pretty quick and might confuse people, but then again if you've played Ninja you know their burst phase, which is every minute, is already quite a bunch of shit stringed together in a short time. You pool your ninjutsus, one of which is the ice one, and you fit basically all your oGCD in that short period, so you're almost weaving/double weaving on every hit, with a bunch of mudras mixed(which have lower GCD, similar to Reaper/MCH burst phases). I'd say the main difference is the positionals, especially the repeated short positionals during the burst phase. I wonder if these will stick, as it seems a bit too weird imo, hitting alternating positionals on 1.5s GCDs seems a bit of a stupid concept.

Honestly I don't see it being any different than like, every expansion, in terms of shit players playing new DPS classes. New SAMs especially but even Dancers last expansion had so many fucking idiots even though it was a very simple class.
 

Malkav

French Madman
2,686
1,583
I don't think it's that complicated, there's a bunch of ressources, but they only slightly interact with each other. You build soul, then you use soul to build the other, and once you have 50 you go into the burst phase. The burst phase just mixes the 2 other systems, and that's roughly it. You have a "dot" to maintain which is just a dmg increase debuff and you have a 2mins cd that provides you with a lot of ressources.

It isn't really that complex, although the burst phase looks pretty quick and might confuse people, but then again if you've played Ninja you know their burst phase, which is every minute, is already quite a bunch of shit stringed together in a short time. You pool your ninjutsus, one of which is the ice one, and you fit basically all your oGCD in that short period, so you're almost weaving/double weaving on every hit, with a bunch of mudras mixed(which have lower GCD, similar to Reaper/MCH burst phases). I'd say the main difference is the positionals, especially the repeated short positionals during the burst phase. I wonder if these will stick, as it seems a bit too weird imo, hitting alternating positionals on 1.5s GCDs seems a bit of a stupid concept.

Honestly I don't see it being any different than like, every expansion, in terms of shit players playing new DPS classes. New SAMs especially but even Dancers last expansion had so many fucking idiots even though it was a very simple class.

Generating Shroud gauge is not that straightforward. When you use Soul Gauge, it gives you Demonic Scythe (or Demon's bells depending on translations) stacks (which are not shown on job gauge). Normal OGCDs give you one stack, the big one gives you two. You use one stack for each step of your 2 step Demonic Scythe combo (which has positionals). It's this specific combo that build Shroud Gauge, so it's not a direct conversion of Soul Gauge to Shroud Gauge.

The job has a lot of ressources to keep track of, and on paper I think is more on the convuloted side. Yeah, I'd say NIN is close to it, but DRG/SAM/MNK are way more simplistic. RPR is going to be one of those job where the skill floor is way higher and will make bads even more bads.
 

Pyros

<Silver Donator>
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Yeah but the buttons light up when you have enough Soul Gauge and use the skills that give you access. Like it'll probably have a sound once you hit 50 for the normal building and then for the special skills that build right away you don't need a sound cause you know you use these after spending your gauge. I don't think it needs to be displayed on the job gauge either cause you then have buttons on your bars that are lit up specifically, similar to when you play RDM your melee combo will be lit up once you have enough mana or when you get DNC procs, they'll be lit up on your bars.

So now you have these buttons lit up and all you have to do is press them, literally. If it's your first rotation/it's been more than one minute since last one, both are lit up, but otherwise, only the one that has the combo bonus is, so again you just press as you go, the only thing you have to pay attention is which is flank and which is rear, otherwise you lose potency, so you'll have to somewhat keep track of that. The icons being similar does suck for that, so positionning them on your bar so you remember which is which is gonna be important I think(for me I'll likely do like E > rear and Alt+E > side).

They're basically displayed like DNC procs, but aren't random procs and instead force proced when you use your 50 soul spenders. In a similar ways, your current procs aren't shown on the DNC job gauge, only as buffs, but that's enough because the proc buttons are lit up on your bars, so you can easily see what's proced anyway without relying on gauge. And since those "bells" last for 30seconds, it's not like you would miss them unless you're absolutely not looking at your bars. That's a long time, and that actually lets you pool them or delay them if you can't hit the positionals right when you activate. This gives you a ton of flexibility in fact, since you can both float soul gauge AND float your bells, so I expect that might end up something you do to fit more stuff into the raid buff phases(past the opener obviously). Feels similar to DNC holding feathers, gauge and preparing procs for burst phases.

I don't know about the floor being "way" higher though, higher sure probably but don't know how high. I think once you get your hands on it and the rotation is calculated, it might really not be complicated, it seems very much like a priority rotation where you just execute the highest stuff first(entering the form thing), using your cooldowns as they come up, pressing buttons that light up and then doing 123 if you have nothing else to do. The ceiling might be higher though because if it works like DNC with the pooling, you might end up having to do somewhat weird shit in preparation for burst phases, floating a bunch of ressources. I don't know about timing issues and such but such an idea would be, start lemure right before 2mins window, do the first few moves then use your 2mins during that lemure phase, so the finisher is within the raid window, then use the big sacrifice shit to get another lemure right away, do that, and then use floated "bells" + floated shroud gauge to get 50 again(preferably in only 1 GCD, so you'd only float one "bell" and 40shroud), and enter a 3rd lemure phase during the raid window, hopefully finishing it before buffs drop. It's gonna be tight as fuck and with the 1.5s GCD, hectic as fuck, so I can see it very easy to drift/fuck up, but at the same time assuming there's enough time for it all, it feels like it's gonna be optimal, since lemure is where all your big damage is.
 

Malkav

French Madman
2,686
1,583
Yeah but the buttons light up when you have enough Soul Gauge and use the skills that give you access. Like it'll probably have a sound once you hit 50 for the normal building and then for the special skills that build right away you don't need a sound cause you know you use these after spending your gauge. I don't think it needs to be displayed on the job gauge either cause you then have buttons on your bars that are lit up specifically, similar to when you play RDM your melee combo will be lit up once you have enough mana or when you get DNC procs, they'll be lit up on your bars.

So now you have these buttons lit up and all you have to do is press them, literally. If it's your first rotation/it's been more than one minute since last one, both are lit up, but otherwise, only the one that has the combo bonus is, so again you just press as you go, the only thing you have to pay attention is which is flank and which is rear, otherwise you lose potency, so you'll have to somewhat keep track of that. The icons being similar does suck for that, so positionning them on your bar so you remember which is which is gonna be important I think(for me I'll likely do like E > rear and Alt+E > side).

They're basically displayed like DNC procs, but aren't random procs and instead force proced when you use your 50 soul spenders. In a similar ways, your current procs aren't shown on the DNC job gauge, only as buffs, but that's enough because the proc buttons are lit up on your bars, so you can easily see what's proced anyway without relying on gauge. And since those "bells" last for 30seconds, it's not like you would miss them unless you're absolutely not looking at your bars. That's a long time, and that actually lets you pool them or delay them if you can't hit the positionals right when you activate. This gives you a ton of flexibility in fact, since you can both float soul gauge AND float your bells, so I expect that might end up something you do to fit more stuff into the raid buff phases(past the opener obviously). Feels similar to DNC holding feathers, gauge and preparing procs for burst phases.

I don't know about the floor being "way" higher though, higher sure probably but don't know how high. I think once you get your hands on it and the rotation is calculated, it might really not be complicated, it seems very much like a priority rotation where you just execute the highest stuff first(entering the form thing), using your cooldowns as they come up, pressing buttons that light up and then doing 123 if you have nothing else to do. The ceiling might be higher though because if it works like DNC with the pooling, you might end up having to do somewhat weird shit in preparation for burst phases, floating a bunch of ressources. I don't know about timing issues and such but such an idea would be, start lemure right before 2mins window, do the first few moves then use your 2mins during that lemure phase, so the finisher is within the raid window, then use the big sacrifice shit to get another lemure right away, do that, and then use floated "bells" + floated shroud gauge to get 50 again(preferably in only 1 GCD, so you'd only float one "bell" and 40shroud), and enter a 3rd lemure phase during the raid window, hopefully finishing it before buffs drop. It's gonna be tight as fuck and with the 1.5s GCD, hectic as fuck, so I can see it very easy to drift/fuck up, but at the same time assuming there's enough time for it all, it feels like it's gonna be optimal, since lemure is where all your big damage is.

Oh yeah, the buff window optimization will probably be some gigabrain ridiculous stuff.

Reminds me that I saw Perfect Balance for new MNK may be useable out of combat, which would lead to 20+ sec pull timers if true. I hope we don't have to deal with that shit.
 

Ehrgeix

Trakanon Raider
182
127
I haven’t looked into skills yet but e.g., on Nin you just press all your buttons on cd and everything lines up and works fine and you don’t have to think. Most jobs are like this (gnb etc). Is Rpr actually difficult in a way that requires thought? (E.g., on Drk you have to hold some stuff you could press until 60s windows, pld has atonement shifting etc - not that either of those are particularly challenging).
 

Gavinmad

Mr. Poopybutthole
42,271
50,242
Is the kind of shit yall are talking about the difference between playing 95% optimally and 100% optimally? cause im too old and lazy these days to care about that 5%.
 
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Malkav

French Madman
2,686
1,583
Is the kind of shit yall are talking about the difference between playing 95% optimally and 100% optimally? cause im too old and lazy these days to care about that 5%.

Honestly outside of Ultimate or Savage week 1 min-ilvl prog, it barely matters. By the time week 3/4 rolls out, you have enough tomestone gear to offset the damage "loss". Otherwise, it's just parsing optimization.

I'm an old man too and tend to find statics on the more casual side. Progging a tier takes a while this way (and sadly my last two statics kinda crumbled around boss 3), but I still enjoy it despite my grey tank parses.
 
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Pyros

<Silver Donator>
11,018
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I haven’t looked into skills yet but e.g., on Nin you just press all your buttons on cd and everything lines up and works fine and you don’t have to think. Most jobs are like this (gnb etc). Is Rpr actually difficult in a way that requires thought? (E.g., on Drk you have to hold some stuff you could press until 60s windows, pld has atonement shifting etc - not that either of those are particularly challenging).
Well NIN isn't exactly like that. First off, you want to float your ninjutsus, so you can use them all during Trick Attack window. Which means when they come back up you have to wait instead of use them as they come. The 2nd "weird" aspect is you generally want to Kassatsu before the whole bullshit starts, because it stays on for a while and you don't have the room to fit it in during the full burst phase due to how packed it is and Mudras don't let you weave while Ninjutsus only let you single weave. So you pop Kassatsu like 3 or 4 GCDs before you use the Ninjutsu on it(not sure the exact amount of GCDs haven't played NIN in a while).

Now it's not that complicated, a lot of classes do that yeah, pooling ressources for 2mins bursts(and for 1min trick attacks if you have a NIN) is common enough. I'd say the biggest "issue" with the Reaper burst window, is if you're chaining 3x Lemure, it's A LOT of skills in a row, a lots of which are apparently positionals? Might have been Yoshida just moving around cause he's used to the standard positionals, we didn't see the tooltips of the Lemure window GCDs I think, but you're basically doing flank rear flank rear on 1.5s GCD, then a cast, then popping it again and doing flank rear flank rear cast, then a GCD, then again. That's like a stupid amount of positionals in a very short time, faster than MNK. If they're not positionals(and imo they shouldn't be with the lower GCD it's just a mess), then it's just faster skills, but still a lot of inputs compared to most other classes in that window, including Ninja. If you can only fit 2 lemures though and they're not positionals, then it's fairly similar to Ninjutsus so not as bad.

Is the kind of shit yall are talking about the difference between playing 95% optimally and 100% optimally? cause im too old and lazy these days to care about that 5%.
It does have a fairly significant impact in performance when everything's optimized, but in pubs a lot of time your raid's buffs are gonna drift anyway so it's hard to get the full performance, and we're still probably only looking at a 5-10% drop yeah. Just ends up being pretty important if you're looking for high parses, although for example dying will have a much larger impact overall. In this specific example I think the only requirement for almost max perf will just be to have 50 shroud gauge before your 2mins cooldown comes back, so you can do use 2 lemures in a row during your and other's buffs. The triple lemure might not fit anyway, hard to say at this point.
Oh yeah, the buff window optimization will probably be some gigabrain ridiculous stuff.

Reminds me that I saw Perfect Balance for new MNK may be useable out of combat, which would lead to 20+ sec pull timers if true. I hope we don't have to deal with that shit.
I really hope they work something out so it doesn't work this way. Could reduce the duration of PB a bit, like to 25s or so, and it'd fix the problem. But the optimization is really small though, because while you get a 30secs pb buff, you have to both get in melee range then use 3GCDs and Blitz, so you need around 6.5seconds to execute it(maybe a bit less if you can get into range right away since GCD is under 2s for MNK but not sure you'd get under 6secs reliably). So the optimal countdown might be 23secs or so, but a 3secs difference will be very unlikely to offer you an additional PB > Blitz in a given fight. That'd be speedrun optimization shenanigans and you'd need to be fucking consistent to get that additional PB(and even then it might just not end at a point where you can get one regardless).
 

Ehrgeix

Trakanon Raider
182
127
Is the kind of shit yall are talking about the difference between playing 95% optimally and 100% optimally? cause im too old and lazy these days to care about that 5%.

Probably less than 5%, if you press buttons when you can press them and don’t overcap resources you can get 99s sometimes, 90+ consistently - most of the playerbase does a decent chunk wrong most of the time. This design means it’s relatively hard to excel / skill cap of the game is pretty low compared to like cata / mop era WoW, TERA, etc.
 

...

Goonsquad Officer
5,606
13,425
it seems to me that the true 'skill' of high end raiding is everyone lining up their burst windows for the ideal times in the fight and/or together where aplicable.
 
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Pyros

<Silver Donator>
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it seems to me that the true 'skill' of high end raiding is everyone lining up their burst windows for the ideal times in the fight and/or together where aplicable.
Well the true skill is actually doing all mechanics perfectly, with as little downtime as possible. Most pubs fail right away at that stage. Like having random deaths, people messing up mechanics and getting(or worse, giving) dmg downs, losing several GCDs due to not optimizing movements and so on is a shit ton of lost damage. Keeping your buff windows synced is definitely important too, but any mechanical issue will just fuck up that anyway. Anyone getting into a 2min burst window with a death penalty or a damage down is basically worse than if they don't pop their own buff.

Plus often what happens is more that your raid buffs are slightly staggered due to drifting, but being 2mins(for most of them, and especially next expansion with the planned changes), it usually only has 4-5 times to drift so you're rarely drifting more than as many GCDs over the course of the fight. So what ends up happening is some people have some of their GCDs that aren't under all the buffs, which is bad, but you still get some effects out of them(just not all the effects together which generally multiply each other too), so the loss isn't even that big.

Stuff like ABC(always be casting), uptime and not fucking up mechanics are huge contributors to damage potential, much much more than perfect rotation and perfect buff alignement. These are still nice and they'll make the difference between purple and gold parses to an extent, and will certain matter if you're getting into speedruns. But they're basically the cherry on top, the whole cake is actually doing the fight properly on a mechanical level. It's a lot more about the fundamentals than perfectionism.

On the flipside, working on your rotation and not drifting your buffs is a thing you can do on your own, via rote repetition on dummies and such, while having your pub(or even static) Dancer not die 5secs before the 2mins window of a fight is something you have largely no control over. That's why people still put in the work on these, and also because it's much easier to do the mechanics when most of your rotation is down to muscle memory, versus having your eyes glued on your bars while trying to dodge 12aoes and checking your 3 debuffs to see where you're supposed to go.
 
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Ehrgeix

Trakanon Raider
182
127
it seems to me that the true 'skill' of high end raiding is everyone lining up their burst windows for the ideal times in the fight and/or together where aplicable.

This is not actually a coordination problem though, because (almost) all your bursts are 60s/120s cds, so if everyone is good you will naturally press them at the same time and gain more than if some people are bad and don't do that. (There's some small exceptions wrt holding 2 minutes for a last potion window before boss dies or something if it won't cost you a use, etc).