SOME MINOR CORRECTIONS: -There are 19 jobs, not 17. (I forgot to include the recent Endwalker additions!) -"Actions" would have been a more accurate term than "Abilities", but you get the idea.
Don't forget that healers are also responsible for keeping themselves alive too, you could argue that keeping themselves alive is the number 1 important thing, because a dead healer can't heal or resurrect the tank or the rest of the party. Well, unless you have a DPS with party healing/ resurrect abilities like summoners and red mages. 😉
@Chris Davey I want to make the same point. As someone who plays a healer most often, it's important for new healers to learn to not get tunnel vision. What I mean by that is: don't focus so much on your party's health bars that you don't notice that YOUR health is low. Pay attention to yourself, your location in the room, the placement of the bosses or enemy mobs, and your fellow party members. Standing in danger puddles, standing in front of the boss (too close to the Tank), or standing too far away from a ranged damage party member can all affect how much healing and how many "emergency heals" you'll need to handle.
I *looove* the UI customization and just quality of life and accessibility options the game provides in general. the UI team really makes the game super convenient to play while still retaining its skill ceiling and difficulty. Dan mentioned his legally blind friend that apparently has skills like a monster in a previous episode and it really rings true, I've a friend with only one working hand and he's beaten ultimates - aka the MOST DIFFICULT content in the game - with his one working hand
I'd like to comment on the Healer priority list. Tanks are actually not your highest priority on the heal order, the Healer is. While the Tank may be the one consistently taking damage, if you find you have to heal yourself (the Healer) or the Tank, it is generally good practice to heal yourself first. A Tank's kit gives them options to survive even at the brink of death, and even if they die, you can still revive them. But if you die, the rest of the party will eventually run out of damage mitigation and HP to finish the fight. So always prioritize the Healer's survival first. And a lot of times, that means you have to heal yourself before anybody else.
Oh boy, I gotta come up with a bonus Spoiler Free Lore Comment. Hm. Abilities. Dan points out that a Gladiator will get more abilities when they become a Paladin. This only happens if a Gladiator equips a Paladin Job Stone, which is given for free at the level 30 job quest. All combat classes receive Job Stones at either level 30, or at their minimum level. No Job Stone, no extra abilities, abilities which the game is designed & balanced around. *You would be surprised of the number of characters who are near max level and do not have Job Stones equipped.* Directional Abilities. Dan's talk on directionals are the reason tanks should not spin around their targets. Dodging enemy attacks is fine, and probably preferable, but running in circles for fun lowers the DPS of the team. I've been told this was a traditional thing in WoW, but it's detrimental in FFXIV. In old versions of directional abilities, messing up the directional would result in the combo action being lost, which could be a big deal. Danger Puddles. Usually, "who is going to be hit" is determined when the "cast bar" completes, aka when the ability fires. This is *different* than when the animation occurs. So you'll see some players dodge out of puddles, and then move into the puddle zone when it disappears, taking no damage, even if the ability is spewing flame into that zone. It's a little weird, but you get used to it. Later fights stack this, so they show multiple puddles, in sequence, and then fire them off in sequence. You have to remember where the safe zone is for each one, and move accordingly. You can see this at 25:35. There are exceptions to this "safe after the cast" rule, which can be a rude awakening to players. These attacks usually have a persistent effect, like a prolonged flamethrower blast, or a big acid puddle. Enmity, or Aggro, used to be a very complicated thing in FFXIV. Some classes specifically had abilities that reduced their enmity, and sometimes you could transfer some of your enmity to another target (usually your tank). As I understand it, there was a bit of an overhaul of the tank classes sometime around the release of Shadowbringers, which ensured that each tank had a toggleable buff (tank stance) which generates bonus enmity when dealing damage, and does nothing else. Prior to this, tank stance reduced the damage generated and increased enmity, so juggling tank stance and a DPS stance was sometimes required (I'm specifically thinking of the Paladin's Shield Oath & Sword Oath. This is the joke Zepla was making in her "Shield Oats" video). This eventually compounded a game wide problem that was recently addressed with the release of Endwalker: tanks started generating enmity numbers that were ridiculous. All numbers were reduced in Endwalker, but we still have the big Final Fantasy Numbers. If you're fighting a boss, the party list will show which character has the top enmity, with A for #1, and numerically after that. This really matters for some bosses who will sometimes target the #2 spot for certain attacks, and for the terrible situation if the person in the #1 slot dies. Fun Fact, healing generates a lot of enmity. If the tanks are dead, healers are usually the next people targeted All jobs are viable! Except for Blue Mage. Blue Mage is a bit of odd content, where you can be massively overpowered and one shot bosses. But they're restricted so that it doesn't massively imbalance the game.
Just to note: A indicates who has Aggro. This is what you'll usually see on whoever is at the top of the enmity list. However, in 24-man content you can't see other parties' enmity, so in these cases if your party's tank has the most aggro in your party but not overall then they'll have a 1 instead.
I main an OT (off tank), and let me tell you the number of times I accidentally got our ninja killed in savage because I forgot to turn my stance on before the twin tank busters that were aggro based, and not role based T_T The fun thing about co-tanking is that aggro generation is also based on player skill (are you hitting your buttons in the right order for optimal damage?), and gear based. I main DRK in savage content, so my gear is at BiS (best in slot), or pre-BiS at any given time. However, most players don't raid, so I normally out-gear them. This means I can easily rip aggro from another tank if I'm not paying attention (I solve this by usually just turning my stance off once I've ensured I'm at the appropriate spot on the list should the MT die), and/or shirking my aggro onto one of my healers (a surprise for them, to be sure, but it's not enough to endanger them)
@@dragonbretheren Weather patterns are on Eorzea time, the weather changes ever 8 Eorzean hours, timed gathering nodes are also on Eorzea time, they show up at specific times of day Eorzea time. Hunt targets are not on any kind of fixed schedule, and will respawn at random during a certain window of time since they were last killed. The only things tied to server time are daily and weekly resets, and you can just as easily use any other time zone for those.
FF14 rite of passage 1: Finding a HUD layout you like for a particular class. Rite of passage 2: Seeing someone else's customized layout that works for them, and either asking "how did you do that" or "how do you play with that abomination?"
@@JohnDCrafton Four years, I mostly just added more and more hotbars as I went and found myself needing the space. I like having everything in the default positions near the edges of the screen, but I also find it a little difficult to keep track of certain stuff. I might have to change the size of some elements...
Eorzea time: used for setting a consistent-length short timer on when to start fighting a FATE in collaboration with non-party-member players. Standard rule is to start 1 Eorzean hour after the shout gets sent by calling out the FATE name and posting the time to fight so everyone has time to travel and arrive. (Tell everyone to start in 1 Eorzean hour and it will be about 2m 55s +/-3 seconds. Tell everyone to start in 3 real minutes and you get 2m 30s +/-30 seconds because the clock might've rolled over to 5:51 a second after you said start at 5:53.) Additionally, Eorzean time is the schedule that special gathering spots operate by. If it says "3am in rain" then it means it spawns at 3am eorzean time. Server Time: for long-term planning longer than 5 minutes or when not everyone is expected to be at their computer while waiting. If the Event FATE respawns in 20 minutes, you tell everyone that the next spawn is at 6:00[server time]. Not in 6h 52m Eorzean Time(yes that is 20 minutes. No it is not a clean conversion and I had to round). Eorzean time is for consistency and accuracy, Server time is for tracking and planning. Local time is for making sure you stay up to only *two* hours past your bed time.
One neat function of having your gear slots visible next to your inventory dots is that it lets you see if your gear has spiritbonded! This happens after you've used a piece of equipment (helmets, swords, rings, etc) in a lot of engagements/crafts/gathering runs. When the dots turn white, you can right-click that piece of equipment, pick "extract materia" and get - you guessed it! - a piece of materia. Put them in your gear or sell them on the market board, might come in handy either way!
Red dots indicate broken gear - go get them repaired. I'm pretty sure there's also a significantly more obnoxious text pop-up near the top of your screen as well. Much less useful for most people are the orange dots in your inventory which indicate a full stack of something, even if it's just something that can't be stacked (and isn't equipment).
Others mentioned that the red dots mean broken gear, and orange dots mean full stacks. I guess for completeness I'll mention that Green dots are unbroken, non-spirtbonded equipment, and blue dots are incomplete stacks of non-equipment items. Full list of dot colors: * Blue = Incomplete stack of normal items. * Orange = Full stack of normal items (or unstackable items) * Green = Equipment that isn't broken or fully spiritbonded * Red = Equipment with durability = 0% (i.e. Broken) * White = Equipment with spiritbond = 100% (i.e. Materia can be extracted) Red and White are by far the most important colors to watch out for.
As you get involved in the community, you will often see people mention they are a "RDM main" or "SCH main". 'Main' is short for 'main class' and it's what that person does most of the time or is most comfortable playing. That doesn't mean they can't or won't play other jobs but that's the one they will do most of the time.
@@HanabiraKage I think you underestimate the level of stupidity I operate at. There’s a reason I don’t do EX, Savage, or Ultimate lmao. |D; (Well, some EX. Not level Sync’d lmao.)
Afaict Server Time is for interacting with people on the same server but not in the same timezone. So for example when someone want to say when some kind of even begins, then instead of saying the time and timezone they're in, they can just say the time in server time. This means it's the same for everyone, and they won't need a converter.
An important bit of combat, particularly for tanks: When the enemy cast bar is pulsing with a red outline, that indicates an attack that can be interrupted. Tanks have the "Interject" role action, which can interrupt those attacks - and generally such attacks will be a problem if not interrupted.
One of the most important UI changes you can make in my opinion is to split the enemy health bar into components, put the enemy cast bar right towards the middle at the top or bottom of the screen where you're focusing and crank up the scale on it, because that's one of the most important pieces of information you should be watching out for.
"Tankxiety" was definitely something that hit me when I tried the role in my early game, but I somewhat cured it by being a Healer main. Healers have a very symbiotic relationship with the tank; after hitting lvl.60 on most healers, I felt like I knew as much about tanking as my own role, an could pick up the tank role with much more ease.
The hardest thing to get used too in FFXIV for me coming from WoW was being able to step back into danger puddles once the puddle is gone, even if the dragon breathing fire animation was still playing. ...Similarly, spent a long time confused why I was getting hit when the animation clearly missed me, but it doesn't matter. Weird at first, but lets them do cool things and also make the animations over the top.
It really doesn't feel good when you first start playing, especially when you're used to other MMOs. It feels like every attack doesn't have impact or believability. But once you get into later content that pushes the mechanical density and complexity, it clicks as to why it does it this way.
It even depends on the attack. Most attacks are one and done even if the animation is still going, but sometimes you get attacks that leave stage hazards that hurt/debuff you, or attacks that genuinely keep putting out damage for as long the animation plays. There is no way to tell which is which beforehand.
One thing to add is there is daily random dungeon and boss fight runs for player that give extra exp or endgame. This is the main thing that keep the duty finder you see Dan show going. A level 85 tank doing one of there dailies to level can get a level 25 dungeon with lower level players. This help keep you from waiting hours in hope someone somewhere else is doing this 5 year old side quest fight. That said you still may have to wait a little but it pop on a active hour. Though high end raids is another matter
As of Endwalker, there is actually 19 (+1) jobs in the game. The +1 is for Blue Mage, which is considered a "Limited Job", effectively that means that BLU's can not go up to the same level cap as the other 19 jobs (the BLU cap is currently level 70), and they have various restrictions on the types of content they could enter. BLU is like this because if you know how Blue Mage works in other Final Fantasy's, BLUs only learn spells from enemies, and they tend to be among the strongest job types. BLU in FFXIV is no different, with the right spell set, they can easily trivialize a lot of content. They can also change what role they are for parties, by default they are a Caster DPS, but they could change to either being a Tank, or a Healer. By taking advantage of this, they created achievements that could only be earned by beating the various raids with only full parties of BLU's.
One thing you did not mention about the danger puddles: you get hit if you are in the area when the puddle disappears, not when the animation occurs. You see the puddle, you move out. The puddle disappears, you move back (if you need to. Tanks do this a lot to keep the enemy in a single spot facing a single way). Even if the animation shows the enemy shooting a long burst of fire out of their mouth all over you, so long as you were not in the puddle at the time it disappeared, you take no damage. Many of the later mechanics need you to jump from one danger puddle to the next as soon as one of them disappears, so this is useful to know about the mechanic.
He did actually mention this, and even did it a couple times in the video, but he probably could have been a bit clearer that you can move back in even if it looks like things are exploding, it's safe as long as the danger puddle is gone.
@@iryoku2 I did not hear him ever say that the end of the danger puddle was the end of the danger. Instead, it seemed that he was explicitly waiting until the animation was done before he headed back in.
@@Law-gnome He didn't explicitly say that, but he said the inverse at 23:12. "How do you know you've gotten out of them in time? The basic rule is, most of the time, if you are still standing in it when it disappears, you are going to get hit." Like I said, he could have made it more clear, maybe by explicitly stating what you're saying, but what he said does imply that if you're not standing in it when it disappears, you won't get hit. He also moves back into 100-Needles at 32:54, and again at 33:05, both during his explanation of the tank role, and he also kind of suggests that you can move back in then as well.
I'm not the target audience for this video, but I love that you've made as many of these FFXIV videos as you have. I love anything that makes this game more accessible or visible to people who otherwise wouldn't play it. It's a really special game, and you're doing a fantastic job showcasing it!
I love how you explain things at such a foundational level without being patronising. Really helps make things clear without presumption. Thank you so much for this. 👍🏼
im about a year late to this series (and ffxiv in general). but a friend recommended it to me about 1-2 weeks ago & i’m already lvl 47-ish. and this series helps a lot! i’m also glad that by the time i started playing, they let you run story dungeons with NPCS. 1): MMOs make me SUPER anxious (especially since i stumbled into the healer position accidentally SKSK). 2): my internet has been SUPERRR buggy, so i’d be of no help to anyone 😭 but all in all i’ve enjoyed it, even if i’ve just been playing on my own. :’]
Speaking as a mentor (although, honestly not the best one), the "next main scenario quest" is the most valuable resoruce. Specially because it shows CLASS quests just under itself, so useful.
There are sneaky tricks to use up to 13 hotbars, AND the crosshotbars in play, but it involves macros and switching the hotbars out. Well beyond standard levels of insanity, but kind of fun to do. Back when the gathering minigame was different, I had a button that toggled on "collectable mode" that turned on my ability to gather collectables, and changed my bars to a set with the normally hidden collectable mini game commands. You can go DEEP.
(10:20) The oldest option for status is to have it all in a single bar, I think that was the default for a while, and then an option that had to be enabled. Currently, and what you are showing off has buffs, debuffs, and neutral in 3 bars, and I think that's default now. There's a new (as of endwalker) option to break statuses into FOUR groups. And that looks like it's going to be the default going forward. The fourth group is "conditonal enhancements" ... yha, no clue what that means.
There is a plot dungeon (a certain research station) with a 2 part final boss, and in order to pass it without too much trouble, you have to learn that you can run into explosions, as long as you are away from the orange danger puddle.
@@ICountFrom0 Conditional enhancements are procs like the ones that let you use verfire and verstone on RDM. Basically, if you need to watch your buffs in order to play your job properly, you can separate out the conditional enhancements and put them somewhere more friendly for that purpose.
Congratulations Dan on being only the second person who I've ever encountered who automatically thinks of mana as a percentage in this game. I've had to work so hard to get other people to even see the possibility of it.
It didn't used to be like this. We did used to have an MP amount that was based on level, and healers could get more MP with Piety. It was Shadowbringers and patch 5.0 that fixed it to 10K for everyone. I figure long time players are less willing to see MP as % because of this.
More notes: You can set it to display all three clocks at once if you want. The minimap can be zoomed in and out with the +/- symbols on it ( I recommend zoomed out as far as possible) and can be un/locked to north with the gear symbol... you can (and should) increase the size of your main map window by dragging the bottom right corner of it and repositioning the window. The partylist symbols, when you target a specific enemy or boss, show that target's aggro to each partymember on their job symbol, starting with A, then 1, 2, 3 ... There is also an aggro bar next to the numbers, which may not be as useful if the tank has had aggro for a long time, as the others tend to shrink. If you haven't died (which resets aggro), you can kinda gauge your relative output with some exceptions (some tank actions have naturally higher aggro, and some heals, mainly large Area of Effect heals)
Ahhhh! 35:55 To clarify, the healer's second Priority is themselves, not the DPS, although the argument can be made that it's actually their top priority, before the tank. Can't keep the party alive if you're dead.
And this goes double in larger raids, where you usually have a back-up tank when the main tank goes down. If the tanks die, you still have a moment to recover. If the healers die, the fight becomes a race against time which you often can't win.
To echo what Dan is saying at 40:30 FF14 in general has an awesome community. Yes there are jerks but they are rare, like really rare. Like in the DTC Chat maybe once a week a member will complain that they had a negative experience with a random group. And that is dozens of players doing dozens of random groups each. In my experience (and surprisingly when you've been on the internet before) people are more likely to offer you friendly advice after you mess up then yell at you for it
Something that I think you didn't say here that I think is key. Mostly for dungeons. When there is 3 enemies or more, as a rule of thumb, you want to use your AoE (area of effect) abilities. Or your "Multi target" abilities. So you hit all the enemies at once. The potency of your AoE attacks will probably be lower than your single target attacks, but with single target you are doing (for example) 130 at a single enemy. If your AoE is 100 and hit 3 enemies you are hitting for a combined total of 300 damange per attack!
I've played through the main plot line "solo" with no significant problems. Since I'm playing the free version, I can't join free companies, so I have to have random players help me in dungeons. My only complaint isn't rude players, it's quick players. I assume most of them have played through the dungeon before, as they know where to go, and they have a tendency to try to get through it as fast as possible. But I like to stop and look around at the scenery, plus there's occasionally plot-relevant text\dialog that I want to experience, which can be a problem when I've gotten done reading\listening to it, and everyone else has moved further on.
It's not ideal but you can backtrack your way through the dungeon after the third boss is killed. You don't have to leave immediate once it's completed. You could ask to take it slow as well. I've asked that in a few dungeons I'm not entirely comfortable with and generally the player slow down. It's not a guarantee for sure but it happens more often than you'd think That said if they're rushing forward while you're watching cutscenes then the people are just dicks
99% of the time, people will wait for your cutscenes, if however you want to explore everything and read everything, I suggest you pull every mob you see while you have the group, even if it's out of the way, and clear the dungeon at the group's pace. Then, once the final boss is cleared, use Return to get back to the beginning of the dungeon, and walk through it at your leisure. If you didn't pull every mob while the party was still present, you won't be able to explore everything without an overwhelming and arduous fight, and you might not be able to beat the mobs period. I main tank and enjoy the story and lore so I would respect everyone's time and get them through quickly, then go back and admire/read everything, and look at the chat history under the battle tab in case I missed any dialog in any fight my first time through. You'll be able to do that more easily now with AI npc's going into dungeons with you in ARR, but this tip still works in Heavensward and Stormblood content.
One thing that you forgot to mention that really helps understanding one of the most fun parts of the rotation is weaving. Dan has showed abilities that have a cooldown of 2.5 seconds and abilities that have much longer cooldowns. Conveniently placed on the first and second hotbar respectively. The 2.5 second cooldown is "global" so all skills with that cooldown will go on cooldown at the same time, these skills are referred to as GCD's (global cooldowns). At 19:12 you'll notice that Dan is waiting 2.5 seconds even when using different skills for a combo. You can also see that the skills on the second hotbar are NOT going on cooldown. These are called "off globals" or OGCD's. You can use these at any time even while waiting for the global cooldown. So of course you'd prefer to use them while you're waiting for those 2.5 seconds. This is called "weaving" and it's what makes your rotation so interesting. You want to use as many skills on your global cooldown as possible to do the most damage, so you don't want to delay those. Because of this, you are typiclly limited to a maximum of two OGCD's every 2.5 seconds, "weaved" in between your GCD's. Now imagine you're maximum level, you have a ton of skills, and you need to figure out the correct order to use them in for your rotation. You want to use all your skills as fast as possible while staying within that two OGCD limitation. That's where the fun is in optimization and how the slow combat you see in the videos now evolves into a challenging chaotic fiesta of button presses. Not to mention dodging danger puddles while doing all that :)
41:00 i would, for the sake of being able to access as much narrative as possible, recommend leveling a tank class, a healer, a melee dps, magic dps, and ranged dps.
Wow.... this is awesome! And needs to be a whole mini series "Durmin teaches you how to FF XIV" For all the people the playframe power to compel people t get games brought into the game. Already figured most of this out, but the one bit I could not figure out how to do is... how do you get the hot bars to stop showing the empty boxes? I couldn't find the toggle for that.
About cast time instant. It doesn't actually mean the skill comes out instantly. It means the skill animation starts instantly. The skill actually triggering often is at some point in that animation. That can be really annoying when playing a healer.
Yeah this is something in XIV that new players have to get used to as opposed to other MMOs. In XIV, a lot of skills have what's called "animation lock" (especially Dragoon) that prevent you from using other abilities and even moving until the animation ends. And the damage doesn't actually come out until the animation is over, which means you can finish a cast and it will do nothing because the enemy/you are already dead.
Certainly! Let me see if I can explain... So when I used each of those three attacks in the Gladiator's combo sequence, did you notice how all three abilities (and a handful of others) ALL went on cooldown, with the little timer showing me how long I'd have to wait before they were usable again? This is called your Global Cool Down (or GCD), and it will apply to many of your abilities. Use one of these GCD abilities, and you'll have to wait the 2.5ish seconds before you can use ANY of the others. That said, there are other abilities in your kit which are Off Global Cool Down (or OGCDs, as some refer to them). These can be used at literally any time without impacting your global cool down at all (you can even use them inbetween hits in the 1-2-3 combo!). But these abilities also tend to have MUCH longer independent cool downs, some as long as 4 minutes. So you'll generally be spending combat constantly throwing out GCD abilities every 2.5ish seconds (as fast as they'll allow) and peppering in the OGCD abilities whenever they become available and have strategic value for your current situation. Hope that kind of helps?
Thank you so much for this! There are so many little nuances to combat that I had no idea I was missing as a new player. I really appreciated this video. :)
So, maybe as a suggestion for a future "Combat 102" video - when you're talking about how other roles work such as healer or damage dealer, could you switch to those classes/jobs when explaining how they do things? For example, when you mentioned how damage dealers do a lot more damage, could you show a side-by-side of GLA's 1-2-3 and, say, LNC/DRG's 1-2-3 to show the higher potencies?
That would be alot of work especially if he didn't open the class/job or didn't level it up to match the Tank also he will need to equip it with similar gear level to be able to compare them after all he only created this characterfor story mode. I think it's enough to know that Tanks do less damage than Dps (Damege Dealers).
@@HanabiraKage He would not need to switch. He's 70 in every canon class through StB because he bought level skips, which is the level you need to be to grab RPR/SGE.
@@alenezi989a3 A) You can get every job on one character, so Dan could easily grab Lancer (off-screen) to show the tooltips. He wouldn’t even need to level the class, since you don’t need to unlock the skills to see the tooltips via the Actions & Traits menu - meaning a Level 1 Lancer would still have tooltips available for a side-by-side comparison with Gladiator. B) Dan could easily ask a friend or a member of his FC to send him screenshots of said tooltips. C) Dan could also just as easily take screenshots of the skill descriptions from the official FFXIV Job Guide posted on the Lodestone. It's not that big of an ask, really. Just something I proffered as a suggestion so that comparisons to jobs and roles other than Gladiator or Tank could have visual aids of some sort to accompany it.
HUD: - Blue segment of EXP bar represents rested EXP - x1.5 EXP for EXP equivalent to the amount represented by the segment. It being blue tells you that it's enough to get you to the next level, it will be a dull brown if not. Combat: - Active skills here are called "Actions" and passive skills are called "Traits". Actions are further divided into Weaponskills (use Attack Power and Skill Speed), Spells (use Attack/Healing Magic Potency and Spell Speed), and Abilities (stats used depend on skill). Of the three, only Abilities do not trigger the global cooldown all skills go on whenever you use any of them, instead having their own cooldown timers. Sometimes Abilities share cooldown timers with other Abilities; when this is the case the relevant Abilities will say so in the description. - If your target is out of range, a tiny red X will appear at the bottom left of the skill icon if it doesn't cost anything. Otherwise the cost (MP or some other resource) listed at that same spot will turn red instead. - Latency can affect your ability to get out of danger puddles in time. For example, I live in Southeast Asia but play in North American servers so my latency's pretty bad; I have to be out of danger puddles nearly a full second before it vanishes to avoid damage.
This gives such a nice insight in the game's combat mechanics! Very clear and fun to watch! And the free reign for optimizing your HUD is soooo satisfying!
Ive never really gotten into MMO's. I played WOW barely, started FF14 ages ago and never got anywhere. I feel like one of the biggest issues I had was an understanding of the basic mechanics. (And no one to play with) Thank you for these educational tidbits!
29:50 I take it this video was made a while back? There's 19 jobs (not counting Blue Mage) now. I suppose that also explains why your level is back down to 29 compared to current videos.
The job gauges being intrusive by default is an understatement, lol. as an ow the edge knight, I put my darkside icon in the same place you put the stance icon, but I moved my stance/bloodgauge to right above the secondary crossbar, in the middle of it, making it look like it blends with it; far more natural and less intrusive plus it's easy to notice it when I look at my crossbar... which is good... because my chocobo brain keeps forgetting to turn on tank stance after entering a dungeon.
This game sounds like a fascinating rabbit hole from top to bottom. I just need to get the Endwalker benchmark test to work on my computer, then I might at least give it a shot...
I'm a Call Of Duty, Overwatch, Apex Legends Battlefield and Fortnite player I was running around dodging the hits I was spamming the left attack and didn't see any clicks translating as hits thank you for making this video easy to understand and follow I didn't understand any of the thing on the screen but you video made it possible for me to just follow along!
I can understand the tanxiety but honestly I think it's the easiest role. A lot of the time, you can set the pace of "every enemy nearby" and use your cooldowns (and if you don't know what you're doing, good news! Veterans are getting bonuses because of you). Bosses have some surprises for you but there's a lot of boss mechanics that you aren't targeted by, and if you do get hit, you can afford a lot more mistakes than other party members. Oh speaking of: watch out for the swirly red and black penalties on characters who stand in danger puddles in dungeons. This is called Vulnerability, and it stacks, making mistakes more and more lethal.
I will say, as someone who (relatively) recently made an alt just to replay the entire story as a tank, and suffers from tanxiety (though I absolutely learned that term from this video); It's not really the difficulty of the role so much as the looming sense of responsibility. I'm a SCH main on my other character, so I'm no stranger to having a party critical job. But honestly? If I'm having a bad day on SCH, or zone out for a minute, but no-one dies, most people won't notice... But I feel like if I lose focus for even a moment on PLD, I'm going to misplace or poorly group the mobs and annoy the DDs, or pull too slowly and annoy the old hats, or pull too FAST and annoy the new players. I take my responsibilities as a team player very seriously, so I feel like I'm being scrutinized a lot more on PLD than on SCH.
@@Hulan6 I have the same problem. Try out WAR when it gets raw intuition. The fact that you can effectively keep yourself healed on most pulls without relying on the healer has done wonders for making tanking super fun for me. You might still give them a couple heart attacks waiting for low hp before you pop RI and shoot back to full, but you control whether you live or die 99% of the time. And unlike clemency, WAR's heals are all 100% free to use. You _want_ to use them on cooldown when you can. You start running into the opposite problem where you don't even get a chance to use your fun heals because the healer is intent on keeping you full any time you take damage instead of letting you get a little low.
The server time is useful for people who want to organize things with people across multiple time zones because it gives everyone a time that they don't have to convert manually. Source: I used to be part of a group that helped players with dungeons in another mmo that didn't have server time (or a looking for group tool during it's heyday) and converting times zones was a constant pain for everyone.
Small thing I don't know whether you mentioned (watched the whole video, but was playing FFXIV while doing it, so I might have missed it) When playing with mouse and keyboard, there are two control-styles. The standard is tank controls (meaning left doesn't make you walk left, but instead makes you slowly turn counter clockwise etc.) because it seems like a lot of other mainstream MMOs like WoW and GW2 are using that. I don't know how well it works in those games, but in FFXIV you will probably have to change it at some point. The alternative option called "legacy-controls" is just standard over the shoulder controls. You press the key for the direction you want to go in and you go in that direction. Trying to dodge "danger puddles" later on with tank controls is something you wouldn't wish on your worst enemy. That's for the already mentioned reason of you only being able to turn really slowly and for the additional reason that walking backwards is a lot slower in tank controls.
I watched the whole thing despite being 70 levels in the game, so it's good, useful advice. It's hard to remember when you weren't as good at the game, so I appreciate you taking the time to parse the various parts of the MMO out.
I'm watching despite being Lv90 on multiple jobs. It's always good to watch these sorts of things because sometimes other people have caught stuff you haven't.
I was really nervous when I tried out a Healer for the first time, but once I got comfortable with it and levelled to a point where I had some good skills, it's actually a lot of fun
OMG this was so helpful! I especially liked the HUD explanation because I wanted to make mine look nice and uncluttered like yours, but when I hit the HUD button and saw all of the outlines all over the place I got overwhelmed and just noped out. I'm also super anxious about doing my first raid (yep, I'm a healer) so I've just been dragging my feet, leveling up crafting classes, filling my gosh darn inventory to the brim (that's how I accidentally found out about the dots! I was curious too) and doing everything except the raid. But thanks to this video (and spam-watching JoCat's) I feel a bit better about it. Also, how do I join the free company?? Do I have to be not a free trial member? 'cuz i'm still a sprout...
Yeah for free companies you need to be a subscriber sadly. You can however join a linkshell, which is basically a chat room. Though I am not 100% sure on how to find them and get yourself in one, so... well, that's something to look up. Also, I think you mean dungeon? but yeah, there is nothing to worry about the first dungeon especially is super easy and if you just say in chat that this is your first time going through the tank should take things slow, not overwhelming you. Have you tried the tutorial missions before the dungeon? The ones that have a sprout as an icon, they can help a lot.
@@nahuel3433 yes, dungeon, sorry >< Ah well, I guess I’ll just join a free company when I get my subscription going. Yeah, I think I saw a linkshell person in Ul’dah
@@angelcollina I keep checking back and not seeing so I am assuming the youtube bot is killing my comment because it has a link. Because I was trying to point you to the Lodestone's (which is the official FFXIV site for community things) community finder. Which is what can point you to Cross-World Linkshells with people. Just surf around and choose the one you fancy. The Linkshell NPC "just" allows you to create your own.
It is amazing how different classes can appear to have similar abilities and motions but their feel can easily push you to love one class while hating another.
if you do decide to do a Job crash course (which I'd love to see~! would be fun to hear your take on all the classes) I'd highly reccomend having said crash course be with the job at level 50, 60, or 70. Because a lot of classes are just kinda the same thing pre-50 (especially most of the tanks), so 50, 60, and 70 tend to be (varying based on class, obviously) the levels where that class finally gets the ability(ies) that give it its nieche.
I've just finished the Endwalker main story, which is... unusual for me, as I generally get distracted by something else and end up finishing the story just ahead of the next expansion releasing. So now might be a good time to leave my tanxiety behind for a while. I've practically only been playing Paladin for the last 8+ years, so the plan is to try familiarize myself and progress with a healer and a damage dealer while waiting for the next story content update.
@@edgarlarios4718 Well, an update on this: I took Monk to just over lv.50 in short order, but then decided to play other games instead. I've finished 11 games so far this year (counting Endwalker), but of course that doesn't mean my backlog has actually shrunk. Between two bundles to support Ukraine and two others that just felt irresistible... Yikes. Gonna finish the 6.1 story soon, and then keep playing Chrono Cross while leveling some crafting jobs on the side.
I will also say Crystal (the datacenter Dan is on) is a bit nicer than the other two. I have experience in all three and Crystal stays the one I prefer to Duty Finder in. Can't say anything about EU or JP, though.
If anything, the only "extra info" I'd ask for is "What Role does each Class fit into?" Such as, is Dragoon a DPS, or Tank? I assume Scholar is a job, is it DPS or Healing? ETC.
Tanks: Warrior, Paladin, Dark Knight, and Gunbreaker. While there are no Tank "types", all of them have different strengths and weaknesses. There are two types of healers: "barrier" healers and "pure" healers. Former is better at preventing damage. Latter is better at recovering damage. Barrier Healers: Sage and Scholar Pure Healer: White Mage and Astrologian. There are three types of DPS, as Dan touched on: Melee, Ranged, and Caster. Melee: Monk, Reaper, Dragoon, Ninja, Samurai Ranged: Machinist, Bard, Dancer Caster: Black Mage, Red Mage, Summoner There's also Blue Mage, which is a "Limited" job as it can mostly only play with other Blue Mages, has a lower max level, can't do story quests, can fill all three roles, and, in typical FF fashion, only learn moves from enemies and are overpowered af.
I will write this down just because I feel like it and it may be too in depth to go in a video like this. The tanks are: *Paladin* (*) Evolves from Gladiator, the one displayed here. Sword and shield and a lot of utility and also a magic combo *Warrior* (*) Evolves from Big axe, big angry, lots of self healing. *Dark Knight* Big sword, very edgy, makes shields around itself and uses a lot of magic points, at later levels can summon a shadow duplicate of themselves *_Gunbreaker_* Uses a Gunblade for FF8 fans, it's the tank with the most in depth damage combo, which makes many people say he is 3 DPS in a trenchcoat passing itself as tank. The healers are *White Mage* (*) Evolves from Conjurer. Big heals and regens, has a big stun move for dungeons *Astrologian* Pure healer like White Mage, has a card system that randomly takes from a pool and lets you buff party members among other things. *Scholar* (**) Evolves from Arcanist. A Shield healer, meaning it basically gives you an extra chunk of HP on top of your maximum (can also purely heal but it's not its frote). It is also a pet class, meaning you summon a fairy around which automatically heals people and you have to tell it to do other healing actions. *_Sage_* Also a shield healer, this guy selects a specific partner (usually the tank) and automatically heals them every time he does damage, a very offensive healer. The Melee damage (or melee DPS) are *Monk* (*) Evolves from Pugilist. Punches with fist weapons, each of its main attacks makes you change your stance which allows you to use other attacks, naturally fast. Has a chakra system that changes depending on which abilities you use *Dragoon* (*) Evolves from Lancer. JUMPS! to close distances and to make damage, has a really long combo (imo) *Ninja* Evolves from Rogue. This class is also fast, has a cool 3 button system that depending on the order and how many of them you press you make different abilities. The main idea with this one is to use as much abilities you can in the 10 second window you create with your ability called "Trick Attack" which makes the target take more damage *_Samurai_* The "Selfish" DPS, has no party utility but does a lot of damage. You have 3 combos and each time you complete one of them you get one of 3 symbols. Depending on how many of them you have your Iaijutsu ability does different things. *_Reaper_* The scythe wielding edgy boi that has a contract with a demon-like Void sent. Dunno much about this one other than it's easy to play and looks really cool. The Ranged damage are *Bard* (*) Evolves from Archer. A bow wielding attacker that plays songs during the fight to buff companions (as a bonus, you can do a mission to actually play an instrument in the overworld) *Machinist* Gun wielding tech people, the selfish DPS of this group doing quite a bit of damage. At later levels it can summon a robot that punches things *_Dancer_* The chakram throwing dancer selects a dance partner and gives it a damage boost, plus their dances do both damage and have several other utility aspects The Magical Ranged damage (or Casters, the key difference with the normal ranged is that this ones have to stay still to cast some ablities while the ranged can move around and shoot no problem) are: *Black Mage* (*) Evolves from Thaumaturge. The Selfish DPS of this group. The Black Mages juggle between their damage dealing mode where they spend all their mana on big boom spells, and the mana regeneration mode where they recuperate mana while doing ice spells, that back and forward is really fun, they also prefer to be very stationary which is what makes them hard to play in later levels when the game is all about dodging danger puddles. *Summoner* (**) Evolves from Arcanist. Press button, summon big monster, get new spells and spam them. They are the exception to the "has to stand still" rule especially in later levels since most of their spells are instant. *_Red Mage_* A jack of all trades, every time they cast a spell, their next spell will be cast instantly, so they "hard" cast their faster spells, to instantly cast the longer ones. They also have to juggle between using black magic and white magic to fill their bars, once both of them are full enough, they can use a melee combo with their rapier and jump away to keep casting. To clarify _Italics_ means you need to be a paid sub to use them, since they are introduced in later expansions that the free trial doesn't cover. Also, Dark Knight, Machinist and Astrologian need you to reach Heavensward for you to use them since the missions to unlock them are in a HW area. The rest can be unlocked at level 50, 60 and 70 depending on which expansions they were introduced in. (*) they are starting classes, notice all of them also evolve from other classes, because at lvl 30 they change names and get more specialized basically. So if you make a new character and want a Paladin you'd have to go for a Gladiator. (**) also starting class but these ones are particularly weird. They both evolve from the same class and share a level with each other. Meaning that if you just play Summoner and never touch Scholar, once you are level 90, your scholar will be too and vice versa.
so, one little thing, you can actually evade auto-attacks, it's somewhat pointless tho except in solo POTD runs, it's very important for survivability when soloing on jobs like MNK
"The next role of the three, another one that people sometimes feel scared to take on" YUP! I cannot heal, though I do enjoy tanking... I wish people couldn't run off on their own with impunity, but I've tried to let people learn from their mistakes only to have them just more slowly kill the things charging them
So I have a question about how jobs and levels relate to fashion, which is clearly the most important part of the game. If you get higher level armour than your character can wear or a weapon too high level to use, but it looks really cool, can you still use it from your glamour closet? Is it possible to use glamours to make your gear look like something meant for another class, say, make an axe look like a sword or a magic staff? It's been a couple days, so I'm not sure how active the comments are or if they're still being monitored, but here's hoping.
I don't believe you can glamour an item to look like something that is higher than its own level (slight bummer). Fortunately, MANY of the fun fashion items in the game are specifically set to level 1 with garbage stats; the implied intent being "This is a glamour item, use it on anything". XD
@@PlayFramePlus Oh, thank you for the response! I suppose the fashion system working that way does act to reward players for engaging with the other systems, levelling up and completing the content. The fancy-looking high level items are probably a better reward for players who put in the time if they can't be replicated so easily, tragic as the loss of their looks would be to any others.
@@Corvus-Scientiae I can confirm: You cannot glamour an item onto an item with a lower level OR item level. However there's really no reason you'd want to glamour something with a higher item level onto a piece of the same level but lower item level, since you always want to equip higher item level, you'd just equip the better piece of gear and have the appearance anyways. It can also be an indicator if you're in a lower level dungeon, but see someone in level 80 gear, you know they're at least level 80 and should know their job pretty well (if I see people who are lower level in a dungeon I usually watch out for them to see if I can offer any advice)
You cannot make gear look like it's for another class. Some gear can be worn by any class, but gear that you cannot wear for stats on your current job, you cannot wear for glam. This especially goes for weapons because each class has their own unique weapon. In fact, equipping a weapon is actually how you change classes. If you are a Black Mage and equip an Axe , you will switch classes to a Warrior ( or Marauder if you haven't unlocked Warrior). Now that's not to say that there aren't weapons that *look* like another class's weapon. There's a Greatsword for Dark Knight that is just a Katana. Hell, the best Axe in the game right now is actually a hammer model. But for the purposes of the type of weapon it is, what class uses it, and what animations are used when it attacks, it's an axe.
it's so weird being an "MMO illiterate" despite having played a lot of old school JRPGs... I mean, I get what Dan is explaining, but all this new or slightly different information at this speed _even when there is just one player and one enemy on screen_ is still overwhelming for me. Yet, I finally understood one of the things that confused me the most! (that attacks and defenses, both from player and enemies are passive, calculated on your rolls and not on your position or skillful "clicks")
I recommend playing a game like Xenoblade Chronicles, Final Fantasy XII, or Knights of the Old Republic if you want to gain some MMO literacy without diving in head first. They are close approximations of MMO combat, but are single player games.
I have a wish/suggestion for when you get to the post release content of ARR. Can you please talk about the timeframe between updates and what people did in between these? A bit of historical context would be really cool.
Man, you really make me want to try out the game but having literally no one play with kinda ruins it for me. I'll just enjoy your series in the mean time and maybe try out the far future FF mmo
How do you change the camera view? Mine is stuck right behind my character and I'm having trouble seeing everything on the screen in battles and I can't rotate it to see the front of my character (unless I'm crafting).
i have a question Mr. Durami Sir. Do You have unlimited inventory slots in the game? And also, how does this game make the later parts of it more challenging? (More mechanics you have to deal with, bigger enemy numbers e.t.c.) And last but certainly not least: Why are you so freaking cute?! Sincerely: A Durmin/Dan fan Edit: thank you all so much for the answers! I am going to have fun reading these in my spare time.
Oh no, you certainly don't have unlimited space in this game. Stuff will pile up if glamour is what you want. You can either sell stuff for various resources or place gear you want saved up for later in safeboxes of sorts like your Chocobo's backpack, retainer inventory, etc. Yeah there will be more mechanics introduced throughout the game. This is a big component of why people tell you _not_ to buy skips, because the MSQ duties will steadily introduce you to more mechanics that will be standardized in later fighter
In the bottom right corner you can see, above his Gil and above his menu bar, a grid of four rectangles broken up into smaller squares. That's his inventory, the lit up squares are spaces taken up by the items he's carryinng, and the grey squares are open spaces. There's 35 spaces per bag, so 140 total inventory spaces. When you get your Chocobo, you get an additional set of 70 inventory spaces, and each of your retainers (which Dan hasn't messed around with but are basically your lackeys) has 175 spaces for holding onto items for you. You only get two retainers though (unless you add $2 per month to your subscription fee for each one), so that's 350 spaces. So without paying extra, you get a max of 560 inventory slots.
@@trace9021 If you're willing to pay about double your subscription fee, the maximum inventory you can get is 140 inventory slots (not counting crafting crystals or key items, which have their own inventory tab), the armory chest for equipment (35 slots for each type of gear except weapons and rings, which get 50), two saddlebags (140 inventory slots between them, only accessible on the overworld), and up to 10 retainers (175 inventory slots each for a total of 1750, only accessible at a summoning bell (there's at least one in every major city and housing area), also can do other things besides be a living inventory such as sell items on the marketboard or gather items, mostly crafting and gathering ingredients). So 2030 inventory slots, 2445 if you include the gear-exclusive armory chest (not counting up to 9999 of each crafting crystals, up to 35 key item slots, and up to 23* soul crystals, which upgrade your class to a job when equipped, and don't really count as gear in any other way). Either way, your base 140 inventory slots and your armory chest can be accessed anywhere any time, while the other inventory methods cannot. Then there's also the glamour dresser in inn rooms which can hold 400 pieces of gear, but while the items are in there you can only use them for their appearance and not their stats or effects. It costs you one glamour prism item to put something into the dresser, and doing so resets some minor things about the gear such as spiritbond level (which is part of the system for obtaining materia, don't worry about it for now). Best used mainly for items that are cosmetic in nature and don't have actual stats and effects, as far as storage goes that is. For those into fashion, that dresser fills up real quick, though. Finally there's the armoire, a small cabinet in the inn room (one can be crafted for placement in a personal house, too) in which select pieces of gear, usually ones related to seasonal events, crossovers, preorder bonuses, or contest rewards, can be stored. They can be stored within or removed for usage with no cost, and also count as items stored in the glamour dresser without adding to the glamour dresser's inventory space. You can store as many eligible gear pieces within as you want. The selection of eligible gear is quite limited, though. *only 20 of those are for combat jobs. you can have up to three soul crystal equivalents corresponding to crafting jobs, and have the ability to reassign those three soul crystals among your eight crafting jobs for the price of a new Soul of the Crafter to replace the previous one. You can only have three Souls of the Crafter assigned at once and can't reuse ones you've already assigned.
For your second question: the game has a LOT of mechanics during boss fights, especially during the raids. And the harder raids are, the more mechanics will be thrown at you at one time. For example: Dan mentioned danger puddles. These are actually just the simplest and most ubiquitous mechanic. But we have encountered more! Like, for example, the gaze is one we've seen in Haukke Manor (spooky house). It shows an eye above an enemy and, when they are done casting their spell, hits everyone looking at it. If you face your character away from the enemy, you don't get hit. 25:25 showcase several of these mechanics we haven't seen yet. I'll highlight two of them: At 25:53, it shows a circle of arrows that point inwards around someone. That is called a Stack, an attack which is going to do a lot of damage to the person it is targetting. But if you all "stack" up on each other in that circle, the damage will be split across everyone. So, for example, instead of one person taking 10000 damage, 4 people take 2500. Much more survivable. At 25:48, there is a danger puddles with arrows, meaning you will be knocked in that direction if you get hit by it. Titan actually had an attack like that, but it didn't have the arrows because it predates that symbol. XIV gets better at standardizing those mechanics into a unique symbol as time goes on. In total there are at least 100 different mechanics like this (not including mechanics that only show up in one fight). Not all of them show up in every fight, of course. And not all of them work the same way, as bosses love to put twists on familiar mechanics. But gradually, dungeon after dungeon, boss after boss, the game introduces and teaches you how those mechanics work until they become just part of the vocabulary of the game. And as the game gets harder, more and more of them start getting thrown at you at one time. So like the Glare and Stack mechanic I talked about? There is a boss that puts a Glare on the Stack marker. So you have to be nearby the player to share the damage, but not be looking at them to avoid an additional nasty effect.
Difficulty ramps up in several ways, some of which are *mostly* exclusive to higher difficulty levels of content. To start with, there's the obvious one of later enemies often dying more slowly and doing more damage per hit. Dying more slowly might not seem like a difficulty increase, but in a dungeon where the tank's and healer's *good* abilities all have a cooldown attached to them, extending the fight length can leave the healer with no good heals, in which case they have to resort to their inefficient heals instead of doing damage, making it even longer. If you play healer enough and try to play it well, you'll really feel the pain occasionally when a dungeon pull takes significantly longer than it normally does. It can also mess with tanks pretty easily. For example, let's say you pop rampart and it lasts for 20s. Normally, you might have a couple things alive when it finishes and they'll be dead soon, no need to use anything else. If all the enemies still have half their hp after that, you're gonna have to use something else. Most of your main stuff is on 1.5 - 2 minute cooldowns, so it really sucks for both you and the healer having to use an extra if there's another pull coming up right after where you wanted to use it. Enemies doing more damage actually goes beyond simply having more to heal, too. As you get toward the more difficult levels of content, bosses will start doing heavier tankbusters (exactly what they sound like) that outright kill the tank from full hp unless they mitigate the damage. Savage raids will start doing party damage that will outright kill the non-tanks unless it is mitigated. For example, I'm currently on the second fight (out of four) of the new raids and one of the straightforward raidwide damage attacks there will certainly kill us if we're not prepared for it. Both of these mean that rather than just having more to heal, you *need* to start being proactive with these attacks to prevent instant death. Another straightforward way that the game gradually increases difficulty and remains interesting is mechanical variety. As you play, you'll see more and more new types of attacks introduced and reused in other bosses. Party stacks, spreads that may or may not drop lasting puddles, knockbacks and draw-ins, status effects, partners, the arena itself, spinny fun, proximity damage, and more. There's a lot of variety, but it's all introduced one at a time so that by the end, most players have a pretty good grasp of the basic forms of each. The next step there is to start combining these. You might have to spread out while dodging an attack that makes one half of the arena unsafe. You might have to watch the boss to see which side is safe while paying attention to a debuff you have that requires you to stop attacking in 5 seconds. The game starts out nicely telegraphing most of these things, but as you go up in difficulty, less and less gets telegraphed, you have to know what each cast name or boss animation is going to do and dodge accordingly. The more you see and remember, the easier it becomes to get a feel for sightreading new content even if it's a mechanic you've never seen before. Additionally, the game varies boss fight length and the density of mechanics. Casual bosses (in trials or raids) typically last a few minutes, but can work their way toward 10 minutes of low intensity for the newest content before people start getting better gear, especially if it's not a clean kill. Extreme trials have a set time limit to kill the boss, usually roughly near 10 minutes. If you die, you come back with a debuff that ruins your damage, which makes meeting the time limit harder. On top of that, this is when you start having to do more mechanics while keeping up that damage. There's usually a couple or a few big gimmick mechanics per extreme trial and then a bunch of smaller stuff you have to do sprinkled throughout. Savage raids both crank up the time limit and how many mechanics you do in that time, as well as the difficulty of the bigger mechanics. Not only do you have to contend with really learning how to do the mechanics consistently, but also how to do that without simply stopping your attacks. For example, I play a caster a lot, which means I'm often stuck in place for a couple seconds to cast. When I learn savage fights, I also learn how to fit my movement around my casts, how much time I have to move, how much risk something is, etc. It makes a huge difference in my overall damage to find a way to be attacking all the time. Finally, the ultimate difficulty raids. These are gruelling 15-20 minute fights with a very high density of mechanics. You don't get much time to rest or recover before it's on to the next mechanic. Very much a mental endurance challenge on top of the normal gameplay difficulty. Finally, perhaps the truest evolution of difficulty: other people and coordination. In normal content, you will get mechanics that are reasonable to resolve on the fly. If you have to spread out, you have lots of room and time to do it. It doesn't get very bad once you know how to handle them individually. In addition, one good healer can make it nearly impossible to wipe. As long as a couple people are alive and capable of recovering, you can usually push through almost anything. In extreme trials, that doesn't fly anymore. The older extremes didn't do this as much, but in most extremes, you need some coordination. This is where you start seeing mechanics such as a conal attack on every party member, meaning you pre-assign "clock spots" and go there to avoid overlapping two cones. You start seeing attacks where you need to have half the party stack on either healer for an untelegraphed attack (just the cast name usually). It's easier in this difficulty for one person to mess up and also kill someone else or even the entire party. Each member has to be aware of what's happening and what to do. Savages sometimes keep this with less margin for error and sometimes go even further. You'll have numerous mechanics that ask you to solve a little puzzle of "What does this mechanic do?" followed by coming up with a strategy for where each person should go. Often, you won't know where you're going until the mechanic starts and gives you some kind of marker. It's often essentially impossible to live through these mechanics if anyone is already dead or dies early on in the mechanic, or if anyone isn't in the right spot. Ultimates of course take this a step further. There's a LOT to remember about one complete fight and you'll be actively using that knowledge with tiny breaks between, for up to 20 minutes. The most recent ultimate is notorious as one where if anyone ever dies during the first boss of it, you might as well wipe instead of trying to resurrect them. There are only a couple places where you might have time to quickly recover 1-2 deaths, but the damage check is also a big obstacle with any deaths.
I wonder if the relative nice-ness of the community is because of the pay wall. In my experience, most jerks and trolls would not be willing to ply their trade at the cost of anything to themselves. Only those who WANT to be in the FF14 community are in there. And thank you for explaining how you can walk into a cloud if cactus needles and take no damage: the mechanical attack only matters for an instant. Having the animation of the attack not matter seems to fit FF14's form over function mentality. (And it HAS been mentioned often about fashion and aesthetics being the true endgoal)
It's not the paywall. WoW has never had a great community and it's always required a paywall. Hell, I'd argue WoW even has better moderation than XIV (including harsher punishments for being a jerk with a higher chance of being punished), yet XIV is still malms ahead of WoW. If I had to guess is it would be four factors XIV has over other MMOs: more expression for RP, a higher emphasis on story, lack of world PvP, and an emphasis on replaying old content. The first two bring in a lot of players that don't usually touch MMOs... well at least not mechanically dense MMORPGs. Having a more variety of players means there is a bigger variety of voices, personalities, and just people to enjoy the content with. You won't always run into someone who grates on you because there arent hundreds of thousands of people exactly like them in the game's narrow audience. Plus, just the inclusion of same sex player marriage, even with so few other LGBTQ+ features in the game, signal that queer people are welcome in the game. Which is usually a good sign you are fostering a good playerbase. The lack of world PvP or any faction based combat reduces animosity in both the play experience and interactions in the playerbase. As much as I enjoyed razing Alliance towns down to the geound and killing all the NPCs there in WoW, it does no favours when it comes to making a welcoming and understanding community. Having you be expected to replay old content, whether through level sync in instances or levelling other jobs, means that you are going to be expecting to play with new players constantly. In fact, the game *rewards* you for playing with new players. This change means that more veteran players are conditioned to be a lot more forgiving of new players and that newer players can more readily lean on these more experienced players to get through tough content.
A really short crash course is almost a full hour? Makes me wonder how long it would take if he did a more complete and proper guide. Knowing Dan, he would still try to make it entertaining to watch either ways. I do have 1 small question Dan, why didn't you include some snippet about novice network ( i think that is what it is called anyways ) ? It is not a guild but it gives access to help when people need it. You can do some casual chatting for fun but is also doing something with a mentor in case people need help. Maybe a nice alternative for people who want to solo it, but still have something as a back up for help without adding guilds and the like?
It highly depends who hangs out in there on your server. Some NN channels are full of awful advice, dick-measuring contests, and other pretty idiotic stuff for new players trying to learn. Some are genuinely friendly and helpful.
@@Qazqi Ah okay. The one from cerberus is nice and helpful so far, so thought it was the same for all. Didn't know it was so dependant on channels whether or not they were helpful though.
Please don't call everything "abilities". The game makes a distinction between abilities, weaponskills, and spells. It's a pretty important distinction to understand. The general term for everything is "actions".
Honestly this is the very reason why the community doesn't call them abilities, but "Off-Global-Cooldowns" or "OGCDs". Abilities is a very generic term and using it to mean one specific type of skill is one of the things I wished they changed. Call them "Combat Tricks" or "Fast Actions" or something specific so people know thats what's meant.
I figured that making a distinction between abilities / weaponskills / spells would just add needless complexity to a guide mostly intended for folks who don't play the game and really just want help parsing all the chaos onscreen a little better. But yeah, "Actions" would have been a better term to use. :P
Is there a cool word for the fear of being a healer? The one for being a tank is very good; I'm not going to try to type it because I don't know how to spell it.
the way you explained it, is emnity different from aggro? you seemed to imply it has more to do with rhe amount of aggro you produce. I only ever played WoW and it seems very similar. Not really a bad thing just interesting
The best part of the hud is macros. "Potion up" drinking/eating all the potions you want for the day. "Set" tying your ogcd damage boost to your generic attack. So that whenever you use your generic attack if your damage boost is ready it also activates the damage boost.
You really shouldn't use macros in combat. Macros do not take advantage of the games action queueing system, which means that by default the GCD is 2.5 seconds, if you press another GCD action between say 2.0s and 2.5s, then the game will queue it up and use the action automatically as soon as the GCD is ready. However macros don't take advantage of this feature, so you have to wait until after GCD is ready to be able to use a GCD action in a macro. Also the command in macros only work in whole numbers. So if you have say a command, then the game will either read that as a wait of 2, or a wait of 3, effectively breaking the macro, or slowing down your combat. The best use of macros however is actually for crafting. Since crafting is effectively turn based rather than real time, macros work beautifully for automating crafting.
You'll be unable to use any abilities that require MP until you regain enough back (especially nasty for magic-based casters who have a lot of MP-reliant abilities). HP and MP both regenerate very quickly outside of combat, but running out of MP mid-fight can be rough. Various jobs that rely heavily on MP have abilities specifically for recovering it, though, and there are consumables which can help in an emergency too.
Judging by Dan's ending tips it seems like the little I played of wow a long time ago did actually thoroughly train me to follow mmorpg action forever. I don't know if I'm impressed or upset xD I have been imprinted!
WoW was seminal. Many MMORPGs have come and gone since with innovations here and there (most of which Blizzard copied wholesale into their game), but none have left as big of an impact on the DNA of the genre as much as WoW. Basically understanding WoW let's you understand 90% of every other MMORPG
Just to be clear, gladiator isn't a job, it's a class. Also, if you went to ask at the conjurer's guild, you wouldn't become a level 1 white mage, you would become a level 1 conjurer. You can do a job quest at level 30 of a combat class, which grants you a piece of equipment called a job stone. Wearing the job stone, allows you to stop playing class and start playing the job. This differentiation is important because not all abilities and gear can overlap between the job and its base class. The job of paladin builds on the class of gladiator, the job of black mage builds on the class of thaumaturge, etc. Job and class are words that have very specific meanings in the world of FFXIV. There are no gathering or crafting jobs but there are several gathering and crafting classes. Hope this helped clear things up! (Edit: It's been a long time since I've played but I vaguely recall some jobs introduced in later expansions allowing you to get job stones under different conditions for some of the newer jobs. What I describe above goes for the 7 original combat classes and jobs only. Those are gladiator/paladin, marauder/warrior, pugilist/monk, lancer/dragoon, archer/bard, conjurer/white mage, and thaumaturge/black mage. Later added jobs and classes may have followed a similar system but I don't remember or I left before they were implemented.)
SOME MINOR CORRECTIONS:
-There are 19 jobs, not 17. (I forgot to include the recent Endwalker additions!)
-"Actions" would have been a more accurate term than "Abilities", but you get the idea.
And you can do all of this on a Playstation controller. I forgot to put that down.
Don't forget that healers are also responsible for keeping themselves alive too, you could argue that keeping themselves alive is the number 1 important thing, because a dead healer can't heal or resurrect the tank or the rest of the party. Well, unless you have a DPS with party healing/ resurrect abilities like summoners and red mages. 😉
@Chris Davey I want to make the same point. As someone who plays a healer most often, it's important for new healers to learn to not get tunnel vision. What I mean by that is: don't focus so much on your party's health bars that you don't notice that YOUR health is low. Pay attention to yourself, your location in the room, the placement of the bosses or enemy mobs, and your fellow party members.
Standing in danger puddles, standing in front of the boss (too close to the Tank), or standing too far away from a ranged damage party member can all affect how much healing and how many "emergency heals" you'll need to handle.
As of patch 6.1, you can enter some content, such as dungeons, with an NPC party. However, having a party of other players is preferable.
Dan, that number is only ever going to get less correct with time, don't worry about it too much.
I *looove* the UI customization and just quality of life and accessibility options the game provides in general. the UI team really makes the game super convenient to play while still retaining its skill ceiling and difficulty. Dan mentioned his legally blind friend that apparently has skills like a monster in a previous episode and it really rings true, I've a friend with only one working hand and he's beaten ultimates - aka the MOST DIFFICULT content in the game - with his one working hand
I'd like to comment on the Healer priority list. Tanks are actually not your highest priority on the heal order, the Healer is. While the Tank may be the one consistently taking damage, if you find you have to heal yourself (the Healer) or the Tank, it is generally good practice to heal yourself first. A Tank's kit gives them options to survive even at the brink of death, and even if they die, you can still revive them. But if you die, the rest of the party will eventually run out of damage mitigation and HP to finish the fight.
So always prioritize the Healer's survival first. And a lot of times, that means you have to heal yourself before anybody else.
Oh boy, I gotta come up with a bonus Spoiler Free Lore Comment. Hm.
Abilities. Dan points out that a Gladiator will get more abilities when they become a Paladin. This only happens if a Gladiator equips a Paladin Job Stone, which is given for free at the level 30 job quest. All combat classes receive Job Stones at either level 30, or at their minimum level. No Job Stone, no extra abilities, abilities which the game is designed & balanced around. *You would be surprised of the number of characters who are near max level and do not have Job Stones equipped.*
Directional Abilities. Dan's talk on directionals are the reason tanks should not spin around their targets. Dodging enemy attacks is fine, and probably preferable, but running in circles for fun lowers the DPS of the team. I've been told this was a traditional thing in WoW, but it's detrimental in FFXIV. In old versions of directional abilities, messing up the directional would result in the combo action being lost, which could be a big deal.
Danger Puddles. Usually, "who is going to be hit" is determined when the "cast bar" completes, aka when the ability fires. This is *different* than when the animation occurs. So you'll see some players dodge out of puddles, and then move into the puddle zone when it disappears, taking no damage, even if the ability is spewing flame into that zone. It's a little weird, but you get used to it. Later fights stack this, so they show multiple puddles, in sequence, and then fire them off in sequence. You have to remember where the safe zone is for each one, and move accordingly. You can see this at 25:35. There are exceptions to this "safe after the cast" rule, which can be a rude awakening to players. These attacks usually have a persistent effect, like a prolonged flamethrower blast, or a big acid puddle.
Enmity, or Aggro, used to be a very complicated thing in FFXIV. Some classes specifically had abilities that reduced their enmity, and sometimes you could transfer some of your enmity to another target (usually your tank). As I understand it, there was a bit of an overhaul of the tank classes sometime around the release of Shadowbringers, which ensured that each tank had a toggleable buff (tank stance) which generates bonus enmity when dealing damage, and does nothing else. Prior to this, tank stance reduced the damage generated and increased enmity, so juggling tank stance and a DPS stance was sometimes required (I'm specifically thinking of the Paladin's Shield Oath & Sword Oath. This is the joke Zepla was making in her "Shield Oats" video). This eventually compounded a game wide problem that was recently addressed with the release of Endwalker: tanks started generating enmity numbers that were ridiculous. All numbers were reduced in Endwalker, but we still have the big Final Fantasy Numbers.
If you're fighting a boss, the party list will show which character has the top enmity, with A for #1, and numerically after that. This really matters for some bosses who will sometimes target the #2 spot for certain attacks, and for the terrible situation if the person in the #1 slot dies. Fun Fact, healing generates a lot of enmity. If the tanks are dead, healers are usually the next people targeted
All jobs are viable! Except for Blue Mage. Blue Mage is a bit of odd content, where you can be massively overpowered and one shot bosses. But they're restricted so that it doesn't massively imbalance the game.
Just to note: A indicates who has Aggro. This is what you'll usually see on whoever is at the top of the enmity list. However, in 24-man content you can't see other parties' enmity, so in these cases if your party's tank has the most aggro in your party but not overall then they'll have a 1 instead.
I main an OT (off tank), and let me tell you the number of times I accidentally got our ninja killed in savage because I forgot to turn my stance on before the twin tank busters that were aggro based, and not role based T_T
The fun thing about co-tanking is that aggro generation is also based on player skill (are you hitting your buttons in the right order for optimal damage?), and gear based. I main DRK in savage content, so my gear is at BiS (best in slot), or pre-BiS at any given time. However, most players don't raid, so I normally out-gear them. This means I can easily rip aggro from another tank if I'm not paying attention (I solve this by usually just turning my stance off once I've ensured I'm at the appropriate spot on the list should the MT die), and/or shirking my aggro onto one of my healers (a surprise for them, to be sure, but it's not enough to endanger them)
Server time is really useful if you are trying to co-ordinate a bunch of people for a raid or event across different timezones.
Or just use UTC/GMT. I don't know what my server's time is when I'm not logged in, but I can easily figure out what UTC is.
Server time is also usually relevant for timed features such as weather patterns, rare hunt targets, rare gathering nodes, etc.
@@dragonbretheren that's Eorzea Time not server time
@@dragonbretheren Weather patterns are on Eorzea time, the weather changes ever 8 Eorzean hours, timed gathering nodes are also on Eorzea time, they show up at specific times of day Eorzea time. Hunt targets are not on any kind of fixed schedule, and will respawn at random during a certain window of time since they were last killed. The only things tied to server time are daily and weekly resets, and you can just as easily use any other time zone for those.
Some folks find it useful for knowing when maintenance is to start. :Vb
FF14 rite of passage 1: Finding a HUD layout you like for a particular class.
Rite of passage 2: Seeing someone else's customized layout that works for them, and either asking "how did you do that" or "how do you play with that abomination?"
Three years later and I'm still making HUD adjustments.
2 is a constant, especially if you watch XIV streamers. Dear lord. Love them all but I cannot parse some of their layouts.
Dan's gives so little info and yet manages to be in the way of so much screen space, I just don't understand.
@@JohnDCrafton Four years, I mostly just added more and more hotbars as I went and found myself needing the space. I like having everything in the default positions near the edges of the screen, but I also find it a little difficult to keep track of certain stuff. I might have to change the size of some elements...
Eorzea time: used for setting a consistent-length short timer on when to start fighting a FATE in collaboration with non-party-member players. Standard rule is to start 1 Eorzean hour after the shout gets sent by calling out the FATE name and posting the time to fight so everyone has time to travel and arrive.
(Tell everyone to start in 1 Eorzean hour and it will be about 2m 55s +/-3 seconds. Tell everyone to start in 3 real minutes and you get 2m 30s +/-30 seconds because the clock might've rolled over to 5:51 a second after you said start at 5:53.)
Additionally, Eorzean time is the schedule that special gathering spots operate by. If it says "3am in rain" then it means it spawns at 3am eorzean time.
Server Time: for long-term planning longer than 5 minutes or when not everyone is expected to be at their computer while waiting. If the Event FATE respawns in 20 minutes, you tell everyone that the next spawn is at 6:00[server time]. Not in 6h 52m Eorzean Time(yes that is 20 minutes. No it is not a clean conversion and I had to round).
Eorzean time is for consistency and accuracy, Server time is for tracking and planning.
Local time is for making sure you stay up to only *two* hours past your bed time.
One neat function of having your gear slots visible next to your inventory dots is that it lets you see if your gear has spiritbonded! This happens after you've used a piece of equipment (helmets, swords, rings, etc) in a lot of engagements/crafts/gathering runs. When the dots turn white, you can right-click that piece of equipment, pick "extract materia" and get - you guessed it! - a piece of materia. Put them in your gear or sell them on the market board, might come in handy either way!
Had no idea about this little interface feature until literally yesterday. Glad I won't have to check spiritbond manually anymore.
Red dots indicate broken gear - go get them repaired. I'm pretty sure there's also a significantly more obnoxious text pop-up near the top of your screen as well.
Much less useful for most people are the orange dots in your inventory which indicate a full stack of something, even if it's just something that can't be stacked (and isn't equipment).
Others mentioned that the red dots mean broken gear, and orange dots mean full stacks. I guess for completeness I'll mention that Green dots are unbroken, non-spirtbonded equipment, and blue dots are incomplete stacks of non-equipment items. Full list of dot colors:
* Blue = Incomplete stack of normal items.
* Orange = Full stack of normal items (or unstackable items)
* Green = Equipment that isn't broken or fully spiritbonded
* Red = Equipment with durability = 0% (i.e. Broken)
* White = Equipment with spiritbond = 100% (i.e. Materia can be extracted)
Red and White are by far the most important colors to watch out for.
Honestly I don't really need the crash course but I'm always happy to watch more FF14 on PlayFrame ^_^
Never has there been a more true statement: "Play the job you want, they are all viable."
Underline it, bold it. Frame it!
As you get involved in the community, you will often see people mention they are a "RDM main" or "SCH main". 'Main' is short for 'main class' and it's what that person does most of the time or is most comfortable playing. That doesn't mean they can't or won't play other jobs but that's the one they will do most of the time.
Dan: There’s one last responsibility damage dealers have … don’t die like an idiot.
Me, a floor tank: LISTEN
He said "like an idiot", which implies that it's okay to die if it's not in an idiotic fashion!
@@HanabiraKage I think you underestimate the level of stupidity I operate at. There’s a reason I don’t do EX, Savage, or Ultimate lmao. |D;
(Well, some EX. Not level Sync’d lmao.)
@@Caterfree10 Look, if your job is floor tank dying is doing your job i.e. not stupid. :p
Afaict Server Time is for interacting with people on the same server but not in the same timezone. So for example when someone want to say when some kind of even begins, then instead of saying the time and timezone they're in, they can just say the time in server time. This means it's the same for everyone, and they won't need a converter.
An important bit of combat, particularly for tanks: When the enemy cast bar is pulsing with a red outline, that indicates an attack that can be interrupted. Tanks have the "Interject" role action, which can interrupt those attacks - and generally such attacks will be a problem if not interrupted.
And range dps have Head Graze as well
I normally main Gunbreaker and I did not know that. Thank you for the tip.
One of the most important UI changes you can make in my opinion is to split the enemy health bar into components, put the enemy cast bar right towards the middle at the top or bottom of the screen where you're focusing and crank up the scale on it, because that's one of the most important pieces of information you should be watching out for.
"Tankxiety" was definitely something that hit me when I tried the role in my early game, but I somewhat cured it by being a Healer main. Healers have a very symbiotic relationship with the tank; after hitting lvl.60 on most healers, I felt like I knew as much about tanking as my own role, an could pick up the tank role with much more ease.
The hardest thing to get used too in FFXIV for me coming from WoW was being able to step back into danger puddles once the puddle is gone, even if the dragon breathing fire animation was still playing. ...Similarly, spent a long time confused why I was getting hit when the animation clearly missed me, but it doesn't matter. Weird at first, but lets them do cool things and also make the animations over the top.
It really doesn't feel good when you first start playing, especially when you're used to other MMOs. It feels like every attack doesn't have impact or believability.
But once you get into later content that pushes the mechanical density and complexity, it clicks as to why it does it this way.
It even depends on the attack. Most attacks are one and done even if the animation is still going, but sometimes you get attacks that leave stage hazards that hurt/debuff you, or attacks that genuinely keep putting out damage for as long the animation plays. There is no way to tell which is which beforehand.
One thing to add is there is daily random dungeon and boss fight runs for player that give extra exp or endgame. This is the main thing that keep the duty finder you see Dan show going. A level 85 tank doing one of there dailies to level can get a level 25 dungeon with lower level players. This help keep you from waiting hours in hope someone somewhere else is doing this 5 year old side quest fight. That said you still may have to wait a little but it pop on a active hour. Though high end raids is another matter
As of Endwalker, there is actually 19 (+1) jobs in the game. The +1 is for Blue Mage, which is considered a "Limited Job", effectively that means that BLU's can not go up to the same level cap as the other 19 jobs (the BLU cap is currently level 70), and they have various restrictions on the types of content they could enter. BLU is like this because if you know how Blue Mage works in other Final Fantasy's, BLUs only learn spells from enemies, and they tend to be among the strongest job types. BLU in FFXIV is no different, with the right spell set, they can easily trivialize a lot of content. They can also change what role they are for parties, by default they are a Caster DPS, but they could change to either being a Tank, or a Healer. By taking advantage of this, they created achievements that could only be earned by beating the various raids with only full parties of BLU's.
One thing you did not mention about the danger puddles: you get hit if you are in the area when the puddle disappears, not when the animation occurs. You see the puddle, you move out. The puddle disappears, you move back (if you need to. Tanks do this a lot to keep the enemy in a single spot facing a single way). Even if the animation shows the enemy shooting a long burst of fire out of their mouth all over you, so long as you were not in the puddle at the time it disappeared, you take no damage.
Many of the later mechanics need you to jump from one danger puddle to the next as soon as one of them disappears, so this is useful to know about the mechanic.
He did actually mention this, and even did it a couple times in the video, but he probably could have been a bit clearer that you can move back in even if it looks like things are exploding, it's safe as long as the danger puddle is gone.
There are exceptions, but those are few and far between and don't do much damage per damage tick so you have the opportunity to get out.
@@iryoku2 I did not hear him ever say that the end of the danger puddle was the end of the danger. Instead, it seemed that he was explicitly waiting until the animation was done before he headed back in.
@@Law-gnome He didn't explicitly say that, but he said the inverse at 23:12. "How do you know you've gotten out of them in time? The basic rule is, most of the time, if you are still standing in it when it disappears, you are going to get hit." Like I said, he could have made it more clear, maybe by explicitly stating what you're saying, but what he said does imply that if you're not standing in it when it disappears, you won't get hit. He also moves back into 100-Needles at 32:54, and again at 33:05, both during his explanation of the tank role, and he also kind of suggests that you can move back in then as well.
Dan: "Every job in the game is viable!"
Blue Mage: Someone believes in me!
Also Dan: "There are 17 jobs in the game"
Blue Mage: T_T
I'm not the target audience for this video, but I love that you've made as many of these FFXIV videos as you have. I love anything that makes this game more accessible or visible to people who otherwise wouldn't play it. It's a really special game, and you're doing a fantastic job showcasing it!
I love how you explain things at such a foundational level without being patronising. Really helps make things clear without presumption. Thank you so much for this. 👍🏼
im about a year late to this series (and ffxiv in general). but a friend recommended it to me about 1-2 weeks ago & i’m already lvl 47-ish. and this series helps a lot!
i’m also glad that by the time i started playing, they let you run story dungeons with NPCS. 1): MMOs make me SUPER anxious (especially since i stumbled into the healer position accidentally SKSK). 2): my internet has been SUPERRR buggy, so i’d be of no help to anyone 😭
but all in all i’ve enjoyed it, even if i’ve just been playing on my own. :’]
Speaking as a mentor (although, honestly not the best one), the "next main scenario quest" is the most valuable resoruce. Specially because it shows CLASS quests just under itself, so useful.
There are sneaky tricks to use up to 13 hotbars, AND the crosshotbars in play, but it involves macros and switching the hotbars out. Well beyond standard levels of insanity, but kind of fun to do.
Back when the gathering minigame was different, I had a button that toggled on "collectable mode" that turned on my ability to gather collectables, and changed my bars to a set with the normally hidden collectable mini game commands. You can go DEEP.
(10:20) The oldest option for status is to have it all in a single bar, I think that was the default for a while, and then an option that had to be enabled.
Currently, and what you are showing off has buffs, debuffs, and neutral in 3 bars, and I think that's default now.
There's a new (as of endwalker) option to break statuses into FOUR groups. And that looks like it's going to be the default going forward. The fourth group is "conditonal enhancements" ... yha, no clue what that means.
There is a plot dungeon (a certain research station) with a 2 part final boss, and in order to pass it without too much trouble, you have to learn that you can run into explosions, as long as you are away from the orange danger puddle.
(33:00) In one dirrection? So the others can be, stabbing westward?
@@ICountFrom0 Conditional enhancements are procs like the ones that let you use verfire and verstone on RDM. Basically, if you need to watch your buffs in order to play your job properly, you can separate out the conditional enhancements and put them somewhere more friendly for that purpose.
10/10 - as a non FF player I really enjoyed this bonus vid. GG Dan, you are a real MVP
Congratulations Dan on being only the second person who I've ever encountered who automatically thinks of mana as a percentage in this game. I've had to work so hard to get other people to even see the possibility of it.
It didn't used to be like this. We did used to have an MP amount that was based on level, and healers could get more MP with Piety. It was Shadowbringers and patch 5.0 that fixed it to 10K for everyone. I figure long time players are less willing to see MP as % because of this.
I was there Gandolf, I was there 3,000 years ago.
... I remember TP and how it made Pal a slightly better tank in big pulls.
To help matters, the party list displays the 10000 MP with the last two zeroes visibly smaller than the other digits!
That steppy cactus is the second funniest move cycle I have seen in a game, behind only the incredible mini-Gobbue half-panicked run animation.
th-cam.com/video/_zoRoEh-kOA/w-d-xo.html
I didn't realize until now how cute the Sabotender's animations are.
More notes: You can set it to display all three clocks at once if you want. The minimap can be zoomed in and out with the +/- symbols on it ( I recommend zoomed out as far as possible) and can be un/locked to north with the gear symbol... you can (and should) increase the size of your main map window by dragging the bottom right corner of it and repositioning the window. The partylist symbols, when you target a specific enemy or boss, show that target's aggro to each partymember on their job symbol, starting with A, then 1, 2, 3 ... There is also an aggro bar next to the numbers, which may not be as useful if the tank has had aggro for a long time, as the others tend to shrink. If you haven't died (which resets aggro), you can kinda gauge your relative output with some exceptions (some tank actions have naturally higher aggro, and some heals, mainly large Area of Effect heals)
I have my clocks set up to show both Eorzea and Local time, you can show only two at once as well
Ahhhh! 35:55 To clarify, the healer's second Priority is themselves, not the DPS, although the argument can be made that it's actually their top priority, before the tank. Can't keep the party alive if you're dead.
And this goes double in larger raids, where you usually have a back-up tank when the main tank goes down.
If the tanks die, you still have a moment to recover. If the healers die, the fight becomes a race against time which you often can't win.
I concur, the healer is frequently top priority imo. I main RDM and if I see a healer go down, I’ll swiftcast them up ASAP.
Wow, this was so nice! Really helped me understand a bit more what is happening when you fight! Thank you for this :D
To echo what Dan is saying at 40:30 FF14 in general has an awesome community. Yes there are jerks but they are rare, like really rare. Like in the DTC Chat maybe once a week a member will complain that they had a negative experience with a random group. And that is dozens of players doing dozens of random groups each. In my experience (and surprisingly when you've been on the internet before) people are more likely to offer you friendly advice after you mess up then yell at you for it
Something that I think you didn't say here that I think is key. Mostly for dungeons.
When there is 3 enemies or more, as a rule of thumb, you want to use your AoE (area of effect) abilities. Or your "Multi target" abilities. So you hit all the enemies at once.
The potency of your AoE attacks will probably be lower than your single target attacks, but with single target you are doing (for example) 130 at a single enemy. If your AoE is 100 and hit 3 enemies you are hitting for a combined total of 300 damange per attack!
Yep. Just be aware a few jobs have aoe skills/combos that start being more effective at 2 enemies or more.
I've played through the main plot line "solo" with no significant problems. Since I'm playing the free version, I can't join free companies, so I have to have random players help me in dungeons. My only complaint isn't rude players, it's quick players. I assume most of them have played through the dungeon before, as they know where to go, and they have a tendency to try to get through it as fast as possible. But I like to stop and look around at the scenery, plus there's occasionally plot-relevant text\dialog that I want to experience, which can be a problem when I've gotten done reading\listening to it, and everyone else has moved further on.
It's not ideal but you can backtrack your way through the dungeon after the third boss is killed. You don't have to leave immediate once it's completed.
You could ask to take it slow as well. I've asked that in a few dungeons I'm not entirely comfortable with and generally the player slow down. It's not a guarantee for sure but it happens more often than you'd think
That said if they're rushing forward while you're watching cutscenes then the people are just dicks
99% of the time, people will wait for your cutscenes, if however you want to explore everything and read everything, I suggest you pull every mob you see while you have the group, even if it's out of the way, and clear the dungeon at the group's pace. Then, once the final boss is cleared, use Return to get back to the beginning of the dungeon, and walk through it at your leisure. If you didn't pull every mob while the party was still present, you won't be able to explore everything without an overwhelming and arduous fight, and you might not be able to beat the mobs period. I main tank and enjoy the story and lore so I would respect everyone's time and get them through quickly, then go back and admire/read everything, and look at the chat history under the battle tab in case I missed any dialog in any fight my first time through. You'll be able to do that more easily now with AI npc's going into dungeons with you in ARR, but this tip still works in Heavensward and Stormblood content.
If you have more mechanics questions, feel free to ask here in the comments and us xiv veterans will do our best to help out.
One thing that you forgot to mention that really helps understanding one of the most fun parts of the rotation is weaving. Dan has showed abilities that have a cooldown of 2.5 seconds and abilities that have much longer cooldowns. Conveniently placed on the first and second hotbar respectively. The 2.5 second cooldown is "global" so all skills with that cooldown will go on cooldown at the same time, these skills are referred to as GCD's (global cooldowns). At 19:12 you'll notice that Dan is waiting 2.5 seconds even when using different skills for a combo.
You can also see that the skills on the second hotbar are NOT going on cooldown. These are called "off globals" or OGCD's. You can use these at any time even while waiting for the global cooldown. So of course you'd prefer to use them while you're waiting for those 2.5 seconds. This is called "weaving" and it's what makes your rotation so interesting. You want to use as many skills on your global cooldown as possible to do the most damage, so you don't want to delay those. Because of this, you are typiclly limited to a maximum of two OGCD's every 2.5 seconds, "weaved" in between your GCD's. Now imagine you're maximum level, you have a ton of skills, and you need to figure out the correct order to use them in for your rotation. You want to use all your skills as fast as possible while staying within that two OGCD limitation. That's where the fun is in optimization and how the slow combat you see in the videos now evolves into a challenging chaotic fiesta of button presses. Not to mention dodging danger puddles while doing all that :)
41:00 i would, for the sake of being able to access as much narrative as possible, recommend leveling a tank class, a healer, a melee dps, magic dps, and ranged dps.
Very true, though the payoff for that doesn't start until the third expansion, so people don't have to worry about it right away.
Always appreciating these.
Often listening to you as I work
Wow.... this is awesome! And needs to be a whole mini series "Durmin teaches you how to FF XIV" For all the people the playframe power to compel people t get games brought into the game.
Already figured most of this out, but the one bit I could not figure out how to do is... how do you get the hot bars to stop showing the empty boxes? I couldn't find the toggle for that.
Character Configuration > Hotbar Settings > Hide Unassigned Slots
Thanks for the bonus video, Dan👍
How is everyone's week going?
Thank you VERY much, Dan. This video was really helpful to me. Please keep doing these videos as this series continues.
About cast time instant. It doesn't actually mean the skill comes out instantly. It means the skill animation starts instantly. The skill actually triggering often is at some point in that animation.
That can be really annoying when playing a healer.
Yeah this is something in XIV that new players have to get used to as opposed to other MMOs. In XIV, a lot of skills have what's called "animation lock" (especially Dragoon) that prevent you from using other abilities and even moving until the animation ends. And the damage doesn't actually come out until the animation is over, which means you can finish a cast and it will do nothing because the enemy/you are already dead.
I still have a question. I've heard the term "global cooldown timer" and that you need to pay attention to it. What is the global cooldown timer?
Certainly! Let me see if I can explain...
So when I used each of those three attacks in the Gladiator's combo sequence, did you notice how all three abilities (and a handful of others) ALL went on cooldown, with the little timer showing me how long I'd have to wait before they were usable again? This is called your Global Cool Down (or GCD), and it will apply to many of your abilities. Use one of these GCD abilities, and you'll have to wait the 2.5ish seconds before you can use ANY of the others.
That said, there are other abilities in your kit which are Off Global Cool Down (or OGCDs, as some refer to them). These can be used at literally any time without impacting your global cool down at all (you can even use them inbetween hits in the 1-2-3 combo!). But these abilities also tend to have MUCH longer independent cool downs, some as long as 4 minutes. So you'll generally be spending combat constantly throwing out GCD abilities every 2.5ish seconds (as fast as they'll allow) and peppering in the OGCD abilities whenever they become available and have strategic value for your current situation.
Hope that kind of helps?
@@PlayFramePlus Yes that was helpful, thank you. I needed that distinction between GCD and OGCD
Thank you so much for this! There are so many little nuances to combat that I had no idea I was missing as a new player. I really appreciated this video. :)
So, maybe as a suggestion for a future "Combat 102" video - when you're talking about how other roles work such as healer or damage dealer, could you switch to those classes/jobs when explaining how they do things? For example, when you mentioned how damage dealers do a lot more damage, could you show a side-by-side of GLA's 1-2-3 and, say, LNC/DRG's 1-2-3 to show the higher potencies?
That would be alot of work especially if he didn't open the class/job or didn't level it up to match the Tank also he will need to equip it with similar gear level to be able to compare them after all he only created this characterfor story mode. I think it's enough to know that Tanks do less damage than Dps (Damege Dealers).
@@alenezi989a3 I mean not really.
He could grab a Reaper or a Sage and he'd be good, they start at lvl 70 after all.
@@nahuel3433 He'd have to switch to his other character for that; you need to have at least one job at those jobs' starting levels to unlock them.
@@HanabiraKage He would not need to switch. He's 70 in every canon class through StB because he bought level skips, which is the level you need to be to grab RPR/SGE.
@@alenezi989a3
A) You can get every job on one character, so Dan could easily grab Lancer (off-screen) to show the tooltips. He wouldn’t even need to level the class, since you don’t need to unlock the skills to see the tooltips via the Actions & Traits menu - meaning a Level 1 Lancer would still have tooltips available for a side-by-side comparison with Gladiator.
B) Dan could easily ask a friend or a member of his FC to send him screenshots of said tooltips.
C) Dan could also just as easily take screenshots of the skill descriptions from the official FFXIV Job Guide posted on the Lodestone.
It's not that big of an ask, really. Just something I proffered as a suggestion so that comparisons to jobs and roles other than Gladiator or Tank could have visual aids of some sort to accompany it.
HUD:
- Blue segment of EXP bar represents rested EXP - x1.5 EXP for EXP equivalent to the amount represented by the segment. It being blue tells you that it's enough to get you to the next level, it will be a dull brown if not.
Combat:
- Active skills here are called "Actions" and passive skills are called "Traits". Actions are further divided into Weaponskills (use Attack Power and Skill Speed), Spells (use Attack/Healing Magic Potency and Spell Speed), and Abilities (stats used depend on skill). Of the three, only Abilities do not trigger the global cooldown all skills go on whenever you use any of them, instead having their own cooldown timers. Sometimes Abilities share cooldown timers with other Abilities; when this is the case the relevant Abilities will say so in the description.
- If your target is out of range, a tiny red X will appear at the bottom left of the skill icon if it doesn't cost anything. Otherwise the cost (MP or some other resource) listed at that same spot will turn red instead.
- Latency can affect your ability to get out of danger puddles in time. For example, I live in Southeast Asia but play in North American servers so my latency's pretty bad; I have to be out of danger puddles nearly a full second before it vanishes to avoid damage.
This gives such a nice insight in the game's combat mechanics! Very clear and fun to watch!
And the free reign for optimizing your HUD is soooo satisfying!
Ive never really gotten into MMO's. I played WOW barely,
started FF14 ages ago and never got anywhere. I feel like one of the biggest issues I had was an understanding of the basic mechanics. (And no one to play with)
Thank you for these educational tidbits!
29:50 I take it this video was made a while back? There's 19 jobs (not counting Blue Mage) now. I suppose that also explains why your level is back down to 29 compared to current videos.
He was also playing paladin.
Current videos have him with a Warrior, not a Paladin.
The video is pretty recent, I think he just got the number wrong
The job gauges being intrusive by default is an understatement, lol. as an ow the edge knight, I put my darkside icon in the same place you put the stance icon, but I moved my stance/bloodgauge to right above the secondary crossbar, in the middle of it, making it look like it blends with it; far more natural and less intrusive plus it's easy to notice it when I look at my crossbar... which is good... because my chocobo brain keeps forgetting to turn on tank stance after entering a dungeon.
This game sounds like a fascinating rabbit hole from top to bottom.
I just need to get the Endwalker benchmark test to work on my computer, then I might at least give it a shot...
I'm a Call Of Duty, Overwatch, Apex Legends Battlefield and Fortnite player I was running around dodging the hits I was spamming the left attack and didn't see any clicks translating as hits thank you for making this video easy to understand and follow I didn't understand any of the thing on the screen but you video made it possible for me to just follow along!
I can understand the tanxiety but honestly I think it's the easiest role. A lot of the time, you can set the pace of "every enemy nearby" and use your cooldowns (and if you don't know what you're doing, good news! Veterans are getting bonuses because of you). Bosses have some surprises for you but there's a lot of boss mechanics that you aren't targeted by, and if you do get hit, you can afford a lot more mistakes than other party members.
Oh speaking of: watch out for the swirly red and black penalties on characters who stand in danger puddles in dungeons. This is called Vulnerability, and it stacks, making mistakes more and more lethal.
I will say, as someone who (relatively) recently made an alt just to replay the entire story as a tank, and suffers from tanxiety (though I absolutely learned that term from this video); It's not really the difficulty of the role so much as the looming sense of responsibility. I'm a SCH main on my other character, so I'm no stranger to having a party critical job. But honestly? If I'm having a bad day on SCH, or zone out for a minute, but no-one dies, most people won't notice...
But I feel like if I lose focus for even a moment on PLD, I'm going to misplace or poorly group the mobs and annoy the DDs, or pull too slowly and annoy the old hats, or pull too FAST and annoy the new players. I take my responsibilities as a team player very seriously, so I feel like I'm being scrutinized a lot more on PLD than on SCH.
@@Hulan6 I have the same problem. Try out WAR when it gets raw intuition. The fact that you can effectively keep yourself healed on most pulls without relying on the healer has done wonders for making tanking super fun for me. You might still give them a couple heart attacks waiting for low hp before you pop RI and shoot back to full, but you control whether you live or die 99% of the time. And unlike clemency, WAR's heals are all 100% free to use. You _want_ to use them on cooldown when you can.
You start running into the opposite problem where you don't even get a chance to use your fun heals because the healer is intent on keeping you full any time you take damage instead of letting you get a little low.
The server time is useful for people who want to organize things with people across multiple time zones because it gives everyone a time that they don't have to convert manually. Source: I used to be part of a group that helped players with dungeons in another mmo that didn't have server time (or a looking for group tool during it's heyday) and converting times zones was a constant pain for everyone.
Great video for watching when doing the MSQ roulette.
Small thing I don't know whether you mentioned (watched the whole video, but was playing FFXIV while doing it, so I might have missed it)
When playing with mouse and keyboard, there are two control-styles. The standard is tank controls (meaning left doesn't make you walk left, but instead makes you slowly turn counter clockwise etc.) because it seems like a lot of other mainstream MMOs like WoW and GW2 are using that. I don't know how well it works in those games, but in FFXIV you will probably have to change it at some point.
The alternative option called "legacy-controls" is just standard over the shoulder controls. You press the key for the direction you want to go in and you go in that direction.
Trying to dodge "danger puddles" later on with tank controls is something you wouldn't wish on your worst enemy. That's for the already mentioned reason of you only being able to turn really slowly and for the additional reason that walking backwards is a lot slower in tank controls.
I mean. I don't use legacy controls and I've cleared synced Extremes. It's really not that bad.
If you hold down the right mouse button it locks which way you're facing and then pressing the turning keys just strafes.
I watched the whole thing despite being 70 levels in the game, so it's good, useful advice.
It's hard to remember when you weren't as good at the game, so I appreciate you taking the time to parse the various parts of the MMO out.
I'm watching despite being Lv90 on multiple jobs. It's always good to watch these sorts of things because sometimes other people have caught stuff you haven't.
I was really nervous when I tried out a Healer for the first time, but once I got comfortable with it and levelled to a point where I had some good skills, it's actually a lot of fun
I already know all this,but i just needed some content to listen to on 2nd monitor while i multitask
OMG this was so helpful! I especially liked the HUD explanation because I wanted to make mine look nice and uncluttered like yours, but when I hit the HUD button and saw all of the outlines all over the place I got overwhelmed and just noped out.
I'm also super anxious about doing my first raid (yep, I'm a healer) so I've just been dragging my feet, leveling up crafting classes, filling my gosh darn inventory to the brim (that's how I accidentally found out about the dots! I was curious too) and doing everything except the raid. But thanks to this video (and spam-watching JoCat's) I feel a bit better about it.
Also, how do I join the free company?? Do I have to be not a free trial member? 'cuz i'm still a sprout...
Yeah for free companies you need to be a subscriber sadly.
You can however join a linkshell, which is basically a chat room. Though I am not 100% sure on how to find them and get yourself in one, so... well, that's something to look up.
Also, I think you mean dungeon? but yeah, there is nothing to worry about the first dungeon especially is super easy and if you just say in chat that this is your first time going through the tank should take things slow, not overwhelming you.
Have you tried the tutorial missions before the dungeon? The ones that have a sprout as an icon, they can help a lot.
@@nahuel3433 they could be talking about raid as Crystal Tower is MSQ now.
@@nahuel3433 yes, dungeon, sorry ><
Ah well, I guess I’ll just join a free company when I get my subscription going.
Yeah, I think I saw a linkshell person in Ul’dah
@@angelcollina I keep checking back and not seeing so I am assuming the youtube bot is killing my comment because it has a link.
Because I was trying to point you to the Lodestone's (which is the official FFXIV site for community things) community finder. Which is what can point you to Cross-World Linkshells with people.
Just surf around and choose the one you fancy.
The Linkshell NPC "just" allows you to create your own.
@@nahuel3433 Thanks for the help! 🙏
This was a huge help, thank you!
It is amazing how different classes can appear to have similar abilities and motions but their feel can easily push you to love one class while hating another.
Thank you so much for this video! This has been one of the most helpful beginner videos I have seen so far.
Consider me interested in the Combat 102 about the jobs
if you do decide to do a Job crash course (which I'd love to see~! would be fun to hear your take on all the classes) I'd highly reccomend having said crash course be with the job at level 50, 60, or 70. Because a lot of classes are just kinda the same thing pre-50 (especially most of the tanks), so 50, 60, and 70 tend to be (varying based on class, obviously) the levels where that class finally gets the ability(ies) that give it its nieche.
I've just finished the Endwalker main story, which is... unusual for me, as I generally get distracted by something else and end up finishing the story just ahead of the next expansion releasing.
So now might be a good time to leave my tanxiety behind for a while. I've practically only been playing Paladin for the last 8+ years, so the plan is to try familiarize myself and progress with a healer and a damage dealer while waiting for the next story content update.
The job and role quest stories really are worth it.
@@edgarlarios4718 Well, an update on this:
I took Monk to just over lv.50 in short order, but then decided to play other games instead.
I've finished 11 games so far this year (counting Endwalker), but of course that doesn't mean my backlog has actually shrunk. Between two bundles to support Ukraine and two others that just felt irresistible... Yikes.
Gonna finish the 6.1 story soon, and then keep playing Chrono Cross while leveling some crafting jobs on the side.
I will also say Crystal (the datacenter Dan is on) is a bit nicer than the other two. I have experience in all three and Crystal stays the one I prefer to Duty Finder in. Can't say anything about EU or JP, though.
I'd argue highest priority for healers is keeping themselves alive
watching this 6 months into the game having no idea about the enimity symbols on the enemy list: 👁️👄👁️
When I played on the free trial back when it was capped at 35 I played every single job available to me to 35 -Except fishing- It was fun.
If anything, the only "extra info" I'd ask for is "What Role does each Class fit into?"
Such as, is Dragoon a DPS, or Tank? I assume Scholar is a job, is it DPS or Healing? ETC.
Tanks: Warrior, Paladin, Dark Knight, and Gunbreaker. While there are no Tank "types", all of them have different strengths and weaknesses.
There are two types of healers: "barrier" healers and "pure" healers. Former is better at preventing damage. Latter is better at recovering damage.
Barrier Healers: Sage and Scholar
Pure Healer: White Mage and Astrologian.
There are three types of DPS, as Dan touched on: Melee, Ranged, and Caster.
Melee: Monk, Reaper, Dragoon, Ninja, Samurai
Ranged: Machinist, Bard, Dancer
Caster: Black Mage, Red Mage, Summoner
There's also Blue Mage, which is a "Limited" job as it can mostly only play with other Blue Mages, has a lower max level, can't do story quests, can fill all three roles, and, in typical FF fashion, only learn moves from enemies and are overpowered af.
I will write this down just because I feel like it and it may be too in depth to go in a video like this.
The tanks are:
*Paladin* (*) Evolves from Gladiator, the one displayed here. Sword and shield and a lot of utility and also a magic combo
*Warrior* (*) Evolves from Big axe, big angry, lots of self healing.
*Dark Knight* Big sword, very edgy, makes shields around itself and uses a lot of magic points, at later levels can summon a shadow duplicate of themselves
*_Gunbreaker_* Uses a Gunblade for FF8 fans, it's the tank with the most in depth damage combo, which makes many people say he is 3 DPS in a trenchcoat passing itself as tank.
The healers are
*White Mage* (*) Evolves from Conjurer. Big heals and regens, has a big stun move for dungeons
*Astrologian* Pure healer like White Mage, has a card system that randomly takes from a pool and lets you buff party members among other things.
*Scholar* (**) Evolves from Arcanist. A Shield healer, meaning it basically gives you an extra chunk of HP on top of your maximum (can also purely heal but it's not its frote). It is also a pet class, meaning you summon a fairy around which automatically heals people and you have to tell it to do other healing actions.
*_Sage_* Also a shield healer, this guy selects a specific partner (usually the tank) and automatically heals them every time he does damage, a very offensive healer.
The Melee damage (or melee DPS) are
*Monk* (*) Evolves from Pugilist. Punches with fist weapons, each of its main attacks makes you change your stance which allows you to use other attacks, naturally fast. Has a chakra system that changes depending on which abilities you use
*Dragoon* (*) Evolves from Lancer. JUMPS! to close distances and to make damage, has a really long combo (imo)
*Ninja* Evolves from Rogue. This class is also fast, has a cool 3 button system that depending on the order and how many of them you press you make different abilities. The main idea with this one is to use as much abilities you can in the 10 second window you create with your ability called "Trick Attack" which makes the target take more damage
*_Samurai_* The "Selfish" DPS, has no party utility but does a lot of damage. You have 3 combos and each time you complete one of them you get one of 3 symbols. Depending on how many of them you have your Iaijutsu ability does different things.
*_Reaper_* The scythe wielding edgy boi that has a contract with a demon-like Void sent. Dunno much about this one other than it's easy to play and looks really cool.
The Ranged damage are
*Bard* (*) Evolves from Archer. A bow wielding attacker that plays songs during the fight to buff companions (as a bonus, you can do a mission to actually play an instrument in the overworld)
*Machinist* Gun wielding tech people, the selfish DPS of this group doing quite a bit of damage. At later levels it can summon a robot that punches things
*_Dancer_* The chakram throwing dancer selects a dance partner and gives it a damage boost, plus their dances do both damage and have several other utility aspects
The Magical Ranged damage (or Casters, the key difference with the normal ranged is that this ones have to stay still to cast some ablities while the ranged can move around and shoot no problem) are:
*Black Mage* (*) Evolves from Thaumaturge. The Selfish DPS of this group. The Black Mages juggle between their damage dealing mode where they spend all their mana on big boom spells, and the mana regeneration mode where they recuperate mana while doing ice spells, that back and forward is really fun, they also prefer to be very stationary which is what makes them hard to play in later levels when the game is all about dodging danger puddles.
*Summoner* (**) Evolves from Arcanist. Press button, summon big monster, get new spells and spam them. They are the exception to the "has to stand still" rule especially in later levels since most of their spells are instant.
*_Red Mage_* A jack of all trades, every time they cast a spell, their next spell will be cast instantly, so they "hard" cast their faster spells, to instantly cast the longer ones. They also have to juggle between using black magic and white magic to fill their bars, once both of them are full enough, they can use a melee combo with their rapier and jump away to keep casting.
To clarify
_Italics_ means you need to be a paid sub to use them, since they are introduced in later expansions that the free trial doesn't cover. Also, Dark Knight, Machinist and Astrologian need you to reach Heavensward for you to use them since the missions to unlock them are in a HW area. The rest can be unlocked at level 50, 60 and 70 depending on which expansions they were introduced in.
(*) they are starting classes, notice all of them also evolve from other classes, because at lvl 30 they change names and get more specialized basically. So if you make a new character and want a Paladin you'd have to go for a Gladiator.
(**) also starting class but these ones are particularly weird. They both evolve from the same class and share a level with each other. Meaning that if you just play Summoner and never touch Scholar, once you are level 90, your scholar will be too and vice versa.
so, one little thing, you can actually evade auto-attacks, it's somewhat pointless tho except in solo POTD runs, it's very important for survivability when soloing on jobs like MNK
"The next role of the three, another one that people sometimes feel scared to take on" YUP! I cannot heal, though I do enjoy tanking... I wish people couldn't run off on their own with impunity, but I've tried to let people learn from their mistakes only to have them just more slowly kill the things charging them
Meanwhile I'm more comfortable healing than I am tanking. I just don't like being in a leadership role.
Amazing video! I will surely come back to this video when I will finally decide to play this game :>
Tanxiety? Great, now I have a word for that sense of dread!
So I have a question about how jobs and levels relate to fashion, which is clearly the most important part of the game. If you get higher level armour than your character can wear or a weapon too high level to use, but it looks really cool, can you still use it from your glamour closet? Is it possible to use glamours to make your gear look like something meant for another class, say, make an axe look like a sword or a magic staff?
It's been a couple days, so I'm not sure how active the comments are or if they're still being monitored, but here's hoping.
I don't believe you can glamour an item to look like something that is higher than its own level (slight bummer). Fortunately, MANY of the fun fashion items in the game are specifically set to level 1 with garbage stats; the implied intent being "This is a glamour item, use it on anything". XD
@@PlayFramePlus Oh, thank you for the response! I suppose the fashion system working that way does act to reward players for engaging with the other systems, levelling up and completing the content. The fancy-looking high level items are probably a better reward for players who put in the time if they can't be replicated so easily, tragic as the loss of their looks would be to any others.
@@Corvus-Scientiae I can confirm: You cannot glamour an item onto an item with a lower level OR item level. However there's really no reason you'd want to glamour something with a higher item level onto a piece of the same level but lower item level, since you always want to equip higher item level, you'd just equip the better piece of gear and have the appearance anyways. It can also be an indicator if you're in a lower level dungeon, but see someone in level 80 gear, you know they're at least level 80 and should know their job pretty well (if I see people who are lower level in a dungeon I usually watch out for them to see if I can offer any advice)
You cannot make gear look like it's for another class. Some gear can be worn by any class, but gear that you cannot wear for stats on your current job, you cannot wear for glam.
This especially goes for weapons because each class has their own unique weapon. In fact, equipping a weapon is actually how you change classes. If you are a Black Mage and equip an Axe , you will switch classes to a Warrior ( or Marauder if you haven't unlocked Warrior).
Now that's not to say that there aren't weapons that *look* like another class's weapon. There's a Greatsword for Dark Knight that is just a Katana. Hell, the best Axe in the game right now is actually a hammer model. But for the purposes of the type of weapon it is, what class uses it, and what animations are used when it attacks, it's an axe.
Whoo! Durmin is the most adorable little tutor Yeah!
HUD review appreciated =)
it's so weird being an "MMO illiterate" despite having played a lot of old school JRPGs... I mean, I get what Dan is explaining, but all this new or slightly different information at this speed _even when there is just one player and one enemy on screen_ is still overwhelming for me. Yet, I finally understood one of the things that confused me the most! (that attacks and defenses, both from player and enemies are passive, calculated on your rolls and not on your position or skillful "clicks")
I recommend playing a game like Xenoblade Chronicles, Final Fantasy XII, or Knights of the Old Republic if you want to gain some MMO literacy without diving in head first. They are close approximations of MMO combat, but are single player games.
I have a wish/suggestion for when you get to the post release content of ARR.
Can you please talk about the timeframe between updates and what people did in between these? A bit of historical context would be really cool.
Man, you really make me want to try out the game but having literally no one play with kinda ruins it for me. I'll just enjoy your series in the mean time and maybe try out the far future FF mmo
How do you change the camera view? Mine is stuck right behind my character and I'm having trouble seeing everything on the screen in battles and I can't rotate it to see the front of my character (unless I'm crafting).
Hold right mouse and drag
i have a question Mr. Durami Sir. Do You have unlimited inventory slots in the game? And also, how does this game make the later parts of it more challenging? (More mechanics you have to deal with, bigger enemy numbers e.t.c.) And last but certainly not least: Why are you so freaking cute?!
Sincerely: A Durmin/Dan fan
Edit: thank you all so much for the answers! I am going to have fun reading these in my spare time.
Oh no, you certainly don't have unlimited space in this game. Stuff will pile up if glamour is what you want. You can either sell stuff for various resources or place gear you want saved up for later in safeboxes of sorts like your Chocobo's backpack, retainer inventory, etc.
Yeah there will be more mechanics introduced throughout the game. This is a big component of why people tell you _not_ to buy skips, because the MSQ duties will steadily introduce you to more mechanics that will be standardized in later fighter
In the bottom right corner you can see, above his Gil and above his menu bar, a grid of four rectangles broken up into smaller squares. That's his inventory, the lit up squares are spaces taken up by the items he's carryinng, and the grey squares are open spaces. There's 35 spaces per bag, so 140 total inventory spaces. When you get your Chocobo, you get an additional set of 70 inventory spaces, and each of your retainers (which Dan hasn't messed around with but are basically your lackeys) has 175 spaces for holding onto items for you. You only get two retainers though (unless you add $2 per month to your subscription fee for each one), so that's 350 spaces. So without paying extra, you get a max of 560 inventory slots.
@@trace9021 If you're willing to pay about double your subscription fee, the maximum inventory you can get is 140 inventory slots (not counting crafting crystals or key items, which have their own inventory tab), the armory chest for equipment (35 slots for each type of gear except weapons and rings, which get 50), two saddlebags (140 inventory slots between them, only accessible on the overworld), and up to 10 retainers (175 inventory slots each for a total of 1750, only accessible at a summoning bell (there's at least one in every major city and housing area), also can do other things besides be a living inventory such as sell items on the marketboard or gather items, mostly crafting and gathering ingredients). So 2030 inventory slots, 2445 if you include the gear-exclusive armory chest (not counting up to 9999 of each crafting crystals, up to 35 key item slots, and up to 23* soul crystals, which upgrade your class to a job when equipped, and don't really count as gear in any other way).
Either way, your base 140 inventory slots and your armory chest can be accessed anywhere any time, while the other inventory methods cannot.
Then there's also the glamour dresser in inn rooms which can hold 400 pieces of gear, but while the items are in there you can only use them for their appearance and not their stats or effects. It costs you one glamour prism item to put something into the dresser, and doing so resets some minor things about the gear such as spiritbond level (which is part of the system for obtaining materia, don't worry about it for now). Best used mainly for items that are cosmetic in nature and don't have actual stats and effects, as far as storage goes that is. For those into fashion, that dresser fills up real quick, though.
Finally there's the armoire, a small cabinet in the inn room (one can be crafted for placement in a personal house, too) in which select pieces of gear, usually ones related to seasonal events, crossovers, preorder bonuses, or contest rewards, can be stored. They can be stored within or removed for usage with no cost, and also count as items stored in the glamour dresser without adding to the glamour dresser's inventory space. You can store as many eligible gear pieces within as you want. The selection of eligible gear is quite limited, though.
*only 20 of those are for combat jobs. you can have up to three soul crystal equivalents corresponding to crafting jobs, and have the ability to reassign those three soul crystals among your eight crafting jobs for the price of a new Soul of the Crafter to replace the previous one. You can only have three Souls of the Crafter assigned at once and can't reuse ones you've already assigned.
For your second question: the game has a LOT of mechanics during boss fights, especially during the raids. And the harder raids are, the more mechanics will be thrown at you at one time.
For example: Dan mentioned danger puddles. These are actually just the simplest and most ubiquitous mechanic. But we have encountered more!
Like, for example, the gaze is one we've seen in Haukke Manor (spooky house). It shows an eye above an enemy and, when they are done casting their spell, hits everyone looking at it. If you face your character away from the enemy, you don't get hit.
25:25 showcase several of these mechanics we haven't seen yet. I'll highlight two of them:
At 25:53, it shows a circle of arrows that point inwards around someone. That is called a Stack, an attack which is going to do a lot of damage to the person it is targetting. But if you all "stack" up on each other in that circle, the damage will be split across everyone. So, for example, instead of one person taking 10000 damage, 4 people take 2500. Much more survivable.
At 25:48, there is a danger puddles with arrows, meaning you will be knocked in that direction if you get hit by it. Titan actually had an attack like that, but it didn't have the arrows because it predates that symbol. XIV gets better at standardizing those mechanics into a unique symbol as time goes on.
In total there are at least 100 different mechanics like this (not including mechanics that only show up in one fight). Not all of them show up in every fight, of course. And not all of them work the same way, as bosses love to put twists on familiar mechanics. But gradually, dungeon after dungeon, boss after boss, the game introduces and teaches you how those mechanics work until they become just part of the vocabulary of the game.
And as the game gets harder, more and more of them start getting thrown at you at one time. So like the Glare and Stack mechanic I talked about? There is a boss that puts a Glare on the Stack marker. So you have to be nearby the player to share the damage, but not be looking at them to avoid an additional nasty effect.
Difficulty ramps up in several ways, some of which are *mostly* exclusive to higher difficulty levels of content. To start with, there's the obvious one of later enemies often dying more slowly and doing more damage per hit.
Dying more slowly might not seem like a difficulty increase, but in a dungeon where the tank's and healer's *good* abilities all have a cooldown attached to them, extending the fight length can leave the healer with no good heals, in which case they have to resort to their inefficient heals instead of doing damage, making it even longer. If you play healer enough and try to play it well, you'll really feel the pain occasionally when a dungeon pull takes significantly longer than it normally does. It can also mess with tanks pretty easily. For example, let's say you pop rampart and it lasts for 20s. Normally, you might have a couple things alive when it finishes and they'll be dead soon, no need to use anything else. If all the enemies still have half their hp after that, you're gonna have to use something else. Most of your main stuff is on 1.5 - 2 minute cooldowns, so it really sucks for both you and the healer having to use an extra if there's another pull coming up right after where you wanted to use it.
Enemies doing more damage actually goes beyond simply having more to heal, too. As you get toward the more difficult levels of content, bosses will start doing heavier tankbusters (exactly what they sound like) that outright kill the tank from full hp unless they mitigate the damage. Savage raids will start doing party damage that will outright kill the non-tanks unless it is mitigated. For example, I'm currently on the second fight (out of four) of the new raids and one of the straightforward raidwide damage attacks there will certainly kill us if we're not prepared for it. Both of these mean that rather than just having more to heal, you *need* to start being proactive with these attacks to prevent instant death.
Another straightforward way that the game gradually increases difficulty and remains interesting is mechanical variety. As you play, you'll see more and more new types of attacks introduced and reused in other bosses. Party stacks, spreads that may or may not drop lasting puddles, knockbacks and draw-ins, status effects, partners, the arena itself, spinny fun, proximity damage, and more. There's a lot of variety, but it's all introduced one at a time so that by the end, most players have a pretty good grasp of the basic forms of each. The next step there is to start combining these. You might have to spread out while dodging an attack that makes one half of the arena unsafe. You might have to watch the boss to see which side is safe while paying attention to a debuff you have that requires you to stop attacking in 5 seconds. The game starts out nicely telegraphing most of these things, but as you go up in difficulty, less and less gets telegraphed, you have to know what each cast name or boss animation is going to do and dodge accordingly. The more you see and remember, the easier it becomes to get a feel for sightreading new content even if it's a mechanic you've never seen before.
Additionally, the game varies boss fight length and the density of mechanics. Casual bosses (in trials or raids) typically last a few minutes, but can work their way toward 10 minutes of low intensity for the newest content before people start getting better gear, especially if it's not a clean kill. Extreme trials have a set time limit to kill the boss, usually roughly near 10 minutes. If you die, you come back with a debuff that ruins your damage, which makes meeting the time limit harder. On top of that, this is when you start having to do more mechanics while keeping up that damage. There's usually a couple or a few big gimmick mechanics per extreme trial and then a bunch of smaller stuff you have to do sprinkled throughout. Savage raids both crank up the time limit and how many mechanics you do in that time, as well as the difficulty of the bigger mechanics. Not only do you have to contend with really learning how to do the mechanics consistently, but also how to do that without simply stopping your attacks. For example, I play a caster a lot, which means I'm often stuck in place for a couple seconds to cast. When I learn savage fights, I also learn how to fit my movement around my casts, how much time I have to move, how much risk something is, etc. It makes a huge difference in my overall damage to find a way to be attacking all the time. Finally, the ultimate difficulty raids. These are gruelling 15-20 minute fights with a very high density of mechanics. You don't get much time to rest or recover before it's on to the next mechanic. Very much a mental endurance challenge on top of the normal gameplay difficulty.
Finally, perhaps the truest evolution of difficulty: other people and coordination. In normal content, you will get mechanics that are reasonable to resolve on the fly. If you have to spread out, you have lots of room and time to do it. It doesn't get very bad once you know how to handle them individually. In addition, one good healer can make it nearly impossible to wipe. As long as a couple people are alive and capable of recovering, you can usually push through almost anything. In extreme trials, that doesn't fly anymore. The older extremes didn't do this as much, but in most extremes, you need some coordination. This is where you start seeing mechanics such as a conal attack on every party member, meaning you pre-assign "clock spots" and go there to avoid overlapping two cones. You start seeing attacks where you need to have half the party stack on either healer for an untelegraphed attack (just the cast name usually). It's easier in this difficulty for one person to mess up and also kill someone else or even the entire party. Each member has to be aware of what's happening and what to do. Savages sometimes keep this with less margin for error and sometimes go even further. You'll have numerous mechanics that ask you to solve a little puzzle of "What does this mechanic do?" followed by coming up with a strategy for where each person should go. Often, you won't know where you're going until the mechanic starts and gives you some kind of marker. It's often essentially impossible to live through these mechanics if anyone is already dead or dies early on in the mechanic, or if anyone isn't in the right spot. Ultimates of course take this a step further. There's a LOT to remember about one complete fight and you'll be actively using that knowledge with tiny breaks between, for up to 20 minutes. The most recent ultimate is notorious as one where if anyone ever dies during the first boss of it, you might as well wipe instead of trying to resurrect them. There are only a couple places where you might have time to quickly recover 1-2 deaths, but the damage check is also a big obstacle with any deaths.
me who's played FFXIV for 2 years now and has 2 lvl 90 jobs: hmm yes interesting
I wonder if the relative nice-ness of the community is because of the pay wall. In my experience, most jerks and trolls would not be willing to ply their trade at the cost of anything to themselves. Only those who WANT to be in the FF14 community are in there.
And thank you for explaining how you can walk into a cloud if cactus needles and take no damage: the mechanical attack only matters for an instant. Having the animation of the attack not matter seems to fit FF14's form over function mentality. (And it HAS been mentioned often about fashion and aesthetics being the true endgoal)
It's not the paywall. WoW has never had a great community and it's always required a paywall. Hell, I'd argue WoW even has better moderation than XIV (including harsher punishments for being a jerk with a higher chance of being punished), yet XIV is still malms ahead of WoW.
If I had to guess is it would be four factors XIV has over other MMOs: more expression for RP, a higher emphasis on story, lack of world PvP, and an emphasis on replaying old content.
The first two bring in a lot of players that don't usually touch MMOs... well at least not mechanically dense MMORPGs. Having a more variety of players means there is a bigger variety of voices, personalities, and just people to enjoy the content with. You won't always run into someone who grates on you because there arent hundreds of thousands of people exactly like them in the game's narrow audience.
Plus, just the inclusion of same sex player marriage, even with so few other LGBTQ+ features in the game, signal that queer people are welcome in the game. Which is usually a good sign you are fostering a good playerbase.
The lack of world PvP or any faction based combat reduces animosity in both the play experience and interactions in the playerbase. As much as I enjoyed razing Alliance towns down to the geound and killing all the NPCs there in WoW, it does no favours when it comes to making a welcoming and understanding community.
Having you be expected to replay old content, whether through level sync in instances or levelling other jobs, means that you are going to be expecting to play with new players constantly. In fact, the game *rewards* you for playing with new players. This change means that more veteran players are conditioned to be a lot more forgiving of new players and that newer players can more readily lean on these more experienced players to get through tough content.
A really short crash course is almost a full hour? Makes me wonder how long it would take if he did a more complete and proper guide.
Knowing Dan, he would still try to make it entertaining to watch either ways. I do have 1 small question Dan, why didn't you include some snippet about novice network ( i think that is what it is called anyways ) ? It is not a guild but it gives access to help when people need it. You can do some casual chatting for fun but is also doing something with a mentor in case people need help. Maybe a nice alternative for people who want to solo it, but still have something as a back up for help without adding guilds and the like?
It highly depends who hangs out in there on your server. Some NN channels are full of awful advice, dick-measuring contests, and other pretty idiotic stuff for new players trying to learn. Some are genuinely friendly and helpful.
@@Qazqi Ah okay. The one from cerberus is nice and helpful so far, so thought it was the same for all. Didn't know it was so dependant on channels whether or not they were helpful though.
I've tried a lot of the classes, and Rogue was the one I couldn't get past a job class quest >.
Yayyyy you made it c: ty ty ty
Please don't call everything "abilities". The game makes a distinction between abilities, weaponskills, and spells. It's a pretty important distinction to understand. The general term for everything is "actions".
Honestly this is the very reason why the community doesn't call them abilities, but "Off-Global-Cooldowns" or "OGCDs". Abilities is a very generic term and using it to mean one specific type of skill is one of the things I wished they changed. Call them "Combat Tricks" or "Fast Actions" or something specific so people know thats what's meant.
I figured that making a distinction between abilities / weaponskills / spells would just add needless complexity to a guide mostly intended for folks who don't play the game and really just want help parsing all the chaos onscreen a little better.
But yeah, "Actions" would have been a better term to use. :P
@@PlayFramePlus that's fine, you don't have to make the distinction, but calling everything abilities only confuses the issue
What sword is that
Is there a cool word for the fear of being a healer? The one for being a tank is very good; I'm not going to try to type it because I don't know how to spell it.
the way you explained it, is emnity different from aggro? you seemed to imply it has more to do with rhe amount of aggro you produce. I only ever played WoW and it seems very similar. Not really a bad thing just interesting
Yeah, enmity and aggro function pretty more or less the same!
The best part of the hud is macros. "Potion up" drinking/eating all the potions you want for the day. "Set" tying your ogcd damage boost to your generic attack. So that whenever you use your generic attack if your damage boost is ready it also activates the damage boost.
You really shouldn't use macros in combat. Macros do not take advantage of the games action queueing system, which means that by default the GCD is 2.5 seconds, if you press another GCD action between say 2.0s and 2.5s, then the game will queue it up and use the action automatically as soon as the GCD is ready. However macros don't take advantage of this feature, so you have to wait until after GCD is ready to be able to use a GCD action in a macro. Also the command in macros only work in whole numbers. So if you have say a command, then the game will either read that as a wait of 2, or a wait of 3, effectively breaking the macro, or slowing down your combat.
The best use of macros however is actually for crafting. Since crafting is effectively turn based rather than real time, macros work beautifully for automating crafting.
They could drop the gcd to 2 sec flat and do a slight animation adjust. Games great regardless but combat could be a tiny bit faster
what happens if the MP bar gets to zero?
You'll be unable to use any abilities that require MP until you regain enough back (especially nasty for magic-based casters who have a lot of MP-reliant abilities). HP and MP both regenerate very quickly outside of combat, but running out of MP mid-fight can be rough. Various jobs that rely heavily on MP have abilities specifically for recovering it, though, and there are consumables which can help in an emergency too.
Healing priority is: self (healer) > tank > DPS w/rez > DPS
Can't heal a tank if the healer dies 😂
watching this after doing my expert roulette cause dan's ffxiv stuff is just enjoyable to watch
Judging by Dan's ending tips it seems like the little I played of wow a long time ago did actually thoroughly train me to follow mmorpg action forever. I don't know if I'm impressed or upset xD I have been imprinted!
WoW was seminal. Many MMORPGs have come and gone since with innovations here and there (most of which Blizzard copied wholesale into their game), but none have left as big of an impact on the DNA of the genre as much as WoW.
Basically understanding WoW let's you understand 90% of every other MMORPG
@@wavesofbabies yeah, I was actually quite surprised by that
Wait, have you played Xenoblade?
Just to be clear, gladiator isn't a job, it's a class. Also, if you went to ask at the conjurer's guild, you wouldn't become a level 1 white mage, you would become a level 1 conjurer. You can do a job quest at level 30 of a combat class, which grants you a piece of equipment called a job stone. Wearing the job stone, allows you to stop playing class and start playing the job. This differentiation is important because not all abilities and gear can overlap between the job and its base class. The job of paladin builds on the class of gladiator, the job of black mage builds on the class of thaumaturge, etc. Job and class are words that have very specific meanings in the world of FFXIV. There are no gathering or crafting jobs but there are several gathering and crafting classes. Hope this helped clear things up! (Edit: It's been a long time since I've played but I vaguely recall some jobs introduced in later expansions allowing you to get job stones under different conditions for some of the newer jobs. What I describe above goes for the 7 original combat classes and jobs only. Those are gladiator/paladin, marauder/warrior, pugilist/monk, lancer/dragoon, archer/bard, conjurer/white mage, and thaumaturge/black mage. Later added jobs and classes may have followed a similar system but I don't remember or I left before they were implemented.)
Ah, I see. This is the FFXIV propaganda episode that gets me wanting to play it.