I show off 10 really weird features of FFXIV, some that might even be able to improve your gameplay, and some that might just be really funny to know about!
Ten More Mechanics, which includes how Slidecasting works: https://youtu.be/O9Sw4Xk0eRg
Discord Community Server, come hang out:
https://discord.gg/FDNFgEYyaT
Twitter: https://twitter.com/CaetsuChaijiCh
Music Used:
FFXIV Endwalker – Cradle of Hope
#ffxiv #endwalker
Chapters:
00:00 Introduction
00:34 (1) Caster Tax
03:58 (2) The Players Hurtbox
04:52 (3) Attack Snapshots
05:57 (4) The Backwards Cast
06:42 (5) The Combo Timer
07:52 (6) DoTs, HoTs and the 3 Second Server Tick
09:20 (7) Potencies Don’t Compare Well
11:55 (8) Determination is Weird
14:08 (9) Macros and Spellqueueing
15:23 (10) Buff and Attack Application Order
17:45 Fun Fact
source
My favorite snapshot is when I cast arm's length, put it on cooldown, then get thrown into the death wall anyway as I see the cooldown timer tick down over my corpse
So I had an idea from watching the caster gaze thing (#4). I remembered testing at e8 and it not working until I was far enough in the hitbox. I've tested some more with a few different hitbox sizes (e8, o11, o10) and I think it's based on being within an absolute distance to the centre of the hitbox, which I estimate to be 3-4y based on collective unconscious. At a dummy, you can be outside the hitbox, whereas I found the larger the hitbox, the farther in I had to be, seemingly the same absolute distance from the middle as the dummy at a glance. With actual bosses, you also need to watch that they haven't moved over to you in that time or get a friend to tank it and keep it in place. FWIW, I seem to remember one or more of Ily'a wiggle trick video and Xeno's legacy-with-strafe video describing a difference between legacy and standard.
One interesting note at o10, I noticed this seemed to be about the same distance that the boss would stop adjusting and moving toward me.
For another really weird feature idea, I'd toss out the cap of number of people that can be hit by one attack. One of the early Bozja fights showed it off pretty well with that attack that iirc drops everyone to low or 1 hp, with a few people on the edge not getting hit. Similar topic, I guess the buff/debuff limits could apply (buffs coming up with duel cheese), though those are more clear from a programming perspective of maintaining well-known upper bounds on computation.
Didn't know about the caster tax. Explains why my macro'd Holy button never seemed to be a DPS loss like everyone including myself figured it should be.
4:41 had a healer pull me and get me hit once because I did exactly that
Worth noting that the time between an aoe action being cast and receiving its effect can be delayed based on the number of people between you and the caster. For example, in an alliance raid, if you're at the edge of the arena you might notice a raidwide hits you quite a while after the animation went off, which is because all 23 other players need to register the hit before you take the damage. This also affects most (if not all) aoe heals, and that small time gap has killed me in savage before lol
@ 7:40 "There really isn't a reason too…", in UCOB if your team has a good Twin kill time you can start a Gnashing combo right as Twin's killed. The transition into Nael is just shy of like 25 seconds ish. This means you can bring the rest of that Gnashing combo into your Nael pot window, AND because the cooldown for Gnashing is on the first skill by the time you complete the combo you can immediately do another under that same pot.
CUMBO TIMER
The fact that shields apply instantly doesn't apply to every instance of applying shields. I dunno about other healer jobs but for WHM, divine benison needs to be applied around a 0.5-1 GCD early (in my experience) otherwise the shield appears but it is not registered in the damage calculations, basically shields having its own snapshot timings
You're correct about shield application speed being changed in endwalker. As a scholar main in Shadowbringers, I remember all too many times I was slow to get a shield out. Seeing my cast finish, raidwide goes out, hp getting hit, then the shield being applied.
Funny story about the buff application thing. My group found out first hand that it's proximity based when we were helping someone do the 5.3 trial for the first time. I accidently hit tank LB just a touch too early but somehow timed it so it was expired when me and my co-tank (who was right next to me) died to the insta kill while everyone else still had the buff. Healer's were pretty quick to recover though and we still cleared but it was pretty funny in the moment and I still sometimes get teased for that moment.
Fyi the backwards cast (#4) you can still get snapshotted if the split second you press your cast the mechanic goes off, even if your character looked away. You will get snapped as the "backwards cast" is more like ur character turns to face the boss to start its cast then turn very quickly to continue the cast. The odds are VERY slim but it can happen.
Love your in-depth explanation of ffxiv advanced combat mechanics! Thank you for amusing videos!
A little sad to hear about the potency variance between roles. I had thought the release of Endwalker standardized it across all jobs once and for all, but it turns out that that didn't happen.
It's called Hitbox, not Hurtbox.
For (7), while it's a good observation; the tank mastery trait is most likely a mistranslation, you deal 20% less damage on all actions while taking 20% less damage as well. So that nice looking 1.2k potency double down will innately deal around 960 without No Mercy (1152p w/ NM). The only ability that is not applied is DRK's Living Shadow, meaning it deals close to the stipulated potency with the only drawback of not being buffed by Darkside or the class' job Mod among other things.
Job Modifiers is another attribute that makes it hard to compare potency within the same class archetype – it's essentiall bonus stats based on the job, but for damage calculations it uses the class's main stat.
This only applies to Melees and tanks as they have varing job modifiers that affects their damage (PhyRange, Casters and Healers all have the type JobMod within their archetype).
To really show case how Job Mod affects final damage.
Take DRG's Geirskogul and SAM's Enhanced Enpi, on paper they're both 260p
Under no gear, no personal or external buffs. The Geirskogul will be dealing slightly more damage on average by a little bit. This is because DRG's job mod is 115, where as SAM's is only 112. If you want to compare tanks and melees the disparity is much worse: GNB/PLD are 100, whereas WAR/DRK are 105.
What JobMod is used for is to calculate f(WD) a multipler that is used to calculate the actual damage output to my knowledge – and f(WD) uses the base Weapon Damage on your weapon alongside a level modifier (don't worry about it).
There's more to it than just jobmod and f(WD) when it comes to calculating actual damage output, but it does make it so that you can't really compare potencies between class archetypes or somethings within the same archetype in the case for tank/melee.
If you want to compare damage or burst between classes you'll have to just calculate it from the ground up. Akhmorning has most of the formulas you need to calculate it so, but the values and modifiers might be outdated because of the stat squish and also not being updated to current patch.
The other work around is using modified potencies where it's potency x total buffs.
We can take NIN's for example, Hyosho is 1300p, but it can only be casted under Kassatsu so it's potency before trick will be 1690 modified potency, multiple that with trick and we'll get 1859p.
If we want to know the modified potency of a NIN under 2 Mug + Trick, its just 1690 x 1.1 x 1.05 = 1951.95. I don't remember if the game just floors the values or rounds it up.
Snapshotting was definitely a weird concept to learn. But now it feels pretty good to confidently walk into attack animations and not take damage, except the odd times where you still take damage lol.
Talking about the AOE thing, I believe dancer's tech step has some kind of weirdness based on how close they are to the enemy and that affects who and how it's applied to at what point.
Quick note about spell speed on black mage: Thundercloud Thunder 3 is such a significant portion of Black Mage's damage that Spell Speed is actually very preferred, since Damage Over Time actually scales with spell speed, and since Thundercloud clumps 30 seconds of DoT into one massive hit, it means that said cast is going to be dealing that much more damage! Every 30 seconds you get much more damage for running around a large amount Spell Speed as of level 90 because of that, on top of the obvious advantages.
for 4, you have to be using Standard type movement, which is objectively inferior, really
As an extra bit related to attack snapshots, your position only updates while you're on the ground. If you jump, your location is fixed at the pixel location from the moment you left the ground, until it updates the frame you make contact with solid ground again. This is how you can be hit by an AOE you appear to be out of if you bunny hop and your position hasn't updated yet. Extra aside, this is also why movement skills like Shukichi, Hell's Egress/Ingress, En Avant, etc. move you across the ground, and can never be used to jump gaps.
Another weird one is how the time after pressing a skill until the enemy is hit is on a skill-by-skill basis. You can for example on DRK use an Edge of Shadow and instantly consume MP before the on-hit effect of Blood Weapon on a Bloodspiller actually takes effect. The only other case I know of this being used is that MNKs will sometimes use a delayed skill right at the start like 1-1.5s prepull and then use a macro to immediately cancel AAs because logs only start when the boss is hit.
I've actually died on DRK before because i chose to use Bloodspiller at the end of my LD and the hit delay was long enough that I died before I got healed by it.
I love how ridiculously technical your videos are, and I posite a question for you: Blue Mage has the spell "Toad Oil" that raises evasion by 20% but I can't find any information in exactly what the base or current evasion is. Think you'd be able to help figure this out?
As much as i love the game, the attack snapshot mechanic is still one of the most annoying things in the game.
Especially when, in harder content, some attacks are near instant, which means you need to predict when it'll happen and move a while before the boss even starts to prepare the move.
Tried to do backwards casting but it didn't work, then i found out it only works in standard type movement. Is there any way to do it in legacy type movement? I already tried wiggling while holding right click but it didn't work.
the spell travel time hurst my soul. I main AST and for P10S' harrowing hell I always use macrocosmos (of course), I would prefer to make it go off on its own after the knockback but sometimes in PF things go weird and I have to manually use it to save our asses. So that week I was trying to get my reclears and I have to manually cast it. Everyone is saved… but the sage who dies to the late snapshot. We wipe that pull and go into another… where the EXACT SAME THING happens and the sage is the ONLY ONE where the macrocosmos went off late.
Nooooo he leaked my secret party trick in Mt. Gulg!!!
Snapshots are definitely the weirdest mechanic to learn, especially with how inconsistent they seem. I cant even count how many times my corpse ends up out of the mechanic when it goes off with the non-telegraphed snapshots.
WHM, Liturgy of the bell is also weird. it checks the whm's healing bonus before every pulse. unlike the rest (asylum, physis2…) they check at the moment they're active.
Like in P3S where the boss let the healers to soak the puddle to get 300% bonus healing. WHM can actually place the bell before taking the puddle and the healing bonus also apply.
while other healers have to wait for the bonus then start healing after that.
pretty sure it is the only healing skills that does this.
The funny thing about buff/shield application is that shake if off was notoriously slow when applying to the party it was common for half of the party not to get it applied for the mechanic happening. Just a few patches ago, it was buffed to apply nearly instantly as well as giving a HoT.
The determination tooltip is wrong in english. In German it seems to be more accurate:
Entschlossenheit: Je höher dieser Wert, desto höher der ausgeteilte physische und magische Schaden und die Höhe der durch Magie geheilten LP.
(Translated in English)
Determination: The higher this value, the higher the physical and magical damage dealt and the amount of HP healed by magic.
healed by magic… this is the point.
In my experience, Japanese is often difficult to translate into English. However, it seems to be a little easier into German when it comes to an accurate translation.
W/re Asylum, the way I understand it is, it doesn't pulse healing on each person's server tick – it pulses healing on YOUR server tick. I.e. every time your server tick comes up (when DOTs and HOTs on you would tick), it heals everyone in the bubble. That's why it's treated separately from the DOTs and HOTs on each individual person.
Which is really frustrating because BLU specifically cares if you use a spell or ability, because if you use something that boost physical spell damage, it doesn't modify physical ability damage, such as Titan's move.
15:55 The reason for applying aoe effects over time, to target/targets. Is server stability and overall game health. Many mmo's suffer from an abundance of instant gameplay related latency spikes, caused by hitting thirty targets at the exact same time with an attack thus applying on hit effects and everything that comes along with that. By staggering the applications, both the servers and your computer can take this process in steps rather than a massive text dump. The result is that rather than WAR needing to time bloodletting (waiting below half health) to get 'maximum value' you get a consistent healing over time effect, that is overall less punishing and more enjoyable.
I do remember noticing the buff application thing whenever I was playing WHM and spamming holy, as whenever I tried to use an OGCD like assize or whatever, the static noise and stun debuff seemed to apply right away, instead of taking like a full second to appear. On closer inspection though, it seemed as if the enemies were still attacking until the animation for holy actually went off, so it might just be a visual glitch. That or just my latency.
Weird/interesting Features:
1: In Shadowbringers, the Gremlin enemy insults you by using Bad Mouth which inflicts the Misery debuff on you. This debuff can be removed with Esuna, but it also can be removed by a player using the /comfort emote to you.
2: In the Palace of the Dead deep dungeon, there are hidden traps, one type of which transforms you into a frog for a time. Any snake enemy can one hit KO you while you are in frog form.
I love having a STEM degree for blm
What's wrong about the burst meta?
Note on the hurt boxes: this quirk goes back to 2.0 days. In 2.0, player hurt boxes used to be based on the width of the character. This meant that if you had anything hanging over the AOE marker on the x-axis plane, no matter where it was on the z-axis plane, then you would be hit by the ability. The 2 issues that caused the devs to change to a single pixel were due to latency and fairness.
1) Latency issues in the early days meant players would not see the AOE marker immediately upon its engagement. Therefore, they would react to move out of the way upon client sight, which was not in sync with the server clock. As such, players would be fully out of AOE markers when they saw the ability commence, yet still be hit with said ability. This has been resolved with optimized servers, but it was a real issue in 2013/2014.
2) Fairness: this one is almost laughable. By using character models as the basis for being hit by an AOE, a movement tax was enacted on Roegs, with Lalas getting dodge benefits. There were videos showing characters of different races standing on the same pixel when an AOE went off, only to see the wider models get hit because a Roeg foot was inside the orange when a Lala foot wasn’t. To avoid some arbitrary unknown width of a hurt box, the decision was made to make it centroid of the x-axis plane under the character.
Both changes were beneficial to the player base and attractive to new players learning the game, which at the time was fairly new with AOE dodging.
Raidwide damage from bosses is also applied individually. It's possible for a bosses enrage cast to kill some players, but some others survive to land the killing blow. Very weird, but moments where that happens are always very satisfying. Dunno if its intentional or just a design quirk, but I hope it stays like that so we can always have those just barely scraping by moments.
that delay during AoE propagation is how my static once cleared p7s AFTER the enrage cast went out. her animation went off, the screen went black, we really thought we'd lost…and then we were greeted to the sight of two chests and four people dead on the floor!
Number 1 weird mechanic presented right in your face as you create your character:
Potato People
Although the potencies are differnt based on the jobs, I always do find it so odd that aspected helios and medica 2 share the exact same potencies but medica 2 is a lot more expensive
I remember using ninja and when lagging, I could dual ninjitsu when the lag caught up.
Attack snapshots are especially interesting with gaze mechanics. Most gaze mechanics slowly ripple outward – think of the first boss of Weeping City of Mhach, who does Frond Affeared. You have to wait until the "dodged" message pops up before you can turn back to her, or you get feared. But a couple gaze mechanics go out all at once. Later in the same raid, during Ozma, there's a gaze mechanic where you only have to look away for a split second right as the cast goes out, then you can turn back instantly.
Hi. Since this is your newest released Video on your channel i, as a newcomer to FF XIV want to say thank you a lot for your content.
Specialy your Job-guides made me and my friends get a quick grip and a baseline understanding on how and what to do in order to be at least somewhat efficient.
Keep it up, your tone of voice wich is always very calm makes it very easy to understand what you try to explain. Calm and Clean Step by Step explanaition. Bug thumbs up 👍
To note, the reason you can't 1-to-1 compare melee strength jobs to tank jobs for potency and such is because of how strength is calculated for both jobs. Tanks don't get the full effectiveness of their damage stat, while melees do.