The Secret Sauce Behind FFXIV's INCREDIBLE Jobs



Rhythm and physicality: the hidden magic that makes FFXIV jobs feel incredible to play, despite a slow GCD and initially confusing oGCD rules. Also, jobs have so, so much SOUL!
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44 thoughts on “The Secret Sauce Behind FFXIV's INCREDIBLE Jobs”

  1. tho I lament the loss of power slash, the opener and weaving OGCDs on DRK feels so damn good. edge of darkness is such a satisfying attack.

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  2. I never played, but I hear how Sabin used fighting game inputs for his moves in FFVI. Can you imagine if they figured out and added a job based on that? That would be amazing. Before the removal of Kaiten, SAM just felt perfect to me. It had this really nice flow to it, and trying to greed a Sen or Iaijutsu before having to move is fun. I do miss the follow-ups to Third Eye, but there's still a small satisfaction to timing it right. When I subscribe again to not lose my house, I'm gonna go back to my roots and play my first love, MNK, again. I really loved what they did with the Beast Chakra, and seeing Tifa's move from Remake is really nice, especially since she's best girl.

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  3. SAM main who hasn't played the latest patch yet, but after hearing our sword twirl going away I definately felt a disturbance in the force I couldn't quite place. Now I can.

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  4. As a bard main the weaving of songs, dots and now getting to the radiant finale always feels like I'm actually playing music. When I hit it all just right it feels so perfect. I rarely get that perfect feeling from any other job and I have several at 90. I think that's why I've stuck with bard all this time even when times were tough for bards. i love that musical feeling.

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  5. For me there's usually one job in each role that just clicks. And it's changed each expansion, as the jobs changed. I was forced into SMN during Shadowbringers by my savage static, since they needed a caster and I hate BLM. (I considered myself a SCH main, but they already had two healers.) I got quite good at it, but it never felt right. There was always a sense of panic, frustration when I let DoTs drop, anger if I miscounted, Ruin IV, etc. Endwalker summoner is a lot simpler and it definitely clicked with me. WAR is my new old love in the tank section, and while I'm still a fantastic scholar, the result is that I'm a very mediocre sage. The two jobs may look superficially similar, but they play so different. (SCH never has to target anyone but the tank during pack pulls, for example. Eos and the oGCD group heals can fix everyone else up.)

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  6. They've actually done quite a bit to declutter the busier classes, I'm still surprised they haven't redone Machinist a bit too. And while that might on some level sound like they are simplifying stuff too much, they have also been ramping up the intensity of boss mechanics in newer content a lot.

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  7. I cannot for the life of me touch SAM right now because it feels so… off… I'm so use to hearing/prepping kaiten for midare/namikiri that it feels cursed without it.

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  8. I would agree that XIV HAD good jobs, but I can't say that it still does. Kaiten's removal isn't an irregularity, it's completely in-line with how the direction the devs have been taking the combat design of the game. The tanks and healers used to have similar nuances to their play, but those were gutted in Stormblood and Shadowbringers. XIV's jobs have consistently been getting simpler and more streamlined. With the loss of TP, enmity management, cross class/role actions v1, stances, dots, and dozens of other unique abilities, the game has lost so much flavor that it's very bland if you know how it used to play. Kaiten is just the latest casualty in XIV's war against fun and interesting gameplay.

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  9. Not too hard to make a class if you completely ditch subclasses like this cinematic has done. Imagine if you had all the BEST moves from 3 different subclasses, THAT is your shitty secret sauce. These moves came out a whole decade later to and honestly looks like half of them predate WoW. Not to mention you can hardly see shit if you're playing with others. There is no thinking in this game everything is done for you, except acquiring more bank space. That will cost you MORE money EVERY single month on top of a normal subscription fee if you want that. Enjoy your 15yr old cast of characters and emotional midgets.

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  10. This perfectly explains why Samurai feels so much less fun without Kaiten. It just FELT really good to use. Still bummed about losing it.

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  11. I have several jobs I've 'clicked' with actually.
    Dark Knight, Red Mage, Samurai, Gunbreaker and Sage.

    For Dark Knight, it's has to do with how bulky they are, against bosses. trash pulls they feel kinda shitty, but against a boss. The amount of damage you can just 'lolno' through with TBN is hilarious, Living Shadow is just a fun button to push for that 'i brought a friend :3' feel, which tanks don't get, and yeah, Delirium into Bloodspiller after Bloodspiller is nice, and while thats might sound kinda meh, and some people might even think 'why not play Warrior then?'. I tried. Warrior is just 'ok', but even now i haven't 'clicked' with it and likely never will.

    Red Mage and Sam it's all about the loop. the build up to dashing in to the melee combo and its finisher combo, or a double, soon to be triple Midare Setsugekka, and i don't care what you say about Fell Cleave, Midare feels WAY BETTER then Fell Cleave.

    for Sage, well, still learning how to not suck at healing but, in PvE i so far, like how offensive it is, how, often i can put shields up and how, much like with TBN on DRK, just 'yeah … no ….' damage from Tankbusters on the tank currently under my care, and in PvP i'm pretty much a scourge upon the land that should be instantly removed lest i linger to cause problems, and I do cause problems when allowed. which is rare, sadly :/

    lastly Gunbreaker. the only other tank I have instantly clicked with when i sat down with it, and the cause of a bit of salt XD. the Gnashing Fang combo kinda felt like what we wanted with DRK as a replacement for Dark Arts spam (may that age of DRK burn in hell), but just folded into a new job. and, it's a lot of fun, it's the RIGHT kind of busy, it's a lot less squishy now. Ripping into something with its Gnashing Fang combo always feels good, hell even the fallow up to Burst Strike feels kinda nice. Only thing I'm not really sure what to do with outside the use of Bloodfest is Double Down, kinda feels tacked on even more then Burst Strikes follow up attack dose, but least that isn't invasive the way Double Down is….

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  12. Akh Morn, Akh Morn, Akh Morn. No button feels better to me than to have my own pet dragon god blast the everliving hell out of something.

    I started as PLD, tried NIN and BLM and WHM and they were all cool and all when I was new and bad, but nothing truly resonated until the 4.4(?) duty where you play as Alphinaud, and tried book casting for the first time. It made me pull Arcanist out, give it a try, and Summoner after. Something about Summoner, which at the time was considered one of the most complicated jobs to play, clicked with me. I liked how it was a cooldown-based priority system, a flowchart or a bunch of if-thens. It was neat having a little pet, especially back in Stormblood where they even were targettable and had health bars (that were ignored for most AoE attacks.) It was the job that I got my first ever on-content clear with, on the 4.5 Extreme trial. It flowed into Shadowbringers very similarly, swapping out the pet as a literal party member for more control on its actions through the Egi Assault abilities, and was the job that I got into Savage raiding with for the first time. And Endwalker came, and they redid the job, and while I certainly miss my old, super complicated job that made peoples' heads spin, this new one is sooooo good. Simple, but it plays into the class fantasy.

    I've been a fan of the Final Fantasy series, and coming in to 14 was such a treasure trove of nostalgia rerealized. Summoner was always one of my favorite jobs; powerful attacks that were also AoE with no loss in strength compared to more basic Black Magic attack spells. Fantastic creatures to burn and freeze and blow away my enemies for me. Always having that dragon king Bahamut as the apex of summon magic, unleashing a Megaflare that few enemies would survive. New SMN plays into that class fantasy so well.

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  13. the fighting game analogy is interesting.. FFXIV is an RPG without builds.. like fighting games each character specializes in a move set with no builds and u just master the combos.. Each job/character has a fine tuned combat style, that would be ruined if there were "builds" .. from a fighting game fan.. the combat in FFXIV is extremely satisfying , the sound, the animations.. and i usually hate tab targetting.

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  14. I like the music analogy as a general analogy but it ignores animation locks. Start adding in some required 1/16th note rests or maybe a dotted sixteenth after specific abilities and it gets a bit more realistic 😉

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  15. WHM, is what clicked with me, its the class that got me through the entirety of the MSQ. First it was slow, like VERY SLOW, but when I got into endgame and savages, oh boy I just fell in love even more. WHM literally only has 2 buttons for DPS, you put dia then glare, then dia again if it expires, the occational Presence of Mind. Then suddenly a HP draining mechanic happens and the adrenaline just pumps in, I like the feeling of that HUGE burst of healing, and specially when you correctly time your AOE heal to an AOE damage, it's so satisfying.

    WHM is like a rhythm game level, where at the start it's very chill, then suddenly a whole bunch of notes just comes in bursts, but instead of panicking you don't, its like I'm in this trance of knowing what, where, and when to click.

    Just knowing what buttons to click, what skills to use in what certain scenario as a WHM, is what really got me into the class. AND FOR ETHEIRYS' SAKE SQEX PLEASE GIVE WHM MORE LOVE.

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  16. For me there’s nothing better than repulling on Black Mage, both stacks of triple cast and ley lines come back all at once, and then on the second repull you have manafont again. Fire. Phase. For. Nearly. 30. Seconds

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  17. I used to main brd in arr when it launched.. Tried nin when it came out later and I knew instantly that was my main job… So many years after and having cleared most of the content NiN is still my main job.

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  18. I suppose for me it was WHM and RDM, though I started as a CNJ just because I like to main healers in most mmos. Though I can't say the healers feel very rhythmic to me, more just a step beat, or random panic depending on how things are going. RDM, amusingly, did not at ALL click with me to begin with. I just didn't get it originally, and ended up playing MCH then DNC before going back to it. But once it did click.. it's probably my favorite of the dps classes. And I suppose it's just fun to essentially do figure 8's on the primary rotation keys, before just chaining down the board for the melee combo.

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  19. the DRG rotation feels like a freight train of GCDs and oGCDs that pretty much never stray and it is an absolute joy to get into the groove of it while solving mechanics, exactly like a rhythm game

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  20. As a RDM main, I love the back-and-forth of balancing my mana, and then blowing it all out with my melee combo. Following that up with giant blast after giant blast of Verflare/Verholy and Scorch (and soon to be Resolution… I'm almost there!) is just endlessly satisfying.

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  21. I main bard, and I just really enjoy the upkeep aspect of it and I kick my own ass when I forget to make sure my dots are still up, or I buff in the wrong order. I like being a support DPS and that something I've found really only exists in FF14.

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  22. My favorite thing about playing monk is the cool instant transmission dashes, that rush of uppercuts when you use brotherhood and how the combos all flow so seamlessly and how even if you flub a button press, you can get right back into your flow almost instantly. Ugh, God I love monk so much.

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  23. this is one thing that imo is rarely touched upon. i actually "hear" a kind of musical rhythm when i play weaving my ogcds, double weaving as long-short-short-long etc. and my rotation thus has a certain groove to it. when i see people just mashing the buttons until the ability comes off cooldown or until the gcd comes up again, i cringe. if you are really "in the zone" you don't need to look at cooldowns because the rhythm tells you when to refresh.

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  24. I will have to say that my favorite class has to be white mage because of the glare attack animation just feels right. Can't explain why such a simple attack feels right but it does

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  25. 5:25 Ayy not anymore! We Australians can now finally taste what low ping is like for FFXIV.

    Fighting game and rhythm game are two of my favourite genres in gaming, you definitely nailed what exactly makes FFXIV job feels good to play. The rhythmicality of doing rotations in raids is satisfying to pull off. There's a reason why a lot of people describes XIV raids as doing simon says while playing DDR or Guitar Hero.

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  26. I’m not a Sam main but removing Kaiten kinda makes me don’t wanna play sam anymore, just solely because of aesthetic reason. Swinging your sword around into Iai stance before executing big dick slash is so visually pleasing for me.

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  27. Instead of 4/4 you should have put the metronome into 3/4 like a waltz, since you have 2 weave windows in each GCD. Would have made it feel “dancier” too

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  28. As a musician and as a XIV player I loved this video and its comparisons so so much! 😀
    I'm a main DRG and the most satisfying part of my rotation is every minute when you can combine "double" geirskoul with stardiver and whatever else you're doing in your usual 2.5 rotation, it just feels so powerful <3

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  29. And this is why wows combat will never be better… you can talk about all the smoothness in the world.. but if the class/jobs feels bad, no amount of smoothness will changes that…

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