What factors into making a job difficult to learn, play or master? Of course, this is a heavily subjective topic, but putting it into words and examples can sometimes help you to discover what it is that makes jobs difficult for you! In this video I cover 6 common reasons for jobs to be difficult â whether it causes the learning, playing or mastering part of the job I leave up to you though!7
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Music Used:
FFXIV Endwalker â Cradle of Hope
#ffxiv #endwalker
Chapters:
00:00 Introduction
00:50 (1) Overwhelming amounts of oGCDs
02:12 (2) High Speed GCD Rotations
03:31 (3) Unpredictable Rotations
04:50 (4) Small Mistakes Are Very Costly
06:36 (5) Complicated and Unintuitive Rotations
08:09 (6) Overwhelming Information
10:07 The Summary
11:23 Fun Fact
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thank you for the vid cae twas good
Thanks for the video!
Imo, DRK is the easiest of all tanks because it's press your damage buttons every 2 mins. The 10% buff is easy to maintain because of edge. Other than that it's 1-2-3 press defensive CDs and keep 3000 mana for TBN.
I find WAR slightly more complicated than DRK because you still need to be cognizant of storm's eye combo to keep up your buff, beast gauge and not overcapping it, and slamming your infuriates under buff windows (while also not overcapping your gauge by pressing infuriate). But that's just my opinion!
shouts out the dragon kick rotation ty for teaching it, I bust that out when running content with my FC sometimes just to stir the pot by getting top parse with the "wrong" rotation
For me it really is too many buttons and complex mechanics of the class.
Reaper mains are seething from this and I love it
Hey dont wanna be that guy, but how are you able to properly gauge the difficulty of a class if all you have logged is normal mode parses? ( im just going based off your page ) not saying you canât necessarily find a job âhardâ in normal content but it doesnt give you a proper example of what the class would be like when you add in more intricacies such as mechs that require a bit more thinking than normal mode.
Took me a good 30 minutes after not touching it for like 4 years if leveling. I immediately bounced off xause i had literally no idea what to do. Cause i tried to set it up with a melee combo priority but that's not rdms focus
I surprised the WHM isn't mentioned in the category of "So boring and simple that I turned my brain off and forgot I was standing in an AoE"
I'm not even joking. I genuinely think WHM is more difficult than SGE because I'm ADHD and my brain loses focus after the 20th consecutive Glare đđ
One case I can think of and it applies to casual players like myself who dont log in everyday. You go through msq learn that job and your decently competent at it. But you then start to level other jobs 1 at a time over a LONG time due to not logging in every day and then you need to relearn that job, and once you go to another job it feels like you need to relearn how to optimize that one and one that's max level you forget the other job you just leveled lol.
A weird example was monk from stormblood to shadowbringers. I got it to 70 right before the expansion, rotation had changes from the fist stuff but then after not playing it since the start it got a rework and changed again XD so it was a weird learning experience for that.
It's why I kinda enjoy how pvp skills work, nice and easy to learn so you can focus on combat, but I'm boomer brained lol
Worth noting that a lot of difficulty can come from optimizations. It's almost always pretty straightforward to contribute decent dps just by doing a basic rotation, keeping the gcd rolling, and pushing your cooldowns when they come back up, but then things get more difficult as you try to squeeze out the diminishing returns.
RDM is an easy example for me to use. At the base level, you're doing your short-long dualcasts, building gauge, and comboing when you have enough gauge for it. You've got 3 instacasts on top of that for movement if you need them before falling back to reprise (spoiler alert: I basically never use reprise).
From there, one of the optimizations that other jobs share is pooling for bursts. Instead of using your gauge immediately, you can hold it for a burst so the combo does more damage. But then two b2b combos don't entirely fit in 15-20s, so you can play around with when you want to start those combos to put the strongest hits into the burst. Same for adding a pot on top of that.
However, using combos like this means that you might now miss a combo you were using for movement and would like to find an alternative uptime strategy for that earlier part. Maybe accel and swiftcast will do the job. Holding the combo also means you have to manage the gauge to avoid overcapping (which can easily happen at 6min and 8min in a fight with no downtime depending how you do things), but then overcapping is also fine as long as the fight ends without you losing a combo over it.
That's one of the most core RDM optimizations. Let's revisit the notion of replacing a combo used for movement with accel and swiftcast. First, this requires having those charges in the first place. The first level of accel/swift optimization is to keep them on cooldown for a very minor gain in damage, also trying to get extra procs with them. So you need to remember not to use them for a while beforehand if you're going to use them on movement instead, which is top priority for them.
However, there's another major issue here. Dualcast makes it so that gcds are essentially 5 seconds long instead of 2.5. This means you're always on an odd gcd or an even gcd. Every combo, accel, or swift shifts you to the other parity. Now why does that matter? If fleche or contre sixte comes back, it'll either be right after dualcast (good) or during the hardcast (bad) depending on your parity. A bad one will cause a gcd of delay before you can use it, and with their low cooldowns, that can add up to a lost use overall fairly quickly. This affects mitigations like addle and barrier too. Easy example, you have to be on a specific gcd at the right time in p12s phase 1 to cover both ___dialogos and the raidwide after it with a single mit.
The way this is managed is to use accel and swift for shifting to the right gcd parity. Getting every fleche+c6 use takes priority over the minor damage gain from procs or skipping a short cast. But wait, we said accel and swift would do the job for the combo we moved earlier. Now we would really prefer to make sure we still have enough charges to keep fleche+c6 happy if we're using some for movement, especially in cases like p12s phase 1 where fleche is already moved earlier in the opener so it can be used right before the boss goes untargetable for LC. Remember that if the gcd is already aligned and you pop an accel for movement, you're now unaligned and need to pop another instacast to realign it before they come back soon (or get into a combo by then).
So now even accel and swift are more complicated, and movement is getting messier. There's a third major optimization that throws another wrench in things. Manafication is 110s, 10s less than the 2-minute bursts. The intuitive thing to do with it once you're trying to fill bursts is to hold it for those 10s each time so that it comes out with embolden for the burst, making sure that extra +50/+50 gauge doesn't overcap unless the extra gauge is going to waste anyway at the end of the fight.
However, every 2 minutes will cause an extra 10s to be added to lost cooldown time. For a long fight, that's almost a minute of lost time, which can easily result in an entire combo being missed if the boss dies late enough after your last manafication use. That extra combo far outweighs the benefits of doing the obvious thing, so you're now either holding manafication for embolden or using it immediately based on killtime. But what if the boss dies kinda far after your manafication, but not really far after? You still have the option of holding it for the first burst or two and then switching to using it immediately after that.
The thing about manafication timing jumping around now is that it feeds back into your other concerns. First, it forces you to use a combo around the same time as manafication to use up the damage buff it gives, so that's less flexibility on using a filler combo for movement. Second, it makes the gauge management trickier. For example, the second manafication is now 10s before burst. If you were saving gauge for that burst, you're going to be at over 50/50 and the manafication will overcap you, so that one requires less flexible timing on the combo because you do the three melee hits to spend the gauge with 5s left on manafication and then pop manafication to refill what you just used before going into the finishers. That leaves you with two combos' worth of mana for the burst right after.
I don't expect many people to read all that, but RDM is considered one of the really easy jobs and it still hits you with a surprising amount of depth in its more major optimizations. When people get upset every patch that RDM is behind SMN on dps (which amusingly, but inconsequentially, was not true for the max p9s parses last I checked), it's mainly because everything on RDM ties back to movement and uptime and takes considerable effort to get looking good and consistent. That's not even getting into the number of rezzes it takes at a particular point in the fight to screw you out of enough gauge for a burst. And this is just an incomplete look at one job, one of the ones everyone points to as easy. BLM certainly has more going on in minor optimizations, and it's pretty fascinating across the board to see how different and more complex jobs become when you have all the optimization details to focus on as well.
It's also worth mentioning that the process of applying fundamentals like uptime and major optimizations varies for every fight. It takes me a good while of progging through a savage fight to actually work out a plan for it. Some of that carries over between fights, but a lot of it is puzzling out and memorizing all the little differences, how to move for all variations of an attack, which gcd to start combos on so that the balance between free movement and needing to be in melee is timed correctly, and more.
Ppl who think blm is the easiest job just never did savage raids lmao
I enjoyed this video especially as a monk main. Theres a lot i agree with abd honestly i love how fast i have to think on rotations with it cause it keeps me ready and prepared for just about anything. And honestly I apply that same thinking to other jobs like other melees, casters, and even tanks and healing jobs. But I get and often heard over the years how daunting jobs ( monk especially) can be. đ€·đŸââïž
Not understanding tooltips is why I didn't know how to get more addersgall as sage for a long time
Nice video. I gave up raiding about 15 years ago and I think of FFXIV in the context of other games. I don't take for granted that it's natural to have to work around a burst window, though I can imagine it being a fun challenge. Burst would be a PvP thing in other games – burst and die or burst and move on. I don't consider the easy jobs brain-dead because even the easy ones use so many more skills than most classes I've played in other MMO's. I've had to up my keybind game even for SMN, the job with the least number of buttons to press I think.
Another factor for me is that difficulty is partly from whether the job and rotation make sense to me. I finished leveling RDM today, and while I am loving the feel of it, and didn't find the dualcast mechanic so bad after a little practice, the gameplay switches dramatically when you get to 70. I had to watch a video and spend a little time with a striking dummy to figure out how to proc verholy/scorch/etc. And the way it all works still just makes no sense to me. I can play it, but I don't understand why they designed it the way they did. BLM or any other harder job I've tried usually makes a lot more sense to me.
It also is harder for me, at least when starting to play a job, when the names of skills don't communicate what they do. RDM would be one example, but SAM felt the same way when I unlocked and never leveled it. I love SGE, but the names of spells are not exactly helpful.
Finally, for us old people, the jobs with lots of oGCD's may not always be terribly hard to play casually, and I know casual play isn't the subject of the video – but personally I have more fun when I'm doing a lot of double weaving. The problem is that my old wrists rebel, and if I spend a few hours on AST or MCH, I'm in pain the next day, so they're just off-limits to me.
I enjoy a lot of ogcds and optimizing under buffs. It's why I main DRG. There's room for jobs with high and low apm. Reaper was a great addition for that reason. The DRG rework worries me because I know I'm not the know one that enjoys playing this way
Summoner is super difficult to play, I literally can't play it without falling asleep and getting squished.
Thank you Cae for the video! Always interesting subjects to talk about đ
For me, the unpredictable rotations are actually easier than the static ones because I am ADHD as all heck and my short-term memory is terrible, but I am decent at making quick decisions and adjusting on the fly. I easily lose my place in DRG or SAM's rotations, for instance, and struggle to keep track of MNK's combo pattern, but find NIN much more comfy (and RPR too but I think that's a given lol).
I was about to write about the monk rotation being very set in stone once you understand how the whole thing work before you mentionned it at the very end of the video ^^
When I started monk, I actually had a hard time understanding the logic in its rotation. But when it click, everything fit nicely together <3
you forgot one thing when talking about nin, the most demoralizing thing worse than getting bunnied is moving by mistake before ending the ninjutsu casts of te chi jin, that is the real trigger for me, i have my mudra on Q,E,R you have any ideia how many times i fat fingered a move key
The easiest jobs for me are the ones with less button pressing per minute, with my ping, too much weaving becomes so clunky to play. I love BLM and Reaper because they arent too chaotic on the button mashing, but you still have some difficulty in other aspects which motivates me to get better at the job.
Great video as always <3
The only people who think ninja is hard are people who have never actually tried to play ninja.
All your positionals are rear-except the 1-2 armor crushes you do each minute. The filller actually doesnât matter, itâs JUST 1-2-3 for 45 seconds of every minute. And your burst can be done in ANY order. You just hit mug+ trick and press the good buttons then go back to being afk 1-2-3.
I remember once I said "Redmage is easier than summoner if you're a controller player" and I was met with a bunch of "what makes you say that" and "summoner is only difficult if you consider how many 'different' buttons there are" I'm closer to assuming because most people don't play on controller they don't truly know how different controller play is to keyboard mouse play than assuming my hotbars are just weird on controller.
Thx for making this vid, Caetsu.
Personally i found Mnk, Rpr and Nin easy with their 123 combos (and Mnk is basically refresher vs dmg combos or stare at your Twin Snakes and Demolish and Riddle of Fire timers) which can be flexbile
but have a hard time with Sam and Drg with long combo sequences and sheer number of ogcds, and I'm a controller player.
I dunno how you Drg / Sam mains do this, plus gcd drift placement when you have to separate from boss for mechanics. How?
If I ever find myself offset from the 2.13 gcd rotation of samurai, normally timed vs the duration of higanbana for me, I just remember that when Iki Shoten comes off CD I should be 5 GCDs from reapplying higanbana, the reapplication being the 6th gcd. From there it flows back into place. It may be a slight dps loss but Iâll finish whatever combo Iâm on, eat the sen, and reset the rotation with a fresh higanbana and burst timed with the group buffs.
Normally, with no downtime or forced offsetting of the rotation, Iki Shoten should come off CD right after the second part of your second sen combo. Meaning there should just be the final part of the sen combo, 2 GCDs for the third sen, and 1 gcd for iaijutsu. At that point if you had done it all right, you can meikyo and reapply the dot as normal with raid buffs.
For specific savage fights or any other GCD tier youâre on your own, I only play 2.13 and donât do savage rofl
Lol, blm is the easiest when no one attacks me in 5v5. Just nees to spam ice.
Tbh, none of the jobs in this game are difficult at all. There is only one thing standing in the way of mastery, and that is the player.
Players have certain expectations of the jobs, and the standard they're imagining is far higher than the game ever expects or requires of them.
But if they just tried, they'd quickly realise the ferocious tiger they've been staring down was but a mewling kitten.
This is true even for the jobs that don't start at level 1; if they seem intimidating, it's only because you're jumping in at the deep end for a role you're unfamiliar with.
For example, if you've played WAR and WHM to levels 60 and 70, then tried out Gunbreaker and Sage, you'll quickly realise their respective kits are about 90% the same, set up your hotbars accordingly, and carry on.
Failing that, your first job quest is basically a tutorial, if you can make it through on normal difficulty, you'll be fine in Duty Roulette.
My guess is that people have difficulty for the simple reason that they unlock the job, check some end-game guide, yet never actually READ THE MOVE DESCRIPTIONS.
My Monk rotation tends to end up as unga-bunga bc of the options, but I love the job so much regardless~
Bard also suffer horribly when they mispress their song or die as that will screw their entire 2min rotation, leaving the entire party songless for periods of time. So it doesnt only just hurt bards but the rest of the party as well imo.