Durmin is here to give you the crash course on the playable jobs in Final Fantasy XIV. Today: the three jobs based in Gridania!
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0:00 – Introduction
0:28 – WHITE MAGE
3:47 – DRAGOON
7:30 – BARD
10:58 – Wrapping Up
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Edited by Daniel Floyd
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Only 2 healers and tanks each in a realm reborn.
It's actually pretty helpful to get a glimpse of what these classes play like at high levels, without having to spend 500 hours getting them to high level.
Resident Bard main here. It's the job I started the game with and I'm still playing it 4 years later so I'm gonna talk a little about it.
Bard has three main rules to it:
-Keep your DOTs up
-Don't waste procs
-Always be beeping
In short – you want to keep your two damage over time effects active as much as possible, using Iron Jaws right before they run out. You also don't want to leave abilities like Refulgent Arrow for later, as you're just wasting damage that way. Most importantly, though, you want to keep songs up at all times. Any second you're not playing a second is a second you're losing damage. In general, there's an order they go in, and you basically just cycle them out (Wanderer's Minuet > Mage's Ballad > Army's Paeon, cutting Mage's Ballad slightly short so that the timers line up).
Bard's playstyle is less about specific combos and more… a priority queue. Basically, at any given moment you could have one of a number of abilities available to you, and while some are on fixed timers and more predictable, a lot won't be, so for the most part you want to be aware of your abilities and use the highest priority skill that is available to you (for example, Refulgent Arrow is higher priority than Burst Shot, so if it's available, you always want to use that first). It's very fun and quite flexible, and it feels extremely satisfying when you really nail it.
Also the performance stuff is very fun. I don't play it as much as I used to since most people just use plugins to play MIDI files, but back when it was first added and before those plugins existed I put literally hundreds of hours into practising performance. Using a controller. No I refuse to use any other tools why do you ask?
Now I'm going to catch myself saying "Preventative care!" every time I start a battle by spamming Holy.
Yay! We get to talk about my main! Bard, in my opinion, is so much fun.
Each song has an 80% chance of granting Repertoire and each song's Repertoire effect is different. Mage's Ballad reduces the recast time of Bloodletter and Rain of Death (the latter is one of three multitarget skills). Army's Paeon reduces cast time and recast time for all skills. The Wanderer's Minuet grants you the use of Pitch Perfect, which can be stacked three times to increase the damage dealt.
haven't played whm yet bc i'm scared of healing, am still trying to wrap my head around brd, and drg has been pretty fun to play so far. jumpy stabby is easy serotonin for bad days, and the lvl50 armor set is the coolest of the arr artifact armors, imo.
I will say, watching Durmin swaying side to side is a deeply relaxing experience for me.
BLOOD FOR THE BLOOD LILY.
And now to Gridania! Another bonus spoiler free lore comment!
Conjurer/White Mage – The Conjurers are the only healers in the game below level 30 (Scholar can be used when syncing below level 30, but in natural progression, arcanist is a DPS class). As a result, any generic NPC healer will usually be a conjurer. White Magic, just like its diametrically opposed counterpart, is somewhat restricted in the lore of the game. Only Padjals may become white mages, or at least until your character joins their ranks. The 6th Umbral Calamity (The Calamity of Water) was initiated during an all out war between the White Mages of Amdapor and the Black Mages of Mhach. After the waters receded, these mages were not looked upon kindly, and the practice mostly died out. A lot of the White Mage questlines deal with the padjal's duties in the Twelveswood and how they go about them. Ad Dan notes, "Holy Spam" is a great form of preventative healing, and will result in massive particle effects. One of the leading reasons for players to reduce the spell effects for other players is Holy Spam. The player base stereotypes White Mages (and most other healers too) as a group who's constant attempts to keep everyone alive has lead to them becoming mad with the power of life and death. The damage from the Blood Lily hasn't exactly helped break this stereotype.
Lancer/Dragoon – The traditional Final Fantasy jumps & spears. The Lancers of Gridania are typically charged with being the primary front line units of the Twin Adders, and the lancer quests touch on a very Gridanian problem: Elezen Racism. There is a lot of conversation about the Duskwight Elezen, and the prejudice they encounter. The Dragoon quests delve more into Ishgard's history, as the dragoons are actually more prominent there. As a result, a lot of dragoon abilities reference dragons. In fact, one of the abilities of a dragoon (Dragonsight) is to buff a nearby party member. Prior to Endwalker, this created a ribbon of dragonscale linking the dragoon and their ally… which resulted in a lot of confusion as many players thought this was some kind of enemy mechanic, leading players to run away from the dragoons to break it. Since Endwalker's release, the visual element of this buff has been removed. The player base also loves giving dragoon players a hard time, partially due to the extensive animation lock that the job has had over the years. Dragoons would begin their flashy jumps, but would be unable to move from their position while in these animations. This tends to be bad when an enemy attack is telegraphed to land exactly where the dragoon is jumping. Dragoons have been called "Floor Tanks" due to their tendency to die while in animation lock.
Archer/Bard – The original ranged DPS class. Bards provide excellent buffs to the party, along with good ranged damage. But that's not why most people know bards. Most people know bards due to their level 30 mechanic: Performance. At level 30, bards get the ability to play music on a wide range of instruments: woodwinds, brass, strings, an entire piano, and with the release of patch 5.55, the envy/bane of all amateur musicians, the electric guitar. And not just any electric guitar. A digital replica of a $3,500 USD special FFXIV edition Fender Stratocaster. And you get this version just for hitting level 30. Bards groups like the Songbirds have sprung up over the years putting on pop up concerts across the data centers. Officially, playing copywrite music is against the TOS, but let's be clear, that's SE giving themselves legal cover. The first week after the Stratocaster was implemented I logged into the Limsa tavern and immediately saw a Miqo'te plucking out Black Hole Sun.
I don't know about Dan, but I'll try to do another of these comments as Durmin hits each expansion, showing off the newly added jobs.
You can move at jogging speed in all directions on Mouse and Keyboard? For some reason, I could only slowly strafe backwards so if I had to run from something, I had to twist the camera, hence I tried playing on controller.
Ay! Dragoon! That's the class I started with! (Well, lancer… and I never actually made it to dragoon… oops)
Great work Dan! Thanks for the overview.
For any White Mage hopefuls out there: The Cast Times and Stun Times on Holy are nearly perfectly aligned that if you Swiftcast Holy, then regular cast Holy 2 more times, the stuns will perfectly chain together where the enemies will only get 2 auto attacks worth of damage during all of that time. This means you can start every big pull by doing DPS while the largest number of enemies are still alive.
The most important thing about these videos is that Durmin is adorable as every single class.
Dan left out the most important thing about Dragoon as of patch 6.1 (aka today) Dragoons can earn the "Dan" title again. Let's just say a bunch of members of DTC have been picking up Dragoon today for that reason 😉
Something that hasn’t come up in these three videos much is that each job has its own storyline, a series of quests that introduce you to the mechanics and fluff of the job. These have all pretty much concluded by level 70 – Shadowbringers and Endwalker switched from individual job quests to role quests – but they do include some nifty content. It’s obviously a matter of preference, but some jobs like Dragoon tie in well with certain parts of the MSQ, others flesh out some lore about the world, and others get weird. While it’s not universal, at the end of each expansion these job quests also usually give you a set of job-specific armor. The armor Durmin has worn for most of these jobs in these three videos is the level 50 job armor for that job. It’s nice because in contrast with many MMOs where unless you do organized content you usually don’t get any impressive cosmetic looks, ffxiv gives you a decent glamor that fits with the fantasy behind the job.
Are you going to touch on the crafter and gathering jobs?
I really enjoy this series!
As a BRD main I will just note that physical ranged damage dealers work twice as hard for half the DPS (lots of little abilities off the global cooldown that deal light damage), but to make up for it we are exceptionally stylish.
Bard, Machinist or Dancer, in at least two out of three cases you're going to be the one with the best-looking themed armor sets in the raid.
Just getting back to re-watching this series. My second time through, I wonder—how does the beginning differ if you play a character from v 1.0? In episode 1 there’s so much talk of being a new adventurer, but if you’ve time traveled an old character that’s not really what would happen, I’d imagine.
Asking here since I’m not sure if Dan will see comments on old videos like ep 1. 🙂
What is the song playing during the white mage? It's very pretty.
The problem with Dragoons is most of them don't know what parrots look like, and thus are easily fooled by dragons pretending to be parrots.
Half-pint white mages make me very tempted to want to get into this game.
I started as a white mage and to this day main white mage. it's my favorite since it allows me to simultaneously engage in my desire to support others and my murderous urges. 10/10, white mage is best mage.
"Whenever you're not healing somebody…" DRAMATIC ZOOM "hurt somebody!!" Where is the editing oscar for this series?!?! x'D
I'm looking forward to seeing Jobs 201, where you go over tarot cards, inner darkness, and GUNS. I am wondering if katanas and sword-canes would be 301 or 202, and if the copycat will be with them since that's the patch cycle they got added in.
BLOOD FOR THE BLOOD LILY!!! JUMPS FOR THE DRAG….OH GOD A LEDGE!! AVENGE MEEEEeeeeee……
Can we talk about bard-Durmin's fabulous hat? Are all of the bard's outfits that pretty?
One more little precision about Bard, for anyone interested : each of the Bard's songs, on top of slightly boosting your allies, imparts a specific gimmick to your gameplay while said song is playing.
Mage's Ballad has a chance to reduce the cooldown of one of your oGCD attacks ("Out of Global CoolDown", meaning an attack you can "weave" in-between your regular skills), which means you need to be quick on your feet to use said attack anytime the cooldown-shortening effect triggers.
Army's Paeon has a chance to grant you one stack of a "skill speed"-like buff, which essentially means haste which reduces the delay between your auto-attacks as well as between your skill usage. This effect can stack up to 4 times, at which point you'll be using your skills relatively fast (not like, *frantically fast*, but noticeably faster).
Wanderer's Minuet has a chance to grant you one "charge" that you can expend on a special skill called Pitch Perfect. You can stack up to 3 charges max, and the more charges you have, the higher the damage of Pitch Perfect. That naturally means that you'll want to wait until you have stacked 3 charges before using Pitch Perfect.
You cycling between these three songs is basically what lays down what we call your "rotation", such that you will always have one of these songs active.
Bard also relies on a very important concept, that concerns every single job of the game, but that Bard makes you particularly aware of : server ticks. It's a pretty intricate concept if you delve into specifics, but the baseline of it is that the game's system internally runs on a 3 second cycle. Every 3 seconds, any "over time" effect will "tick", which means it will trigger. This is why all Damage/Healing Over Time effects, buffs/debuffs, etc all have effects that last for multiples of 3 (for example, the White Mage "regen" effect lasts 24 seconds).
What it means, is that all these effects of your songs I have mentioned above have a chance of occuring every 3 seconds. So, if your current active song is Mage's Ballad, every 3 seconds, there is a chance your oGCD skill's cooldown will be reduced. If you're playing Army's Paeon or Wanderer's Minuet, every 3 seconds you have a chance to gain a stack of skill speed effect or a charge for your Pitch Perfect attack.
All of this contributes into giving Bard a very reactive, "on-the-fly" kinda gameplay, which makes it a very exciting and pretty unique job in my opinion ! So if you like a gameplay that is not necessarily set in stone, that relies on a sort of "priority list" kind of rotation ("if this thing happens, I do that, if not I do this"), Bard is a very fun job to play~
I'm a little disappointed that you didn't make use of the phrase "spoony bard."
But I like that, true to their FFIV origins, the Dragoon is just The Lancer at heart.
all healers ever: if i'm not busy patching up my team, I AM RECOGNIZING MY LACK OF HYPOCRATIC OATH!