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🤗 patreon.com/zeplahq
🐦 twitter @xepla
📺 Twitch.tv/zeplahq
🗣 Official Discord server: https://discord.gg/zeplahq
FINAL FANTASY is a registered trademark of Square Enix Holdings Co., Ltd.
© SQUARE ENIX CO., LTD. All Rights Reserved.
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What that guy is asking for is precisely what the old job quests used to provide. The job quests literally taught you the basics of how to play your job. Like for healer ones, you were thrown into situations where you had times you needed to focus on single target healing and other times you had to aoe heal while also keeping an eye out for dispelling a crucial debuff. Sometimes the npcs would tell you to use a specific ability for a certain situation and keep shouting it until you did and if you didn't you died.
Bringing those back for new players to have an engaging way to learn the class seems to be the right move for SE to make.
Best way is to just read your tool tips (for both actions and traits) and start from the lowest level ability and work your way up. You'll get an understanding of how the job is supposed to be played.
Do fates starting at low levels and go by increments of ten until you reach your jobs starting level
when i heard zepla played dk i though "unholy or blood arent very complex but they have their things you need to learn so a starting zone is nice", then she said she played frost and i was like "frost… there are like 3 specs in this game whos rotation is 3-5 buttons, and she chosse the least complex of all of them as an example lol".
least complex wow classes (by rotation(my opinion)):
1. frost dk
2. demon hunter(dps)
3. sub rogue
4. sin rogue
5. literally all other melee specs lol
i wont lie i put sin rogue 4th only because its my main spec and im not going to admit its easier than sub. BECAUSE ITS NOT.
I started playing around the release of shadowbringers leveled all the healer roles during the msq,came back recently for endwalker started playing sage.
Playing it till 73 i said to myself fuck it i am going to learn a dps class.
It was overwhelming at first but you will learn it more quickly then you would imagine,the way i did it was que up for low level dungeons and when you felt comfortable with all the skills you have for that dungeon you que up for higher level dungeons rinse and repeat.
If you boot up any class in mid levels (30 – 50) best idea in-game is to read the descriptions, put them abilities to your hotbar and simply go and test the abilities against lvl 1 target dummy. This will quickly give you an idea of your basic rotation so you can be much more accurate when thinking about your keybindings.
This person leveled as a healer and then jumps into DPS as a level sixty or seventy job? "Omg there's cOmBoS"?? The game does need more tutorials but this is just kind of stupid.
I feel like dancer doesnt have enough procs imo. If they translated the pvp en avant proc to pve i feel like it would be better but thats my opinion!
I mean, just go hit a dummy for half an hour. It sounds boring but just take your time to read the skills, order the hotbar like other similar jobs and just get the feel of how the class works. Try that on dungeons and it'll be enough until you reach level cap. At that point, it is wise to check proper openers and rotations.
I can see why Zepla says it's not engaging, but consider how much time you'd spent watching videos about classes. After that you'd still have to organize your hotbar and spent time training your muscle memory so it doesn't really save you a lot of time in the end.
To me learning a new job, spec, class, etc etc etc. It really comes down to the person and their expectations. If you expect a simple "trick" or "tip" to fast track you won't be actually learning the job. To learn a job you need a mixture of practice and research. Research the job/class by reading tooltips, looking up guides, ask players that have played the job/class for awhile. However when doing that there is a very important question that you need to constantly ask, and that question is "why?". If you do not understand why things are done the way they are, why you are pressing the buttons when you press them, you aren't learning the job. To truly learn a job you need to understand those things to make well informed good decisions in the moment when adjustments need to be made.
If all you did is memorize a series of buttons without knowing why they are in that order when gameplay puts you in a position where you can't do that you will be lost, or will make a decision that is worse than someone that understands the why.
Add on to that gameplay experience either at a training dummy, or by doing content in the game. This will help the "muscle memory".
At the end of the day though to truly "learn" a job/class you need to put in some work upstairs with the brain with research and studying mixed with actually playing. There are some exceptions of course and some people just understand things quicker, but those people aren't going to be the ones looking up how to learn a job/class.
https://www.youtube.com/c/WeskAlber
all that needs to be said. obviously, you shouldn't HAVE to go outside the game, and it would be cool for more interactive resources in game, but there are plenty of resources for folks that want to look for them.
This is just my perspective but once you are able to unlock dancer/gunbreaker/the higher starting level jobs I think at that point you are expected to at least understand the game enough to put the basics together. and also like a ton of people have mentioned there is no reason you can't go into lower level content or even just going into fates and stuff in the open world to learn the job as well. On top of that if you are expecting to have some form of mastery over a job you have just unlocked I think that's the fault on the player for not trying to put the time in to learn and have the expectation of things being unknown at first
"I dont know how you can screw up SMN"
* Me, a SMN main, watching my wife as a 60 SMN always spamming Ruin instead of summoning, dying on the inside. *
After a few tries with Sage, it was obvious just jumping in the fray wouldn't do it. So I went to my barracks, round up my squadron and did the dungeons one by one. It's long enough that I can appreciate how the abilities work together and try to optimize their position, while I can take my time without getting on my teammates' nerves.
I think the FFXIV community has a very specific problem with job guides. There seems to be no difference, guidance-wise, between "X job for dummies" and "how do I optimize the DPS for this job at a high level".
I believe the best way to learn a job is to pick it up and just start using it in simpler content, then learn proper optimal play once you're comfortable with what the buttons do, which is a quite natural progression when you're leveling from 1. If you haven't quite "clicked" with FFXIV job design yet, jobs that start high can leave you so lost you don't really know how to begin that process, but guides for the basics don't really exist. Well, outside of JoCat's 😛
I've been comfortable as a dragoon only for many years now. 7.0 has me worried now lol.
This is basically what i've done when i want to start a new Job.
1: watch a WeskAlber video, he basically reads the tooltips for you and teaches you how to use the skills, which makes it a lot easier than doing it yourself, this can help you UNDERSTAND what each action does, and why you should use it.
2: Try out a suggested opener/rotation on a training dummy, and question WHY do you use them in that order? you have to think about this yourself if you actually want to get comfortable with your job, WeskAlber does talk about this, but you should use his guides as a way to learn how to learn, like school.
3: Do synced dungeons/trials to build up to your level, this will allow you to start the job at a level you are comfortable with, removing some skills, so that you can learn the basics of your job first
4: as an alternative to 3, deep dungeon while focusing on the tooltips when each new skill is unlocked. Probably not viable for later levels, but it's faster than synced dungeons, I would probably prefer doing dungeons/trials with some thinking about the new actions in between, which gives more time with each new action.
Bonus: Start with a fresh Job UI, go through every single skill and group them up by what usecase it has. Try them out, find what flaws there are in your UI, then redo it, then try it out again and repeat. This helps me out a lot, especially with jobs like Sage, where you have different types of shields and heals that can be grouped up together based on types and functions.
I had a great deal of trepidation (and still do…) about picking up the jobs that start at an advanced level in ffxiv, due to the paralysis mentioned here– just being more or less air-dropped into a giant skill/action set with no real explanation of how it works or what to do.
But now I figure out something that works for me– I sit down, go through all the actions/traits, and try to roughly align them on my hotbars in a way that at least vaguely matches what i'm familiar with on my main (i.e, single target attacks in one place, cool downs in one place, aoe in one place, etc etc). Then it's off to find a training dummy, and just get as familiar as possible with the core basics of the job: the basic combo, the resource gauge, that sort of thing.
Then it's just time to jump in the deep end of the pool. Queue for a dungeon. Or MSQ. Or an alliance raid. And I just be upfront with people– "hey, this is my first time doing content with this job, plz excuse any dumb mistakes'. Be upfront w/ ppl that you really don't have much of a clue what you're doing and very new to the job your playing. FFXIV roulette content really is more or less designed so that's it actually hard to impede the group unless you're really actively trying. Your damage might suck, your healing might suck, your tanking may not be great. But you'll learn by doing. And if you're friendly and upfront with the people you're playing with, no one's really gonna bug you about it.
I do think the revamp coming for the action list soon will help things. It'll finally sort of flow-chart actions/procs so you can get a better ground level understanding of how the pieces connect together. the scholar -> summoner transition can be particularly jarring because summoner has like 60 actions but only 1/3 of them can actually be assigned to the hotbar!
Place of the dead has always been a great way to start new jobs. You will start for level 1 and work you way up to 60. Learning the job while actually playing.
what i love to do with a new job is go into palace of the dead because you can start at level one and just gradually unlock your abilities and get used to them.
boy when i first unlocked dancer and they flooded my hotbar with new abilities that would all proc new abilities i was ready to quit the class just as quick as i got it
I blame the substandard education of system of certain countries and the use of lead in gasoline.
I'll just leave it at that.
They should redo Class quests, which is unlikely.
Personal take but they should add a tutorial for how to use the skills in rotation in these class quest cuz if your forced to do them to get skill why can't they also show you how to use them in the rotation
To jump in for wow's defense: the DK and DH "tutorials" are imo super awesome. They tap in heavy into class fantasy (story in wow lol). And for DK it is more, like it teaches how to enchant your weapon. Also new skills are rewards for quests there and one is not overwhelmed by the amount of skills. I always enjoyed doing the tutorials.
I do exactly what that post at the end suggests, with one additional thing:
1. go to a training dummy (I use the ones in Summerford),
2. clear my hotbars,
3. open the Actions & Traits window,
4. add lowest level skill not already on my hotbars,
5. attack the dummy, use new skill when available/appropriate a few times,
6. loop back to step 3,
0. while doing all of the above, have the appropriate WeskAlber video playing on the other monitor. 🤓
I just remove all my skills and add them in one by one once I understand what it does. Kinda like turboleveling without the monotony
just do low level dungeons. start with the level 10 dungeon, you'll only have like 3 skills you can use. When you are comfortable, go do a level 15. Keep escalating the dungeon level by 5 or 10 everytime you feel like you have a hang on things. This way you only have to learn 1 or 2 new skills at a time and it's not overwhelming.
I've come to understand that everyone has different levels of understanding of things and your perspective is shaped entirely by your experience. For me as someone who's playing FFXIV for about 9 years now I personally think that every job in the game is pretty easy to understand on a basic level but of course takes time to master with some being easier than others. This perspective is shaped by my experience of FFXIV NOT being the first MMO that I ever played coupled with decades of playing various different types of video games so my mind is ready and open to understanding how things link together. But specifically with FFXIV, I think the main reason why I think all the jobs are easy to play at a basic level is because I've played pretty much all the iterations of the jobs over time so I've SEEN how much the jobs have grown and changed over the years and how much easier they are to play now as compared to when they were first introduced.
With all that being said, I've had several people in my free company come to me for explanations about how to play this job or that job and I honestly love explaining them because it forces me to break down my understanding of the jobs to a more fundamental level that people without my specific background in video games can understand. Now, most of the people who come to me asking about jobs don't ask about the ones that start from level 1 or even from level 30 in Heavensward but instead the newer jobs introduced in Stormblood onwards because they feel overwhelmed by getting all of these actions at once. To those people, I always first ask them about their main job and how they have their abilities set up on their hotbar and why. This usually then goes into why I have things set up a certain way on my hotbar which I normally share with them so they have a visual representation of what I'm pressing and why. Once they come to realize that all jobs are basically broken down into the same fundamental elements within a role then you quickly realize that if you simply put buttons that do the same things in the same spaces on your hotbars then understanding the job is reduced down to simply getting used to its animations along with whatever specific gimmick is unique to the job which for me always end up on the same buttons for all the jobs more or less.
If you break down all the jobs in this fashion for the different roles then you not only can easily understand and learn the existing jobs in the game but whenever a new job is introduced and you initially think it's this super foreign concept to learn you quickly realize that it's not all THAT DIFFERENT from anything else and you can reach a baseline understanding of how to play the job within an hour of picking it up. But again, the most important aspect in this is figuring out your optimal button layout that's comfortable and makes sense to how you play the game and then applying that layout to all the jobs in a way that makes sense to you. It'll be slightly different for all the different roles and you may even decide to change or refine it over time as you get better at the game and/or learn how to play more jobs but it's still the best starting point for making sense out of what initially looks like chaos.
One thing I wish FFXIV had was a training mode. Practicing your Opener would be SOOOO much easier if you could reset your cooldowns whenever you wanted. I know you can go in and out of Stone, Sky, Sea but that’s clunky as hell. You could also set your Level so you could practice your rotation at Lvl 50, at lvl 60, at lvl 70, lvl 84, whatever level you choose.
And icing on the cake would be being able to try-out a job at various levels BEFORE you decide to level it. Maybe I don’t want to put the commitment into leveling Dragoon without knowing how it plays at lvl 90.
Half disagree on PotD. I think it’s great to get introduced to a job cause you start with basically nothing at level 1 and slowly get introduced to the skills so you can start getting the flow of how it works. However, once you feel comfortable enough to start working on a rotation, then switch to something else cause the enemies won’t last long enough in PotD to practice one. Then once you have a feel for the rotation, consider dungeons, trials, normal raids, etc. But that’s just what works for me. Might not be best for everyone.
Always reorder the hotbar by looking at what level things unlock in the traits tab, read the tool tips and then go find a training dummy and go from there. Works for pretty much every class (except maybe BLM cuz their rotation completely changes depending on level)