Final Fantasy XIV (Part 1)

Just realized I wrote hand jobs

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Just to reiterate in case anyone was thinking about taking this out for a test drive, this is the first 100+ hours of the game, including an entire game-length main story. Nothing the expansions add (including classes) is available until after level 50.

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Anyone up for talkin’ HUD?

I’ve exclusively played this game with my xbox one controller on my PC up through end-game HW content, and kisses fingers like a chef the game just feels perfect to me with a controller.

However, I’ve never been able to get my HUD looking satisfactory. Because of the way the game provides boss information, and because one bad mechanic mismatch and you wipe, you basically have to be watching the fight itself for cues on what’s coming next. i.e. no staring at your hotbar for procs like back in the Burning Crusade days.

This means that all of my buffs, threat counters, and hotbars have to basically be swallowing up my avatar so I can keep my eyes on the fight, but it just looks ugly and I can’t think of any better way to do it.

Anyone got any good HUD pics they’d like to share?

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I’ve been looking into that today as well. I had some problems setting everything up for a controller yesterday but I figured it out and I like playing with a controller. Although not everything seems accessible? Like how do I hover over the connection symbol to see the sending/receiving information? Now granted you don’t need that much but I have lag spikes sometimes and I’m just weird about these things. Like, a combination of controller and mouse seems to still be required for me. Assigning stuff from scratch to the cross bar is a pain without click and drag.

I set up my warrior cross bar and it still had the actions that got removed on it lol

One tip I got today is that you can display a hot bar above your cross bar that has all the cooldown actions on it so you can keep track of them. You don’t use it, just look at it. Don’t think I really need that at my level but it’s something to keep in mind.

Also, someone tell me what buttons to press as a warrior. I never use the storm’s stuff or anything really besides tomahawk, overpower, provoke and the basic attack combo. That’s… Not how you play the game. I know that much. I don’t really want to be competent but I want to look like I am so I don’t get dissed?

The game really does a bad job - or no job - at telling you how to actually play the way it’s meant to be played once you got all these crazy actions

Some YouTube comment said that the guy’s UI in the guide video looked like his girlfriend’s makeup drawer and I don’t really know what that means but I sort of feel it? Idk

What level are you?

As long as you are grabbing and holding aggro in dungeons no one should be giving you shit, and threat management in FFXIV is pretty easy most of the time.

With defiance (tank stance) active you should be holding aggro on everything pretty easily with just an occasional overpower, maybe popping tomahawk and provoke/ultimatum every once in awhile.

After you find you are able to maintain holding aggro, then you work on dodging aoe attacks and pointing enemies away from your crew.

After getting those two skills down, With warrior, the whole thing is building Berserk combo rythms by building up rage as fast as possible. The goal is to get 4 “finishers” in a single berserk proc. In general you do this by:

  1. Heavy Swing -> Maim -> Storm’s Eye (to get your +10% dps buff up) then spamming

  2. HS -> Maim -> Storm’s Path (which gives you 20 rage per use)

  3. Get up to 100 rage, then your combo is Berserk -> Inner Beast (if fighting 1v1)/Steel Cyclone (if fighting a group of mobs) -> Infuriate -> IB/SC -> IB/SC. Then you do your Storm’s Path combo again to try get sneak in one last IB/SC before berserk runs out.

If you are soloing or REALLY cocky and have a good healer you can do all this in Deliverance (dps stance) instead.

That’s pretty much your main bread and butter thing. It’s way harder to do during most fights than it sounds!

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Thanks, that helps a bunch! All the guides I found were way too complex. I’m not going to remember 25 actions long rotations at this point, I really just want to get the basics down. And I probably asked this itt before, I’m just bad at remembering this stuff. Sorry everyone

I’m level 50 btw. I have 4 or 5 dungeons ahead of me before I get to Heavensward so I’ll be sure to play with what you said in mind. I’m good at keeping aggro (because I overcompensate and don’t really care about doing damage that much anyway) and there were never really any complaints except for once when I didn’t know that I had to point an enemy in a certain direction. But you’re right, that part’s pretty easy.

MMOs are just hard for me in general because I don’t deal well with information overload and clutter, and these games are all about that. I can’t keep most of my own actions apart and then I’m supposed to adapt my playstyle to if there’s a ninja present and what he’s doing and all this stuff and I just throw my hands in the air lol

But I’m sure it just takes getting used to and I’ll learn eventually. Also, I never played with a group and you don’t learn shit playing with randos. Everything just goes by so quickly and you don’t know what even happened. I’m really looking forward to playing with you all in the future and actually knowing what’s happening and participating

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sounds like a standard tank to me

What all these guides don’t tell you and most people talking about this stuff don’t want to admit is that this sort of thing is only if you want to be the absolute, utmost bleeding edge of efficiency. If you don’t worry about it, you’re losing maybe 3%.

What it really boils down to is knowing

  1. what your buttons DO. Like, actually knowing what everything on the tooltip says, and exactly what that means
  2. How they interact with each other
  3. how that effects the situation
  4. Why and in exactly what situations you would want to press that button.

For instance, when I played, I mained Samurai. The rotation guides all had these huge flowcharts and timetables and whatnot for how to hit their weak spot for massive damage. I ignored all of them, because I would have had to be on coke to keep up with everything, and I still regularly ended up leading DPS charts by a mile, and even when I didn’t, I was either still first place, or barely second place by a hair. Occasionally another SAM would see me stray from The True Path and give me a hard time about it, and I’d just look over at the meters and be like “buddy, if me doing 400dps more than you isn’t enough for you, then I don’t know what to tell you”.

I mean I can’t really blame them, because the game doesn’t provide dps meters for you, there’s no way he could have seen that I was outdamaging him by a country mile without installing ILLEGAL THIRD PARTY TOOLS. To him I just looked like another New Class Day bandwagoner. But the reason I wasn’t is because I studied my actions list obsessively for like three days as soon as the class came out, and worked out exactly which buttons were the most important, which ones were situational, and which ones I’d never even use (whether because they were inferior to other options, so situational that I’d rather just ignore them than take up the space on my bar, or because their damage-to-resource-cost ratio was just too low).

I knew what the buttons did, but more importantly I knew what they were FOR. By really diving in and taking a look at what each one did, and what problems it solved in a fight, I was able to build a much simpler flowchart than all the ones I had seen. I also developed muscle memory and mentally clustered abilities into routines, so instead of

“okay my dot is about to fall off, I have full kenki, and no sen, so I need to do four Hissatsu: Shintens, Hakaze, Shifu, Hakaze, Jinpu, make sure I’m behind the target, Gekko, Hissatsu: Kaiten, Higanbana, then if Meikyo Shisui is up, pop it, Gekko, run to the target’s side, Kasha, Yukikaze, Hakaze, Hissatsu: Kaiten, MIDARE SETSUGEKKAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA, Hissatsu: Shinten, then reset rotation”

I would just be like

“FULL SAUCE, NO CANDY??? DUMP SAUCE, BUILD 'EM UP, BREAK 'EM DOWN, YOU’RE TOO SLOW, WOMBO COMBO, EXCALIBOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO, shake it off, start over”

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All good man! Yeah, when you read something like this it can be totally overwhelming.

MMOs are funny because a)the MMO skillset is unique and doesn’t transfer over to any other genres I can think of and b)like Joe says above “getting good” is mostly geared towards the tippy top 1% of players and the rest of us can basically play the game 100% fine with just the most basic ability to pull off our role.

Also, when you read a guide like the above, it’s helpful to remember that it’s almost always initially created via theorycrafting (i.e someone pouring over spreadsheets and patch notes and creating an ideal rotation that way) and actual perfect implementation 100% of the time is usually understood to be both impossible and unnecessary for 99% of players.

I’ve probably ran close to 1,000 dungeons as a main tank warrior and I still cant even keep up the base rage dump combo with 100% efficiency on most bosses when things get HEATED. But the nice thing about FFXIV (both the developers and playerbase outside of the above mentioned top 1%) IMO is that they seem to actively discourage “min/max social shaming” by not providing stuff like dps meters and (supposedly) clamping down on players who actively use them to beat on people in randos chat. (Though it can of course be frustrating when someone is wrongly calling you out and you can’t show them the metrics that you are doing it right via a dps meter or whatnot)

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yea the only job where playing The Best Rotation is somewhat necessary is machinist, and that’s just because the current implementation is kind of junk and yr damage is bad unless yr cooldowns line up every 60s.

if you’re tanking and everyone is still alive you’re probably doing good. warrior can pump out some good damage but that’s a “i know this fight like the back of my hand” optimization, not mandatory for clears. my server might be unusually nice but i’ve only seen folks giving tanks shit in chat because of aggro problems or pulling more than the healer is able to deal with, never their personal dps.

UI/hotbar nerd shit


(apologies for the phone pic, i don’t know how to get screenshots off my ps4 without tweeting them lol)

i definitely do the ‘shove everything near the bottom’ thing but with a lot of stuff removed that i can otherwise get to thru menus (inventory, etc) to reduce clutter. if i was in a dungeon there would be a party list to the top left & a limit break bar on top. in harder content i usually focus target a healer that isn’t dying constantly, as i assume they know mechanics and just follow them everywhere. i am the laziest red mage. i usually zoom way the fuck out for bosses since i have a hard time reading all the tells without a birds eye view.

for controller, i find that setting up the W cross hotbar (WXHB) is super helpful beyond lv 50. it lets you double tap L2 or R2 to display half of another cross hotbar. i usually put my most used skills on the first one, then less used stuff like buffs, stance actions, and long cooldowns on the 2nd.

there’s also the expanded hotbar, which shows half of a third hotbar when you hold L2 then hold R2, or vice versa. i put generic stuff like teleports, mount summons, and sprint on that one.

finally, any skills on my 2nd hotbar that have long-ish cooldowns i put on an additional regular hotbar that sits over my job gauge so i can see when they’re ready without constantly checking the other bar.

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EVERYONE IS TALKING ABOUT FFXIV AGAIN!!!

i’m still on siren. i have a lvl 70 dragoon and a lvl 70 ninja (new fav). i’ve been working on bard the past couple of days. if we set up a cross-world linkshell i’d be happy to join!

i think i’m gonna pre-order the shadowbringers ce… x_x

also i can upload a pic of my hud when i get home, still tweaking it as i go but i think it’s at a good spot for now. except for my crafting hotbars. after i moved from pc to ps4 and all my hotbars went to default (aka ‘blank’) i haven’t really bothered with those cuz crafting item management gives me a headache

also yea i use controller too, i like it pretty well, especially with the expanded controls as physical mentioned. i’ve established in my mind that double tapping L2 is what i do if i want to do “cool high level fun stuff”

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I know I’ve said this before and I certainly don’t mean it as an insult or criticism, but it’s shocking to me how mechanically similar this is to WoW, and yet the hugely different population of players that it draws.

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the deciding factor is catgirls obv

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Like I think that is (almost) literally true!

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mechanically similar, but by this point that’s just because these things have all become genre convention by this point

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That’s just not true! There are all kinds of ways to build an MMO that aren’t WoW-cum-EQ based. But you’re right, most of the big ones are WoW clones. Of course the question is “why”, and I’m pretty sure the answer is v. unflattering things vis a vis addictive game behaviors and I don’t want to shit up people’s fun FF14 thread with that stuff.

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I will say that FFXIV has completely excised all of the “rng-inside-rng” slot machine stuff that old WoW used to do. Even talking about end-game raid gear, it’s usually a max of 10 runs before you get enough knicknacks to just outright buy whatever the boss drop is.

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