Your first tip is applicable to casters as well. A lot of casters will cancel their spell the moment the ground beneath them turns yellow, or completely ignore the mechanic entirely. Unless you're longcasting raise, you can usually at least finish the spell you are casting, especially if you've practiced slide casting.
The mistake I see melees making most is MOVING WAY TOO MUCH to hit positionals. You only need to move far enough to cross the line, you don't need to be in the middle of the area.
To add to this a common thing I see melee players doing is standing outside the boss hitbox to hit their positionals. You can hit positionals from within the hitbox as long as you're within the correct quadrant and being closer to center can make it easier for healers to effectively use their aoe heals and not have to give you bandaids specifically. This one is a bit situational though since outside of savage raidwides don't usually hit hard enough that it ever matters
but what difference does it make though? It's not a mistake in fact its a better play as it is safer to be not at the edge in case the tank moves the boss slightly which is pretty common.
"Take risks to learn your limits" man i love this part! One of my favorite things about learning new jobs is pushing til i get my face melted and then figuring out how to not do that the next time 😂
1) Very minor addition but you can also tell if a target actually requires doing positionals by the arrow on the front of the hitbox, of it's outside of the circle, positionals are real, if ot's inside the circle, they're given automatically. 2) As with most advice, there's always gonna be exceptions, like if the trash pack before the next boss is close to death, maybe you should hold cooldowns for the boss rather than clipping the last 30% stragglers of the trash pull tgat are gonna die in 5 seconds anyway.
Very good additions yes! I always forget about the arrow position detail, so thank you! And yes not worth using all your cooldowns on a pack that is already essentially dead! 😅
Samurai and Bards casually hoping nobody notices when they take their turn dragooning off the platform. Can't count the number of times Hissatsu: Yaten has killed me XD
Apparently I'm the only healer that gets excited instead of mad when I get a "bad" group that takes a lot of damage so I can have fun healing instead of being a glare mage.
@@CaetsuChaijiCh No limits here! I get to heal so very rarely these days that any excuse to engage in the resource management/timing puzzle that is proper healing is absolutely delightful! It's felt to me for a long time as though the FFXIV devs think healing is "boring" and everyone just wants to deal damage, but for me healing is so much more interesting than damage! Shame it's such a rarity to actually engage with it beyond using the occasional oGCD.
what's really fun is when you go in with a healer and tank friend and you have the mutual trust and consent to just intentionally eat the occasional greed vuln stack because you all know it won't actually cause a death/wipe, AND they get to use the healing CDs they never get to use outside extreme/savage/ultimate
I feel this, yeah it can be fun being a glorified extra DPS but man, I honestly get the good brain vibes when I see the HP bars go up instead of down when healing.
ikr! sometimes when I'm extra bored I may misuse rescue to get an excuse to heal 👀 but honestly as an ast I don't deal much damage, and unlike whm/sge I don't have any other attacks other than the standard kit (eg afflatus misery or toxicon/phlegma);-;
One thing I’d like to add as a little tip for hitting positionals is to always hover around the border between rear and flank (right where the 3/4 circle ends) so you only have to make small adjustments to your position Also don’t feel the need to go straight to their side or straight behind them, just a bit into the zone is just as effective
I am leveling all my jobs at the same time and I think I have watched every single one of your beginner guides. They are a few years old but still very much relevant. This is the first time that I am watching one of your new videos and I just had to comment because the difference in quality is night and day. I always have to increase the volume when I watch your older videos, but the sound quality of this video is just top notch. You also sound livelier in this video and it feels like you are injecting more of your personality into it which I think is pretty awesome. Thanks for sharing your wisdom and Keep up the great work my friend! ❤
Thank you so much! Yes I believe most of the newest job guides I have are around a year old, and I've had a lot of growth in that time as well! 😄 I really appreciate hearing this! 🥰
8:25 man im so guilty of this and pentaweaving even on other non melee classes 😂😅 but thanks for this video, it really gives me more insights and things to keep in mind while playing my melee jobs^^
The hardest monk positional is weaving an Enlightenment straight line attack that hits everything without also causing your PBAoE GCDs to miss the farthest enemies.
I've definitely done a few triple weaves as a sprout monk lol. I just had to press all the buffs immediately 😂. But yeah, I think my main melee mistake is forgetting that true north exists. I probably need to move it to a more convenient spot on my hotbar too.
I feel a lot of these mistakes are due to the levelling process in the beginning being about killing very weak mobs that go down very fast, being a mostly solo experience, and the hall of the novice teaching people bad lessons.
I appreciate how you try to see *why* people might make some of these mistakes, rather than just dismissing them as bad and wrong and leaving it at that. As for the "pentaweave" - for me it's usually not a matter of not knowing it's important to keep casting; I think the reasoning behind ABC is reasonably obvious to most (but definitely not all!). For me it's more a matter of getting so bound up in getting the oGCDs laid down in order that my brain just loses track, especially when I'm also trying to juggle successive AoEs in some more intense moments. My poor ASD brain just overloads and the thing that's normally almost automatic slips off the stack for a moment. (This is why I've never even tried to get into cutting-edge raiding tbh, and even Extreme fights of the prior expansion feel intimidating.)
Thank you! 😊 Yes I can understand how that could happen! I do think you might be fine in even a current extreme if you just give it a chance! You don't have to be perfect for this, not even for savage (although you may have to be pretty good!) I don't know if it helps, but if you try to think of what you need to do as a job in sets, where you match the gcd with the ogcds you need, it might help? 😊
I love melee DPS Jobs, it has always been my style of play. I am currently struggling with Always Be Casting while deciding what AoE damage I can take. I feel like it will come with time and familiarity, but I need to keep on top of my GCDs more.
Most aoe can be stepped out of and still maintain close to full or full uptime. You might have to do a ranged attack then gapclose. Don't stand in markers or your healers are going to hate you, and the damage of the overall party is going to be lower since the healer is gonna have to heal when players soak aoe's
@@retzerbil867 I am noticing I can animation lock my attack in while spinning and getting out of the AoE. I think I need to focus more on perfecting that to help keep uptime.
@@aggonee150 not sure what you mean, but weskalber on youtube has an excellent video on uptime and actual uptime. I'd check that out for a general philosophy to follow aswell as a lot of examples
@aggonee150 indeed, it isn't easy, and learning when to run out is a skill itself! Optimally, you'd want to start an attack and then run out, so you can run back in before the gcd is up, but after the boss mechanic is gone. Sometimes, the area of the mechanic is large enough that you have to run sooner, and cannot make it back in, in time. What you can do there is at least use a dash to close the gap, and there you have to make the decision between using a ranged attack, or sit on your gcd for maybe half a second or more, such that you can start melee rotation again faster. The better choice can vary, which is again why it is a skill itself to learn these timings! 😊
The triple+ weave is the reason I quit DRG as my first job. I knew I had to keep my GCD rolling but it was too hard for me as a sprout to figure out which buffs to use first and which oGCDs to use first. Early vs late burst also confused me. Coming back to it later in EW it made a lot more sense to me especially with all buffs becoming 2M/60s. And also no more early/late burst. I found DRG a lot of fun again.
Of the ones mentioned I do fall into the get out of there straight away camp on melee range telegraphs. I also have an awful habit of forgetting to spend resources like the kenki gague on my samurai which can see me end up having to double weave or even worse tripe weave between gcd's to get the gague down.
A good way to practice getting out of AOEs is to go run Eureka Orthos solo. You'll learn really quick how to manage uptime vs safety because if you mess it up, you just simply die! I also recommend this for ranged who need to learn how to stay closer to enemies. EO truly insists that you git gud at basic mechanics.
Only on the Free Trial, but in my experience True North is an absolute blessing for Dragoons & Samurai who get tons of positionals back to back to back (to back). Don't be afraid to weave it in!
I know this could be a bit late but standing next your tank (applies to ranged and casters as well) is not a DPS gain, so please don't go there unless the fight demands it as all you do is cause more stress to your tank due them having to worry about keeping you alive when a tank buster hits (if it's an AoE tank buster) and you're not fitting your positionals anyway.
Another one: many people don't realise just how many AoEs can be dodged from max melee distance. The number of boss-centered AoEs that actually require a full disengage is actually quite small, and many of THOSE are only just big enough that you can disengage and reengage within the space of a GCD even without a gapcloser. It is actually very, very rare that any mech requires a full disengage that lasts over a GCDs' worth of time because you had to run out to Narnia to dodge, and they're getting even rarer over time as the fight devs perpetuate this trend of making boss hitboxes the size of a continent so that everyone can maintain full uptime and render the existence of ranged DPS nigh pointless lol The second boss of Lapis Manalis can absolutely be full-melee-uptimed on her dashes and I find it really fun practicing doing that on a melee or tank. (As a completely unrelated sidenote, that second boss ranks you based on speed of completion (only if running with actual players; she always gives a generic line about drusilla if running with trust/duty support) and rank 1 requires a kill time of no more than 1:30, something I have only ever managed to achieve with a 3 DPS 1 tank comp. We fooded, potted, and did a countdown and everything 😂)
I never did the math of splitting damage buffs verses all 2 or 3 at once. From what I heard, for most fights, bursts is better than longevity? This makes me ponder game design and what i guess the majority of players want... hmm... interesting
It's not so much about what's best for a fight, and more about how jobs are structured and multiplicative stacking 😊 However if a fight requires you to be careful about your damage (I believe there is such a mechanic in the epic of Alexander) then I suppose it is POSSIBLE you might not want to click all the cooldowns immediately in that context! For splitting damage buffs to be valuable, you'd need something to somehow make a higher sustained average of damage be better. Less bursty cooldowns and higher filler damage could help this, but multiplicative stacking would still make cooldown stacking better. If you then add something that makes cooldown stacking detrimental instead of beneficial, then we'd get somewhere, but more so by disqualifying stacking, rather than making splitting actually superior 😅 there certainly could be more ways to approach it but I am no game designer! 😊
I think #2's dungeon point makes a great case for intermediate-to-advanced players. If you only ever practice your rotation when it is perfect, then you remove all capability to improvise a situation. If you're only playing to the muscle memory of each fight, are you really learning how to play your class, or are you just memorizing button rotations during a specific fight? I think there is a case to dungeon runs in that, by popping all of your cooldowns when they come up, and not saving them only for the boss fights, you actually teach yourself to play when you don't have all the cards on the table. Not everything is a raid boss fight, not everything should be centered around that. Being able to play multiple styles, or at a disadvantage for a moment, or even just starting at a different point in your rotation, I think there's a lot of value in that. But since so much of the conversation sits in low orbit around raiding, I would much rather have someone in a raid learning party who could adjust to changes, rather than being so rigid in their knowledge of a fight or rotation that the moment they or someone else messes up just one too many times, they cannot recover from it mentally or physically--that they have to reset the entire fight or they feel like they aren't "optimal." Don't get me wrong, knowing a fight to that level is really valuable, but it's only valuable to that fight and that fight alone. While there is some carry-over, no one fight is exactly the same, and so you can't assume that there is any 1:1 in any of it, even if they end up just sitting there most of the time.
Very much so! Being able to adjust your rotation to the circumstances is a skill of its own that probably many forget about exactly due to the "perfectionism" that sometimes comes about in raiding! 😅
@@CaetsuChaijiCh Exactly! And aside from the learning phase of each fight, or constantly making mistakes and adjusting to them in that tight hour or so you and your static might set aside each week, dungeons are probably the most consistent and reliable way of getting that kind of practice in. There aren't a whole lot of good ways of doing that--stone sky sea is good for optimizing solo damage in a very controlled space, and practicing at a training dummy in general is good for getting your rotation down in that same controlled moment, but without any timer constraints. But improv implies you have to be in a situation that isn't optimal, and I think dungeons provide the perfect environment for that kind of learning. As a beginner you might just be trying to figure out the game, but when you have basic mechanics and rotations down, dungeons double as a training ground for when things just aren't perfectly lined up to begin with.
As both a shield healer and a tank. I just take the hits from attacks more than melee. I'm in a dungeon via roulette? I'm in chill mode, I'm not moving if I don't have to. :P Most vulns actually don't even apply if they do not break shields either, so that's a plus. Though it was funny to see a first time-time Aetherfont running RDM start panicking every time they tried to stack with me(SCH) and I am planted in like 5 AOEs without a care. On a different note: I am guilty of, if a button doesn't get pressed right or gets too far off I sit on it while I am tanking. Mostly in Savage stuff, because it takes far too much for me mentally to re-build my rotation and timings while still remembering where I am in a fight. I genuinely time the fight with my rotation and when my CDs go off, and when a mistake happens, I can forget what part of a fight I am in, or at least lose track of what is happening as I immediately get focused on what button is out of place, and how can I work it in. It's bad enough that I... genuinely... don't lose as much DPS by forgoing a burst buff once than I would in trying to work it in a new position. And I am one of those few GNBs that likes the skill speed. 2.42/2.41 is my sweet spot. :3 I wouldn't know how to time a fight on a 2.5 any more.
For sitting on cooldowns i tend to only evade the use of specific abilites during dungeon pulls on Ninja, simply because the 90s CDs really throw me off and can wildly change the general timing i see (wall pulls usually see 2 packs per boss, dump all CDs on 1st pack have 1 mins back for 2nd pack, everything off CD agsin for a boss). But NIN using bunshin or even TCJ can cause a pack to die so quickly that everyrhing ends up severely misaligned going forward causing basically everything to take longer overall to clear
Hold on WHAAAAT? You mean to tell me ive been wasting true north on enemies with a full circle under them??? Until this video i assumed that when its a full circle, only the flank worked but not the rear. So when the boss was in a wall, i stuffed myself in a corner trying to hit the flank and using true north for rear positions.The more I know!
Pentaweaving is a thing I have fallen for as Dragoon. To me it tends to happen if I for one reason or another had to give up a GCD and then get back. If at that point have OGCD's available, I blindly use them first before I get my GCD rotation rolling again. I have found that as long as you can keep your GCD rotation rolling, handling OGCD's effectively feels more natural.
2:40 - I'm a Monk main... I don't even HAVE a basic ranged attack to throw in. I just have to watch my uptime tick away... because for some fucking reason SquEnix still won't give us a ranged attack when EVERY OTHER CLASS HAS ONE!
You can use Six-sided Star just before you move away, which both takes twice as long as a normal GCD, and gives you a small speed boost, so you can sometimes stay in longer - Thunderclap can also allow you to skip away in the last moment given the amazing speed it resolves with - and if you are forced away for an extended period, at least you can meditate and then shoot Enlightenment blasts if you can at least get that close! I know all of these are more like bandage solutions, but hey, ultimately stepping away and spamming ranged attacks are sort of a backup plan anyway! ^^
Not melees, but I think the "not using cool downs on trash pulls" thing is kinda exacerbated on classes that have resources that can be charged over the required number to use them, such as RDM, MCH, and to a lesser extent, RPR. It seems like it would be beneficial to charge your resource Gauge to the maximum on dungeon pulls, so that you have an even bigger burst when you get to the boss. Is this really practical or are you actually losing out somewhat by not spending those gauges in AOE?
A very good point! To answer the question: it is possible that doing this can reduce the time you spend on bosses, but spending these resources can similarly speed through trash packs faster. And often, dealing with the trash packs more quickly has more value! There's nothing wrong with engaging a boss with resources for one burst, or close to, but saving ALL of it is a bad idea. For example, if you engage the first boss with nearly enough for a melee combo as red mage, you will cast like two volleys and then melee combo, and in an average group, manafication and embolden will me ready or almost ready at this time anyway, so if you had MORE mana than that, you would essentially have this feeling of being overburdened with resources instead! The same can apply to machinist due to barrel stabilizer. For reaper, it can be a bit strange because of how deaths design works. Even trying to use everything, I sometimes get this overburdening feeling because I simply can spend all my soul gauge AND all of my shroud gauge with the intense supply that can happen on trash packs. With that said, the idea is that saving a bit for the boss to get a better re-opener isn't a bad idea, but going full on money goblin on it and hoarding all of it is probably not optimal! 😁
The thing is that AOE damage is magnified the more mobs there are, to the point that if you're maximizing potency dealt over the dungeon (which very roughly equates to clear speed), dumping any resource that can hit multiple enemies is mathematically better than saving it for the boss. THAT SAID there's a ton of nuance here - for instance overkill damage on packs is a potential potency loss, and for single target CDs it's not obvious without making an actual spreadsheet whether using them on a single target is worth it over the horizon of an entire dungeon clear (the answer is, surely, "sometimes", and I'd wager "most of the time" but i could probably write an essay speculating entirely on the potential DPS implications of using mug and DWAD on cooldown against trash). And then there's the question of what the other DPS is doing and if your party buffs are going to sync up if you go ham, especially since your AOE rotation can very subtly affect buff times. All this honestly comes down to "probably just use stuff on CD unless it makes your brain sad because this level of micro-optimization is probably not meaningful outside a dedicated dungeon speedrun group and almost certainly varies dungeon to dungeon, ilvl to ilvl, and party comp to party comp"
@@underdarkness7692 I mean, that first part can be said for any damage you deal at all, the question is whether it saves you time. Mathematically, it approximately evens out for most jobs (burst aoe to burst single target potency ratio is similar to downtime aoe to downtime single target potency ratio), and you end up doing a 2 minute trash pack/1 minute boss or a 1 minute trash pack/2 minute boss (not actual numbers, just as an idea). This part might sound a little odd: while your party's dps is effectively inversely proportional to clear time, your personal DPS is NOT so directly correlated. If you burst down all the trash packs and do less on the bosses, you will have an inflated DPS relative to how much time you actually saved your party. Bang for bang, 1 DPS is worth less in AOE situations than in single target. Your party members that are bursting the boss down will be saving about as much time as you will be, but their dps will not reflect that. So yeah, the mathematically correct conclusion is to use stuff on cd, excluding downtime. The singular exception is rphys, since they have a better aoe to single target potency ratio than other jobs. In some extraordinarily niche optimization, they could end up holding slightly for aoe while the others go single target. Let's do an actual example. Suppose there's a pack of 10 mobs (4500 hp each) followed by a boss (21000 hp). Suppose Alice does 100 dps to each mob in aoe and 200 dps to the boss Suppose Bob does 50 dps to each mob and 500 dps to the boss Then the packs take 30 seconds to kill. Alice does 30000 damage and Bob does 15000. The boss also takes 30 seconds to kill. Alice does 6000 damage and Bob does 15000. Alice did 36000 damage in that minute while Bob only did 30000. So Alice contributed more to the clear time, right? But let's look at what happens when they're alone. Alice takes 45 seconds on the mobs and 105 seconds on the boss, for 150 seconds total. Bob takes 90 seconds on the mobs and 42 seconds on the boss, for 132 seconds total. This is what I mean when I say aoe dps is 1-for-1 less valuable than single-target. Conceptually though, it's equally important to have them both be high. Also note that both Bob and Alice each took over twice as long to clear alone as they did together. Bob's struggling for a lack of aoe just as much as Alice is in single-target.
@@antarath517 i think the thing is that you're assuming burst damage on trash = no burst damage on boss. i think the most my burst has ever been delayed on a boss is 30s, and thats not super common. generally speaking blowing CDs on trash will cost you at most a single off-burst IME it IS possible that having your burst delayed can lead to DPS loss due to boss move timing not aligning with the delay, but generally speaking using CDs on trash slightly delays potency on a boss, not outright removes it. also dungeons take place over multiple encounters, so bursts that dont happen on a boss just get moved to the next trash pack. this is why i said it gets into spreadsheet territory - there's a lot that can go wrong here. killing a mob really fast by blowing single target CDs might be a net time loss, and it's *possible* depending on how long a hallway is or how long a boss death animation is or if the boss has an ability that hard stuns the party etc that using or not using a burst window could cause your CDs to essentially "clip" or "desync" (meaning they come up before they're needed and you have to sit on them until the pack is together - or they come up too late and the pack does in the middle of a burst window). stuff like AOE bosses (e.g. the first boss in Troia, the tank boss in paglth'an), and the converse - big trash mobs (e.g. at the end of the ship section of aetherfront) complicate it too. regardless, i stand by what i say that unless you are *explicitly* attempting to account for things you *know* are gonna happen (like boss kill/field animations, long gimmick mechanics, etc) using burst on CD is most likely to be closer to optimal in most cases. the most common exception i can think of is if you know youre going to get an RDPS/mage LB1 on a trash pack, my intuition is saving burst is probably worth it on said pack.
@@underdarkness7692 I agree with you and I never tried to say otherwise. I simply said that it's not as simple as "more dps = more contribution to clear time" Just burst on CD. It's use it or lose it.
My only real comment here is that in most cases, any mechanic that doesn't either kill you or give you a damage down isn't worth respecting. As you said, obviously avoid damage where possible, but if a mechanic forces you to choose between eating a vuln stack or missing a GCD, go get that GCD. Most bad melee I see are the ones that see an AOE get telegraphed and then go sit in the corner while it resolves. Related to that, as a melee, you should learn were max melee is on a boss and try and sit there when possible if a boss telegraphs a Chariot. In most cases, you can still roll your GCD and avoid damage from point-blank AoEs. Additionally, there is a difference between the range of your GCD and the range of your auto attacks... and as a melee, your auto attacks make up most of your actual damage output, so you want to avoid going outside of auto range where possible. And finally, a fun fact re pentaweaving: In The Omega Protocol (Ultimate), the optimal reopener on Phase 2 for a Dragoon requires a pentaweave in order to get all of your cleaving damage on the bosses before the damage filter goes up. I only bring this up to deal psychic damage to my fellow melee players.
Sure, eat A vuln stack, but are you eating 6 and then dying to a basic raidwide AOE? For the third time this fight? Because if so you can lay on the floor now, you're a liability and we're doing more damage not raising you.
how do ppl feel compelled to do better? i'd understand if something like recount was shown but 99.5% of ff players dont use addons. the game so easy that untill savage nothing you or others do matter. if u dont show me at the bottom of the dps i have no incentive to do better, but thats just me idk. edit : ping? pretty sure i move at the right time still getting hit with average ping of 40 ms
Doing better makes content easier, and makes enemies die faster. Most players don't require a meter on the screen outright telling you that you are doing better to know that you are 😊 Ffxiv snapshots when a mechanic hits you differently than wow: often, the time when the mechanic decides to hit you is when the orange telegraph marking disappears, NOT three seconds later when the explosion actually happens. It is almost certainly this that is catching you 😉
As a console player I want to do better because I only play jobs I really like which is SAM and PLD. without a parser I won't know how to squeeze that last couple of % out but I definitely don't need a parser to know I messed up a rotation or mechanic or had downtime on a boss
![[FFXIV] Five Mistakes Ranged DPS Make!](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/ufJ83kiDQHk/mqdefault.jpg)
![[FFXIV] Five Mistakes Tanks Make!](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/zu7l-S6Rvpw/mqdefault.jpg)
![[FFXIV] Five Mistakes Mages Make!](/img/n.gif)
Your first tip is applicable to casters as well. A lot of casters will cancel their spell the moment the ground beneath them turns yellow, or completely ignore the mechanic entirely. Unless you're longcasting raise, you can usually at least finish the spell you are casting, especially if you've practiced slide casting.
A very good point! Learning to take these risks as a mage would certainly also help there! 😊
I love doing this to make my healer friend panic :)
The 'Pentaweave' fucking sent me.
That's me on AST after a long day.
Haha, when things just go wrong I am pretty sure I've done that on AST as well! 😂
When Tank never weave their mit always lead to healer's multipleweave 😂
The mistake I see melees making most is MOVING WAY TOO MUCH to hit positionals. You only need to move far enough to cross the line, you don't need to be in the middle of the area.
Better safe than sorry. It's not like you lose anything for making sure you don't miss because the tank decides to move.
Some fights are just boring like that.
The problem is that every time the boss wiggles slightly, you miss your positional.
To add to this a common thing I see melee players doing is standing outside the boss hitbox to hit their positionals. You can hit positionals from within the hitbox as long as you're within the correct quadrant and being closer to center can make it easier for healers to effectively use their aoe heals and not have to give you bandaids specifically. This one is a bit situational though since outside of savage raidwides don't usually hit hard enough that it ever matters
but what difference does it make though? It's not a mistake in fact its a better play as it is safer to be not at the edge in case the tank moves the boss slightly which is pretty common.
"Take risks to learn your limits" man i love this part! One of my favorite things about learning new jobs is pushing til i get my face melted and then figuring out how to not do that the next time 😂
That's the spirit! How else will you know what you can get away with! 😄
1) Very minor addition but you can also tell if a target actually requires doing positionals by the arrow on the front of the hitbox, of it's outside of the circle, positionals are real, if ot's inside the circle, they're given automatically.
2) As with most advice, there's always gonna be exceptions, like if the trash pack before the next boss is close to death, maybe you should hold cooldowns for the boss rather than clipping the last 30% stragglers of the trash pull tgat are gonna die in 5 seconds anyway.
Very good additions yes! I always forget about the arrow position detail, so thank you!
And yes not worth using all your cooldowns on a pack that is already essentially dead! 😅
the main mistke for Dragoons and Red Mages will always be backflipping off the arena. People say to just not backflip... but its cool.
At least you looked cool as you soared off the arena! 😂
Samurai and Bards casually hoping nobody notices when they take their turn dragooning off the platform. Can't count the number of times Hissatsu: Yaten has killed me XD
At least you go backwards, I can't tell you how many times my Hell's Ingress has become Hell's Offgress......
Melees might consider Leg Sweep when there's no WHM around during mob pulls.
Johnny performed this maneuver FLAWLESSLY
Apparently I'm the only healer that gets excited instead of mad when I get a "bad" group that takes a lot of damage so I can have fun healing instead of being a glare mage.
It is interesting when the group is bad, but even I have a limit where it starts to get concerning!
@@CaetsuChaijiCh No limits here! I get to heal so very rarely these days that any excuse to engage in the resource management/timing puzzle that is proper healing is absolutely delightful!
It's felt to me for a long time as though the FFXIV devs think healing is "boring" and everyone just wants to deal damage, but for me healing is so much more interesting than damage! Shame it's such a rarity to actually engage with it beyond using the occasional oGCD.
what's really fun is when you go in with a healer and tank friend and you have the mutual trust and consent to just intentionally eat the occasional greed vuln stack because you all know it won't actually cause a death/wipe, AND they get to use the healing CDs they never get to use outside extreme/savage/ultimate
I feel this, yeah it can be fun being a glorified extra DPS but man, I honestly get the good brain vibes when I see the HP bars go up instead of down when healing.
ikr! sometimes when I'm extra bored I may misuse rescue to get an excuse to heal 👀
but honestly as an ast I don't deal much damage, and unlike whm/sge I don't have any other attacks other than the standard kit (eg afflatus misery or toxicon/phlegma);-;
One thing I’d like to add as a little tip for hitting positionals is to always hover around the border between rear and flank (right where the 3/4 circle ends) so you only have to make small adjustments to your position
Also don’t feel the need to go straight to their side or straight behind them, just a bit into the zone is just as effective
I am leveling all my jobs at the same time and I think I have watched every single one of your beginner guides. They are a few years old but still very much relevant. This is the first time that I am watching one of your new videos and I just had to comment because the difference in quality is night and day. I always have to increase the volume when I watch your older videos, but the sound quality of this video is just top notch. You also sound livelier in this video and it feels like you are injecting more of your personality into it which I think is pretty awesome. Thanks for sharing your wisdom and Keep up the great work my friend! ❤
Thank you so much! Yes I believe most of the newest job guides I have are around a year old, and I've had a lot of growth in that time as well! 😄
I really appreciate hearing this! 🥰
8:25 man im so guilty of this and pentaweaving even on other non melee classes 😂😅
but thanks for this video, it really gives me more insights and things to keep in mind while playing my melee jobs^^
The hardest monk positional is weaving an Enlightenment straight line attack that hits everything without also causing your PBAoE GCDs to miss the farthest enemies.
"Em-pie-ral arrow" I wish to empie you!
I've definitely done a few triple weaves as a sprout monk lol. I just had to press all the buffs immediately 😂.
But yeah, I think my main melee mistake is forgetting that true north exists. I probably need to move it to a more convenient spot on my hotbar too.
I feel a lot of these mistakes are due to the levelling process in the beginning being about killing very weak mobs that go down very fast, being a mostly solo experience, and the hall of the novice teaching people bad lessons.
I appreciate how you try to see *why* people might make some of these mistakes, rather than just dismissing them as bad and wrong and leaving it at that.
As for the "pentaweave" - for me it's usually not a matter of not knowing it's important to keep casting; I think the reasoning behind ABC is reasonably obvious to most (but definitely not all!). For me it's more a matter of getting so bound up in getting the oGCDs laid down in order that my brain just loses track, especially when I'm also trying to juggle successive AoEs in some more intense moments. My poor ASD brain just overloads and the thing that's normally almost automatic slips off the stack for a moment.
(This is why I've never even tried to get into cutting-edge raiding tbh, and even Extreme fights of the prior expansion feel intimidating.)
Thank you! 😊
Yes I can understand how that could happen! I do think you might be fine in even a current extreme if you just give it a chance! You don't have to be perfect for this, not even for savage (although you may have to be pretty good!)
I don't know if it helps, but if you try to think of what you need to do as a job in sets, where you match the gcd with the ogcds you need, it might help? 😊
I love melee DPS Jobs, it has always been my style of play. I am currently struggling with Always Be Casting while deciding what AoE damage I can take.
I feel like it will come with time and familiarity, but I need to keep on top of my GCDs more.
Most aoe can be stepped out of and still maintain close to full or full uptime. You might have to do a ranged attack then gapclose. Don't stand in markers or your healers are going to hate you, and the damage of the overall party is going to be lower since the healer is gonna have to heal when players soak aoe's
@@retzerbil867 I am noticing I can animation lock my attack in while spinning and getting out of the AoE. I think I need to focus more on perfecting that to help keep uptime.
@@aggonee150 not sure what you mean, but weskalber on youtube has an excellent video on uptime and actual uptime. I'd check that out for a general philosophy to follow aswell as a lot of examples
@aggonee150 indeed, it isn't easy, and learning when to run out is a skill itself!
Optimally, you'd want to start an attack and then run out, so you can run back in before the gcd is up, but after the boss mechanic is gone. Sometimes, the area of the mechanic is large enough that you have to run sooner, and cannot make it back in, in time. What you can do there is at least use a dash to close the gap, and there you have to make the decision between using a ranged attack, or sit on your gcd for maybe half a second or more, such that you can start melee rotation again faster. The better choice can vary, which is again why it is a skill itself to learn these timings! 😊
The triple+ weave is the reason I quit DRG as my first job. I knew I had to keep my GCD rolling but it was too hard for me as a sprout to figure out which buffs to use first and which oGCDs to use first. Early vs late burst also confused me.
Coming back to it later in EW it made a lot more sense to me especially with all buffs becoming 2M/60s. And also no more early/late burst. I found DRG a lot of fun again.
Of the ones mentioned I do fall into the get out of there straight away camp on melee range telegraphs.
I also have an awful habit of forgetting to spend resources like the kenki gague on my samurai which can see me end up having to double weave or even worse tripe weave between gcd's to get the gague down.
Acknowledging a mistake is in a way the first step to improve on it, so that's great! 😊
You can sit on cooldowns a little bit for the sake af buff alignment just fine as long as you don't lose one usage
Indeed! The important part is knowing ahead of time whether it will or will not lose you a usage! 😊
A good way to practice getting out of AOEs is to go run Eureka Orthos solo. You'll learn really quick how to manage uptime vs safety because if you mess it up, you just simply die! I also recommend this for ranged who need to learn how to stay closer to enemies. EO truly insists that you git gud at basic mechanics.
I like eureka for practicing classes tbh, I got monk down but it took eureka for it to truly click for me
Only on the Free Trial, but in my experience True North is an absolute blessing for Dragoons & Samurai who get tons of positionals back to back to back (to back). Don't be afraid to weave it in!
It's a godsent in Savage Raids (especially when I adjusted as RPR lol considering I'm primarily a tank main)
A lot of people are confused by whether you can hit positionals *inside* the boss's hitbox.
The answer is you can.
I know this could be a bit late but standing next your tank (applies to ranged and casters as well) is not a DPS gain, so please don't go there unless the fight demands it as all you do is cause more stress to your tank due them having to worry about keeping you alive when a tank buster hits (if it's an AoE tank buster) and you're not fitting your positionals anyway.
~BuT ArM’s LeNgTh DoEsN’t Do DaMaGe~ 😂
Another one: many people don't realise just how many AoEs can be dodged from max melee distance. The number of boss-centered AoEs that actually require a full disengage is actually quite small, and many of THOSE are only just big enough that you can disengage and reengage within the space of a GCD even without a gapcloser. It is actually very, very rare that any mech requires a full disengage that lasts over a GCDs' worth of time because you had to run out to Narnia to dodge, and they're getting even rarer over time as the fight devs perpetuate this trend of making boss hitboxes the size of a continent so that everyone can maintain full uptime and render the existence of ranged DPS nigh pointless lol
The second boss of Lapis Manalis can absolutely be full-melee-uptimed on her dashes and I find it really fun practicing doing that on a melee or tank.
(As a completely unrelated sidenote, that second boss ranks you based on speed of completion (only if running with actual players; she always gives a generic line about drusilla if running with trust/duty support) and rank 1 requires a kill time of no more than 1:30, something I have only ever managed to achieve with a 3 DPS 1 tank comp. We fooded, potted, and did a countdown and everything 😂)
DF Dragoons catching so many strays rhis video
I never did the math of splitting damage buffs verses all 2 or 3 at once. From what I heard, for most fights, bursts is better than longevity? This makes me ponder game design and what i guess the majority of players want... hmm... interesting
It's not so much about what's best for a fight, and more about how jobs are structured and multiplicative stacking 😊
However if a fight requires you to be careful about your damage (I believe there is such a mechanic in the epic of Alexander) then I suppose it is POSSIBLE you might not want to click all the cooldowns immediately in that context!
For splitting damage buffs to be valuable, you'd need something to somehow make a higher sustained average of damage be better. Less bursty cooldowns and higher filler damage could help this, but multiplicative stacking would still make cooldown stacking better. If you then add something that makes cooldown stacking detrimental instead of beneficial, then we'd get somewhere, but more so by disqualifying stacking, rather than making splitting actually superior 😅 there certainly could be more ways to approach it but I am no game designer! 😊
I think #2's dungeon point makes a great case for intermediate-to-advanced players.
If you only ever practice your rotation when it is perfect, then you remove all capability to improvise a situation. If you're only playing to the muscle memory of each fight, are you really learning how to play your class, or are you just memorizing button rotations during a specific fight?
I think there is a case to dungeon runs in that, by popping all of your cooldowns when they come up, and not saving them only for the boss fights, you actually teach yourself to play when you don't have all the cards on the table. Not everything is a raid boss fight, not everything should be centered around that. Being able to play multiple styles, or at a disadvantage for a moment, or even just starting at a different point in your rotation, I think there's a lot of value in that.
But since so much of the conversation sits in low orbit around raiding, I would much rather have someone in a raid learning party who could adjust to changes, rather than being so rigid in their knowledge of a fight or rotation that the moment they or someone else messes up just one too many times, they cannot recover from it mentally or physically--that they have to reset the entire fight or they feel like they aren't "optimal."
Don't get me wrong, knowing a fight to that level is really valuable, but it's only valuable to that fight and that fight alone. While there is some carry-over, no one fight is exactly the same, and so you can't assume that there is any 1:1 in any of it, even if they end up just sitting there most of the time.
Very much so!
Being able to adjust your rotation to the circumstances is a skill of its own that probably many forget about exactly due to the "perfectionism" that sometimes comes about in raiding! 😅
@@CaetsuChaijiCh Exactly! And aside from the learning phase of each fight, or constantly making mistakes and adjusting to them in that tight hour or so you and your static might set aside each week, dungeons are probably the most consistent and reliable way of getting that kind of practice in. There aren't a whole lot of good ways of doing that--stone sky sea is good for optimizing solo damage in a very controlled space, and practicing at a training dummy in general is good for getting your rotation down in that same controlled moment, but without any timer constraints.
But improv implies you have to be in a situation that isn't optimal, and I think dungeons provide the perfect environment for that kind of learning. As a beginner you might just be trying to figure out the game, but when you have basic mechanics and rotations down, dungeons double as a training ground for when things just aren't perfectly lined up to begin with.
I am so, so guilty of trying to hit a positional, missing it, and getting hit/dying to an aoe
As both a shield healer and a tank. I just take the hits from attacks more than melee. I'm in a dungeon via roulette? I'm in chill mode, I'm not moving if I don't have to. :P Most vulns actually don't even apply if they do not break shields either, so that's a plus. Though it was funny to see a first time-time Aetherfont running RDM start panicking every time they tried to stack with me(SCH) and I am planted in like 5 AOEs without a care.
On a different note: I am guilty of, if a button doesn't get pressed right or gets too far off I sit on it while I am tanking. Mostly in Savage stuff, because it takes far too much for me mentally to re-build my rotation and timings while still remembering where I am in a fight. I genuinely time the fight with my rotation and when my CDs go off, and when a mistake happens, I can forget what part of a fight I am in, or at least lose track of what is happening as I immediately get focused on what button is out of place, and how can I work it in. It's bad enough that I... genuinely... don't lose as much DPS by forgoing a burst buff once than I would in trying to work it in a new position.
And I am one of those few GNBs that likes the skill speed. 2.42/2.41 is my sweet spot. :3 I wouldn't know how to time a fight on a 2.5 any more.
10:38 I don’t need someone to pet my dog for me. I love petting my dog.
You could get your doggo double pets! 😄
For sitting on cooldowns i tend to only evade the use of specific abilites during dungeon pulls on Ninja, simply because the 90s CDs really throw me off and can wildly change the general timing i see (wall pulls usually see 2 packs per boss, dump all CDs on 1st pack have 1 mins back for 2nd pack, everything off CD agsin for a boss). But NIN using bunshin or even TCJ can cause a pack to die so quickly that everyrhing ends up severely misaligned going forward causing basically everything to take longer overall to clear
Hold on WHAAAAT? You mean to tell me ive been wasting true north on enemies with a full circle under them???
Until this video i assumed that when its a full circle, only the flank worked but not the rear. So when the boss was in a wall, i stuffed myself in a corner trying to hit the flank and using true north for rear positions.The more I know!
ALL THE RISK, ALL THE TIME, so fun 😂
Em-pie-real Arrow
Pentaweaving is a thing I have fallen for as Dragoon. To me it tends to happen if I for one reason or another had to give up a GCD and then get back. If at that point have OGCD's available, I blindly use them first before I get my GCD rotation rolling again. I have found that as long as you can keep your GCD rotation rolling, handling OGCD's effectively feels more natural.
Multitudinous mistakes melee may make, my my my!
Miraculous! 😄
Mistake number one: playing melee. :p (Honestly tho, no keep on playing melees people, you’re needed for the party buffs and I won’t do it
2:40 - I'm a Monk main... I don't even HAVE a basic ranged attack to throw in. I just have to watch my uptime tick away... because for some fucking reason SquEnix still won't give us a ranged attack when EVERY OTHER CLASS HAS ONE!
You can use Six-sided Star just before you move away, which both takes twice as long as a normal GCD, and gives you a small speed boost, so you can sometimes stay in longer - Thunderclap can also allow you to skip away in the last moment given the amazing speed it resolves with - and if you are forced away for an extended period, at least you can meditate and then shoot Enlightenment blasts if you can at least get that close!
I know all of these are more like bandage solutions, but hey, ultimately stepping away and spamming ranged attacks are sort of a backup plan anyway! ^^
I hate the feeling of missing out on positional potency.... So l just play ranged, lol
That is also a solution haha!
I say just play the game the way you want.
Not melees, but I think the "not using cool downs on trash pulls" thing is kinda exacerbated on classes that have resources that can be charged over the required number to use them, such as RDM, MCH, and to a lesser extent, RPR. It seems like it would be beneficial to charge your resource Gauge to the maximum on dungeon pulls, so that you have an even bigger burst when you get to the boss. Is this really practical or are you actually losing out somewhat by not spending those gauges in AOE?
A very good point!
To answer the question: it is possible that doing this can reduce the time you spend on bosses, but spending these resources can similarly speed through trash packs faster. And often, dealing with the trash packs more quickly has more value!
There's nothing wrong with engaging a boss with resources for one burst, or close to, but saving ALL of it is a bad idea.
For example, if you engage the first boss with nearly enough for a melee combo as red mage, you will cast like two volleys and then melee combo, and in an average group, manafication and embolden will me ready or almost ready at this time anyway, so if you had MORE mana than that, you would essentially have this feeling of being overburdened with resources instead! The same can apply to machinist due to barrel stabilizer.
For reaper, it can be a bit strange because of how deaths design works. Even trying to use everything, I sometimes get this overburdening feeling because I simply can spend all my soul gauge AND all of my shroud gauge with the intense supply that can happen on trash packs.
With that said, the idea is that saving a bit for the boss to get a better re-opener isn't a bad idea, but going full on money goblin on it and hoarding all of it is probably not optimal! 😁
The thing is that AOE damage is magnified the more mobs there are, to the point that if you're maximizing potency dealt over the dungeon (which very roughly equates to clear speed), dumping any resource that can hit multiple enemies is mathematically better than saving it for the boss.
THAT SAID there's a ton of nuance here - for instance overkill damage on packs is a potential potency loss, and for single target CDs it's not obvious without making an actual spreadsheet whether using them on a single target is worth it over the horizon of an entire dungeon clear (the answer is, surely, "sometimes", and I'd wager "most of the time" but i could probably write an essay speculating entirely on the potential DPS implications of using mug and DWAD on cooldown against trash).
And then there's the question of what the other DPS is doing and if your party buffs are going to sync up if you go ham, especially since your AOE rotation can very subtly affect buff times.
All this honestly comes down to "probably just use stuff on CD unless it makes your brain sad because this level of micro-optimization is probably not meaningful outside a dedicated dungeon speedrun group and almost certainly varies dungeon to dungeon, ilvl to ilvl, and party comp to party comp"
@@underdarkness7692 I mean, that first part can be said for any damage you deal at all, the question is whether it saves you time.
Mathematically, it approximately evens out for most jobs (burst aoe to burst single target potency ratio is similar to downtime aoe to downtime single target potency ratio), and you end up doing a 2 minute trash pack/1 minute boss or a 1 minute trash pack/2 minute boss (not actual numbers, just as an idea).
This part might sound a little odd: while your party's dps is effectively inversely proportional to clear time, your personal DPS is NOT so directly correlated. If you burst down all the trash packs and do less on the bosses, you will have an inflated DPS relative to how much time you actually saved your party. Bang for bang, 1 DPS is worth less in AOE situations than in single target.
Your party members that are bursting the boss down will be saving about as much time as you will be, but their dps will not reflect that.
So yeah, the mathematically correct conclusion is to use stuff on cd, excluding downtime.
The singular exception is rphys, since they have a better aoe to single target potency ratio than other jobs. In some extraordinarily niche optimization, they could end up holding slightly for aoe while the others go single target.
Let's do an actual example. Suppose there's a pack of 10 mobs (4500 hp each) followed by a boss (21000 hp).
Suppose Alice does 100 dps to each mob in aoe and 200 dps to the boss
Suppose Bob does 50 dps to each mob and 500 dps to the boss
Then the packs take 30 seconds to kill. Alice does 30000 damage and Bob does 15000.
The boss also takes 30 seconds to kill. Alice does 6000 damage and Bob does 15000.
Alice did 36000 damage in that minute while Bob only did 30000. So Alice contributed more to the clear time, right?
But let's look at what happens when they're alone.
Alice takes 45 seconds on the mobs and 105 seconds on the boss, for 150 seconds total.
Bob takes 90 seconds on the mobs and 42 seconds on the boss, for 132 seconds total.
This is what I mean when I say aoe dps is 1-for-1 less valuable than single-target. Conceptually though, it's equally important to have them both be high.
Also note that both Bob and Alice each took over twice as long to clear alone as they did together. Bob's struggling for a lack of aoe just as much as Alice is in single-target.
@@antarath517 i think the thing is that you're assuming burst damage on trash = no burst damage on boss. i think the most my burst has ever been delayed on a boss is 30s, and thats not super common. generally speaking blowing CDs on trash will cost you at most a single off-burst IME
it IS possible that having your burst delayed can lead to DPS loss due to boss move timing not aligning with the delay, but generally speaking using CDs on trash slightly delays potency on a boss, not outright removes it.
also dungeons take place over multiple encounters, so bursts that dont happen on a boss just get moved to the next trash pack. this is why i said it gets into spreadsheet territory - there's a lot that can go wrong here.
killing a mob really fast by blowing single target CDs might be a net time loss, and it's *possible* depending on how long a hallway is or how long a boss death animation is or if the boss has an ability that hard stuns the party etc that using or not using a burst window could cause your CDs to essentially "clip" or "desync" (meaning they come up before they're needed and you have to sit on them until the pack is together - or they come up too late and the pack does in the middle of a burst window). stuff like AOE bosses (e.g. the first boss in Troia, the tank boss in paglth'an), and the converse - big trash mobs (e.g. at the end of the ship section of aetherfront) complicate it too.
regardless, i stand by what i say that unless you are *explicitly* attempting to account for things you *know* are gonna happen (like boss kill/field animations, long gimmick mechanics, etc) using burst on CD is most likely to be closer to optimal in most cases. the most common exception i can think of is if you know youre going to get an RDPS/mage LB1 on a trash pack, my intuition is saving burst is probably worth it on said pack.
@@underdarkness7692 I agree with you and I never tried to say otherwise. I simply said that it's not as simple as "more dps = more contribution to clear time"
Just burst on CD. It's use it or lose it.
ily
My only real comment here is that in most cases, any mechanic that doesn't either kill you or give you a damage down isn't worth respecting. As you said, obviously avoid damage where possible, but if a mechanic forces you to choose between eating a vuln stack or missing a GCD, go get that GCD. Most bad melee I see are the ones that see an AOE get telegraphed and then go sit in the corner while it resolves.
Related to that, as a melee, you should learn were max melee is on a boss and try and sit there when possible if a boss telegraphs a Chariot. In most cases, you can still roll your GCD and avoid damage from point-blank AoEs. Additionally, there is a difference between the range of your GCD and the range of your auto attacks... and as a melee, your auto attacks make up most of your actual damage output, so you want to avoid going outside of auto range where possible.
And finally, a fun fact re pentaweaving: In The Omega Protocol (Ultimate), the optimal reopener on Phase 2 for a Dragoon requires a pentaweave in order to get all of your cleaving damage on the bosses before the damage filter goes up. I only bring this up to deal psychic damage to my fellow melee players.
Sure, eat A vuln stack, but are you eating 6 and then dying to a basic raidwide AOE? For the third time this fight? Because if so you can lay on the floor now, you're a liability and we're doing more damage not raising you.
how do ppl feel compelled to do better? i'd understand if something like recount was shown but 99.5% of ff players dont use addons. the game so easy that untill savage nothing you or others do matter. if u dont show me at the bottom of the dps i have no incentive to do better, but thats just me idk. edit : ping? pretty sure i move at the right time still getting hit with average ping of 40 ms
Doing better makes content easier, and makes enemies die faster. Most players don't require a meter on the screen outright telling you that you are doing better to know that you are 😊
Ffxiv snapshots when a mechanic hits you differently than wow: often, the time when the mechanic decides to hit you is when the orange telegraph marking disappears, NOT three seconds later when the explosion actually happens. It is almost certainly this that is catching you 😉
As a console player I want to do better because I only play jobs I really like which is SAM and PLD. without a parser I won't know how to squeeze that last couple of % out but I definitely don't need a parser to know I messed up a rotation or mechanic or had downtime on a boss
why is your character always making that weird face in the thumbnail
She isn't always, but she is smiling wide for the camera 😁