Why FFXIV's Jobs Are More Fun Than They've ANY Right To Be! 

THE CONTROLLER INTERFACE IS ACTUAL CHORDS I CANNOT STRESS THIS ENOUGH

Yeah that little loss of sound is so disconcerting when you play combo heavy jobs monk, Samurai or red mage. It’s so subtle that you don’t notice the difference at first

Yeah, the sound effects are actually really helpful. Without the audio feedback from my skills, I tend to really start messing up my combos since I can't tell if they completed without looking. Found that out the hard way when my audio messed up in the middle of trial.

I noticed you get a similar sound difference when you, for example, overcap gauge for Reaper. It feels baaad.

every tme i get that weak hit that meant i messed up a combo I curse under my breath hah.

this is why i hate Torso Bosses, So many Audio queues for melee skills are from the impact point rather than the origin point of the ability and on Torso fights the impact point is 40 feet in the air and half a mile away

"Impending aggression cadence" is an amazing way to describe it. And you are completely right. There is the feelign to casting Communio, especially when you feel done with the fight and you greed a little bit before dodging

bro i’m tranna tell everyone communio is probably the best skill in the game it’s just so cool especially after a full enshroud window it’s soooo satisfying

As someone who’s always looking onto my skills midfight in hope stuff is ready again, I agree. Reaper feels like something I don’t have to look at, same for Sage. I hear the SWISH SWISH SWISH and the KREEEE and everything feels so simple just with sounds

This, so much. The weight and feel of DRG has kept me maining it since 2.0. The animations are also expertly designed and play with each other super well. The delayed impact on the animations for Heaven's Thrust and Chaotic Spring actually line up perfectly with the impact from the (non-Stardiver) jumps. It doesn't look or feel like you interrupted an attack animation. The wind-up on Stardiver feels so different from the rest of the snappy, fast oGCDs that it would honestly be a travesty if they shortened the animation (lock) on it.

My god. "DPS designed for tank players" I do believe that hits too perfectly. I started with DRG but i main tanks in all other MMOs.

as a fellow DRG main i agree

Dancer is really fun if you are not simply stand in one location and press those 1,2… I just used to dance around the entire battle field just to show off how elegant I am 😅 Warning: Healer curses you !

@@woosh4653 I do the same! I started dying a lot more, so now I just do my wiggling next to the healer. XD

@@woosh4653 As long as you stay *relatively* around the healer, most won't find it a problem. Especially with a lot of the more recent changes to the ranges of some of the AoE heals. Plus, quite honestly... having a dancer (or any physical ranged) run around the entire battlefield would probably put them in better ranges for heals than like 95% of BLMs. Typical BLM will get half an inch into the boss arena, pop leylines, and almost never move, it seems.

@@AeriFyrein BLM exist to shout HEALER ADJUST

That typically is the rhythm. Broil being the beat and the ogcds speeding things up when shit hits the fan, like a piece of music at its panicked climax.

@@jafd239 I wouldn't really call it a rhythm... The closest a healer gets having a "rhythm" is AST, but there you feel like you're playing the whole orchestra with your cards, Earthly Star, Astrodyne, Divination and keeping up your dots and regens...

No... just... no. You don't ever "pull off cool moves in cool ways" like in a fighting game. Fighting games can be played however you like. There's reactive gameplay and emergent gameplay, and most feature multiple different combo routes for different situations. FFXIV's combat can ONLY be played generally one or two ways per job and that's it. You have a high-ping rotation and a low-ping rotation, but the base rotation is pretty much just very 1 > 2 > 3. There's barely any oGCD weaving anymore (Monk used to have it, and it was all taken away). By saying this, you're practically admitting you've neither played FFXIV nor played a fighting game before, or at the least, had no idea what you are doing in either.

@@davekaye5483 So you're telling me that as you level up your classes, you don't have fun or find it cool to add whatever new skills you get into your rotations? I get that in endgame, there's only one or two, just like how in a fighting game you only stick to stuff that works, but as you progress there's no enlightening moment as things get pieced together? These skills look cool, and being able to squeeze every little bit of damage out of every new skill you learn is a cool way of going about it.

Exactly this

​@@Fgtr4Life Again, you show you don't understand how the game works. This game is NOT DESIGNED to be a "learn as you level" kind of game. In fact, most of the jobs will give you skills completely out of order from how they're used. The way the game's combat is designed - which isn't something FFXIV players like, but it's just the way it is - is that you have to hit max level and do your job/role quests to unlock all of your skills, and THEN reorganize your hotbar to make sense out of them. It promotes power leveling. But again, this has NOTHING to do with fighting games or the way combat works there. If anything, it still sounds even more now that you have either never played either of these games, or just have absolutely no idea what you're doing in either of them. In and even well before endgame, starting with last expansion but even moreso this expansion, there's no situational variety. The game literally greys out skills and forcibly prevents them from using them if you do not use them in the right order. Monk used to be the most flexible in this regard but it has less than a third of what it used to. If you are talking about the leveling experience, that gives you EVEN LESS to work with. There are no "cool ways to go about" anything in this game. You are forced into a rigid sequence and how limited you are depends on how few of the skills you've unlocked up to that point. Black Mage is a great example of how absolutely convoluted the idea of "learning as you level" is for this game. Once you hit level 43, you might as well just throw away everything on your hotbar that you've used up to that point except for Fire 3, Blizzard 3, Fire 1 and your Thunder DoT. And all you pretty much do is loop your fire and blizzard moves over and over and over again until you get a proc for an instant cast. That's not exactly riveting or exciting gameplay, nor does it present any variety. And that's not an end-game rotation, that's not even halfway leveled to max. From level 60 onward it barely changes. Red Mage's entire gameplay is Jolt > one of two moves and then waiting on RNG for a proc to do your next move. Two buttons. That's not exciting, variety-inducing gameplay. That's BORING. Dancer is an even worse offender. Monk has been neutered to have all of its oGCD weaving removed, and it gets no new skills now after around the halfway point. It just gets what are pretty much tantamount to updated animations. There's nothing new or exciting to look forward to after you level past then. It's just the same. Nothing changes. That's boring. There's no rhythm or flow to it anymore. It's less than a third of what it used to be. What you are describing seems more of a self-justification for ooh-ing and ahh-ing at pretty visual animations which have nothing to do with the ACTUAL gamepaly experience. It's like you're saying something to sound profound on the internet that couldn't be more divorced from reality. Mashing two buttons with abysmally slow cast times while waiting on a proc isn't exactly what most people would call "fun" unless they're EXTREMELY easily amused. And absolutely none of this is reflective of the kind of gameplay in fighting games, at all. You aren't pulling off sweet combos which require execution. There's no whiff-punishing, you're not pulling off wall-to-wall TOD combos, you're not doing any mix-ups, 50/50s and you have no aerial combat. There's no attacking while jumping, no meaties, no okizeme, no OTGs, no high/lows, no special-to-special canceling, no comboing into a super, etc. It's just A>B>C and looping that over and over and over again. If anything, Guild Wars 2 at least has reactive combat, knocking opponents to the ground and hitting them on the ground. But this game? Absolutely not. So there's no "satisfaction" from pulling off sweet moves or comboing into anything impressive. You push the button and the sparkly animation happens. THAT'S IT. That's absolutely not at all like a fighting game. If you are deriving satisfaction from pushing two buttons in a sequence and marveling at a sparkly animation, that means you're easily amused. Don't besmirch the FGC or the fighting game genre with such an awful and ill-fitting comparison that makes literally no sense.

@@davekaye5483 You seem irrationally bitter over this, and that's fine. I'm not here to argue, just to state how I feel about the games that I love to play and the similarities that I see. I hope that the game adds back in that complexity you seem to miss in the future so that you can be happy about playing the game too. 😊

Literally the same story for me verbatim

Monk for me feels like the only job that isn't bound to the gcd I can press a single weapon skill and I don't feel like I'm waiting to make an input instead I'm trying to hurry to put in the next so I don't have down time and when forbidden chakra is ready for use I'm racing to weave it in before my next weapon skill is ready. I feel bad for my controller though its taken such a beating from monk

Could not agree more, they totally nailed the feel and class fantasy of Monk. Playing savage raids now is awesome too as you are constantly pressing stuff, Brotherhood is such a good overdrive move

Straight up. The RDM opener is cursed as hell but it's so fun.

Which RDM opener has you double-weaving Corps-a-Corps and Engagement between the melee combo hits? The one I'm looking at on the RDM channel on The Balance right now has them first double-weaved after the melee combo. E. Riposte > Fleche > E. Zwerchhau > Contre Sixte > E. Redoublement > Corps-a-Corps > Engagement > Verholy > Corps-a-Corps > Engagement >Scorch

Honestly, going back and forth between FFXIV and Elden Ring on controller isn't that big of a jump.

I play on controller and am an old FGC person used to go to evo and everything, never won anythint but i loved it. FFXIV feels way better on controller than on KB/M to me so yeah can confirm.

Tbh the only people who are truly baffled by being able to play FF14 on controller are people who have never played a console before. 😅 The game was built to be used easily on controller. There's some basic adjustments needed like, Don't put buttons you will need while running on the same side as your movement joystick. Also swapping R3 and L3 to special targeting options instead of the standard... idk I think it's something useless like First Person view and target lock? (I changed mine to Assist Target and Sprint lol).

Those who are more used to the HITBOX-style controllers (one where there's no joystick and only buttons, good for execution of certain actions or for ergonomic reasons) are probably better off on KB/M, but Controller is also very good too, after all FFXIV is the only tab-targeting MMORPG with Controller gameplay in mind.

...Wait hold on. The one player in my static who uses a controller also plays a lot of fighting games. Coincidence?

Not at all. Seems like a lot of people here don't actually play fighting games... I can go down the laundry list of all the things that make the general gameplay loop completely antithetical to what fighting games do.

Everything lights up and tells you exactly what to press and where to stand lmao. If you love your hand held 100% of the time this is the game for you though! Enjoy those midgets and 15 yr olds!

@@dallasscandling6329 You clearly have no idea what you’re talking about. Only combos, procs, and resource spenders light up and none of those are telling you what’s optimal/best to do. Combos lighting up just lets you know where you are in the combo. Just because a combo button is lit up doesn’t mean that it’s the correct button to press in that moment for the best dps. Procs and resource spenders light up to let you know they’re available. once again, not because they’re the “correct” button to use in that moment. Anyone who’s just hitting whatever is lit up is playing sub-optimally. But clearly based on your random “midgets and 15 year olds” comment, this is likely a bad faith argument based on no actual knowledge of the game and you just want to shit talk FF because you play some other mmo and view FF as “the enemy”.

@@davekaye5483 Well obviously it’s not exactly like a fighting game, but things like properly timed weaving and cooldowns does share similarities with fighting game mechanics.

Its funny, when Im raiding with my static in ffxiv (I was on NIN), we all play with open mic just for ease of communication, and I had someone call me out on hitting my keys really hard. I was wondering how they couldve heard it cause I have a relatively low mic sensitivity due to mashing my skills in order to compensate for input delay and latency. Then I realized that I was hitting my mudras like how I would hit buttons on my stick, since you can't mash mudras like I do with every other key.

Oh man, even if I have BGM off when the game audio crashes it throws me off SO BADLY.

My favorite is hearing an out of sync raid buff and going wtf in my head

P4S Phase 2 is so fun on Ninja as well, there's always a suiton and a phantom ready for when I need to disengage during act 2, then suiton sort of lines up again with the start of act 4, most of that mechanic happens during the 4 minute trick attack window which means lots of free ranged skills, and during curtain call there's usually a raiton ready to go. Only recently started doing reclears on it (SMN got a bit stale) but it's just so satisfying to play.

@@cute2dfrog YES I love getting full act 2 uptime, extremely satisfying, the other melee lose a hit

100%. Me and my friend will run through dungeons chatting, and just from the sounds can tell the level of skill of the party. Super parsers sound like music.

You probably would have liked Monk back in Stormblood. It blows SAM's rhythm out of the water. Monk now? It's a fucking joke, man. They completely kneecapped it. It has less than a third of the kit it used to, and completely lost its waltz-like rhythm and flow.

@@davekaye5483 I didn't like Monk in Stormblood, actually, and you're being kind of weird about Monk in the comments, here?

This may sound stupid but I without thinking assigned kaiten to left on controller and iajutsu to right and it felt SO good to almost do the motion of hit left then right as if your Samurai is pulling back to then unleash the sword. Very sad to lose it and just happy to play MNK instead

@@olicon3463 yeah samurai definitely feels like "the worse version of dragoon" for me now

Except songs aren't usually subject to randomness, they tend to have structure. The slow cast times and reliance on RNG procs is what kills the rhythm because it's not consistent. You're forced to rely on a factor that is always out of your direct control, which is antithetical to how the rhythm and flow of songs works.

@@davekaye5483 I don't see that it's that disturbing. Instead of Jolt, you use Verstone/Verfire. It's the exact same rhythm. Or vice versa with the AoEs and Impact. My key presses literally just change from 2,3/2,4 to Shift+3, 3/Shift+4,4. If something that simple can throw you off, maybe RDM isn't the job for you.

@@Maria_Erias I've enjoyed rdm a great deal the way I have it setup on my controller feels like I'm just weaving an ♾️ symbol going back and forth between black and white magic until I can finally rush in and spam the hell out of my melee rotation honestly the pattern is so comforting I often just tunnel into it and forget to burn off my mana gauge

Love from another SCH main! And slap the ground? Nah bruh, when we get AoW2, THIS is us: "This hand of mine glows with an awesome POWER! Its burning grip tells me to defeat you! Take this! My love, my anger, and all of my sorrow!

aow is a filler animation, doesnt really fit scholar at all.

I can only assume you didn't play SCH before ShB, if you did you wouldn't be saying any of this lmao. The toolkit for healing has remained much the same but the DPS has been gutted and is 0 fun to me. Before u had 5 dots, all of which were AOE and all which were satisfying, art of war as a replacement feels like a fucking insult cause it doesn't fit scholar, why would a fucking bookworm punch the ground? I honestly wish they kept Miasma 2 or just repurposed it to be the AOE animation. Couldn't they have AT LEAST kept shadowflame?? Man I can rant hours about the absolute dirt they did scholar in 5.0.

and the mobility. I was a WHM main before SGE came out and now I can't go back. The DPS you can put out at higher levels is great as well.

I only want more damage abilities to ad some spice to the SGE rot. Either that or sacrificial abilities, but I guess that wouldn't follow the magitech doctor class fantasy.

It's a good start, but could always be polished imo. It'd be nice if kardia was % based rather than flat amount, and had an aoe variant.

rdm in xi was cooler

Compressing the combos to fewer buttons doesn't really harm the rhythm. You just need the GCDs and oGCDs to stay on separate buttons

@@xSuperMetroidx It harms the physicality of it. Its not just pressing them on time, its pressing them in order and rolling your fingers across the keyboard.

@@GetterRay "Physicality" sounds like a weirdly made-up term to allow overcomplicating a definite, repeating pattern. It's evident when you make a case for the "physical feeling" of pressing combos, and then describe a scenario that [has nothing to do with having the combos on three separate buttons]. The argument for condensing button combos to fewer combos is that, given a combo where I have no reason to go back to an earlier step, why would I want them on 3 separate buttons? The argument against it falls flat because the "physicality" of pressing three different GCDs as you weave in the exact same 1,2,3 pattern every time has no more "physicality" than returning to the rhythm of pressing 1 after every weave, and it has the bonus of reducing button bloat

@@TranscientFelix Its not a made up term if I can define it and Matt uses the same definition in the video. It feels good to press different buttons in an order. It activates your muscles and pressing things with different fingers makes it feel more like playing an instrument and less like just mashing a key. If you've ever played a musical instrument you'd understand the difference between macroing notes to a beat and actually playing and pressing on keys. It feels good to press combos and not mess up the timings and keep your fingers busy by darting around the keyboard and pressing all your ogcds as they might be all over the place. For example, my combos on DRG are set to 1-5, and shift 2-5, but my ogcds are set to ctrl and alt, so my thumb is dancing between positions and my fingers have to go 1 to 5, then back to 2, all in one GCD. That's what the physicality is. I wasn't saying that physicality is timing your combos with boss mechanics. I don't know if you actually watched the video you're commenting on, but I was responding to the question that Matt was posing at the end. Maybe think about the subject and the context a little more next time. My point is, that executing that is difficult and you're rewarded for the learning curve by being able to squeeze your rotation into tight windows that you wouldn't be able to if you mess up your rotation in anyway. You won't hit the right amount of mana balance in E9S on time if you don't have the muscle memory down. And learning that muscle memory is part of the challenge and the reward is compensation. If you just press 1 button to do everything then it wouldn't give you that sense of "flow". If anything you just prove my point. People who advocate for PVP buttons literally don't think beyond the simple practical mechanics and don't consider the fun factor, the muscle movements or the physicality of playing the game. You completely miss it, then when someone points it out, you just pretend its not real rather than engage with the concept.

@@GetterRay I'm more trying to understand what exactly you find engaging about a 1,2,3 combo; it's impossible to lose track of something so basic except if you're weaving your oGCDs in your rotation, but if your oGCDs are what give complexity to maintaining your combos, remembering to do 2 after your a,b oGCDs is not any more mentally or physically taxing/involved than remembering to go back to 1 after your a,b oGCDs.

I wish I had a talent for art because as a SMN main myself, I can see way more potential for our books. The idea is that we need to see the complex symbols and formulas to pull off our spells. There's a bunch of different ways that can be done. We could use scrolls (think Sai from Naruto). We could have projections like those that appear when using Allagan tech or in Scholar and Machinist skills. They could be tattoos on our skin! There's so many more options than just different covers and attachments to our book.

Technically your weapon is a primal god construct, a book is just the focus. Could be worse, they could have given you wands or staves

The audio and visual components are def amazing. I really like how each summon has it's own button feel. Getting through all your ogcds with the demis, how titan feels very methodical, ifrit feels slow and lumbering, and garuda feels very zippy. I understand now why they designed the primal abilities like they did, it really feels like you're controlling different entities.

I don't know what it is about Akh Morn, but it's satisfying to press literally every time.

@@nobodyspecial690 I would prefer a wand or staff. There are some really amazing designs for both of them. There are a few really good book designs but dev team is so stuck on just dressing up covers. When was the last time we saw a really innovative grimoire or codex design?

I started with switch axe but when I reached endgame I switched to the bow because it just felt so nice and especially COOL. And I've been an on-off bard main in FFXIV...

Right? Such a chore to play SAM without it. Still don't understand what convinced the devs to think this was a good idea?

Yeah Samurai never felt the same after the change. Its was my main, but after the change, it felt so off, i had to change.

Totally get it, fun is not only big numbers, sometimes we just want to feel cool doing those numbers

SMN complainer "BUT IT'S ONLY 2 BUTTONS" SMN enjoyer: "waaahahahaha Akh morn goes BOOOOM!!"

They did not do the other roles so well. Monk is utter trash with how it plays, Summoner is far more boring than it has ever been, and a lot of the other jobs have major issues as a consequence of the skill crunch being even more severe this time around than when SHB came out and it was a 50/50 mix-up with most of the jobs either being streamlined or being gutted far too badly. SCH used to be a lot more fun when Summoner was also in a better spot during SB. Shadowflare was a great skill. That was also back when AST was the most fun healer, before it had its fun factor removed in SHB and then lost Diurnal Sect this time around. Right now, SCH and AST have Sage to blame for why they're in a rough state. Sage is just a worse version of what they did with pretty animations, and since healers all have to be casters apparently (they forgot White Monk was a thing in Tactics), there can't be any real variety with a new healer, so they have to neuter anything that isn't the basic WHM and then split up the variety between whatever is left. We can't get anything "new".

@@davekaye5483 ah you see here, I agree, however the other roles have alternatives that are fun to most people. Healers get no alternative for damage rotations aside from managing 1 dot, 1 GCD and 1 ogcd. If you're SCH, naturally the other healers couldn't handle that. (not counting buffs, then SCH gets 1 whole additional button and ast gets to use light speed as a mandatory spell during burst so it's identity of being mobile is gone)

If you haven’t given DNC a fair shake, it’s weirdly fun to play, despite not really having a rotation. It’s all luck and procs, but the feeling you get when everything procs is unbeatable. Also, GNB when you get Continuation hits the middle ground between Tank and DPS in feel. My favorite tank, even though DRK will always have a place in my heart due to their quests.

@@OkamiG15 aye I’ve tried GNB since I wrote this comment, definitely agree, it’s a nice middleground, it’s faster paced than the other thanks. Think i’ll main DRK for clearing content but use GNB for MSQ etc

SNEAKY PETE