As someone who picked up Gunbreaker and Machinist while I was still learning the game, I would consider myself a midcore player at this point and I definitely see exactly what you mean. When I was going through the MSQ on machinist it absolutely was a case of just pressing buttons when they were up (and my friend had to remind me once to use my off globals outside my hypercharge window). But now that I'm starting to get through savage level content (cleared P9, progging 10 and Criterion) I'm making an effort to learn the proper rotations and get better. When you're just hitting buttons when they light up these jobs are super easy, but knowing when to save and when to spend is a great way to express skill and it shows. Recovering from mistakes is also something I need to work on learning, so thanks for that reminder. Good video, I completely agree
I'm glad to hear that my examples aren't completely outlandish! It is a great idea to work on your mastery like that! Especially while doing savage content of course!
I've never heard such an accurate description of "midcore" 😂 You even got the part about me getting extremely excited when my Monk friend popped brotherhood as soon as I used delirium 😅
I often joke in my static that I play the easiest job in this game (dnc) and while I have gotten to the point where it is actually easy. A lot of little choices you make add up, saving feathers, standard step timings, making sure absolutely nothing in your burst drifts…yeah it’s easy but it’s the little optimizations I’m proud of.
Funnily enough, I find Dragoon one of the harder jobs to play because of how static it is, how strict it is to align buffs with your other OGCDS, and how busy it feels during bursts. My fingers hurt easily from rapid button pressing and I get overwhelmed. I find Scholar a comfortably easy job that I often doze off on because I place Eos where it needs to be and then just let it do its work. I don't even run extremes or anything similar - I'd consider myself somewhere between casual and midcore.
Okay thats funny because DRG is for me almost the easiest Meele. (I also play GNB, MCH a lot) Thats why the reason why heavy weaving and a strict rotation is for me not hard, but playing something like Monk or Ninja? Hell no and i will never touch a Healer in High End Content
I think it's also possible for the same person to have each of these perspectives on different classes based on where they are in learning that class too. For example, I went from "Dancer is the easiest class!" when I was starting out on Dancer to "HOLY MOTHER OF GOD HOW DO PEOPLE TOLERATE THESE BURST PHASES" when I started using it in Savage. Incidentally, red mage was the opposite. I went from "HOLY MOTHER OF GOD HOW DO YOU EVEN PLAY THIS" to "lol this is the easiest class"
Yeah when I was learning dnc, it was easy. Then when I sat down and got to working on fine tuning my rotation and opener I was like "oh, damn this is less forgiving" and now it's brain-dead for me 😂
You were absolutely spot-on! There's only two things I think you missed: 1 - I think the name for "parser" could've been chosen better. I've done plenty of barsing and have a good few oranges (and even a nice pink!), but I've never really seen anyone take luck or small mistakes that seriously. I 100% believe this happens with people shooting for literally top 1 (especially considering things like BLM-dpecific strats and sandbagging) but I don't think it really happens elsewhere. B - For me I think a lot of what makes a job easy or hard aren't just the optimizations, but how they fit into a fight. This does mean that jobs can be easier or harder on specific fights. For example, DRK on TEA is *significantly* easier than DRK on P11S; even though TEA is orders of magnitude harder, the boss in P11S is often not strong enough to break your TBN if you're geared, which leads to either mitigation or damage loss nightmares. It's also part of why I think jobs like DNC or NIN are trivially easy while others like DRG or GNB are absurdly hard. Strictly speaking, DRG and GNB have fairly easy rotations, but taking into consideration just how strict resource generation can be for GNBs, or just how much movement you lose as a DRG, actually performing said rotations in a fight can be nightmarishly difficult. In P12SP1 for example, you have to do all of your jumps during the movement part of SC1. DNC and NIN on the other hand, are WAY faster jobs with more things going on, but you only have 1 or 2 things you can't drift, and the rest is easily resolved by just smacking a dummy for half an hour. Great video as always!
I play goon in p12, I dunno wtf you're talking about. Those jumps can be done in moments when you're standing still waiting for a mech to hit. First on the spread/stack, then on lasers and the final one on the in-out, you don't exactly sit still but the dodge is literally a pixel. Slidecasting is harder than drg in that fight, especially when you consider they don't jump at all during sc2a!
I always try to be as objective as possible when it comes to difficulty of jobs and how they are MEANT to be played. But you also have to leave room for people to make mistakes and how jobs play mid to hardcore. Pressing buttons at random and pressing buttons PERFECTLY are edge cases to take into account, but not base your data set on. Its kind of a misnomer to go that far even. Because on the parser end example, at that point ONE mistake is cause for a wipe. Which said margin of error for every job will be one misplay. So then every job is factually the same difficulty - perfection. One time someone told me using Life Surge on DRG outside of Lance Charge windows is playing the job, "wrong." Less than 100% purely optimal with no argument? Yes. "Wrong?" That's such a reductive view and definitely elitist as hell. Right now DRG is "so busy" that they're reworking it (it needs a rework because it's perfection, not because it's busy). If dropping one Life Surge outside of buff alignment so you have a little bit more breathing space for your other 20 weaves (difficult for many people) you have to do is "wrong" then what's the point of anything anymore? So is picking a sub-optimal job, and last I checked the people who start forcing jobs are the kinda people we don't want to deal. There's only 8 "correct" jobs to play, you're playing "Wrong." it's just a flawed mindset that really isn't useful for this kind of discussion, imo. I love my DRG, I love my weave economy. But I recognize that said weave economy is difficulty, and difficulty that can be lessened by one tiny sub-optimal play. It's not like you've gone full casual and using a freestyle rotation, it's one oGCD. Not even Ultimate is that precise.
I absolutely agree. The life surge example is also excellent, since I seem to recall there is a whole priority list based on what your options are to land life surge on. Granted you could land life surge in every Lance charge, but given that your filler combo is 10 steps long, there is a very real possibility that heavens thrust isn't going to be in Lance charge. And there is a whole table priority list of what is better. So even if we were going to take the "optimizers perspective", life surge always in Lance charge might still be inaccurate! It's similar to how I heard someone say that ever casting a cold f3 as blm is a dps loss, forgetting that it is also a dps loss to use every sharp cast on Firestarters. And simultaneously incredibly unlikely to have a Firestarter for every astral fire state on rng alone. Sometimes, people can forget that perfect isn't even always possible, let alone necessary as you mentioned!
Recently I've been trying to kick my habit of a casual AST, playing AST since the moment I reached heavenward years ago. Playing cards randomly, and trying to squeeze in the 1 odd 3 even combo to maximize cards. It definitely felt harder but it's honestly the reason why I love AST.
@@CaetsuChaijiCh Definitely! First time raiding was in endwalker, p1s. It was an experience worth remembering, definitely one of my most enjoyable moments in ffxiv. I'm now on p11s, hoping to clear next week!
As a definite "midcore" player, I am *aware* that buff windows are supposed to line up, and I make an effort to get everything lining up in the 2-minute window, but the fact of the matter is that in 99% of random Duty Finder groups you're lucky if all your allies use their raid buffs *at all*, let alone use them effectively or predictably. In most content I just kinda focus on my own stuff and don't expect anything from my allies beyond what you outline as the "casual" way of approaching jobs. I think it's hard to even attempt the more "hardcore" mindset and playstyle unless you're playing with a static where you all know what's up and are actively communicating. It's also worth noting that a lot of content in the game is dungeons, where the time between bosses throws an additional wrench into the idea of multiple people in the party lining up their buffs and bursts. Some people don't use 2-minute cooldowns on mob pulls ever, some people use them on the very first pull after a boss with the plan that it'll likely be up by the next boss (but sometimes it isn't, or it's delayed a bit), and some people use them on cooldown no matter what.
I'm still going through the msq, and yeah I can relate. Though I do miss getting commendations solely for keeping an eye on when my dance partner enters their burst window so I know when to use devilment, I'm also finding sage quite fun.
So a follow-up question would be: when the devs are making job changes, which group(s) should they focus on for feedback? On the surface it seems like the obvious answer is "listen to all the groups", and there's precedent for this. Back in Heavensward, a number of jobs like DRG and BLM were extremely punishing if you dropped their rotation and needed to recover -- in other words, they had high skill floors. The Casual player in your example might not be too worried if they dropped their rotation, or even might see the proper rotation as too stressful and prefer a rotation that is suboptimal but easier to perform (ex. a Fire1 BLM at lv60). Nowadays, the skill floor has been lowered on most jobs, not only to help them feel more accessible, but also because PF groups in HW would regularly fail DPS checks since all you needed was one player flubbing their rotation. There is also precedent for changes based on feedback from Parsers, such as removing Pre-Pull Doton and other similar openers that would result in 40+ sec pull timers. Because Parsers didn't like long pull timers but would tolerate them, and Midcore players would get driven insane because "the tiny boost to DPS can't be worth the long timer, just do a 15s countdown" But those were examples where everyone's interest aligns, so everyone was happy or at least neutral to a change. What happens when two groups want different things? Take the upcoming AST rework as an example. Casual players who are old enough, miss the uniqueness of HW card effects, and complain that every card has been homogenized to flat damage buffs. Parser players meanwhile are optimizing which jobs get which buffs on which burst windows (as you highlighted in the video), but are generally annoyed by the high APM of their burst window or the RNG of Minor Arcana or even their normal cards. If one group wants Rework AST to be more complicated, and another group wants Rework AST to be streamlined, isn't one group inevitably going to be disappointed?
Indeed! There isn't really an answer that satisfies everyone unfortunately, and because of that, the developers would have to choose a group to focus on. Personally I think the logical ones to focus on are the larger majorities, but part of the problem is that whenever we see discussion or complaints about a job, that is a potential minority that dislikes something. The people that like what is already there rarely speak up loudly about it, so we don't know how large this potential majority (even though it might not even be a majority) is! That's a bit back and forth, but ultimately it's hard to find a good answer 😅
Any job you don't have muscle memory built on is going to be difficult. Example, I have little experience on RDM, I find the job difficult; but BLM I have a lot of experience and find it easy. Even though everyone will say RDM is easier then BLM, it all just comes from experience.
Also true! I've met black mages that said they didn't know how to play summoner, meanwhile they said this right after going over some non standard blm lines 😂 It's very much also about muscle memory and experience!
I am very much in that midcore area and that description of casual players I wish were more accurate. All I want of people not intersteed in hyper learning their job is to at least know what their moves do and attempt to use them. Whenever I get someone in duty finder who never presses a raid buff or just 1-2-3s their way through level 90 content I feel baffled, how do you not see the big flashy "new skill unlocked" and not want to know what it does, who wants to play like they're at level 35? Also casual players who attempt to use everything are easier to teach, because you can show them an opener and explain the logic behind it, and even if they may struggle/not want to memorise the full thing, the core concepts they will probably at least understand even if they dont use, whereas the person who never presses technical step has mmuch more immediate and disruptive problems that ACTUALLY will slow down a casual content run beyond normal variance.
That is a very good point! The players that refuse to use most of their toolkit can be much harder to teach, since there's often some weird reason for it. Whereas the ones using everything might even appreciate learning a more effective way to use the buttons!😁 I sort of aimed to describe an above average casual player because I felt it would be unfair to use the worst possible casual player as the example! 😅
Yeah, they're probably more prevalent than they seem, because a casual player who doesnt overperform, but still does an ok job, you won't notice, silent majority and all that @@CaetsuChaijiCh
this is a really interesting watch as someone who has every job at max level but hasn’t gone out of my way to learn a lot of them, especially ones i used to play in shadowbringers and stopped in endwalker, and all of these jobs are one or the other. gunbreaker and machinist are my current two main jobs, and the rest are ones i used to main in shb. i’m noticing that my approach to the first two is very in line with the midcore player, while the rest i do very casually. i suppose that makes sense, i don’t care about drk or sam to the extent that i would read up on what to do to execute their two minute burst optimally, and i disliked the endwalker changes to ast enough that i don’t want to learn how to actually use its tools properly.
I can kinda forgive not fully understanding a job and playing it in content, but if you walk into a dungeon having no idea what you're doing, that will test everyone's patience. Looking especially at RDMs who single target Verthunder II, NIN who single target Doton (bonus points if the target sits on it for less than 10s, making the overall damage weaker than Fuma Shuriken, yikes!), and ice mage BLMs.
As someone who's currently going through the 2.x MSQ as a Paladin (and thus is currently playing with a burst window of "weave exactly two oGCDs into your weaponskill combo whenever you can"), I'm not sure what I consider myself right now. Currently, my primary focus is learning tank fundamentals; with how basic the PLD kit is in 2.x, I tend not to really think about the kit itself, and am focusing more on learning how to pull correctly and how to deal with certain mechanics in boss fights. I imagine that once I reach ShB/EW I want to be a healthy level of midcore. Try to get a good DRK opener, manage my MP and Blood as best as I can, and maybe freestyle a bit depending on whatever happens during the fight. If I think too much about the optimal play at any moment, I'm worried I'll freeze up.
Indeed, fundamentals are very important, especially as a tank! When doing "casual content" (as in, not extremes and beyond), you don't have to be perfect. However, striving to be better is always commendable!
not something you ought to worry about until you finish the story and get a feel for what endgame content you enjoy. most job kits are pretty stripped at lower levels, and some change a lot as you level them. definitely worth focusing on game fundamentals until you get into higher end content!
At low level, and especially on Paladin which is IMO absurdly boring until at least the 70-80 level range, there's not really much to optimize anyway. At level 50 and below hitting everything when it lights up is pretty much all you need on most jobs.
Casual savage raider here. Kind of oxymoronic, but my mentality is definitely closer to a casual -- got into savage raiding recently, currently pfing through P10S. The divide between the mid and casual gap is pretty big -- lots of people in my groups are aghast that I don't learn rotations or openers at all, it's almost all winging it (which I think is easier with controller). I definitely subscribe to the "if we clear it's fine" philosophy; for me the main thing with savages is just learning the mechs and not dying to them. I feel like most enrages are not due to improper dps rotations but by being hit with damage down (either via death or mechanic failure) I'm also the kind of person that refuses to learn combo inputs in fighting games.
I've spent the majority of my playtime as an AST main (then fully transitioning into all the healers), and I can safely say I'm a midcore player, but slowly pushing myself towards a "parser" or "more optimal" form of gameplay. As I've dipped my toes to Savages proper (progged LC2 on P9S, aiming to clear maybe this weekend?) I've started to watch AST clear vods and seeing what they do so I can implement it in my gameplay, and reading stuff from the Balance (which exposed me to the odd-minute card priority). I generally want to play as optimally as I can in any game I play as I find it fun to play that way, but not as strict on myself since I am a human being who makes mistakes so whenever I drop the wrong card type or drift Divination a GCD late, or when my cards overcap I say to myself "hey you shouldn't forget this, but it's fine you're still improving, you'll get better at this eventually." Interestingly, this is the first time I heard anyone even suggest wiping due to "play card mistakes" before, and that sounds like a player I wouldn't want to get along with so I'll strive to not be like that kind of player haha.
part of the equation is also skill floor - how hard is the job to play to an acceptable degree? That and the realization you can complete all of the content in the game without even nearing the skillcap of certain jobs. For example, there is a huge misconception about BLM being a super hard job to play in the casual playerbase where most of the difficulty of the job is make full use of non-standard lines, where the difference between someone using the easy transpose lines and someone basically playing perfectly is within like 1-ish%. Playing standard rotation BLM and doing some basic transpose lines like transpose from ui into af1f3p or blizzard 1 recovery is not overly difficult, doesnt require extensive fight knowledge to pull off and you usually will outdamage everyone by a large margin (including SAM by the way, if you're running crit BLM and get lucky with xenoglossy dh crits :) ) if you don't make major mistakes. I would even go as far to say that it's easier to play in a midcore context (e.g. savage prog) than RDM because you have tons of mobility that's immediately available to use so you won't lose potency for longer mobility phases if you plan beforehand (which, to those who haven't done savage yet, is easier to accomplish than you think it is)
I do ultimates, parse purples as SAM in current Sav and purple as GNB in legacy ultimates... and the idea of wiping because i didn't get a CDH DD is insane to me.
howdy, I'm what ya might call a "midcore" AST, but at the same time it's difficult to say because of how I use my cards. I pretty much always draw a card on cooldown (because mana.) and always try to give them to the right target for 6% dps instead of 3%. So I basically play them as I get them even though I often forget to use minor arcana. as for Divination I try to use it in my opener and whenever its available after words so every 2 minutes or so. When it comes to Astrodyne though I just use it as soon as I get 3 seals regardless of type. if my seals lined up properly, great, if not, oh well. I just take the RNG L when it comes to losing damage or w/e because Astrodyne has no cooldown on its own and really just depends on my card luck. I mean yeah I could always wait till I had the correct 3 seals but... RNG be RNG, yo.
Oh the key thing with astrologian is that since you can hold a card, and have two charges, you could play three during and before divination. But since you can't hold four cards in any way, optimization dictates that you play one card a minute later (where you would have one card in hand, and one charge), thus ensuring you have three when divination is back. For aatrodyne, it is never worth it to wait for three different seals. But making sure to redraw so you get unique seals is the optimal way to play (focus on YOUR SEALS, Not who receives the card. That comes second). If you do that, then there is a 100% chance you get the speed boost (2 seals), and a 66% chance you get the damage bonus from aatrodyne. Again looking at optimization, you optimally use aatrodyne during divination, but this would also mean that sometimes you can aatrodyne just before you play three cards. Play three and divination, and then aatrodyne again when it ends. These kinds of tricks is what astrologians use to optimize around raid buff windows. However this isn't actually necessary unless you are trying to be perfect, or just trying to optimize. But it is optional. I hope some of this helps you! 😁
I mighta mispoke, lol other than the holding cards thing (outside of opener) I don't really do that but otherwise yeah I always go for minimum of 2 unique seals with redraw and I get that at least 95% of the time. Sometimes I have horrid luck and end up with 3 of the same seal but that rarely happens thankfully. But more often than not I get all 3 seals :)@@CaetsuChaijiCh
Samurai on the highest dofficulty doesnt loop at all but plays "ad-hoc" instead. Its kind of an advanced freestyle and typically what you would want to do for parsing or in Ultimates since looping in ultimates is not really helpful
I lean more into the hardcore side of things and I'd say the only "problem" with the video is that the skill gaps are a lot more pronounced than you described, at least in my experience. The true hyper casuals I've seen around don't even know what a rotation is, keeping their GCD rolling is a miracle and if they do something other than 1-2-3 consider yourself blessed. Your hyper casual would be what I consider as just casual. Midcore is mostly accurate, but I'd add a tier between Midcore and Elitist, which would be the Hardcore tier. People like Xenosys Vex or Katana Azurite would fall under this new category: really good players who will try to go for the best possible damage with optimized rotations, but are grounded enough not to throw a hissy fit and wipe the group when they don't crit and know when ultra optimizing a run isn't worth it (seriously, you don't need a countdown for a normal raid). In all my years playing XIV, I've only seen one person who truly embodied your definition of Elitist, it was a Monk back in the Eden's Verse tier, he joined parties (both prog and reclears), stayed for one run and insta-bailed if you wiped or didn't meet his standards, which is wild considering that was PF with parties not listed as parsing parties.
I definitely *feel* like a midcore player. I use resources like the balance to learn stuff, but I'm not gonna fall over if I let Mage's Ballad go for 40secs instead of ~30. And I like the feeling of completing a good opener or looking at enmity and seeing I'm right behind the tank, but I also use combat macros so I clearly don't mind a few mistakes lol. I've yet to really get into extremes or savage yet though, mostly because I'm a little nervous about looking for a group to run content with and I don't know how people handle pf extremes/savages. I would like to someday though.
That seems very reasonable! And it can be hard to get into savage content definitely! The best I can offer to help you get started, is that I do have a guide on how to prepare yourself for savage (or extreme), which maybe could help you find a way forward when the day comes 😊 Here is a link in case you are interested: ruclips.net/video/FtomquU84-o/видео.htmlsi=rB9eFcqx1ERBTy3g
I wonder which category I fall under. I highly doubt that I come anywhere close to the parser category. I don't even play Savage. I care a *lot* about doing my opener and rotation correctly. To the point where if I judge that I simply can't play a class right, then I drop that class, even if it's one that I want to play. There are 3 to 7 other players counting on me. I don't want to waste their time. For the examples that you listed specifically. Machinist: Not too hard, but also just not my vibe. Prefer Dancer. Gunbreaker: I *love* this class. It's my main tank, and my go-to whenever I need to tank something. For me it's really easy. Dark Knight: I don't think this class is difficult, so much as it is clunky. Out of the four tanks, this one feels actively not fun. It feels like its kit is fighting against itself. Samurai: This is, in my opinion, one of the most difficult classes to play in the game. How *anyone* can play this optimally without three hands is beyond me. I have tried on multiple occasions to play this class, and I just can not. I want to play this class so bad, but...how do people even play this?! Ninja and Monk are *leagues* easier to play than this. Maybe influenced by Ninja being one of my main DPS, but still! Astrologian: Just like Machinist, it's not my vibe, so difficulty is N/A to me. Prefer Scholar.
The super interesting thing about this is that you can be a very optimization heavy, perhaps even somewhat perfectionistic player, without being interested in playing the content where this amount of perfection is required. The way you evaluated the jobs matches with such a perspective to me at least, since the jobs you weighed as very difficult or awkward are jobs that are mainly difficult (or awkward) when you try to perfect them, but are often considered deceptively easy when you don't focus on that. The jobs you focus your time on, like GNB and NIN, have bursts of high precision and perfectionism, followed by resting periods, which make them have a much higher skill floor, but once mastered, can be easier to maintain in most content as a result. That is at least how I view it!
@@CaetsuChaijiCh I see. Thanks for explaining that. I just think that I have to be doing my best, regardless of the content, casual or not. Those parties are all real people, and I don't want to let 'em down.
Knowing your vids, being I've been watching them from my other channel for a long while now. I knew this would be an amazing video and set up to react to it. I laughed so hard, so spot on, with some things feeling directed right at me because it was so accurate. I appreciate all the work you do for the community, your number crunching and rotation info is super helpful.
I often say DRK is harder then GNB and People like "You wtf?" but Gunbreaker is tbh not that hard, its just a very strict rotation and some boss knowledges when Tankbuster comes etc (like activate your mitigation before the tankbuster even starts or know what ability you should first when you have a tankbuster in a Burst window) but Gunbreaker is in the most case rly easy because you just need _normal weaving_ no double weaving most of the time like.. in Gnashing Fang 1 GCD then Hyperfelocity and provoke 2 GCD Hyperfelocity and mitigation etc.. when its normal for you to double weave Gunbreaker is not that hard, DRK can sometimes be more fuck up because something like.. TBN dont break.. you was unanble to selfheal yourself after Living Dead because bad server ping (when you have no heal crits you need 4 hits and i already have a rare case where the server ping literally kills me but that also just happens when you have no heal support at all.. even some hots or small heal is already enough to avoid this) But yeah is always a question of the own POV Im somewhere between Midcore and Parser (i dont care about crits or how other player play their job when we clear the content but i enjoy making as much damage as possible with my job)
@@CaetsuChaijiCh Yeah because DRK no Tank is harder to parsing then DRK, GNB? I make a Top 100 worldwide parse in P12S P2 through _pure luck_ because 5 of my 9 double downs where crit or direct hit (i have literally a freestyle rotation at some point in this try because i fuck up something like Sonic Break then Double Down and after that i _start_ with Gnashing Fang) GNB, PLD have some few high potency attacks but DRK? nothing has a higher potency then 600 (Double Down has 1200 in compare) means you need to play DRK Perfect and have some rng crit luck.. while Gunbreaker "When double down crits you are fine!"
aside from holding a dark arts proc for buffs drk really doesn't have crazy optimization. just hit everything on cooldown (doesn't really matter what order as long as they dont drift) and dont overcap. no actual rotation outside of spamming everything during burst windows. GNB has a set loop and a lot stricter tolerances with weave windows because missing a gnashing ogcd is unrecoverable; drk can weave whatever whenever and don't really lose anything unless you let your mana overcap somehow. TBN breaking or not is generally only a problem in normal content where it doesn't drastically effect anything anyway (though I do wish you didn't loose dps from your main mitigation tool only being 95% consumed instead of 100%).
@tabs5941 technically if we are going to get real specific here, the order in which you use your cooldowns as a gunbreaker during no mercy doesn't matter very much either, as long as they all land in no mercy. And if you suggest that the order matters because you want specific harder hitting attacks to be sure to land in other raid buffs, then that actually is the same argument for why dark knight cares somewhat about their order too. Even if it isn't exactly as much! 😊 Indeed messing up continuation in general serves as an example of a clear mistake that you get punished for (similar to ninja bunny jutsu and monk celestial revolution), but then again we could view TBN as a similar kind of punishing mechanic 😅 it is complicated because both jobs are difficult in their own right. And a huge part in what you personally find harder or easier depends on you 😁
I would consider myself a mid-core player. During Shadowbringers I found Gunbreaker fairly easy to play 'correctly'. But in Endwalker, once they added an extra wrinkle to the charges, keeping everything aligned became what I started to consider it 'hard'. I all but gave up on tanking after that as it was just too much to keep track of.
The biggest difference between GNB and DRK is that GNB is about fitting everything into No Mercy, while DRK is about fitting everything into every raid buff overlapped. In high end content, that's the same window. But if you put an optimizer player into low end content, the GNB is gonna be doing their own thing and the DRK is gonna be ripping hairs out over whether to put all their edge of shadows into tech finish or pray and hope the ninja uses mug at the tail end.
I definitely range across the spectrum a bit on Dancer. In a dungeon I'll likely play the casual for the most part, but anything else I'll be practicing weaving properly, trying to save resources for burst window, trying to keep things smoothly on cooldown, etc. So i guess overall I'd be solidly midcore. Of course that means now that I'm finally able to do savage content, I'm stuck on shield healer which is a frustrating experience lol
@CaetsuChaijiCh i made the silly decision to put myself up as a flex pick because I'm a bit too much of a people pleaser when it comes to getting to join in on something i didn't think I'd get much of a chance to experience to begin with. It's working, but i definitely am not a healer main like i used to be years ago.
when i was learning monk i got confused because the rotation i found required to weave 2ogcds which contradict the abc rule since i can only weave 1ogcd without delay gcd so i just decided to go freestyle the midcore description is so accurate lol
Yeah monk can be a bit tight if your connection isn't great! You'd have to adjust the known rotation and openers slightly if you can only single weave, and it would still be mostly fine I think, but I absolutely understand how it can feel confusing! 😅
Feel like a good example for this is DRG since I’ve seen a mix of people thinking it’s braindead easy with its low skill floor but also mixed reception at higher levels whether thinking it’s easy to optimize or difficult to.
Dragoon is also a good example yes! In my personal experience, it feels like most people aren't sure what to think because of the perception you mentioned 😅 Some feel it is easy, but other melee jobs are perceived as easier. Some feel it is hard, but other melee jobs are perceived as harder! Ultimately it always partly depends on the person, but I do think the amount of buff alignment and unintuitive parts of the rotation should rank it as quite hard to me!
I would argue gunbreaker is the best tank for a casual player to take steps into midcore, based on the points you make about GNB's no mercy window. The window is on every minute too, so you can tell pretty quick how consistent you're being during downtime.
That is a very good point actually! Gunbreakers clear fail states makes it obvious when you do things wrong, and the fact that it's success criteria are also rather specific, means you are doing mostly right once you get past the initial skill floor! 😁
@@CaetsuChaijiCh I'm sure there are other builder/spenders that have similar management, but your video made me realise "oh, this is perfect to get comfortable with aligning your one minute burst" across jobs in general. I think, even though people rag on SMN, it's possibly THE BEST job at 90 for understanding the 2 minute meta because it's literally built around it. I'm hoping in DT it gets a little flexibility in the 91-100 skills.
Not necessarily a parser but to optimize especially your main job, its how you will be a better player, with casual mindset who doesn't give much effort or rather not even doing bare minimum, they'll not improve. I kinda disagree with casual having insanely high skill but not doing hard content, how do they know they're that good without even testing their skill? Like, if im gonna learn another job, i would rather learn from a raider or parser, rather than a "high skill casual", because they only can assume, not proving it that they really know about their job.
With the RNG of AST cards, I actually don't know how to react fast enough to burst a card on the correct person every GCD without clipping. I also wonder if 250ms+ ping makes it harder, maybe the drawn cards show up on screen later.
With 250ms based on my knowledge it should be flatout impossible to double weave without clipping. But in terms of technique when double weaving in the burst, if at all possible, it is preferable to do the draw weave as the late weave since that at least gives you the gcd cast itself to think about what to do with the card. But genuinely, it is not supposed to be easy at all, so if you find it difficult, with or without latency, that is perfectly normal 😊
@@CaetsuChaijiCh Thanks. Yeah I need plogon to double weave. But that only goes so far. Would a good AST be able to card the right player most of the time? Or should I worry less about that and just card *somebody* quickly and prioritise not clipping?
@Cloud7050 a perfectionist level ast would probably be able to card the exact optimal player consistently out of necessity. Assuming that is not your target, you are already extremely good if you can card the right role (like melee card on melee and such). The most important part is making sure you get your seals/signs right, secondarily getting the cards out as fast as possible, and then thirdly landing the card on the best target. While learning, I do think taking an extra gcd to think is worth it to make sure you play your cards logically. Then you can always go faster when you get the muscle memory down! 😊
As a pretty Mid range player in your examples. I find Ninja the hardest (tho i don't like or play DRG or MNK) because you can get SO much cooldown drift if you don't do it perfectly. SAM and RPR are my favs for melee but i like a lot of BLM lately.
Well, at least the new Summoner gives us one thing. *_Nobody_* disagrees about how entirely anti-difficult it is. We just disagree about whether that's a _good thing_ or not. (As a former SMN main, I absolutely think it is NOT a good thing.)
I think this is why black mage is pretty popular for casual players. Its hard to optimize, and hard to maintain constant uptime, but a casual player will simply not do those things.
@zillahstar6962 this can be difficult to determine since not everyone posts logs. In fact, more casual players are less likely to! But it is a decent metric, and does suggest blm is the least popular. I imagine what was meant was the thing that *is* attractive about blm for casual players were the things listed, like the high skill ceiling! 😊
I feel like for me I'm between midcore and parser on Reaper, but on Dark knight I'm entirely in casual based on rotation. On other classes I'd say my position is even more vague. Reaper is a lot easier to keep consistent because it has both a 1 minute and a 2 minute buff and keeping those two things lined up exactly makes the job easier to manage for me. Dark knight has a 1 minute buff but no 2 minute buff so remembering when the 2 minute buff takes place is more vague to me while playing.
The closest you get to a two minute buff for dark knight is watching living shadow, or making sure to use shadowbringer in pairs! But I totally get it. I also find it a lot easier to play reaper more efficiently, where dark knight I'm more likely to be a bit whatever at times 😅
rpr will always drift gluttony if you are playing optimally, because its rotation isn't perfectly 2mins, and every 2min loop you actually have 10 less soul gauge than the previous loop, which is also why i don't like the job too much, it feels very weird. but i appreciate that its nuance is enjoyable for some people. i'm actually curious if they are going to add more gauge generation in 7.0 to 'fix' the gauge loss over time issue
I feel like your definitions of casual, midcore, and parser are flawed. Casual and Parser seem like caricatures, while Midcore is so broadly defined as to include basically every player I know, including someone with multiple world first clears under their belt. I don't know anyone who thinks "as long as a duty was cleared, it doesn't matter how long it took," as the length of time a clear takes is one of the biggest barriers of entry for people who don't prog high end content. I don't know anyone who wipes off a single rotational mistake, because even if your own parse might suffer, that doesn't mean everyone in the party can't get a good parse (and if you crit hard enough, you can potentially parse better than your perfectly played runs). Meanwhile you define midcore as: -Does an opener (Which everyone does, it's the first buttons you hit in an encounter) -Does a rotation, but sometimes has to freestyle (Which, again, everyone does. A rotation is basically just the order of buttons you press) -Likely participates in extremes and savages (Including the phrase "likely" means that they don't necessarily even have to do any high end content) This definition of midcore includes *literally everyone who plays the game* as far as I can tell. And when the definitions for casual and parser feel so disconnected from how anyone actually plays the game, these definitions feel completely meaningless, and thus, so do the conclusions you reach from them. An examination of the different philosophies when it comes to job difficulty would be better served by asking people of varying skill levels rather than a thought experiment in the first place. Even if fixing the issues with your definitions, there's a lot of assumptions you'd have to make in order to imagine how difficult each kind of player would find a job, when you could just talk to those kinds of players and not have to make any assumptions.
Edit: autocorrect turned “midcore” into “misfire. Kinda funny. From that description, I definitely fall in the midcore category. I try to get my openers right and keep things mostly on cooldown without trying optimization tricks such as Reaper’s double Enshroud. Judging from my prog in P9S, it seems to be working. Made it to Enrage with 5% after 2 players died to Chimeric Succession and 3 more, including both healers, died to the following Two Minds due to the lack of players. We’d have mopped the floor with him otherwise(and we weren’t using potions at the time)
Indeed, the "need" to do these perfect optimizations are really only there if you are doing the savage bosses at the minimum item level, and sometimes not even then! So it's like a world first thing. Outside of that, it's just expression of skill for the most part. Doing a proper opener does however set up your rotation to just "flow nicely", which is still a valid reason to use them, when you aren't optimizing too much, as you explained! 😊 Good luck with your savage progress!
I would be aware that even on week 1 this current tier did not have a dps check, if your team has i650+ it is still completely possible to still clear with 5 wipes and a healer LB On week 1 people wouldn't see past the lc2 front firestrikes mechanic with good damage
Because people have different skills so jobs being different makes you use different skills you're more or less proficient in to play the said job. Basically it's subjective. Just like tastes
I would consider myself at the upper end of casual but not midcore. I do my best when I play my jobs but am probably missing some hidden nuances with them. I'm certainly not smart enough to understand why openers are as critically important as they are or why buffs lining up make such a big difference, heck parsers in alliance raid roulettes are probably screaming into their hands whenever I pop my job's raid buff. I'm also stuck in the Free-Trial for financial reasons so I'll probably never end up in content where knowing the optimal opener or learn first hand why lining up my raid buff will ever be important.
Fortunately in the content you do, optimizing at all is considered entirely optional, even if some might suggest otherwise!😊 However if you are curious about the importance of openers, I actually have a video on that too! Here is a link: ruclips.net/video/iBY84KAg3Mc/видео.htmlsi=0z3F5LjUzqi1HAsW
im new to the game and i feel bad going into dungeons because i still dont know any rotations at all my brain just cant remember anything so i feel bad i feel like im holding everyone else back 😭
This feels like one of those topics where it’d be fun to make a comment before AND after watching, so that’s what I’m gonna do. My hypothesis is that the different contexts for the jobs have different skill thresholds that make your job FEEL easier when you play it in easy content. A casual player is not going to need to know about Transpose Lines on Black Mage or even about the fact that TBN stacks with your other mitigation better than they stack with each other. Any of the stuff you do in the MSQ is just Not Going To Be Hard Enough For You To Need That. (Personally, I found that the hardest MSQ fight for me was a raw mechanics check anyway and my mitigation didnt particularly matter) Once you start dipping your toes into Extremes, there’s a lot more information you have to rattle around in your head to play your job “competently” so to speak. Jobs seem harder because the entire game is harder.
It seems like for the most part, my thoughts were your thoughts on this. That different people have different definitions for what is “Necessary” to play. And honestly, that’s one of the beauties of this game when you think about it.
I'd definitely count as midcore. As a long-ish time Bard player, I do consider it way harder to "optimize" than, say, Machinist. Given in its current iteration the song rotation is very strict, meaning you have to rotate your songs at the right time while also reacting to the jobs random procs. That's something you can absolutely feel if you're playing with a more casual Bard in your group, given if they're playing songs to their full duration it means that Battle Voice and Radiant Finale start getting used seemingly at random.
in leveling the arcanist jobs, after level 30 i played nearly purely scholar. i touched summoner maybe 5 times to get my job quests done, and it's left me really unsure about how to properly play summoner, even though a lot of people claim it's the easiest job in the game as is currently.
Welp, I learned something new about astrologian today, gonna try to see if I can manage this card thing, though it's hard to quickly get 3 cards down with a controller T_T. I think I play internally like a parser, but externally like midcore I guess? If I learn something about optimizing my play I apply it, and also share whatever information I know with others, but I don't give up and throw a fight away just cause someone (or even myself) made a mistake somewhere. Though I'm only in stormblood right now so I haven't really played what is likely considered to be a hard fight yet. Even if I get to where I *do* know all the things, I would just try to teach, not...fixate on perfection. The game is so old that I find it really difficult to find information sources that are up to date and trustworthy. I would like to know how to play my preferred classes as optimally as possible and try to apply every new thing I learn, but a lot of times between the age of the game, and the depth of the mechanics it feels like an impossible task.
Yeah on a controller it might be very hard! I can't really give advice on that unfortunately. However in regards to finding trustworthy sources for learning jobs that are up to date, I have guides for all the jobs, although they are split in a low level and high level section. But they should contain most of the information you would be interested in to start mastering. If you then want to go even further, most people will probably recommend checking "the balance" discord server, which should have the most accurate information most of the time. But its a lot of reading rather than video presentations 😊 As you are still leveling, don't break your back trying to do the card bursts if it is too difficult. It isn't outright necessary for any Content, so if you find it overwhelming and ruins your enjoyment of the job, then you don't have to 😊
@@CaetsuChaijiCh getting three at the very beginning of a fight is probably good practice at least. I will definitely poke around your channel for class guides. I've mostly been looking at the videos about weird things about the game or in its history. Maybe I'll finally be able to play dragoon without completely sandbagging lol.
It is funny that I hear so many people dislike MNK because they think it's hard, when I just kinda picked it back up after they removed Kaiten from SAM and haven't had much problem, other than when I'm learning a fight and my brain just overloads and I don't do my rotation. I feel like a weird half-step above that description of midcore, because I always try to do the best of my abilities, even to the point of doing the impossible task of trying to line up with the buffs of others in casual content like dungeons or alliance raids. I just feel like it makes the game more interesting than mindlessly hitting buttons, and it's always good to be somewhat in practice, even though I lost all my motivation to do things like Savage for now.
I guess I would be considered a "parser" in your definition, even though I don't parses as importantly as the name implies. I do however try to learn the best way to push damage, to play perfectly, and do indeed find MCH to be harder than what people say of it because of the numerous layers of optimisation, without even counting how to freestyle correctly back in line in case of mistake or death.
That's perfectly fair! Each of the categories are of course sliding scales you could say. Striving for perfection personally is i think a very cool target to have. And indeed, I actually feel the same way about machinist as you, and part of what inspired this video is exactly that a looot of people disagree! 😂
@@CaetsuChaijiCh Haha, yeah, popular opinions on jobs very often don't paint an accurate picture of all aspects of them, more so than other kind of subjects. I personally felt almost tricked whenever I picked and learned MCH as my main alt job, especially since I picked in great part because of its supposed simplicity lmao
wanting to play optimally doesn't necessarily make you a parser, I have 99s on every fight this teir but I don't sabotage my party member's buffs or run a fight just to parse, so I don't consider myself a parser. I just want to play my best for the sake of my personal enjoyment and standing by the people I play with.
I'm definitely mid range at best when it comes to Machinist, but my main issue with it is ping. Hard to do the fast paced parts without clipping a good amount
I would strongly suggest looking into the programs noclippy or XIValexander, all my international friends swear by them. they will seriously improve the game feel at high ping.
I think a second part that you mentioned at the start but didn't address further is also at play: Preference. All other things aside, some players like direct straightforward things, some don't. Some people find upkeep things easy while others hard. I have to have macros on my healers to play a sound when my DoT is 5 sec from being up otherwise I forget about it. And even for the same thing, difficulty can be different. It's easier for me to upkeep Houton on NIN because there's a large gauge clearly displaying time remaining and rough percent remaining (the pinwheel) vs WAR's tiny little icon, even though both are effectively identical mechanically. And then there are people just good at different kinds of things. I'm good at choosing heals wisely buy dislike high APM, so I like SCH and dislike AST, but some people feel the opposite. I find GNB easier than DRK (and sometimes WAR in terms of that upkeep buff) because it's rigidity makes it VERY easy to keep track of where you are in the rotation and what you should be doing. While this can make it difficult to get back on track and isn't perfectly optimized, as long as one is using Gnashing Fang and Blasting Zone on CD (every 30 sec, including anchored to No Mercy windows), has 3 charges for No Mercy (which you can easily track with the CD on the ability on your bar and only using Blasting Zone when you have 3 charges and have already pressed 1-2 of your melee combo so you can instantly refill it), and uses Bloodfest after Double Down and Gnashing Fang in No Mercy every other minute while rolling through your other 30/60 sec CDs, it's super easy to keep position, and all the CDs will naturally line back up again outside of weird downtime shenanigans. I find this vastly easier than DRK's high APM and more free-wheeling opener focused on gauges (powder gauge is binary/trinary vs other 0-100 gauges and extra things like Dark Arts to juggle) and dumping large amounts of things in burst windows. So in addition to what you say - that people assess difficulty at least partly based on what they're trying to accomplish and how readily they can spot errors - difficulty is also subjective based on what a specific individual finds difficult or easy naturally.
I think there IS an objectively correct way to play each and every class, that can determine how hard jobs are generally compared to one another (especially when you consider things like APM and how in depth astro's card system is). However, there is also the factor of people struggling with different job aspects randomly. I knew a DRK who claimed that he wanted to main PLD but he struggled too much with resquiescat.......
Indeed! This is also partly why I tried to emphasize how sometimes what makes a job appear easier than it is, is the fact that the difficult part is hidden away a bit like with drk and mch! 😊 I am wondering what that player meant exactly by having problems with requiescat though 😅
@@CaetsuChaijiChthis was last expac when you had to hold your last stack for confetior and he would just forget, guess if happened enough he gave up haha
I consider myself a midcore player, I do try in general to optimize my skill rotation, but often end up freestyling. In general, what I consider to be difficult is mostly for these reasons: - Too many cooldown skils. I'm a little bad at keeping track of skill cooldowns and using them off cooldown, and that usually means they often end up offset of the rotation. That's why Dragoon is one of the jobs I dislike the most. - Too many skills that can't be macro'd together. For optimal rotation, you need to have all your skills available on your hotkeys. I try optimizing their placements so that skills make sense, but for certain classes, I end up having to put certain skills in hotkeys that are awkward to reach. This is why the latest Summoner Rework makes it the easiest class ever IMO, a lot of the skills are just regrouped into a single action and changes according to your current Summon, making up a loooot of space in your hotkeys. - Forgiving on mistakes. Once in a while, I might panic a bit and misclick a hotkey or something. For certain jobs, that costs just a bit of damage, but for other jobs, that can throw off a lot of the rotation and therefore cost a lot of damage. And of course, the main culprit for this is the Black Mage who failing to cast a spell can make your main buff expire and you have to spend time to rebuild it before being able to resume the DPS. Which is why I consider Black Mage the hardest job by far. - Intuitive skills. Most skills have simple effects, and you know exactly when you should be using them, and with which other skill you might want to combine with. But there are certain classes that have really weird skill effects which aren't obvious about how you should make use of them. Monk is definitely one of them with so many buffs based on completely swapping the basic combo order. Some of the Healer spells are also like that, leaving you wondering in what kind of situation you'd want to use the spells. Also regarding Bard, I don't consider it a difficult job... But I feel like it's mostly button mashing, so I find it tiring to play. My hands definitely wanted to rest when I had finished leveling up Bard.
I'm an extremely casual in all games I play, if I'm really enjoying the content or the class, I may try to improve but if that implies changing what is easy, and fun for me, I stop In FF14 I play a Warrior on the world but a Black Mage in Duty Finder because is so fun, my rotations are really basic versions of the good ones (according to the Internet) with a limited set of skills for single or multiple targets but for me, the best about BLM is: 1. The LONG casts so I don't worry about downtime or animations because I'm always casting something 2. NOT moving because of the long casts or because I don't need to chase the mobs, I love that part! I park myself in a cozy place to rain disaster over my enemies, and I move only in life or death situations, and even then, just at the last minute I like how some stuff look in the games I've played but I would never invest all the time, and effort needed to become good enough to get it
I must be casual, because I play MCH as my main and I have no idea about openers. I just do the main rotation, weaving the OGDs in between, slap the chainsaw and air chains after the end of the main rotation if they're up (and only if they won't waste 10 points on a 90 rook/queen gauge) and the drill with the guaranteed crit ogd. Then the quick 5 heat dump (with wildfire if available) to get the OGDs back. But then I don't do savage so it works fine for me.
Do parsers play as perfect as possible even when the content that they play (roulette) is low level or even the first dungeons like Sastasha? I wounder sometimes how fast they can clear dungeons like Sastasha or even Praetorium 🤔 Btw very nice video, I always enjoy your content! 😊
Sometimes they might. Although it would be an incredible shock if they were recording and posting their logs for parses! But there are ways to hyper optimize even super casual dungeons! Maybe that is something worth exploring! 😊 Thank you!
For my part, yes and no. At a low enough level there's just not much to even optimize, but after enough runs of Praetorium, just about anyone will start wondering if you can make it go by a little faster, and you don't exactly need to make a new spreadsheet to figure out that pooling a resource for that big pull before boss 1 is worth it. I wouldn't say it even makes much of a difference or that I actively decide "I'm going to optimize this Prae run", it's just something for my brain to do while I'm "waiting" for the dungeon to be done, and I'm used to thinking that way from the content where it matters. Actually, I only started thinking in terms of "parse" or optimizing because I found that doing the same mechanics you've mastered over and over to get to a later prog point in an Ex/Savage fight gets very dull unless you start challenging yourself to do them "perfectly" in the meantime.
Using "parser" and "elitist" for hardcore players is a bit dishonest imo. Parser and Elitist both have negative connotations within the more casual part of the fanbase, while being hardcore and pushing your limits is far from negative. While yes, I parse, it's to see my own improvement, run a xivanalysis and then see where I can improve. Just because someone runs Savage and ultimates doesn't make them an elitist, as you seem to imply at the start.
I realize this problem, however it seems like most names for players that play to a high level of perfection seem to have negative connotations. However I feel like I also specified that it was a hypothetical character, and you can always figure that you yourself might be a perfectionist for example, without being an elitist 😊 To be perfectly honest, I also want to make it clear that being a "casual" is also sometimes something that is considered outright negative by some parts of the player base, so how do we communicate about these things if we can't use words that determine them? Personally I feel "hardcore" would be inaccurate, because a significant amount of the player base views being hardcore as simply doing ultimates, which isn't necessarily the same as parsing to perfection 😊 but it seems like YOU believe that you can't actually run savage or ultimates if you are only midcore, which if you check the comment section, seems to be wildly untrue as well! 😊
I'd say I'm casual, but I read and practice rotations as well as try to line up everything by 2 minutes since I know that is what the game is atm. What is wierd about me is that I do basicly 0 lvl 90 content and just level jobs atm, and with that said I think a lot of difficulty some casuals like me might attribute to the class is actually them not having enough skills early on to make the rotation work somewhat competently. The leveling content is also filled with just doing as much damage as fast as possible, meaning putting up dots and maintainance stuff feels kind of pointless in a lot of cases compared to just hitting them. This means an uncomplicated class is strong in short bursts with decent survivability and a complicated one needs management or uptime. This is just kind of a disconnect in FFXIV where a class can feel both incomplete and weak compared to another just because of levels, especially before lvl 70-80.
If they removed the 2minute raid buffs, that would remove a lot of toxicity I think, because other peoples optimal damage would no longer fall on you performing under the pressure of time. If damage and optimal play relied solely on the individual it would make for much less lashing out at others, or trying to blame others for your own mistakes, which would make parsing more about yourself and your performance, than having that 1% more damage because the raid buffs all hit at the same time. I personally see myself at the early midcore very high casual level, I look at the rotations on the servers, but I mostly take them as suggestions to test and and see if I like the feel of how that class is supposed to be played optimally. (playing on a controller) I hate samurai, it feels ultra bad, too many buttons, too many lines, Black Mage also became a very terrible flow on controller after HW, among others, there's only a couple not even a handful of DPS jobs that feel alright and flow nicely for me. Even Ninja in ARR and HW felt great, but now I have to find button space for the Raiton spells, and it's just the beginning of the button bloat problem and it's starting to not feel nice anymore.
This is final fantasy 14! And if it looks interesting, then its free trial is unlimited in time, and covers the first 70 levels of the game, so you could spend hundreds of hours exploring the game without paying anything 😊
I wanna start off by saying the video is great and I think a lot of people will take a lot home from it. Tho I am really really split on one of the points you made. I do understand why using a "parser" as the highest skill ceiling would be the right thing to do, but I don't think you used the right scale for that. Yes, a job might be difficult to parse with, but that doesn't necessarily mean it is difficult to play. A lot of the "difficulty" parsing (at least when we are talking about the 99s and 100s) simply boils down to the crits/dcrits, so it just means going again and again. The same parser that has 100 on NIN might also have a 47 because their Hyosho did not crit a single time (that might be an extreme example but you get what I mean) even tho their rotation was absolutely flawless. In my opinion, even a parser will consider MCH or SMN easy, even tho they are hard to parse on because of their really high crit dependancy. We could sit here and argue all day long that pressing more buttons does not mean the class is more difficult, but I feel like a lot of people who say that haven't really experienced Savage/Ultimate rading. I think it is important to judge a job also based on learning a new fight. For example, progging on a WAR compared to a GNB will be marginably easier because you have so little to do in comparison. After some time I am sure GNB will feel just as comfortable as WAR, but objectively speaking spamming Fell Cleave and weaving like 3-4 things a minute is way easier than what GNB has to do to achieve the same results. I think that is one of the better ways to judge a job, as at the end of the day, whichever job you have the most muscle memory on will feel the easiest, but you can still acknowledge it's difficulty. Or I might be looking too deep into it or maybe even misunderstood your point. Anyways, buff RDM and DRK, thank you.
Thank you! I mostly used parser as a stand in word or synonym for perfectionist, or at times even elitist. But sometimes perfectionist doesn't apply to parser, and not all parsers are elitist. As you say, getting the highest parse is more about luck, which is why jobs with more predictable and easy to perform rotations are easier in the eyes of a parser. That is also why I suggested a parser might find bard harder than machinist, because bard has at times the same or more things to do than a machinist, but this is then coupled with an inconsistent rotation. Getting a really high parse itself isn't "hard", given that the most important part once all the pieces are in place, is the luck factor. But it isn't hard to be lucky. It is hard to be consistent at something difficult. As your comparison between warrior and gunbreaker somewhat tries to showcase 😊 I hope this helps to add some more detail to this! 😁
I don't much care but manage to nevertheless parse around 60 to 70 in most content. I feel like I'm just a casual who accidentally managed to get into the groove on my preferred jobs.
I have a RDM friend who has played RDM for like, 5 years. We are both midcore, but he treat his RDM as if he was a parser. I, to poke fun at him, intentionally went for a full sps red mage, yet it was I who reminded him "Manification" has a 10 second shorter cooldown, so you can Embolden, melee 1, melee 2, melee 3, Manification, finishers and keep everything within burst. Just because someone isn't hardcore, or who is playing wrong for fun, may still have important insight even for people who do nothing but play a particular job. Do I recommend SPS RDM? Not if you want to do exclusively damage. Is it fun? Very, Just keep Lucid on cooldown XD In the end, play the game how you want to. You want to care about every individual stat from melds? You do you. You want to just get rid of the millions of tenacity melds on your ninja for no reason? Enjoy. The important thing is to never *make* someone play a way they don't want.
That is certainly also something 😂 Personally I actually don't find sps RDM very fun, not necessarily due to optimization, but just because many buttons feel awkward on high speed! But each person has different preferences!
Guess I fall mid to casual for how I play machinist as that is my main. I know the opener but free styling just always ends up FEELING better for fights and that's not counting my Canada to EU ping.
Meanwhile here I am able to play every job at least semi-competently to being some sort of Midcore-Parser facsimile on white mage and Sage in savage, even if I’ve yet to finish P12 and never touched P8 until like a month ago- I just don’t want to think about buff windows really as a dps, so I raid on healer, also since I’ve healed since I started two years ago as a CNJ, I have some trust issues sometimes so I can’t trust myself on dps
I would consider myself midcore, that is raid 3-4 hours a week. I do aim for perfection though, or at least perfection in the eyes of ffiv analysis and everything I've read. As a monk in the 3rd tier this was basically never achieved. For reaper then dancer in the first 2 tiers perfection was the assumed result.
I've been playing FF14 for two years now. I play summoner because it has exactly one double weave and I can't even get that one right 100% of the time. You didn't mention peak or sustained APM, or number and complexity of weaves. Maybe it's just because you're used to astrologian, but I think selecting the right DPS for a card and playing it without clipping next Fall Malefic is even harder than a normal double weave. I also think SAM is as hard or harder than MNK because you have to meld to at least 2.14 GCD and then do double weaves, whereas (hopefully) MNK at 1.94 is not expected to do so.
I didn't outright mention peak or sustained APM, but those can also make an impact yes! And no, I am not good at astrologian, at least not in my personal opinion! 😂 The scary part with astrologian is that optimally, you are actually double weaving the decision to play that card on the right dps. Whether draw is first or second depends on how good you are at it and how lucky you were with redraws, and sometimes you just don't have enough time to think! Which also applies to other fast paced jobs!
I’ve just learned today that attempting to double-weave in Asylum and Temperance in P10S on my opener is… not easy to do since that helps with the first damage, but it’s rough, even after clearing a bunch on Sage
Simpel, every job is easy in dungeon/trial content, extremes and savage require tighter planning while also doing mechanics. For ultimates it's either do it well or wipe. Parsers, they don't count as they never parse realistic numbers
My nemesis is Sage I just can't get on with it, I put my abilities in a particular order so mostly finger memory does the rotation, atm though I'm just enjoying the simplness of SMN
Can I even be considered midcore anymore when I don't even touch expert roulette anymore? The life of turning into a crafter main because everything is being made easier and similar, because people don't like thinking...
Being someone who plays gun breaker, scholar, and red mage I will say I feel red mage is the hardest to work with do to the RNG in verfire and verstone wanting to proc or not
For the Side question that have been happening recently. Should the job be more difficult ? People tend to forget that not much change happened during Shadowbringer to most of the jobs. So When you have a player who has been playing the same job since the start of shadowbringer they will feel the job they are currently playing is easy. But, if you have someone like me who just started in shadowbringer. The perception is quite different. 2 expansion of muscle memory and theory crafting is different from 2-3 savage raid without the two ultimate. Another thing is the older player who did all the ultimate have a much higher skill level than the common new savage pleb (ME !!!). I heard a content creator talking about how DSR changed improved the skill of the player who did it considerably to the point of making savage tier seem like easy content.
imo jobs being fun is more important than encounters being fun. i don't think pandaemonium was a good raid series, it's definitely worse than omega and eden, which is why it stung even more. fun jobs are fun everywhere, fun encounters are only fun within themselves and you always run the risk of having unfun encounters like pandaemonium did
It's not even critting normally, it's direct critting. A normal Hyosho Ranryu is around 50k or so. DCrit Hyosho is 144k damage. Parsing in this game has reached a point where rng reigns more supreme than actual skill expression.
You are absolutely right! 😁 And it is indeed reaching a point where not only do you have to be perfect, you also need everyone else to be perfect. And then you also need the luck to get the dcrits... And preferably also your raid gets this. It's quite absurd! 😅
I don't know why playing your character itself should be a hard thing at all. What is the point? I've never seen another game where it is actively difficult to play your character. My hottake is that all combo buttons (1-2-3) about be consolidated into one button like in PvP. There is no functional difference at all. Pressing one button is no more difficult than pressing three in a row
Some players find it enjoyable to learn to do something that is difficult! Personally I feel the separate buttons for combos is about the feel of the job, and not about difficulty at all. Why do you need to press those weird key combinations in fighting games to access specific attacks? These days fighting games allow you to add shortcuts for some of them sometimes. Similarly, making it separate buttons for your combo adds more feel to it. It's the same argument as saying why does ninja have to have three mudras they have to mix to get the jutsu they want. It's more about the feel of the job, and while it adds to the difficulty, it is generally to my knowledge viewed as a skill floor thing and not something that stays difficult as you learn it 😊 That's not to say that doing pvp style combos wouldn't be nice for convenience, but there are certain jobs where this might feel limiting (gnb and pld gets a specific benefit from their step two combos so in niche situations it might be annoying), or it just doesn't work at all in that way (monk needs all their options available because of perfect balance) Despite all that, I don't think your opinion there is a hot take. It is however a regularly discussed issue 😅
@aiellamori don't worry about it. That guy seemed to be VERY salty about something else and was spewing a lot of assumptions about other people and just being mean in general 😊
Midcore represent 👉😎👉 For funsies I'm gonna see how much of the midcore stuff I can relate to for the jobs I've played and then talk about the video properly lol. Of course not every Midcore™ is gonna be the same as me but y'know. Again. For funsies. MCH: Yeah. Pretty much. Of course, as mentioned earlier, the freestyling is based on what I know of MCH, but y'know…can't stop, and a messed up rotation is better than none! (Also, BRD is harder than MCH for me, but that's because I tend to lean into jobs with limited to no RNG nowadays, see DRG and RPR. It's just easier for my ADHD brain XD). Overall, I wouldn't say it's the easiest job ever, but it's manageable with practice. Then again I feel like that could be applied to most jobs lol. GNB: Again, yeah. Though I do have to mourn the big numbers and make an obligatory "NO MY UPTIME" joke, as a DPS main, lol. The No Mercy window concept took me a while to fully understand, but it was kind of a "Once you get it, you GET it" for me. Though soon I'm gonna be practicing sneaking in the defensive cooldowns in the rotation. Managing the DPS _and_ tank parts of GNB is what makes it particularly difficult. DRK: [blows DRK a little kiss] The DPS instinct is ever strong in me lol. I'm leveling DRK on my main atm and I do at least try to set aside 3k MP for TBN, but sometimes muscle memory goes "3000 MP USE EDGE" and honestly it's kinda funny at this point. The urge to bonk is strong. Overall, though, not terribly hard, but I also play Dragoon, so I'm used to the weave economy. If you're not then it can be. Kind of a nightmare. SAM: Haven't touched it, maybe I will _just_ to see if my thoughts on it line up XD I WANT to play it, it seems pretty fun, honestly. Back to the job guide playlist I go! AST: I need to play more AST to develop a solid opinion on this but right now my opinion is "I am giving every AST I've ever had the pleasure of being in a dungeon with a big hug, are y'all okay" because I've mostly had seemingly midcore ASTs. Honestly, it's kinda like GNB in a way in my brain-doing Cards and Healing separately isn't too difficult, but together it's different-and I managed to get that, so I think I can do AST too, but until then. *_MAN_* AST is hard for me. Overall, again, even other midcore players are gonna be different from me specifically, but that's the whole point of the video: Difficulty. Is. Relative. There are so many factors that can determine how a job feels from one player compared to another. And even if we can't imagine thinking that way ourselves, it's important to understand where others are coming from when they discuss difficulty, and also, honestly, not judge their playstyle if it isn't hurting anyone. If it is, that's different, but if they're having fun and aren't causing trouble...let 'em vibe and have their opinions. Anyway sorry for the long comment but that was, in fact, fun. Good stuff as always!
Even within categories you’ll have people disagree. BRD vs mch is a perfect example. Mch is fixed, but you need to manage heat and battery and if you make a mistake recovery is hard. BRD once your comfortable tracking song vs dots is actually very easy-until the fight has downtime windows and all of the sudden you need to start and stop songs early to keep building apex guage. All jobs are easy for casual players, you just suck at them so it doesn’t matter. But midcore and up it entirely depends on how you think and understand things.
it is interesting how often i hear nonstandard blm players find another job more difficult than nonstandard blm. i don't play nonstandard blm seriously but i have enough basic knowledge of the advantages and disadvantages of different lines to try using them when i need to use my instant casts and it seems far more challenging than just doing a set rotation. i don't even understand the correct way to use sharpcast f1/fire paradox beyond trying to force a 4f4 double transpose line when i have to burn xenoglossies and a triplecast and i don't have an f3p
nflaxkslxna seeing those card prios gon make me cry I put up my astr for raiding so I can start over on the new astr next expac, but I sure as hell will miss being busy and tracking who gets what card during my 2 min and 1 min ;-;
Beauty is in the eyes of the beholder so to speak. Also. Parsers not only require player to be perfect but also need a blessing of RNG for fishing on crits while ensuring your mirror of the job will ensure their own DPS loss. Or they are downright cunts who outright just leave after getting THEIR high parse (been there, that's why I don't like parsing parties). Anyway? I would prefer a full party of midcore blueberries who at least try with rotation/opener and clear content over self-righteous parser player who wipes the raid for no reason except they didn't get crits in opener and never try to recover the fight.
Indeed! I would certainly also prefer a group of midcore players over players that optimize so much that less than perfect is unacceptable! But striving for perfection in play is always commendable i feel, as long as it doesn't become obsessive 😅
I've been leveling my classes and white mage is my most hated job, while Astro is my favorite healer. For context, by the definitions in this video I am a midcore player, sometimes leaning toward casual. I'm most of the way through EW msq part 1, currentl doing lvl 88 quests with astro. I only have 2 jobs lvl 90, Sage and Reaper and have never done an savage raid before, only unsynced a few ARR trials for mounts. all my combat classes are minimum lvl 50 except white mage. I recently attempted leveling roulette as a white mage (it's still < lvl 50) and it sucked (sunken ruins, I think. with earliest dungeon w/ bees) I would let the tank get to low health so I could spread my dot a do a little dmg, but when I go to cast cure the tank they would die before the cast bar finished. it wasn't even intuitive to see that cure 1 is useless compared to cure 2 and it got to the point that rezing players meant even with lucid dreaming I couldn't cast cure 2. after struggling through it, I jumped on astro just to put myself in a good mood again, and redid the same dungeon to prove a point to my friend who was a newbie tank. dropped my regens on her, played cards and it felt so much better and went so much smoother. At that level astro doesn't even get redraw and I still loved it. I first-timed the stormblood alliance raids on astro with relative ease not too long ago, even helping to heal members of other alliances. my optimization of astro mainly looks like keeping up with all my cooldowns and knowing what classes benefit more from the card dmg boost than others. so, purposefully giving the card to a black mage instead of red mage or bard, or a samurai/reaper instead of dragoon or monk. more damage to boost, more damage done. this video was the first time I'd heard an explanation of how to stockpile my cards, but that does make sense. Gunbreaker is pretty easy for me since I just play it like a high apm summoner. Literally just, do the rotation and weave your mitigations wherever you can. Warrior is still the easiest tank for sure, but lvl 50 dark knight just feels clunky and weird. Pally in my hands is fine, but mid. also summoner puts me to sleep and scholar doesn't make sense to me. But the mindset of setting up the blackmage as an artillery turret is a fun puzzle to figure out, though I've only got blackmage to 52 or so. I could go through my impressions on all the classes, but I think these are the most interesting takes I have.
The specific oddity with white mage in lower level content is that it is the only healer with nothing other than regular healing spells until level 50, with the other three having at least SOMETHING very early on. That tends to make the low level experience as white mage quite tough! Just to add some detail to that experience you had!
The fact that we can have this discussion here is a fairly solid argument that the game isn't homogenized. Perhaps the healers are, but not the game as a whole.
I might be midcore at combat but im hardcore at crafting >:) perfect rotations every time. Dont even use the online calcs anymore ive just internalized it at this point lol.
After watching your video I think now I know why I've given up caring about clearing content it doesn't matter how well you play, all that matters if you still enjoy the game.
Tbh I think its job dependent. Dps are fine as is. Healers seem to just be easy. Tanks are brain dead for the most part. Gnb being the hardest due to how strict it is.
The way you describe all this, the parser players are actually kind of bad at the game because they have no ability to adapt? Was that intentional, because that's how it comes off.
That is certainly not intentional 😊 the parser aims for such perfectionism that "adapting" isn't good enough. To get the best parse, you would genuinely have to get everything right, and then also be lucky with crits and stuff. They don't need to adapt, because they should have the fight memorized from start to finish perfectly, and have no need for adjusting on the fly. I hope this makes more sense 😊
A lot of the things you say about "parsers" feels incredibly disconnected from the reality. I want to say this as someone who pretty much only optimizes nowadays, and I can't really relate to a lot of the things you are saying. I understand you tried to just group a massive playerbase into generalisations, but with that you also missed the mark on quite a few things. Perhaps I am somehow biased or overly defensive, but from your video alone I get the feeling you don't really like "parsers".
I think a lot of people that are into optimizing got the impression that I was directly talking about them because they identify as a parser because they might post parses and weigh themselves based on them. What I was referring to are those that almost make a sport out of parsing, those that aim to have "the best" parse which requires things like crit luck. These people there are not many of, but are a strong contrast to an excessively casual player ("openers are pointless anyway!" and the like), in that there is a point where optimization also goes a bit too far. Most of us understand this, but if you want to be the best, it can get a bit silly. Indeed, I could've called them perfectionists too, but as far as I understand, the real problem is that for some reason people take offense to being referred to as a parser, when I was mainly using that term because there is a selection of players that take it to such a degree that you'd think they were hired to do so 😊 I actually didn't try to group that massive of a group, given that I described three examples of players, which allows each individual to find themselves somewhere between them. You can use dps meters and fflogs and not identify yourself as a parser by the example given here, but usually when people complain about parsers, it's this excessive level that can come up. I am quite indifferent to parsers, as I mostly care about everyone being allowed to be here. The video was actually intended to demonstrate how three vastly different perspectives can make a job be observed vastly differently, and was not actually intended to dunk on any of them, even if you get that impression
@@CaetsuChaijiCh I get what you're saying, but perhaps you chose your personalities incorrectly. You describe someone who is a religious perfectionist who needs to "crit, otherwise wipe", while having the perfect rotation. Maybe this is the impression you've gotten of a normal person in this echelon, but it's not like that at all. Perhaps instead of "parser", you should've picked someone more akin to an "optimizer", and the reason for this is that the parser you are describing has opinions that no one wants to hear. You make the "high end dps player" sound like annoying perfectionists, and if you chose that type of player, the toxic know it all who goes for only perfection, then well okay, I guess you managed, but the simple truth of those kinds of players is that they have irrational opinions that are extremely biased and without proper thought put into them. I think if you wanted to have a more clear perspective of what optimizers really think about difficulty, you should've picked a personality that can take an objective view on job difficulty and rate them as such, not the toxic parser personality who will never give an opinion that isn't biased towards their own needs. Perhaps I'm not offended, just annoyed. Optimizers are extremely cool people, and I've met so many great ones who can describe you some incredibly interesting techniques and optimizations to apply to gameplay. I would rather have that group of amazing peeps represented as "high end dps" than the toxic "no crit = wipe" playerbase. (which is also a generalisation because top tier speedkillers will have to do this, but this is such a small group of players they're practically an exception, pun not intended).
@psclly i get what you mean, and I will admit I could have chosen a different word to describe them. But the whole point was that an "objective view of job difficulty" is difficult, because different parts of the community (even different sections of a section of a community) will view what is difficult as different. That was kind of what I was going for: a very casual player would probably view a job like machinist as trivial because they don't care about the fixed rotation. A midcore (or whatever you wanna call it?) would care to know this, which would cause them to rank it as harder. A perfectionist (or in my case I chose to call this individual a parser in the video), would probably not care that much about the difficulty of performing a fully predictable rotation. In fact, they probably practiced it to death, so it isn't even a problem. However a more random rotation (such as bards), you can't perfect to the same degree, because every go will be different. Hence the perfectionist (or parser in my explanation) would find it harder to get that perfect parse with a bard, than with a machinist, and so judge bard as harder. Meanwhile, and I didn't cover this in the video, there's a reasonable chance a midcore or even casual player would view bard as easier, as the randomness the perfectionist judges as difficult, makes it harder to do things perfectly, making the average performance perceived as easier to achieve, making bard appear easier by comparison to machinist. I then went on to take other examples of course, but the whole point of the video wasn't to dunk on anyone, but specifically and quite literally, demonstrate that "objective difficulty" isn't really something we can agree on 😅 But I get what you mean. Personally, I don't mind parsers. Neither the ones doing it for a bit of fun, nor those that take it too far. In fact, I enjoy learning how far we can push things. And my perspective on the game is that improving is always a good thing, so it would be weird to intentionally antagonize those trying to be the best. As I said, I didn't actively attempt to antagonize anyone. In fact I was actually more concerned about calling the casuals casuals because that is also viewed as a negative term, and I only after the fact learned that people found the parser word choice negative in this situation 😅 For my part, as far as I knew, people don't call the average optimizing savage raider, or someone who optimizes in general, a parser, which is why I didn't make the connection that anyone " below" the most sweatiest grinders of parses (not meant in a negative way) would identify with the character I presented in the example 😣
I cringed hard at the classification of optimization and speedkill-oriented players as parsers, as if casuals and midcore players don't parse. Big L honestly.
I feel like you missed the point, given that I described the parser as specifically the type of player to optimize to an excessive degree, because most players know what is meant when you refer to that as a parser. Last i checked you JUST had to refer to the other people that parse (as you said) as casuals and midcore as well, without calling them parsers right? 😊 To reiterate, I was referring to a parser as someone who aims for the highest possible parse, which while is optimization and speed killing, can easily reach excessive degrees 😉
As someone who picked up Gunbreaker and Machinist while I was still learning the game, I would consider myself a midcore player at this point and I definitely see exactly what you mean. When I was going through the MSQ on machinist it absolutely was a case of just pressing buttons when they were up (and my friend had to remind me once to use my off globals outside my hypercharge window). But now that I'm starting to get through savage level content (cleared P9, progging 10 and Criterion) I'm making an effort to learn the proper rotations and get better. When you're just hitting buttons when they light up these jobs are super easy, but knowing when to save and when to spend is a great way to express skill and it shows. Recovering from mistakes is also something I need to work on learning, so thanks for that reminder. Good video, I completely agree
I'm glad to hear that my examples aren't completely outlandish! It is a great idea to work on your mastery like that! Especially while doing savage content of course!
I've never heard such an accurate description of "midcore" 😂
You even got the part about me getting extremely excited when my Monk friend popped brotherhood as soon as I used delirium 😅
Well I am glad to hear my examples were somewhat on point! 😁
Dont care about difficulty. Just punch as Monk
Ah a person of culture
*Just dragon kick
Dragon Kick*
Incorrect, dragon kick spam is the true monk way
I often joke in my static that I play the easiest job in this game (dnc) and while I have gotten to the point where it is actually easy. A lot of little choices you make add up, saving feathers, standard step timings, making sure absolutely nothing in your burst drifts…yeah it’s easy but it’s the little optimizations I’m proud of.
Even the easiest jobs in the game have depth, and that should not be a surprise to anyone! 😁
Funnily enough, I find Dragoon one of the harder jobs to play because of how static it is, how strict it is to align buffs with your other OGCDS, and how busy it feels during bursts. My fingers hurt easily from rapid button pressing and I get overwhelmed. I find Scholar a comfortably easy job that I often doze off on because I place Eos where it needs to be and then just let it do its work. I don't even run extremes or anything similar - I'd consider myself somewhere between casual and midcore.
Okay thats funny because DRG is for me almost the easiest Meele. (I also play GNB, MCH a lot) Thats why the reason why heavy weaving and a strict rotation is for me not hard, but playing something like Monk or Ninja? Hell no and i will never touch a Healer in High End Content
I think it's also possible for the same person to have each of these perspectives on different classes based on where they are in learning that class too.
For example, I went from "Dancer is the easiest class!" when I was starting out on Dancer to "HOLY MOTHER OF GOD HOW DO PEOPLE TOLERATE THESE BURST PHASES" when I started using it in Savage.
Incidentally, red mage was the opposite. I went from "HOLY MOTHER OF GOD HOW DO YOU EVEN PLAY THIS" to "lol this is the easiest class"
That is also very possible yes! And sometimes it can also be a matter of simply being more or less invested in a specific job! 😁
Yeah when I was learning dnc, it was easy. Then when I sat down and got to working on fine tuning my rotation and opener I was like "oh, damn this is less forgiving" and now it's brain-dead for me 😂
You were absolutely spot-on! There's only two things I think you missed:
1 - I think the name for "parser" could've been chosen better. I've done plenty of barsing and have a good few oranges (and even a nice pink!), but I've never really seen anyone take luck or small mistakes that seriously. I 100% believe this happens with people shooting for literally top 1 (especially considering things like BLM-dpecific strats and sandbagging) but I don't think it really happens elsewhere.
B - For me I think a lot of what makes a job easy or hard aren't just the optimizations, but how they fit into a fight. This does mean that jobs can be easier or harder on specific fights. For example, DRK on TEA is *significantly* easier than DRK on P11S; even though TEA is orders of magnitude harder, the boss in P11S is often not strong enough to break your TBN if you're geared, which leads to either mitigation or damage loss nightmares.
It's also part of why I think jobs like DNC or NIN are trivially easy while others like DRG or GNB are absurdly hard. Strictly speaking, DRG and GNB have fairly easy rotations, but taking into consideration just how strict resource generation can be for GNBs, or just how much movement you lose as a DRG, actually performing said rotations in a fight can be nightmarishly difficult. In P12SP1 for example, you have to do all of your jumps during the movement part of SC1. DNC and NIN on the other hand, are WAY faster jobs with more things going on, but you only have 1 or 2 things you can't drift, and the rest is easily resolved by just smacking a dummy for half an hour.
Great video as always!
I play goon in p12, I dunno wtf you're talking about. Those jumps can be done in moments when you're standing still waiting for a mech to hit. First on the spread/stack, then on lasers and the final one on the in-out, you don't exactly sit still but the dodge is literally a pixel. Slidecasting is harder than drg in that fight, especially when you consider they don't jump at all during sc2a!
@@pointlessmike That makes sense LMAO, I'm a pretty bad Dragoon 🤣
I always try to be as objective as possible when it comes to difficulty of jobs and how they are MEANT to be played. But you also have to leave room for people to make mistakes and how jobs play mid to hardcore. Pressing buttons at random and pressing buttons PERFECTLY are edge cases to take into account, but not base your data set on. Its kind of a misnomer to go that far even. Because on the parser end example, at that point ONE mistake is cause for a wipe. Which said margin of error for every job will be one misplay. So then every job is factually the same difficulty - perfection.
One time someone told me using Life Surge on DRG outside of Lance Charge windows is playing the job, "wrong." Less than 100% purely optimal with no argument? Yes. "Wrong?" That's such a reductive view and definitely elitist as hell. Right now DRG is "so busy" that they're reworking it (it needs a rework because it's perfection, not because it's busy). If dropping one Life Surge outside of buff alignment so you have a little bit more breathing space for your other 20 weaves (difficult for many people) you have to do is "wrong" then what's the point of anything anymore? So is picking a sub-optimal job, and last I checked the people who start forcing jobs are the kinda people we don't want to deal. There's only 8 "correct" jobs to play, you're playing "Wrong."
it's just a flawed mindset that really isn't useful for this kind of discussion, imo. I love my DRG, I love my weave economy. But I recognize that said weave economy is difficulty, and difficulty that can be lessened by one tiny sub-optimal play. It's not like you've gone full casual and using a freestyle rotation, it's one oGCD. Not even Ultimate is that precise.
I absolutely agree. The life surge example is also excellent, since I seem to recall there is a whole priority list based on what your options are to land life surge on. Granted you could land life surge in every Lance charge, but given that your filler combo is 10 steps long, there is a very real possibility that heavens thrust isn't going to be in Lance charge. And there is a whole table priority list of what is better. So even if we were going to take the "optimizers perspective", life surge always in Lance charge might still be inaccurate!
It's similar to how I heard someone say that ever casting a cold f3 as blm is a dps loss, forgetting that it is also a dps loss to use every sharp cast on Firestarters. And simultaneously incredibly unlikely to have a Firestarter for every astral fire state on rng alone. Sometimes, people can forget that perfect isn't even always possible, let alone necessary as you mentioned!
@@CaetsuChaijiCh Two of my favorite content creators in conversation. Love it.
Recently I've been trying to kick my habit of a casual AST, playing AST since the moment I reached heavenward years ago. Playing cards randomly, and trying to squeeze in the 1 odd 3 even combo to maximize cards. It definitely felt harder but it's honestly the reason why I love AST.
As long as it enhances your enjoyment of the job, I think that is an excellent choice! 😁
@@CaetsuChaijiCh Definitely! First time raiding was in endwalker, p1s. It was an experience worth remembering, definitely one of my most enjoyable moments in ffxiv. I'm now on p11s, hoping to clear next week!
As a definite "midcore" player, I am *aware* that buff windows are supposed to line up, and I make an effort to get everything lining up in the 2-minute window, but the fact of the matter is that in 99% of random Duty Finder groups you're lucky if all your allies use their raid buffs *at all*, let alone use them effectively or predictably. In most content I just kinda focus on my own stuff and don't expect anything from my allies beyond what you outline as the "casual" way of approaching jobs. I think it's hard to even attempt the more "hardcore" mindset and playstyle unless you're playing with a static where you all know what's up and are actively communicating.
It's also worth noting that a lot of content in the game is dungeons, where the time between bosses throws an additional wrench into the idea of multiple people in the party lining up their buffs and bursts. Some people don't use 2-minute cooldowns on mob pulls ever, some people use them on the very first pull after a boss with the plan that it'll likely be up by the next boss (but sometimes it isn't, or it's delayed a bit), and some people use them on cooldown no matter what.
I'm still going through the msq, and yeah I can relate. Though I do miss getting commendations solely for keeping an eye on when my dance partner enters their burst window so I know when to use devilment, I'm also finding sage quite fun.
So a follow-up question would be: when the devs are making job changes, which group(s) should they focus on for feedback?
On the surface it seems like the obvious answer is "listen to all the groups", and there's precedent for this. Back in Heavensward, a number of jobs like DRG and BLM were extremely punishing if you dropped their rotation and needed to recover -- in other words, they had high skill floors. The Casual player in your example might not be too worried if they dropped their rotation, or even might see the proper rotation as too stressful and prefer a rotation that is suboptimal but easier to perform (ex. a Fire1 BLM at lv60). Nowadays, the skill floor has been lowered on most jobs, not only to help them feel more accessible, but also because PF groups in HW would regularly fail DPS checks since all you needed was one player flubbing their rotation. There is also precedent for changes based on feedback from Parsers, such as removing Pre-Pull Doton and other similar openers that would result in 40+ sec pull timers. Because Parsers didn't like long pull timers but would tolerate them, and Midcore players would get driven insane because "the tiny boost to DPS can't be worth the long timer, just do a 15s countdown"
But those were examples where everyone's interest aligns, so everyone was happy or at least neutral to a change. What happens when two groups want different things? Take the upcoming AST rework as an example. Casual players who are old enough, miss the uniqueness of HW card effects, and complain that every card has been homogenized to flat damage buffs. Parser players meanwhile are optimizing which jobs get which buffs on which burst windows (as you highlighted in the video), but are generally annoyed by the high APM of their burst window or the RNG of Minor Arcana or even their normal cards. If one group wants Rework AST to be more complicated, and another group wants Rework AST to be streamlined, isn't one group inevitably going to be disappointed?
Indeed! There isn't really an answer that satisfies everyone unfortunately, and because of that, the developers would have to choose a group to focus on. Personally I think the logical ones to focus on are the larger majorities, but part of the problem is that whenever we see discussion or complaints about a job, that is a potential minority that dislikes something. The people that like what is already there rarely speak up loudly about it, so we don't know how large this potential majority (even though it might not even be a majority) is!
That's a bit back and forth, but ultimately it's hard to find a good answer 😅
Any job you don't have muscle memory built on is going to be difficult. Example, I have little experience on RDM, I find the job difficult; but BLM I have a lot of experience and find it easy. Even though everyone will say RDM is easier then BLM, it all just comes from experience.
Also true! I've met black mages that said they didn't know how to play summoner, meanwhile they said this right after going over some non standard blm lines 😂
It's very much also about muscle memory and experience!
I am very much in that midcore area and that description of casual players I wish were more accurate. All I want of people not intersteed in hyper learning their job is to at least know what their moves do and attempt to use them. Whenever I get someone in duty finder who never presses a raid buff or just 1-2-3s their way through level 90 content I feel baffled, how do you not see the big flashy "new skill unlocked" and not want to know what it does, who wants to play like they're at level 35? Also casual players who attempt to use everything are easier to teach, because you can show them an opener and explain the logic behind it, and even if they may struggle/not want to memorise the full thing, the core concepts they will probably at least understand even if they dont use, whereas the person who never presses technical step has mmuch more immediate and disruptive problems that ACTUALLY will slow down a casual content run beyond normal variance.
That is a very good point! The players that refuse to use most of their toolkit can be much harder to teach, since there's often some weird reason for it. Whereas the ones using everything might even appreciate learning a more effective way to use the buttons!😁
I sort of aimed to describe an above average casual player because I felt it would be unfair to use the worst possible casual player as the example! 😅
Yeah, they're probably more prevalent than they seem, because a casual player who doesnt overperform, but still does an ok job, you won't notice, silent majority and all that @@CaetsuChaijiCh
this is a really interesting watch as someone who has every job at max level but hasn’t gone out of my way to learn a lot of them, especially ones i used to play in shadowbringers and stopped in endwalker, and all of these jobs are one or the other. gunbreaker and machinist are my current two main jobs, and the rest are ones i used to main in shb. i’m noticing that my approach to the first two is very in line with the midcore player, while the rest i do very casually. i suppose that makes sense, i don’t care about drk or sam to the extent that i would read up on what to do to execute their two minute burst optimally, and i disliked the endwalker changes to ast enough that i don’t want to learn how to actually use its tools properly.
I can kinda forgive not fully understanding a job and playing it in content, but if you walk into a dungeon having no idea what you're doing, that will test everyone's patience. Looking especially at RDMs who single target Verthunder II, NIN who single target Doton (bonus points if the target sits on it for less than 10s, making the overall damage weaker than Fuma Shuriken, yikes!), and ice mage BLMs.
As someone who's currently going through the 2.x MSQ as a Paladin (and thus is currently playing with a burst window of "weave exactly two oGCDs into your weaponskill combo whenever you can"), I'm not sure what I consider myself right now. Currently, my primary focus is learning tank fundamentals; with how basic the PLD kit is in 2.x, I tend not to really think about the kit itself, and am focusing more on learning how to pull correctly and how to deal with certain mechanics in boss fights.
I imagine that once I reach ShB/EW I want to be a healthy level of midcore. Try to get a good DRK opener, manage my MP and Blood as best as I can, and maybe freestyle a bit depending on whatever happens during the fight. If I think too much about the optimal play at any moment, I'm worried I'll freeze up.
Indeed, fundamentals are very important, especially as a tank!
When doing "casual content" (as in, not extremes and beyond), you don't have to be perfect. However, striving to be better is always commendable!
not something you ought to worry about until you finish the story and get a feel for what endgame content you enjoy. most job kits are pretty stripped at lower levels, and some change a lot as you level them. definitely worth focusing on game fundamentals until you get into higher end content!
At low level, and especially on Paladin which is IMO absurdly boring until at least the 70-80 level range, there's not really much to optimize anyway. At level 50 and below hitting everything when it lights up is pretty much all you need on most jobs.
Casual savage raider here. Kind of oxymoronic, but my mentality is definitely closer to a casual -- got into savage raiding recently, currently pfing through P10S. The divide between the mid and casual gap is pretty big -- lots of people in my groups are aghast that I don't learn rotations or openers at all, it's almost all winging it (which I think is easier with controller). I definitely subscribe to the "if we clear it's fine" philosophy; for me the main thing with savages is just learning the mechs and not dying to them. I feel like most enrages are not due to improper dps rotations but by being hit with damage down (either via death or mechanic failure)
I'm also the kind of person that refuses to learn combo inputs in fighting games.
I've spent the majority of my playtime as an AST main (then fully transitioning into all the healers), and I can safely say I'm a midcore player, but slowly pushing myself towards a "parser" or "more optimal" form of gameplay.
As I've dipped my toes to Savages proper (progged LC2 on P9S, aiming to clear maybe this weekend?) I've started to watch AST clear vods and seeing what they do so I can implement it in my gameplay, and reading stuff from the Balance (which exposed me to the odd-minute card priority). I generally want to play as optimally as I can in any game I play as I find it fun to play that way, but not as strict on myself since I am a human being who makes mistakes so whenever I drop the wrong card type or drift Divination a GCD late, or when my cards overcap I say to myself "hey you shouldn't forget this, but it's fine you're still improving, you'll get better at this eventually."
Interestingly, this is the first time I heard anyone even suggest wiping due to "play card mistakes" before, and that sounds like a player I wouldn't want to get along with so I'll strive to not be like that kind of player haha.
part of the equation is also skill floor - how hard is the job to play to an acceptable degree? That and the realization you can complete all of the content in the game without even nearing the skillcap of certain jobs.
For example, there is a huge misconception about BLM being a super hard job to play in the casual playerbase where most of the difficulty of the job is make full use of non-standard lines, where the difference between someone using the easy transpose lines and someone basically playing perfectly is within like 1-ish%. Playing standard rotation BLM and doing some basic transpose lines like transpose from ui into af1f3p or blizzard 1 recovery is not overly difficult, doesnt require extensive fight knowledge to pull off and you usually will outdamage everyone by a large margin (including SAM by the way, if you're running crit BLM and get lucky with xenoglossy dh crits :) ) if you don't make major mistakes. I would even go as far to say that it's easier to play in a midcore context (e.g. savage prog) than RDM because you have tons of mobility that's immediately available to use so you won't lose potency for longer mobility phases if you plan beforehand (which, to those who haven't done savage yet, is easier to accomplish than you think it is)
I do ultimates, parse purples as SAM in current Sav and purple as GNB in legacy ultimates... and the idea of wiping because i didn't get a CDH DD is insane to me.
howdy, I'm what ya might call a "midcore" AST, but at the same time it's difficult to say because of how I use my cards. I pretty much always draw a card on cooldown (because mana.) and always try to give them to the right target for 6% dps instead of 3%. So I basically play them as I get them even though I often forget to use minor arcana. as for Divination I try to use it in my opener and whenever its available after words so every 2 minutes or so. When it comes to Astrodyne though I just use it as soon as I get 3 seals regardless of type. if my seals lined up properly, great, if not, oh well. I just take the RNG L when it comes to losing damage or w/e because Astrodyne has no cooldown on its own and really just depends on my card luck. I mean yeah I could always wait till I had the correct 3 seals but... RNG be RNG, yo.
Oh the key thing with astrologian is that since you can hold a card, and have two charges, you could play three during and before divination. But since you can't hold four cards in any way, optimization dictates that you play one card a minute later (where you would have one card in hand, and one charge), thus ensuring you have three when divination is back.
For aatrodyne, it is never worth it to wait for three different seals. But making sure to redraw so you get unique seals is the optimal way to play (focus on YOUR SEALS, Not who receives the card. That comes second). If you do that, then there is a 100% chance you get the speed boost (2 seals), and a 66% chance you get the damage bonus from aatrodyne. Again looking at optimization, you optimally use aatrodyne during divination, but this would also mean that sometimes you can aatrodyne just before you play three cards. Play three and divination, and then aatrodyne again when it ends.
These kinds of tricks is what astrologians use to optimize around raid buff windows. However this isn't actually necessary unless you are trying to be perfect, or just trying to optimize. But it is optional.
I hope some of this helps you! 😁
I mighta mispoke, lol other than the holding cards thing (outside of opener) I don't really do that but otherwise yeah I always go for minimum of 2 unique seals with redraw and I get that at least 95% of the time. Sometimes I have horrid luck and end up with 3 of the same seal but that rarely happens thankfully. But more often than not I get all 3 seals :)@@CaetsuChaijiCh
Samurai on the highest dofficulty doesnt loop at all but plays "ad-hoc" instead. Its kind of an advanced freestyle and typically what you would want to do for parsing or in Ultimates since looping in ultimates is not really helpful
A very good point! This is indeed sort of what I was trying to alude to! 😁
I lean more into the hardcore side of things and I'd say the only "problem" with the video is that the skill gaps are a lot more pronounced than you described, at least in my experience.
The true hyper casuals I've seen around don't even know what a rotation is, keeping their GCD rolling is a miracle and if they do something other than 1-2-3 consider yourself blessed. Your hyper casual would be what I consider as just casual.
Midcore is mostly accurate, but I'd add a tier between Midcore and Elitist, which would be the Hardcore tier.
People like Xenosys Vex or Katana Azurite would fall under this new category: really good players who will try to go for the best possible damage with optimized rotations, but are grounded enough not to throw a hissy fit and wipe the group when they don't crit and know when ultra optimizing a run isn't worth it (seriously, you don't need a countdown for a normal raid).
In all my years playing XIV, I've only seen one person who truly embodied your definition of Elitist, it was a Monk back in the Eden's Verse tier, he joined parties (both prog and reclears), stayed for one run and insta-bailed if you wiped or didn't meet his standards, which is wild considering that was PF with parties not listed as parsing parties.
I definitely *feel* like a midcore player. I use resources like the balance to learn stuff, but I'm not gonna fall over if I let Mage's Ballad go for 40secs instead of ~30. And I like the feeling of completing a good opener or looking at enmity and seeing I'm right behind the tank, but I also use combat macros so I clearly don't mind a few mistakes lol. I've yet to really get into extremes or savage yet though, mostly because I'm a little nervous about looking for a group to run content with and I don't know how people handle pf extremes/savages. I would like to someday though.
That seems very reasonable! And it can be hard to get into savage content definitely! The best I can offer to help you get started, is that I do have a guide on how to prepare yourself for savage (or extreme), which maybe could help you find a way forward when the day comes 😊
Here is a link in case you are interested: ruclips.net/video/FtomquU84-o/видео.htmlsi=rB9eFcqx1ERBTy3g
I wonder which category I fall under. I highly doubt that I come anywhere close to the parser category. I don't even play Savage.
I care a *lot* about doing my opener and rotation correctly. To the point where if I judge that I simply can't play a class right, then I drop that class, even if it's one that I want to play. There are 3 to 7 other players counting on me. I don't want to waste their time.
For the examples that you listed specifically.
Machinist: Not too hard, but also just not my vibe. Prefer Dancer.
Gunbreaker: I *love* this class. It's my main tank, and my go-to whenever I need to tank something. For me it's really easy.
Dark Knight: I don't think this class is difficult, so much as it is clunky. Out of the four tanks, this one feels actively not fun. It feels like its kit is fighting against itself.
Samurai: This is, in my opinion, one of the most difficult classes to play in the game. How *anyone* can play this optimally without three hands is beyond me. I have tried on multiple occasions to play this class, and I just can not. I want to play this class so bad, but...how do people even play this?! Ninja and Monk are *leagues* easier to play than this. Maybe influenced by Ninja being one of my main DPS, but still!
Astrologian: Just like Machinist, it's not my vibe, so difficulty is N/A to me. Prefer Scholar.
The super interesting thing about this is that you can be a very optimization heavy, perhaps even somewhat perfectionistic player, without being interested in playing the content where this amount of perfection is required. The way you evaluated the jobs matches with such a perspective to me at least, since the jobs you weighed as very difficult or awkward are jobs that are mainly difficult (or awkward) when you try to perfect them, but are often considered deceptively easy when you don't focus on that. The jobs you focus your time on, like GNB and NIN, have bursts of high precision and perfectionism, followed by resting periods, which make them have a much higher skill floor, but once mastered, can be easier to maintain in most content as a result. That is at least how I view it!
@@CaetsuChaijiCh I see. Thanks for explaining that. I just think that I have to be doing my best, regardless of the content, casual or not. Those parties are all real people, and I don't want to let 'em down.
Knowing your vids, being I've been watching them from my other channel for a long while now. I knew this would be an amazing video and set up to react to it. I laughed so hard, so spot on, with some things feeling directed right at me because it was so accurate. I appreciate all the work you do for the community, your number crunching and rotation info is super helpful.
Thank you so much! That makes me very happy to hear that you enjoyed it so much! 😄🥰
@@CaetsuChaijiCh There's days I actually go looking for your videos directly ahead of many others. Love the content.
I often say DRK is harder then GNB and People like "You wtf?" but Gunbreaker is tbh not that hard, its just a very strict rotation and some boss knowledges when Tankbuster comes etc (like activate your mitigation before the tankbuster even starts or know what ability you should first when you have a tankbuster in a Burst window) but Gunbreaker is in the most case rly easy because you just need _normal weaving_ no double weaving most of the time like.. in Gnashing Fang 1 GCD then Hyperfelocity and provoke 2 GCD Hyperfelocity and mitigation etc.. when its normal for you to double weave Gunbreaker is not that hard, DRK can sometimes be more fuck up because something like.. TBN dont break.. you was unanble to selfheal yourself after Living Dead because bad server ping (when you have no heal crits you need 4 hits and i already have a rare case where the server ping literally kills me but that also just happens when you have no heal support at all.. even some hots or small heal is already enough to avoid this) But yeah is always a question of the own POV
Im somewhere between Midcore and Parser (i dont care about crits or how other player play their job when we clear the content but i enjoy making as much damage as possible with my job)
I've had a similar experience with the drk versus gnb comparison 😊 I do think it is very much about how people perceive the jobs at a glance somewhat!
@@CaetsuChaijiCh Yeah because DRK no Tank is harder to parsing then DRK, GNB? I make a Top 100 worldwide parse in P12S P2 through _pure luck_ because 5 of my 9 double downs where crit or direct hit (i have literally a freestyle rotation at some point in this try because i fuck up something like Sonic Break then Double Down and after that i _start_ with Gnashing Fang)
GNB, PLD have some few high potency attacks but DRK? nothing has a higher potency then 600 (Double Down has 1200 in compare) means you need to play DRK Perfect and have some rng crit luck.. while Gunbreaker "When double down crits you are fine!"
aside from holding a dark arts proc for buffs drk really doesn't have crazy optimization. just hit everything on cooldown (doesn't really matter what order as long as they dont drift) and dont overcap. no actual rotation outside of spamming everything during burst windows. GNB has a set loop and a lot stricter tolerances with weave windows because missing a gnashing ogcd is unrecoverable; drk can weave whatever whenever and don't really lose anything unless you let your mana overcap somehow. TBN breaking or not is generally only a problem in normal content where it doesn't drastically effect anything anyway (though I do wish you didn't loose dps from your main mitigation tool only being 95% consumed instead of 100%).
@tabs5941 technically if we are going to get real specific here, the order in which you use your cooldowns as a gunbreaker during no mercy doesn't matter very much either, as long as they all land in no mercy. And if you suggest that the order matters because you want specific harder hitting attacks to be sure to land in other raid buffs, then that actually is the same argument for why dark knight cares somewhat about their order too. Even if it isn't exactly as much! 😊
Indeed messing up continuation in general serves as an example of a clear mistake that you get punished for (similar to ninja bunny jutsu and monk celestial revolution), but then again we could view TBN as a similar kind of punishing mechanic 😅 it is complicated because both jobs are difficult in their own right. And a huge part in what you personally find harder or easier depends on you 😁
I would consider myself a mid-core player.
During Shadowbringers I found Gunbreaker fairly easy to play 'correctly'.
But in Endwalker, once they added an extra wrinkle to the charges, keeping everything aligned became what I started to consider it 'hard'.
I all but gave up on tanking after that as it was just too much to keep track of.
Unfortunate that it made you stop tanking as a whole! Maybe you'd enjoy a different tank, if the problem was gunbreaker? 😊
The biggest difference between GNB and DRK is that GNB is about fitting everything into No Mercy, while DRK is about fitting everything into every raid buff overlapped. In high end content, that's the same window. But if you put an optimizer player into low end content, the GNB is gonna be doing their own thing and the DRK is gonna be ripping hairs out over whether to put all their edge of shadows into tech finish or pray and hope the ninja uses mug at the tail end.
That is a very well put example yes! 😂
At worst the DRK will just give up altogether optimizing in that situation I suppose!
As a DRK main, that moment when a tankbuster arrives with the burst window 😅😢💀
I definitely range across the spectrum a bit on Dancer. In a dungeon I'll likely play the casual for the most part, but anything else I'll be practicing weaving properly, trying to save resources for burst window, trying to keep things smoothly on cooldown, etc. So i guess overall I'd be solidly midcore.
Of course that means now that I'm finally able to do savage content, I'm stuck on shield healer which is a frustrating experience lol
How come you are stuck on a shield healer for savage? Static only had that space? Or do you not feel comfortable optimizing dancer? 😊
@CaetsuChaijiCh i made the silly decision to put myself up as a flex pick because I'm a bit too much of a people pleaser when it comes to getting to join in on something i didn't think I'd get much of a chance to experience to begin with.
It's working, but i definitely am not a healer main like i used to be years ago.
when i was learning monk i got confused because the rotation i found required to weave 2ogcds which contradict the abc rule since i can only weave 1ogcd without delay gcd
so i just decided to go freestyle
the midcore description is so accurate lol
Yeah monk can be a bit tight if your connection isn't great!
You'd have to adjust the known rotation and openers slightly if you can only single weave, and it would still be mostly fine I think, but I absolutely understand how it can feel confusing! 😅
Feel like a good example for this is DRG since I’ve seen a mix of people thinking it’s braindead easy with its low skill floor but also mixed reception at higher levels whether thinking it’s easy to optimize or difficult to.
I can't not float that fucking rotation💀
Dragoon is also a good example yes! In my personal experience, it feels like most people aren't sure what to think because of the perception you mentioned 😅
Some feel it is easy, but other melee jobs are perceived as easier. Some feel it is hard, but other melee jobs are perceived as harder! Ultimately it always partly depends on the person, but I do think the amount of buff alignment and unintuitive parts of the rotation should rank it as quite hard to me!
I would argue gunbreaker is the best tank for a casual player to take steps into midcore, based on the points you make about GNB's no mercy window. The window is on every minute too, so you can tell pretty quick how consistent you're being during downtime.
That is a very good point actually! Gunbreakers clear fail states makes it obvious when you do things wrong, and the fact that it's success criteria are also rather specific, means you are doing mostly right once you get past the initial skill floor! 😁
@@CaetsuChaijiCh I'm sure there are other builder/spenders that have similar management, but your video made me realise "oh, this is perfect to get comfortable with aligning your one minute burst" across jobs in general.
I think, even though people rag on SMN, it's possibly THE BEST job at 90 for understanding the 2 minute meta because it's literally built around it. I'm hoping in DT it gets a little flexibility in the 91-100 skills.
Not necessarily a parser but to optimize especially your main job, its how you will be a better player, with casual mindset who doesn't give much effort or rather not even doing bare minimum, they'll not improve. I kinda disagree with casual having insanely high skill but not doing hard content, how do they know they're that good without even testing their skill? Like, if im gonna learn another job, i would rather learn from a raider or parser, rather than a "high skill casual", because they only can assume, not proving it that they really know about their job.
With the RNG of AST cards, I actually don't know how to react fast enough to burst a card on the correct person every GCD without clipping. I also wonder if 250ms+ ping makes it harder, maybe the drawn cards show up on screen later.
With 250ms based on my knowledge it should be flatout impossible to double weave without clipping.
But in terms of technique when double weaving in the burst, if at all possible, it is preferable to do the draw weave as the late weave since that at least gives you the gcd cast itself to think about what to do with the card. But genuinely, it is not supposed to be easy at all, so if you find it difficult, with or without latency, that is perfectly normal 😊
@@CaetsuChaijiCh Thanks. Yeah I need plogon to double weave. But that only goes so far.
Would a good AST be able to card the right player most of the time? Or should I worry less about that and just card *somebody* quickly and prioritise not clipping?
@Cloud7050 a perfectionist level ast would probably be able to card the exact optimal player consistently out of necessity.
Assuming that is not your target, you are already extremely good if you can card the right role (like melee card on melee and such). The most important part is making sure you get your seals/signs right, secondarily getting the cards out as fast as possible, and then thirdly landing the card on the best target. While learning, I do think taking an extra gcd to think is worth it to make sure you play your cards logically. Then you can always go faster when you get the muscle memory down! 😊
As a pretty Mid range player in your examples. I find Ninja the hardest (tho i don't like or play DRG or MNK) because you can get SO much cooldown drift if you don't do it perfectly. SAM and RPR are my favs for melee but i like a lot of BLM lately.
That is absolutely true about NIN! Often it can feel very much like it has to be perfect!
Well, at least the new Summoner gives us one thing. *_Nobody_* disagrees about how entirely anti-difficult it is.
We just disagree about whether that's a _good thing_ or not. (As a former SMN main, I absolutely think it is NOT a good thing.)
I think this is why black mage is pretty popular for casual players. Its hard to optimize, and hard to maintain constant uptime, but a casual player will simply not do those things.
That is a pretty interesting point!
I thought black mage is the least played caster?
@zillahstar6962 this can be difficult to determine since not everyone posts logs. In fact, more casual players are less likely to! But it is a decent metric, and does suggest blm is the least popular. I imagine what was meant was the thing that *is* attractive about blm for casual players were the things listed, like the high skill ceiling! 😊
What's difficult about clicking Jump? You just click Jump. You have multiple kinds of Jump. All you need is Jump.
I feel like for me I'm between midcore and parser on Reaper, but on Dark knight I'm entirely in casual based on rotation. On other classes I'd say my position is even more vague. Reaper is a lot easier to keep consistent because it has both a 1 minute and a 2 minute buff and keeping those two things lined up exactly makes the job easier to manage for me. Dark knight has a 1 minute buff but no 2 minute buff so remembering when the 2 minute buff takes place is more vague to me while playing.
The closest you get to a two minute buff for dark knight is watching living shadow, or making sure to use shadowbringer in pairs! But I totally get it. I also find it a lot easier to play reaper more efficiently, where dark knight I'm more likely to be a bit whatever at times 😅
rpr will always drift gluttony if you are playing optimally, because its rotation isn't perfectly 2mins, and every 2min loop you actually have 10 less soul gauge than the previous loop, which is also why i don't like the job too much, it feels very weird. but i appreciate that its nuance is enjoyable for some people. i'm actually curious if they are going to add more gauge generation in 7.0 to 'fix' the gauge loss over time issue
I feel like your definitions of casual, midcore, and parser are flawed. Casual and Parser seem like caricatures, while Midcore is so broadly defined as to include basically every player I know, including someone with multiple world first clears under their belt. I don't know anyone who thinks "as long as a duty was cleared, it doesn't matter how long it took," as the length of time a clear takes is one of the biggest barriers of entry for people who don't prog high end content. I don't know anyone who wipes off a single rotational mistake, because even if your own parse might suffer, that doesn't mean everyone in the party can't get a good parse (and if you crit hard enough, you can potentially parse better than your perfectly played runs). Meanwhile you define midcore as:
-Does an opener (Which everyone does, it's the first buttons you hit in an encounter)
-Does a rotation, but sometimes has to freestyle (Which, again, everyone does. A rotation is basically just the order of buttons you press)
-Likely participates in extremes and savages (Including the phrase "likely" means that they don't necessarily even have to do any high end content)
This definition of midcore includes *literally everyone who plays the game* as far as I can tell. And when the definitions for casual and parser feel so disconnected from how anyone actually plays the game, these definitions feel completely meaningless, and thus, so do the conclusions you reach from them.
An examination of the different philosophies when it comes to job difficulty would be better served by asking people of varying skill levels rather than a thought experiment in the first place. Even if fixing the issues with your definitions, there's a lot of assumptions you'd have to make in order to imagine how difficult each kind of player would find a job, when you could just talk to those kinds of players and not have to make any assumptions.
I play warrior and dk because l was told "press the buttons that lit up and that's all", lol.
It's not too far off, but of course optimizing can make something simple complicated! 😁
Edit: autocorrect turned “midcore” into “misfire. Kinda funny.
From that description, I definitely fall in the midcore category. I try to get my openers right and keep things mostly on cooldown without trying optimization tricks such as Reaper’s double Enshroud. Judging from my prog in P9S, it seems to be working. Made it to Enrage with 5% after 2 players died to Chimeric Succession and 3 more, including both healers, died to the following Two Minds due to the lack of players. We’d have mopped the floor with him otherwise(and we weren’t using potions at the time)
Indeed, the "need" to do these perfect optimizations are really only there if you are doing the savage bosses at the minimum item level, and sometimes not even then! So it's like a world first thing. Outside of that, it's just expression of skill for the most part. Doing a proper opener does however set up your rotation to just "flow nicely", which is still a valid reason to use them, when you aren't optimizing too much, as you explained! 😊 Good luck with your savage progress!
I would be aware that even on week 1 this current tier did not have a dps check, if your team has i650+ it is still completely possible to still clear with 5 wipes and a healer LB
On week 1 people wouldn't see past the lc2 front firestrikes mechanic with good damage
@@VForceWave we wanted to use healer LB3, until both healers got faceplanted by the Two Minds 😁
Because people have different skills so jobs being different makes you use different skills you're more or less proficient in to play the said job.
Basically it's subjective. Just like tastes
I would consider myself at the upper end of casual but not midcore. I do my best when I play my jobs but am probably missing some hidden nuances with them. I'm certainly not smart enough to understand why openers are as critically important as they are or why buffs lining up make such a big difference, heck parsers in alliance raid roulettes are probably screaming into their hands whenever I pop my job's raid buff. I'm also stuck in the Free-Trial for financial reasons so I'll probably never end up in content where knowing the optimal opener or learn first hand why lining up my raid buff will ever be important.
Fortunately in the content you do, optimizing at all is considered entirely optional, even if some might suggest otherwise!😊
However if you are curious about the importance of openers, I actually have a video on that too! Here is a link: ruclips.net/video/iBY84KAg3Mc/видео.htmlsi=0z3F5LjUzqi1HAsW
im new to the game and i feel bad going into dungeons because i still dont know any rotations at all
my brain just cant remember anything so i feel bad i feel like im holding everyone else back 😭
Don't worry about that! Most players will already be perfectly fine with you just trying your best 😊
This feels like one of those topics where it’d be fun to make a comment before AND after watching, so that’s what I’m gonna do.
My hypothesis is that the different contexts for the jobs have different skill thresholds that make your job FEEL easier when you play it in easy content.
A casual player is not going to need to know about Transpose Lines on Black Mage or even about the fact that TBN stacks with your other mitigation better than they stack with each other. Any of the stuff you do in the MSQ is just Not Going To Be Hard Enough For You To Need That. (Personally, I found that the hardest MSQ fight for me was a raw mechanics check anyway and my mitigation didnt particularly matter)
Once you start dipping your toes into Extremes, there’s a lot more information you have to rattle around in your head to play your job “competently” so to speak. Jobs seem harder because the entire game is harder.
That is a pretty good pre analysis yes! 😁
It seems like for the most part, my thoughts were your thoughts on this. That different people have different definitions for what is “Necessary” to play. And honestly, that’s one of the beauties of this game when you think about it.
I'd definitely count as midcore.
As a long-ish time Bard player, I do consider it way harder to "optimize" than, say, Machinist. Given in its current iteration the song rotation is very strict, meaning you have to rotate your songs at the right time while also reacting to the jobs random procs.
That's something you can absolutely feel if you're playing with a more casual Bard in your group, given if they're playing songs to their full duration it means that Battle Voice and Radiant Finale start getting used seemingly at random.
in leveling the arcanist jobs, after level 30 i played nearly purely scholar. i touched summoner maybe 5 times to get my job quests done, and it's left me really unsure about how to properly play summoner, even though a lot of people claim it's the easiest job in the game as is currently.
summoner only becomes the "easiest job" at level 86 and up
Welp, I learned something new about astrologian today, gonna try to see if I can manage this card thing, though it's hard to quickly get 3 cards down with a controller T_T.
I think I play internally like a parser, but externally like midcore I guess? If I learn something about optimizing my play I apply it, and also share whatever information I know with others, but I don't give up and throw a fight away just cause someone (or even myself) made a mistake somewhere. Though I'm only in stormblood right now so I haven't really played what is likely considered to be a hard fight yet. Even if I get to where I *do* know all the things, I would just try to teach, not...fixate on perfection.
The game is so old that I find it really difficult to find information sources that are up to date and trustworthy. I would like to know how to play my preferred classes as optimally as possible and try to apply every new thing I learn, but a lot of times between the age of the game, and the depth of the mechanics it feels like an impossible task.
Yeah on a controller it might be very hard! I can't really give advice on that unfortunately. However in regards to finding trustworthy sources for learning jobs that are up to date, I have guides for all the jobs, although they are split in a low level and high level section. But they should contain most of the information you would be interested in to start mastering. If you then want to go even further, most people will probably recommend checking "the balance" discord server, which should have the most accurate information most of the time. But its a lot of reading rather than video presentations 😊
As you are still leveling, don't break your back trying to do the card bursts if it is too difficult. It isn't outright necessary for any Content, so if you find it overwhelming and ruins your enjoyment of the job, then you don't have to 😊
@@CaetsuChaijiCh getting three at the very beginning of a fight is probably good practice at least. I will definitely poke around your channel for class guides. I've mostly been looking at the videos about weird things about the game or in its history.
Maybe I'll finally be able to play dragoon without completely sandbagging lol.
It is funny that I hear so many people dislike MNK because they think it's hard, when I just kinda picked it back up after they removed Kaiten from SAM and haven't had much problem, other than when I'm learning a fight and my brain just overloads and I don't do my rotation.
I feel like a weird half-step above that description of midcore, because I always try to do the best of my abilities, even to the point of doing the impossible task of trying to line up with the buffs of others in casual content like dungeons or alliance raids. I just feel like it makes the game more interesting than mindlessly hitting buttons, and it's always good to be somewhat in practice, even though I lost all my motivation to do things like Savage for now.
I guess I would be considered a "parser" in your definition, even though I don't parses as importantly as the name implies. I do however try to learn the best way to push damage, to play perfectly, and do indeed find MCH to be harder than what people say of it because of the numerous layers of optimisation, without even counting how to freestyle correctly back in line in case of mistake or death.
That's perfectly fair! Each of the categories are of course sliding scales you could say. Striving for perfection personally is i think a very cool target to have. And indeed, I actually feel the same way about machinist as you, and part of what inspired this video is exactly that a looot of people disagree! 😂
@@CaetsuChaijiCh Haha, yeah, popular opinions on jobs very often don't paint an accurate picture of all aspects of them, more so than other kind of subjects. I personally felt almost tricked whenever I picked and learned MCH as my main alt job, especially since I picked in great part because of its supposed simplicity lmao
wanting to play optimally doesn't necessarily make you a parser, I have 99s on every fight this teir but I don't sabotage my party member's buffs or run a fight just to parse, so I don't consider myself a parser. I just want to play my best for the sake of my personal enjoyment and standing by the people I play with.
I'm definitely mid range at best when it comes to Machinist, but my main issue with it is ping. Hard to do the fast paced parts without clipping a good amount
Yeah if you have higher latency, you can be forced to get really creative with machinist as an example just to make things work 😕
I would strongly suggest looking into the programs noclippy or XIValexander, all my international friends swear by them. they will seriously improve the game feel at high ping.
I think a second part that you mentioned at the start but didn't address further is also at play: Preference.
All other things aside, some players like direct straightforward things, some don't. Some people find upkeep things easy while others hard. I have to have macros on my healers to play a sound when my DoT is 5 sec from being up otherwise I forget about it. And even for the same thing, difficulty can be different. It's easier for me to upkeep Houton on NIN because there's a large gauge clearly displaying time remaining and rough percent remaining (the pinwheel) vs WAR's tiny little icon, even though both are effectively identical mechanically.
And then there are people just good at different kinds of things. I'm good at choosing heals wisely buy dislike high APM, so I like SCH and dislike AST, but some people feel the opposite. I find GNB easier than DRK (and sometimes WAR in terms of that upkeep buff) because it's rigidity makes it VERY easy to keep track of where you are in the rotation and what you should be doing. While this can make it difficult to get back on track and isn't perfectly optimized, as long as one is using Gnashing Fang and Blasting Zone on CD (every 30 sec, including anchored to No Mercy windows), has 3 charges for No Mercy (which you can easily track with the CD on the ability on your bar and only using Blasting Zone when you have 3 charges and have already pressed 1-2 of your melee combo so you can instantly refill it), and uses Bloodfest after Double Down and Gnashing Fang in No Mercy every other minute while rolling through your other 30/60 sec CDs, it's super easy to keep position, and all the CDs will naturally line back up again outside of weird downtime shenanigans.
I find this vastly easier than DRK's high APM and more free-wheeling opener focused on gauges (powder gauge is binary/trinary vs other 0-100 gauges and extra things like Dark Arts to juggle) and dumping large amounts of things in burst windows.
So in addition to what you say - that people assess difficulty at least partly based on what they're trying to accomplish and how readily they can spot errors - difficulty is also subjective based on what a specific individual finds difficult or easy naturally.
I think there IS an objectively correct way to play each and every class, that can determine how hard jobs are generally compared to one another (especially when you consider things like APM and how in depth astro's card system is). However, there is also the factor of people struggling with different job aspects randomly. I knew a DRK who claimed that he wanted to main PLD but he struggled too much with resquiescat.......
Indeed! This is also partly why I tried to emphasize how sometimes what makes a job appear easier than it is, is the fact that the difficult part is hidden away a bit like with drk and mch! 😊
I am wondering what that player meant exactly by having problems with requiescat though 😅
@@CaetsuChaijiChthis was last expac when you had to hold your last stack for confetior and he would just forget, guess if happened enough he gave up haha
I consider myself a midcore player, I do try in general to optimize my skill rotation, but often end up freestyling. In general, what I consider to be difficult is mostly for these reasons:
- Too many cooldown skils. I'm a little bad at keeping track of skill cooldowns and using them off cooldown, and that usually means they often end up offset of the rotation. That's why Dragoon is one of the jobs I dislike the most.
- Too many skills that can't be macro'd together. For optimal rotation, you need to have all your skills available on your hotkeys. I try optimizing their placements so that skills make sense, but for certain classes, I end up having to put certain skills in hotkeys that are awkward to reach. This is why the latest Summoner Rework makes it the easiest class ever IMO, a lot of the skills are just regrouped into a single action and changes according to your current Summon, making up a loooot of space in your hotkeys.
- Forgiving on mistakes. Once in a while, I might panic a bit and misclick a hotkey or something. For certain jobs, that costs just a bit of damage, but for other jobs, that can throw off a lot of the rotation and therefore cost a lot of damage. And of course, the main culprit for this is the Black Mage who failing to cast a spell can make your main buff expire and you have to spend time to rebuild it before being able to resume the DPS. Which is why I consider Black Mage the hardest job by far.
- Intuitive skills. Most skills have simple effects, and you know exactly when you should be using them, and with which other skill you might want to combine with. But there are certain classes that have really weird skill effects which aren't obvious about how you should make use of them. Monk is definitely one of them with so many buffs based on completely swapping the basic combo order. Some of the Healer spells are also like that, leaving you wondering in what kind of situation you'd want to use the spells.
Also regarding Bard, I don't consider it a difficult job... But I feel like it's mostly button mashing, so I find it tiring to play. My hands definitely wanted to rest when I had finished leveling up Bard.
I'm an extremely casual in all games I play, if I'm really enjoying the content or the class, I may try to improve but if that implies changing what is easy, and fun for me, I stop
In FF14 I play a Warrior on the world but a Black Mage in Duty Finder because is so fun, my rotations are really basic versions of the good ones (according to the Internet) with a limited set of skills for single or multiple targets but for me, the best about BLM is:
1. The LONG casts so I don't worry about downtime or animations because I'm always casting something
2. NOT moving because of the long casts or because I don't need to chase the mobs, I love that part! I park myself in a cozy place to rain disaster over my enemies, and I move only in life or death situations, and even then, just at the last minute
I like how some stuff look in the games I've played but I would never invest all the time, and effort needed to become good enough to get it
I must be casual, because I play MCH as my main and I have no idea about openers. I just do the main rotation, weaving the OGDs in between, slap the chainsaw and air chains after the end of the main rotation if they're up (and only if they won't waste 10 points on a 90 rook/queen gauge) and the drill with the guaranteed crit ogd. Then the quick 5 heat dump (with wildfire if available) to get the OGDs back. But then I don't do savage so it works fine for me.
Do parsers play as perfect as possible even when the content that they play (roulette) is low level or even the first dungeons like Sastasha? I wounder sometimes how fast they can clear dungeons like Sastasha or even Praetorium 🤔
Btw very nice video, I always enjoy your content! 😊
Sometimes they might. Although it would be an incredible shock if they were recording and posting their logs for parses! But there are ways to hyper optimize even super casual dungeons! Maybe that is something worth exploring! 😊
Thank you!
For my part, yes and no. At a low enough level there's just not much to even optimize, but after enough runs of Praetorium, just about anyone will start wondering if you can make it go by a little faster, and you don't exactly need to make a new spreadsheet to figure out that pooling a resource for that big pull before boss 1 is worth it. I wouldn't say it even makes much of a difference or that I actively decide "I'm going to optimize this Prae run", it's just something for my brain to do while I'm "waiting" for the dungeon to be done, and I'm used to thinking that way from the content where it matters. Actually, I only started thinking in terms of "parse" or optimizing because I found that doing the same mechanics you've mastered over and over to get to a later prog point in an Ex/Savage fight gets very dull unless you start challenging yourself to do them "perfectly" in the meantime.
I actually do try to perform my proper rotation and optimize where possible in Sastasha. Part of the fun is scraping off some seconds off the run.
As a hyper casual warrior main I smash the button that says "Fell Cleave" when I have many "Fell Cleave" it makes me happy.
Using "parser" and "elitist" for hardcore players is a bit dishonest imo.
Parser and Elitist both have negative connotations within the more casual part of the fanbase, while being hardcore and pushing your limits is far from negative.
While yes, I parse, it's to see my own improvement, run a xivanalysis and then see where I can improve.
Just because someone runs Savage and ultimates doesn't make them an elitist, as you seem to imply at the start.
I realize this problem, however it seems like most names for players that play to a high level of perfection seem to have negative connotations. However I feel like I also specified that it was a hypothetical character, and you can always figure that you yourself might be a perfectionist for example, without being an elitist 😊
To be perfectly honest, I also want to make it clear that being a "casual" is also sometimes something that is considered outright negative by some parts of the player base, so how do we communicate about these things if we can't use words that determine them?
Personally I feel "hardcore" would be inaccurate, because a significant amount of the player base views being hardcore as simply doing ultimates, which isn't necessarily the same as parsing to perfection 😊 but it seems like YOU believe that you can't actually run savage or ultimates if you are only midcore, which if you check the comment section, seems to be wildly untrue as well! 😊
I do think most people generally agree that Machinist is the easiet class to use, due to being ranged and not needing to keep up buffs.
I'd say I'm casual, but I read and practice rotations as well as try to line up everything by 2 minutes since I know that is what the game is atm. What is wierd about me is that I do basicly 0 lvl 90 content and just level jobs atm, and with that said I think a lot of difficulty some casuals like me might attribute to the class is actually them not having enough skills early on to make the rotation work somewhat competently. The leveling content is also filled with just doing as much damage as fast as possible, meaning putting up dots and maintainance stuff feels kind of pointless in a lot of cases compared to just hitting them. This means an uncomplicated class is strong in short bursts with decent survivability and a complicated one needs management or uptime. This is just kind of a disconnect in FFXIV where a class can feel both incomplete and weak compared to another just because of levels, especially before lvl 70-80.
If they removed the 2minute raid buffs, that would remove a lot of toxicity I think, because other peoples optimal damage would no longer fall on you performing under the pressure of time.
If damage and optimal play relied solely on the individual it would make for much less lashing out at others, or trying to blame others for your own mistakes, which would make parsing more about yourself and your performance, than having that 1% more damage because the raid buffs all hit at the same time.
I personally see myself at the early midcore very high casual level, I look at the rotations on the servers, but I mostly take them as suggestions to test and and see if I like the feel of how that class is supposed to be played optimally. (playing on a controller)
I hate samurai, it feels ultra bad, too many buttons, too many lines, Black Mage also became a very terrible flow on controller after HW, among others, there's only a couple not even a handful of DPS jobs that feel alright and flow nicely for me. Even Ninja in ARR and HW felt great, but now I have to find button space for the Raiton spells, and it's just the beginning of the button bloat problem and it's starting to not feel nice anymore.
I don't even know what game this is but I'ma still finish this video
This is final fantasy 14! And if it looks interesting, then its free trial is unlimited in time, and covers the first 70 levels of the game, so you could spend hundreds of hours exploring the game without paying anything 😊
@@CaetsuChaijiCh if I had a PC I would I have a shitty laptop that might run it so maybe I will
I wanna start off by saying the video is great and I think a lot of people will take a lot home from it. Tho I am really really split on one of the points you made.
I do understand why using a "parser" as the highest skill ceiling would be the right thing to do, but I don't think you used the right scale for that. Yes, a job might be difficult to parse with, but that doesn't necessarily mean it is difficult to play. A lot of the "difficulty" parsing (at least when we are talking about the 99s and 100s) simply boils down to the crits/dcrits, so it just means going again and again. The same parser that has 100 on NIN might also have a 47 because their Hyosho did not crit a single time (that might be an extreme example but you get what I mean) even tho their rotation was absolutely flawless.
In my opinion, even a parser will consider MCH or SMN easy, even tho they are hard to parse on because of their really high crit dependancy. We could sit here and argue all day long that pressing more buttons does not mean the class is more difficult, but I feel like a lot of people who say that haven't really experienced Savage/Ultimate rading. I think it is important to judge a job also based on learning a new fight. For example, progging on a WAR compared to a GNB will be marginably easier because you have so little to do in comparison. After some time I am sure GNB will feel just as comfortable as WAR, but objectively speaking spamming Fell Cleave and weaving like 3-4 things a minute is way easier than what GNB has to do to achieve the same results. I think that is one of the better ways to judge a job, as at the end of the day, whichever job you have the most muscle memory on will feel the easiest, but you can still acknowledge it's difficulty.
Or I might be looking too deep into it or maybe even misunderstood your point.
Anyways, buff RDM and DRK, thank you.
Thank you!
I mostly used parser as a stand in word or synonym for perfectionist, or at times even elitist. But sometimes perfectionist doesn't apply to parser, and not all parsers are elitist.
As you say, getting the highest parse is more about luck, which is why jobs with more predictable and easy to perform rotations are easier in the eyes of a parser. That is also why I suggested a parser might find bard harder than machinist, because bard has at times the same or more things to do than a machinist, but this is then coupled with an inconsistent rotation. Getting a really high parse itself isn't "hard", given that the most important part once all the pieces are in place, is the luck factor. But it isn't hard to be lucky. It is hard to be consistent at something difficult. As your comparison between warrior and gunbreaker somewhat tries to showcase 😊
I hope this helps to add some more detail to this! 😁
I don't much care but manage to nevertheless parse around 60 to 70 in most content. I feel like I'm just a casual who accidentally managed to get into the groove on my preferred jobs.
That's a good thing though! 😁
I have a RDM friend who has played RDM for like, 5 years. We are both midcore, but he treat his RDM as if he was a parser. I, to poke fun at him, intentionally went for a full sps red mage, yet it was I who reminded him "Manification" has a 10 second shorter cooldown, so you can Embolden, melee 1, melee 2, melee 3, Manification, finishers and keep everything within burst. Just because someone isn't hardcore, or who is playing wrong for fun, may still have important insight even for people who do nothing but play a particular job.
Do I recommend SPS RDM? Not if you want to do exclusively damage. Is it fun? Very, Just keep Lucid on cooldown XD In the end, play the game how you want to. You want to care about every individual stat from melds? You do you. You want to just get rid of the millions of tenacity melds on your ninja for no reason? Enjoy. The important thing is to never *make* someone play a way they don't want.
That is certainly also something 😂
Personally I actually don't find sps RDM very fun, not necessarily due to optimization, but just because many buttons feel awkward on high speed! But each person has different preferences!
id consider MNK to be one of the hardest Jobs, cause of the rotation, not even the speed
Oh personally I think it's a combination, but we still reach a similar conclusion! 😁
y the speed certainly plays a part in it, but not the major big reason is what i meant xD@@CaetsuChaijiCh
Guess I fall mid to casual for how I play machinist as that is my main. I know the opener but free styling just always ends up FEELING better for fights and that's not counting my Canada to EU ping.
Meanwhile here I am able to play every job at least semi-competently to being some sort of Midcore-Parser facsimile on white mage and Sage in savage, even if I’ve yet to finish P12 and never touched P8 until like a month ago- I just don’t want to think about buff windows really as a dps, so I raid on healer, also since I’ve healed since I started two years ago as a CNJ, I have some trust issues sometimes so I can’t trust myself on dps
I would consider myself midcore, that is raid 3-4 hours a week. I do aim for perfection though, or at least perfection in the eyes of ffiv analysis and everything I've read. As a monk in the 3rd tier this was basically never achieved. For reaper then dancer in the first 2 tiers perfection was the assumed result.
That sounds like a reasonable result! 😊 Aiming for perfection can be very interesting, as long as it enhances the enjoyment of the game! 😊
I've been playing FF14 for two years now. I play summoner because it has exactly one double weave and I can't even get that one right 100% of the time. You didn't mention peak or sustained APM, or number and complexity of weaves. Maybe it's just because you're used to astrologian, but I think selecting the right DPS for a card and playing it without clipping next Fall Malefic is even harder than a normal double weave. I also think SAM is as hard or harder than MNK because you have to meld to at least 2.14 GCD and then do double weaves, whereas (hopefully) MNK at 1.94 is not expected to do so.
I didn't outright mention peak or sustained APM, but those can also make an impact yes!
And no, I am not good at astrologian, at least not in my personal opinion! 😂 The scary part with astrologian is that optimally, you are actually double weaving the decision to play that card on the right dps. Whether draw is first or second depends on how good you are at it and how lucky you were with redraws, and sometimes you just don't have enough time to think! Which also applies to other fast paced jobs!
I’ve just learned today that attempting to double-weave in Asylum and Temperance in P10S on my opener is… not easy to do since that helps with the first damage, but it’s rough, even after clearing a bunch on Sage
Simpel, every job is easy in dungeon/trial content, extremes and savage require tighter planning while also doing mechanics.
For ultimates it's either do it well or wipe.
Parsers, they don't count as they never parse realistic numbers
My nemesis is Sage I just can't get on with it, I put my abilities in a particular order so mostly finger memory does the rotation, atm though I'm just enjoying the simplness of SMN
My hands are tiny baby hands so "hard" jobs for me have more buttons. I like the number of buttons warriors have
I also like the more quality over quantity style of warrior! 😊
Can I even be considered midcore anymore when I don't even touch expert roulette anymore?
The life of turning into a crafter main because everything is being made easier and similar, because people don't like thinking...
Being someone who plays gun breaker, scholar, and red mage I will say I feel red mage is the hardest to work with do to the RNG in verfire and verstone wanting to proc or not
For the Side question that have been happening recently. Should the job be more difficult ?
People tend to forget that not much change happened during Shadowbringer to most of the jobs. So When you have a player who has been playing the same job since the start of shadowbringer they will feel the job they are currently playing is easy. But, if you have someone like me who just started in shadowbringer. The perception is quite different. 2 expansion of muscle memory and theory crafting is different from 2-3 savage raid without the two ultimate.
Another thing is the older player who did all the ultimate have a much higher skill level than the common new savage pleb (ME !!!). I heard a content creator talking about how DSR changed improved the skill of the player who did it considerably to the point of making savage tier seem like easy content.
imo jobs being fun is more important than encounters being fun. i don't think pandaemonium was a good raid series, it's definitely worse than omega and eden, which is why it stung even more. fun jobs are fun everywhere, fun encounters are only fun within themselves and you always run the risk of having unfun encounters like pandaemonium did
It's not even critting normally, it's direct critting. A normal Hyosho Ranryu is around 50k or so. DCrit Hyosho is 144k damage. Parsing in this game has reached a point where rng reigns more supreme than actual skill expression.
You are absolutely right! 😁 And it is indeed reaching a point where not only do you have to be perfect, you also need everyone else to be perfect. And then you also need the luck to get the dcrits... And preferably also your raid gets this. It's quite absurd! 😅
just play warrior xddd all your big moves are free dcrit
I don't know why playing your character itself should be a hard thing at all. What is the point? I've never seen another game where it is actively difficult to play your character.
My hottake is that all combo buttons (1-2-3) about be consolidated into one button like in PvP. There is no functional difference at all. Pressing one button is no more difficult than pressing three in a row
Some players find it enjoyable to learn to do something that is difficult!
Personally I feel the separate buttons for combos is about the feel of the job, and not about difficulty at all.
Why do you need to press those weird key combinations in fighting games to access specific attacks? These days fighting games allow you to add shortcuts for some of them sometimes.
Similarly, making it separate buttons for your combo adds more feel to it. It's the same argument as saying why does ninja have to have three mudras they have to mix to get the jutsu they want. It's more about the feel of the job, and while it adds to the difficulty, it is generally to my knowledge viewed as a skill floor thing and not something that stays difficult as you learn it 😊
That's not to say that doing pvp style combos wouldn't be nice for convenience, but there are certain jobs where this might feel limiting (gnb and pld gets a specific benefit from their step two combos so in niche situations it might be annoying), or it just doesn't work at all in that way (monk needs all their options available because of perfect balance)
Despite all that, I don't think your opinion there is a hot take. It is however a regularly discussed issue 😅
@@YesitisI-kf7ng ?
@aiellamori don't worry about it. That guy seemed to be VERY salty about something else and was spewing a lot of assumptions about other people and just being mean in general 😊
NIN is my main DPS and my friends just cant even understand the mudras lol
Midcore represent 👉😎👉
For funsies I'm gonna see how much of the midcore stuff I can relate to for the jobs I've played and then talk about the video properly lol. Of course not every Midcore™ is gonna be the same as me but y'know. Again. For funsies.
MCH: Yeah. Pretty much. Of course, as mentioned earlier, the freestyling is based on what I know of MCH, but y'know…can't stop, and a messed up rotation is better than none! (Also, BRD is harder than MCH for me, but that's because I tend to lean into jobs with limited to no RNG nowadays, see DRG and RPR. It's just easier for my ADHD brain XD). Overall, I wouldn't say it's the easiest job ever, but it's manageable with practice. Then again I feel like that could be applied to most jobs lol.
GNB: Again, yeah. Though I do have to mourn the big numbers and make an obligatory "NO MY UPTIME" joke, as a DPS main, lol. The No Mercy window concept took me a while to fully understand, but it was kind of a "Once you get it, you GET it" for me. Though soon I'm gonna be practicing sneaking in the defensive cooldowns in the rotation. Managing the DPS _and_ tank parts of GNB is what makes it particularly difficult.
DRK: [blows DRK a little kiss] The DPS instinct is ever strong in me lol. I'm leveling DRK on my main atm and I do at least try to set aside 3k MP for TBN, but sometimes muscle memory goes "3000 MP USE EDGE" and honestly it's kinda funny at this point. The urge to bonk is strong. Overall, though, not terribly hard, but I also play Dragoon, so I'm used to the weave economy. If you're not then it can be. Kind of a nightmare.
SAM: Haven't touched it, maybe I will _just_ to see if my thoughts on it line up XD I WANT to play it, it seems pretty fun, honestly. Back to the job guide playlist I go!
AST: I need to play more AST to develop a solid opinion on this but right now my opinion is "I am giving every AST I've ever had the pleasure of being in a dungeon with a big hug, are y'all okay" because I've mostly had seemingly midcore ASTs. Honestly, it's kinda like GNB in a way in my brain-doing Cards and Healing separately isn't too difficult, but together it's different-and I managed to get that, so I think I can do AST too, but until then. *_MAN_* AST is hard for me.
Overall, again, even other midcore players are gonna be different from me specifically, but that's the whole point of the video: Difficulty. Is. Relative. There are so many factors that can determine how a job feels from one player compared to another. And even if we can't imagine thinking that way ourselves, it's important to understand where others are coming from when they discuss difficulty, and also, honestly, not judge their playstyle if it isn't hurting anyone. If it is, that's different, but if they're having fun and aren't causing trouble...let 'em vibe and have their opinions.
Anyway sorry for the long comment but that was, in fact, fun. Good stuff as always!
I'm glad you had fun with it, Lemon! 😁
Even within categories you’ll have people disagree. BRD vs mch is a perfect example. Mch is fixed, but you need to manage heat and battery and if you make a mistake recovery is hard. BRD once your comfortable tracking song vs dots is actually very easy-until the fight has downtime windows and all of the sudden you need to start and stop songs early to keep building apex guage.
All jobs are easy for casual players, you just suck at them so it doesn’t matter. But midcore and up it entirely depends on how you think and understand things.
it is interesting how often i hear nonstandard blm players find another job more difficult than nonstandard blm. i don't play nonstandard blm seriously but i have enough basic knowledge of the advantages and disadvantages of different lines to try using them when i need to use my instant casts and it seems far more challenging than just doing a set rotation. i don't even understand the correct way to use sharpcast f1/fire paradox beyond trying to force a 4f4 double transpose line when i have to burn xenoglossies and a triplecast and i don't have an f3p
nflaxkslxna seeing those card prios gon make me cry
I put up my astr for raiding so I can start over on the new astr next expac, but I sure as hell will miss being busy and tracking who gets what card during my 2 min and 1 min ;-;
Beauty is in the eyes of the beholder so to speak.
Also. Parsers not only require player to be perfect but also need a blessing of RNG for fishing on crits while ensuring your mirror of the job will ensure their own DPS loss. Or they are downright cunts who outright just leave after getting THEIR high parse (been there, that's why I don't like parsing parties).
Anyway? I would prefer a full party of midcore blueberries who at least try with rotation/opener and clear content over self-righteous parser player who wipes the raid for no reason except they didn't get crits in opener and never try to recover the fight.
Indeed! I would certainly also prefer a group of midcore players over players that optimize so much that less than perfect is unacceptable! But striving for perfection in play is always commendable i feel, as long as it doesn't become obsessive 😅
@@CaetsuChaijiCh XIV community not becoming obsessive over something? IMPOSSIBRU!
I've been leveling my classes and white mage is my most hated job, while Astro is my favorite healer. For context, by the definitions in this video I am a midcore player, sometimes leaning toward casual. I'm most of the way through EW msq part 1, currentl doing lvl 88 quests with astro. I only have 2 jobs lvl 90, Sage and Reaper and have never done an savage raid before, only unsynced a few ARR trials for mounts. all my combat classes are minimum lvl 50 except white mage.
I recently attempted leveling roulette as a white mage (it's still < lvl 50) and it sucked (sunken ruins, I think. with earliest dungeon w/ bees) I would let the tank get to low health so I could spread my dot a do a little dmg, but when I go to cast cure the tank they would die before the cast bar finished. it wasn't even intuitive to see that cure 1 is useless compared to cure 2 and it got to the point that rezing players meant even with lucid dreaming I couldn't cast cure 2. after struggling through it, I jumped on astro just to put myself in a good mood again, and redid the same dungeon to prove a point to my friend who was a newbie tank. dropped my regens on her, played cards and it felt so much better and went so much smoother. At that level astro doesn't even get redraw and I still loved it. I first-timed the stormblood alliance raids on astro with relative ease not too long ago, even helping to heal members of other alliances.
my optimization of astro mainly looks like keeping up with all my cooldowns and knowing what classes benefit more from the card dmg boost than others. so, purposefully giving the card to a black mage instead of red mage or bard, or a samurai/reaper instead of dragoon or monk. more damage to boost, more damage done. this video was the first time I'd heard an explanation of how to stockpile my cards, but that does make sense.
Gunbreaker is pretty easy for me since I just play it like a high apm summoner. Literally just, do the rotation and weave your mitigations wherever you can. Warrior is still the easiest tank for sure, but lvl 50 dark knight just feels clunky and weird. Pally in my hands is fine, but mid. also summoner puts me to sleep and scholar doesn't make sense to me. But the mindset of setting up the blackmage as an artillery turret is a fun puzzle to figure out, though I've only got blackmage to 52 or so.
I could go through my impressions on all the classes, but I think these are the most interesting takes I have.
The specific oddity with white mage in lower level content is that it is the only healer with nothing other than regular healing spells until level 50, with the other three having at least SOMETHING very early on. That tends to make the low level experience as white mage quite tough!
Just to add some detail to that experience you had!
@@CaetsuChaijiCh *eye twitch* so it gets better at 50? ...k...
@Wordsman it gets better at higher level yeah, but at 50, at least benediction gives you one ogcd option, which is much better than 0😅
@@CaetsuChaijiCh mmo game design at its finest haha
The fact that we can have this discussion here is a fairly solid argument that the game isn't homogenized. Perhaps the healers are, but not the game as a whole.
I might be midcore at combat but im hardcore at crafting >:) perfect rotations every time. Dont even use the online calcs anymore ive just internalized it at this point lol.
That's the spirit! 😂
Why is no one parsing on this?! 🤣
I play DRK because I think it's cool 😎
That is often the best reason to choose a job! 😁
After watching your video I think now I know why I've given up caring about clearing content it doesn't matter how well you play, all that matters if you still enjoy the game.
Indeed, as long as you enjoy the game in the way you play it, that should be good enough! ^^
Exactly
Tbh I think its job dependent. Dps are fine as is. Healers seem to just be easy. Tanks are brain dead for the most part. Gnb being the hardest due to how strict it is.
The way you describe all this, the parser players are actually kind of bad at the game because they have no ability to adapt? Was that intentional, because that's how it comes off.
That is certainly not intentional 😊 the parser aims for such perfectionism that "adapting" isn't good enough. To get the best parse, you would genuinely have to get everything right, and then also be lucky with crits and stuff. They don't need to adapt, because they should have the fight memorized from start to finish perfectly, and have no need for adjusting on the fly.
I hope this makes more sense 😊
First, and it feels good.
Thats the spirit!
Because that is what we do 🤣
Astro is what I play when I wanna be a White Mage in a toga.
What are these..."cards" you speak of...?
"oh man all this space magic is wonderfully pretty!!
What do you mean cards?" 😂
you can get a whm toga from p4n/p4s
I play dragoon. It's hard. Why? Because pavement is usually tough to tank. I mean lay on.
A lot of the things you say about "parsers" feels incredibly disconnected from the reality. I want to say this as someone who pretty much only optimizes nowadays, and I can't really relate to a lot of the things you are saying.
I understand you tried to just group a massive playerbase into generalisations, but with that you also missed the mark on quite a few things.
Perhaps I am somehow biased or overly defensive, but from your video alone I get the feeling you don't really like "parsers".
I think a lot of people that are into optimizing got the impression that I was directly talking about them because they identify as a parser because they might post parses and weigh themselves based on them.
What I was referring to are those that almost make a sport out of parsing, those that aim to have "the best" parse which requires things like crit luck. These people there are not many of, but are a strong contrast to an excessively casual player ("openers are pointless anyway!" and the like), in that there is a point where optimization also goes a bit too far. Most of us understand this, but if you want to be the best, it can get a bit silly.
Indeed, I could've called them perfectionists too, but as far as I understand, the real problem is that for some reason people take offense to being referred to as a parser, when I was mainly using that term because there is a selection of players that take it to such a degree that you'd think they were hired to do so 😊
I actually didn't try to group that massive of a group, given that I described three examples of players, which allows each individual to find themselves somewhere between them. You can use dps meters and fflogs and not identify yourself as a parser by the example given here, but usually when people complain about parsers, it's this excessive level that can come up.
I am quite indifferent to parsers, as I mostly care about everyone being allowed to be here. The video was actually intended to demonstrate how three vastly different perspectives can make a job be observed vastly differently, and was not actually intended to dunk on any of them, even if you get that impression
@@CaetsuChaijiCh I get what you're saying, but perhaps you chose your personalities incorrectly.
You describe someone who is a religious perfectionist who needs to "crit, otherwise wipe", while having the perfect rotation.
Maybe this is the impression you've gotten of a normal person in this echelon, but it's not like that at all.
Perhaps instead of "parser", you should've picked someone more akin to an "optimizer", and the reason for this is that the parser you are describing has opinions that no one wants to hear.
You make the "high end dps player" sound like annoying perfectionists, and if you chose that type of player, the toxic know it all who goes for only perfection, then well okay, I guess you managed, but the simple truth of those kinds of players is that they have irrational opinions that are extremely biased and without proper thought put into them.
I think if you wanted to have a more clear perspective of what optimizers really think about difficulty, you should've picked a personality that can take an objective view on job difficulty and rate them as such, not the toxic parser personality who will never give an opinion that isn't biased towards their own needs.
Perhaps I'm not offended, just annoyed. Optimizers are extremely cool people, and I've met so many great ones who can describe you some incredibly interesting techniques and optimizations to apply to gameplay.
I would rather have that group of amazing peeps represented as "high end dps" than the toxic "no crit = wipe" playerbase. (which is also a generalisation because top tier speedkillers will have to do this, but this is such a small group of players they're practically an exception, pun not intended).
@psclly i get what you mean, and I will admit I could have chosen a different word to describe them. But the whole point was that an "objective view of job difficulty" is difficult, because different parts of the community (even different sections of a section of a community) will view what is difficult as different. That was kind of what I was going for: a very casual player would probably view a job like machinist as trivial because they don't care about the fixed rotation. A midcore (or whatever you wanna call it?) would care to know this, which would cause them to rank it as harder. A perfectionist (or in my case I chose to call this individual a parser in the video), would probably not care that much about the difficulty of performing a fully predictable rotation. In fact, they probably practiced it to death, so it isn't even a problem. However a more random rotation (such as bards), you can't perfect to the same degree, because every go will be different. Hence the perfectionist (or parser in my explanation) would find it harder to get that perfect parse with a bard, than with a machinist, and so judge bard as harder. Meanwhile, and I didn't cover this in the video, there's a reasonable chance a midcore or even casual player would view bard as easier, as the randomness the perfectionist judges as difficult, makes it harder to do things perfectly, making the average performance perceived as easier to achieve, making bard appear easier by comparison to machinist. I then went on to take other examples of course, but the whole point of the video wasn't to dunk on anyone, but specifically and quite literally, demonstrate that "objective difficulty" isn't really something we can agree on 😅
But I get what you mean. Personally, I don't mind parsers. Neither the ones doing it for a bit of fun, nor those that take it too far. In fact, I enjoy learning how far we can push things. And my perspective on the game is that improving is always a good thing, so it would be weird to intentionally antagonize those trying to be the best. As I said, I didn't actively attempt to antagonize anyone. In fact I was actually more concerned about calling the casuals casuals because that is also viewed as a negative term, and I only after the fact learned that people found the parser word choice negative in this situation 😅
For my part, as far as I knew, people don't call the average optimizing savage raider, or someone who optimizes in general, a parser, which is why I didn't make the connection that anyone " below" the most sweatiest grinders of parses (not meant in a negative way) would identify with the character I presented in the example 😣
I cringed hard at the classification of optimization and speedkill-oriented players as parsers, as if casuals and midcore players don't parse. Big L honestly.
I feel like you missed the point, given that I described the parser as specifically the type of player to optimize to an excessive degree, because most players know what is meant when you refer to that as a parser. Last i checked you JUST had to refer to the other people that parse (as you said) as casuals and midcore as well, without calling them parsers right? 😊
To reiterate, I was referring to a parser as someone who aims for the highest possible parse, which while is optimization and speed killing, can easily reach excessive degrees 😉