Which Ranged Physical DPS is actually the hardest to learn, play and master, in Final Fantasy 14 Endwalker? Let’s talk about exactly that!
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Music Used:
FFXIV Endwalker – Cradle of Hope
#ffxiv #endwalker
Chapters:
00:00 Intro
01:28 Dancer
04:58 Machinist
09:13 Bard
14:01 Different Players find Different Things Difficult
16:23 Outro
16:59 Fun Fact
source
Surprised at the lack of mention of ping reliant hypercharge burst ngl
I am a person who loves playing the support class. I love building up my team, and as such Dancer is my main. So, speaking as a Dancer main, and as someone who has played all three physical ranged classes I don't have even the faintest idea what Bard is even trying to do. It seems to want to be a support like Dancer, while also being a damage dealer like Machinist. It's a complete and utter mess. I wish that it would get a rework and pick one thing that it wants to do, and then do that.
As for the tunneling on Dancer… Yeah, I get that. It definitely happens. However, most of the time I know the boss well enough that I don't really need to pay attention to them that much. Hurray for scripted content. And if I do get caught out, well, En Avant is a truly wonderful thing. Just don't spam it. Cause then you won't have it for later. Not to mention that if you are En Avanting, then you aren't dancing, and if you aren't dancing, then you are no frien- I mean you aren't doing damage.
As someone who plays machinist using a controller, I find that it's the friendliest out of the 3 when it comes to button layout for your hotbar. With my current setup, I can have a single-target/boss-centric layout for one, another for trash packs during dungeon pulls, and a third for defensive cooldowns, second wind, peloton, etc. It's the one job I've found that forces me to shuffle through my hotbars the least, so for me it's by far the easiest to play.
Flamethrower is always a gain on scratching your nose. And THAT has to count for something right? Right???
Trick question. None of them are that hard. XD
12:07
THIS
I started about a month n 2 weeks ago and i went with bard.Maining it till i die fr.
key to bard is setting your UI up for it. bring the boss bar down and closer to your song gauge and cooldowns, keep your dots and buffs aligned left in a small screen space so you can check everything you need to in a single glance. my HUD for all other jobs is now based on what i needed for bard.
i play all 3 phys ranged and i'd say bard's hardest.. but it's not that bad. its a nice challenge
Im surprised for dancer it wasn't mentioned that when its actually time to push all those glowy buttons for the burst, thats where the complexity mostly lies. Once you've grasped the concept of stock piling everything- when the moment of truth actually comes, it can be very overwhelming and difficult to pull off when raid mechanics are happening because you gotta double weave your fans and spend your guage so youre not over capping. And because of the randomness, you can just be generating fans and espree like mad during burst and you want to squeeze all that damage into the party buff window.
It goes from a snooze fest to high apm and stress every burst 😂
Being honest I was very surprised to see BRD that high up. The RNG is definitely a factor, sure, but I thought it was pretty easy to understand as compared to MCH who has more active GCDs and having to pay attention to what order you need to do it in else your rotation is just *shot*. I still have massive trouble figuring out when to use what cause I lose track.
…but I then I realized tracking timers (and procs) were a thing I have fun doing (speaking as someone who mained summoner in ShB), and it tickles my neurons. Which knowing how my ADHD brain works, I realize is not the norm.
I will walk into an aoe during my burst in wanderer's though, I'm not infallible.
I play the expansion on physical ranged, and the post expansion on magical dps.
I'm looking forward to putting my rapiers down and picking my bow back up. It's going to be a ride
P. Range? hard to play?? yeah right!!
Honestly I truly love bard for raiding because I tend to forget burst timers and since you have a literal built in song timer you can't miss
When I started playing this I started as an arcanist and didn't enjoy my casts getting interrupted because I didn't know how the game worked yet. After dropping the game and later remaking a character as an archer, I liked the feel of it a lot more, and I have a personal liking to bards so that was a plus. I feel bard is great that it starts from lv1 even though it takes a lot longer to level, you get to know the tiny bits in detail.
I don't do EXs and stuff but I like the chaos of my rotation and I still drop my dots
Bard is a pain in the ass to play in EW Ultimate
BRD was my first job so its hard for me to say it is the hardest for me exactly but I understand entirely what you mean.
My personal thing with BRD is the DoT timer. I glance, see I have ten seconds left. Cool, I've got time to chuck in a few more filler. I look again, and dang it's on one second already. It's so so easy to lose discipline with BRD. Everything else I'm comfy with, but the Iron Jaws timings always mess me up.
I do like how BRD very easily tells you when to burst with the songs. The songs can also mess with you hugely if you die; death on BRD is supremely punishing.
I found bard to be the easiest of the 3. The only difficulty comes when remembering to refresh my dots. Songs are easy to keep on rotation if you move the soul gauge somewhere where your eyes are always going and then you just hit the simon says as they light up.
Dancer has way too much going on although it is just Single target Combo and an AoE combo with each having a proc to each step. But there are just so many buttons you need for Dancer compared to how few Bard has
I'm gonna sound like a broken record, but… ping makes MCH hardest for me, even though I find it the most fun.
DNC main here – I find I did eventually get out of that tunnel vision problem, but by sheer practice and muscle memory. I really enjoy the random procs; the real challenge is taking that randomness and making a structure out of it to suit the encounter. I never see it as free form. Randomness is saved for when it's best used: ie: 3 feathers for burst window, never cap 4, never Tech Step before an intermission/phase transition/active time maneuver/etc. Despite the RNG my brain is able to make a script for every encounter once I've learned it well, and it's very satisfying to feel like I've done as much as I can, worked around other DNC player buff windows AND used my support abilities as needed. Once I have that down, some fights make me feel like I'm in flight. It's an awesome feeling! P11 is a favorite.
BRD though – I love that job but I KNOW I'm rusty when I'm tunnel-visioning on the hot bar. Woof. There are a lot of plates to keep spinning, to use a old metaphor.
I love bard. It so much fun and very busy but you have to do so much for so little and if you die forget about it.
Tho I've been playing this game off and on from arr to now I finally got my wife to try out the game. She has only played ffxi before and hadn't play anything like this before got her to try brd and she seems to like it cause I thought out of the starter jobs that would be the easiest to get the hang of things but now this video makes me question that choice
I main BRD because it was the class that just clicked for me and is easy for me to manage, so I was surprised when I found out a lot of other players think it’s on the harder end to play. I do pretty well with it, not that there are a lot of other BRDs to compare against.
As someone who mains the ranged physical dps classes, I've always seen people say that these jobs are the easiest yet don't understand the intricate tool kits of them. You explained each so well and hopefully people who thought this way have a new perspective.
I'm curious what the melee video will look like because i think this will be the only video were polls might not be a good reflection of reality, where people might consider Ninja/Samurai the hardest because of the amount of buttons on the hotbar when the filler phase is pretty "empty" on Ninja and Samurai is easy after you learned the stickers. As someone that have played them all I think Reaper is the easiest and followed by Ninja. Viper will have a similar vibe to Ninja and Reaper, especially since they are going for the Reaper/Sage philosophy of design of "Pretty simple but still interesting" unlike some jobs that are just easy and boring (personal opinion). The hardest things about Ninja are having a decent apm, learn the burst phases and having a decent ping lol
Imo the hardest jobs are the ones where you have to maintain a dot, a buff and doing both positional pretty often, the "filler melees" while still having a decent amount of things to do during the burst phases. Samurai is probably 3rd in easiest because you just have to learn the "stickers" thing and keep both buff and dot.
The remaining top 2 hardest should be Dragoon at 2nd because of the previously said positionals and buff/debuff stuff on top of your "jumps" that can really screw you over but overall just know your big cooldowns and follow up on the next combo
Monk is probably the hardest because of all the difficulty of other melees combined into one, also you do not have a single ranged ability to cover out-of-melee-range downtime (you got Six Sided Star but it's not comparable to Ninja's Ninjutsus and Reaper's insane range potency on Harpe and Harvest Moon + the fact that Communio is also long range)
There's a lot of things i didn't talk about, like the Strictness of not drifting on some VERSUS the Freedom of adjusting to drift on others. While some will view the strictness as a big difficulty some will see it as an easy way to build muscle memory and trying to stick to the rotation. While some will view the freedom of drifting and adjusting the rotation as a good thing some others will find it daunting to have to learn and figure out how to recover from said drifting
Edit : typo
Out of every job Bard is the only one I consistently fuck up when playing
I enjoyed MCH back in Stormblood, even though I knew it NEEDED to be changed. But it was so chaotic and fun to absolutely micromanage all of it's kit.
BRD is that for me now. Sure, BRD can freely move around the arena, but it's so easy to tunnel vision between dots, songs, and procs.
excuse me? i use devilment before final step for that slight addition of damage, why the other way round?
I will watch this video when I drive home from work.
I can say bard is super super busy. Maybe not quite “hard,” but super busy. I am furiously mashing buttons on that poor controller to the point where I still get all flustered and start hitting the wrong button combos.
And all that in the middle of raid mechanics. And I have yet to learn how to target team members with the controller to apply Warden’s Paean (spell check) in order to be a little more helpful and therefore that more effective.
But I love that the focus of bard is on party buffs. So my priority is to buff my party first and foremost and then proceed to do as much dps as possible.
I am nowhere near level cap, still in the middle of Stormblood MSQ, and I am having a blast!
So whatever I say, is probably not relevant at all.
Thank you for letting me what your video.
@Caetsu Chaiji Ch. i mentioned this in a previous video comment section, but the reason classes are deemed hard or easy is based on the amount of skill they have to remember and movement. If a class has the list amount of buttons needed to press and is super mobile to avoid damage, majority of players maining or otherwise would consider it easy. You havent released it yet but i bet that the Melee dps wont be so dramatic in its votes, and a couple will be neck and neck for hardness, why? because they have to be upfront with the boss and tend to have a good amount of buttons to press, based on this, ninja will be hardest class in ur next video, followed by either monk or reaper, samurai then dragoon as easiast.
Dawntrail is the first expansion since the launch of ARR where I am considering switching from BRD as my main. I personally find MCH to be super easy and at the same time much better DPS.
Can’t wait to absolutely slam dunk Dancer and Machinist in the bin in Dawntrail and become the Bard I always wanted to be
I’m surprised MCH being ping reliant wasn’t mentioned. Having to high of ping can really hurt the jobs rotations and damage with how apm heavy it is during its overheat phase.
Bard is the hardest dps to play optimally in my opinion.
A lot of people who don’t play it unfortunately think it’s easy as well…
Biggest hot tip as a (fairly recent) bard main – audio queues! Learn the different audio queues for when skills are ready (apex arrow doesn't work below level 86 because reasons 🙄) and also I have a macro on both Stormbite and Iron Jaws with a timer that beeps at me about 2 gcds before I need to refresh dots (be careful to spam macro at end of previous gcd as it will not queue it if you press early like normal skill buttons)
Don't agree with Dancer being the easiest to pick up of the ranged classes. We had a new player in our FC boost to 80 and chose DNC because "YouTube said it was easy", seven hells was that a nightmare for them. YouTubers need to STOP RECCOMENDING DANCER TO NEW PLAYERS it is overwhelming.
Hopefully the upgraded Bloodletter in Dawntrail will make Mage's Ballad better than Army's Paeon again so we don't have this cursed song rotation of full WM, short MB, full AP anymore.
Also I really want them to let BRD start duties with 3 Codas.
Add to that the fact that its almost impossible to properly recover your song rotation after death…
“Oh wait my DoTs dropped” how could you absolutely call me out like this
I play on controller which I think has an impact on this as well. DNC and MCH largely become auto-pilot for me when using a controller, same as most melee jobs, where as BRD I'm constantly messing up, forgetting my dots, hitting the wrong button etc. Which is why I love it. I can't just check out when playing it. People say Ninja is difficult but I honestly thing MNK and BRD are harder because there's so much more to keep track of and their rotations aren't just 123.
This surprised me. I've always thought of Bard as being the easiest one by far. I have the job mapped to like 3 macros that make it a 6-button job. Two macros in particular are just 90% me just spamming the button till it's time to play a song/buff. I guess playing songs on time could be difficult, but I've never found it to be an issue even when in hard content.
'Oh wait my DoTs dropped' I'm in this video and I don't like it.
Speaking as someone who's only been playing for a year or so, Bard felt great at 70 and was a little unwieldy but otherwise fine at 80.
At 90? Screw that. Those last few additions are the straw that broke the camel's back. Utterly miserable to play at max level.
I played ff14 years ago with my Bard till i think lvl40 then i stopped. Now for Dawntrail i was just courious again ( And it was actually rly confusing cause i almost forgott everything xD )
and my goal was (and still is) to enjoy the story from all main quests. As i started again i actually read everywhere how bad they changed the Bard.
I actually never really played any other class, but for me personal its super fun to try ( i think im now lvl60something and finished a realm reborn and the first quests) to line everything correctly. I have to be focused all the Time and i know i still dont have the complete rotation ( wanderers minuet still missing)
it keeps me engaged without the fear of when i miss something the whole raid will die ( props to all main healer and tanks <3 )
im pretty sure i will stick with the Bard ( i also dont have the time to start and learn a new one from the scratch)
so i cant wait for ur next Bard (Dawntrail) rotation video ( It helped me a ton getting back in the game after the long time i didnt played the game 🙂 )
cheers