10 Crucial Combat Tips for Beginners in FFXIV

hello there in this video i'll go over 10 tips for beginner players to get better at the combat and farm fantasy 14. this is one of those videos that i've gotten a lot of requests for over my time running this channel and so this video has been a long time in the making now i'm not an amazing player myself but i have played most of the duties that are out there i have leveled every single job and i have cleared the recent savage gear with some ok damage numbers it really isn't anything to write home about but i still feel like i can give beginner players a good idea of what they can expect and what they should look out for while leveling i think while many mmos share similarities in their combat there are some niche mechanics to final fantasy xiv in particular that continue to hold new players back and i think with just a few tips you can be king or queen of sprouts in no time so without further ado let's get right into it the first tip is also by far the hardest one to get right for beginners i see someone running around with no clue about this in the game every single day this tip is about the actions every job has access to each job action is one of three types there are weapon skills spells and abilities weapon skills and spells put other actions of the same types on cooldown the time it takes for those weapon skills and spells to come back off of cooldown is called recast time but it is generally referred to as global cooldown or gcd by the community if you use an ability on the other hand no other action is affected because of that we can put all actions into two categories there are gcds global cooldowns and ogc off global cooldowns this is important because it dictates the flow of every single job's main rotation to maximize the amount of casts you can do you should be using gcd actions back to back and this is where a lot of people struggle at first see it's very easy to just assume that all actions are equal and it doesn't really matter what you press at a given time but because you can press abilities while the gcd is rolling you are effectively losing possible casts if you use an ability in the place of a weapon skill or spell there should never be a time where you're casting an ogcd ability when you could be casting a gcd ability whenever the global cooldown is ticking down and you're unable to use any weapon skills or spells then it's time to use abilities which are all off the global cooldown you can fit up to two og cds between gcds and doing so is called weaving ideally weaving is the only way you ever use any ability in the game that's not it for this tip though i think it's very important so we're gonna go into some more detail because there's something you need to look out for when weaving when you try to fit more than two abilities between gcds or use an ability too late inside the recast window you run the risk of delaying the next cast by a little bit this is called clipping and should be avoided at all cost this happens because there's a 500 millisecond animation lock after using any action in the game that will not allow you to instantly cast another action to use this tip to your advantage you should go ahead and find all the gcd and ogcd actions on your jobs kit and practice weaving in the abilities so the global cooldown never stops rolling start easy by casting a single ability between two gcds and once you're comfortable give weaving two abilities a try as well just know that this can be vastly more difficult depending on how good your connection to the server is and if it turns out you can't double weave cleanly for whatever reason it's better to revert to single weaves and actually most openers out there also have a single weave version the next tip that i want to give you might sound silly at first but let me explain you need to hit the boss more now i know what you might say it makes a lot of sense that you should hit the enemy more because that will deal more damage thank you jolson for this wisdom however if it was this obvious you would think people would get it right uptime is what sets the good players apart from the exceptional players you want to start implementing this tip into your gameplay by thinking about ways that allow you to continue hitting the boss over the course of a fight instead of being forced to stop by mechanics a good melody dps or tank player mindful of the uptime will attempt to get one last hit in before leaving the dangerous area the last moment a caster may finish a spell before moving out of the aoe that spawned below them instead of cancelling it there are so many different ways to gain uptime in different kinds of fights that it's impossible to break down in this video but every time you're not casting every time you're interrupting a spell you're losing up time so going for uptime is super important for your overall damage however all of this has to be done in a way that is not overly greedy as a player you have to strike a balance especially depending on the kind of content that you're in at the moment between dealing as much damage as possible and not dying needlessly to mechanics that you could have easily avoided you'll find that many are more forgiving of having slightly lower dps than messing up mechanics repeatedly and especially when progging through more difficult fights for the first time whenever you should be focused on learning mechanics going too greedy can be at the detriment of your party so this tip is focus on your uptime but know the right time to do so keep it in the back of your mind that uptime is the thing that really makes the people that you queue with deal so much more damage than you they really have to fight figured out and they have it optimized and with enough practice and you learning the mechanics you'll get to that point as well next up we're going to talk about rotations many people who are new to mmos might not even know the concept of a rotation but let me break it down for you real quick almost all actions in your drops kit have a time and place to be used that will maximize the amount of damage that you deal while generally you could probably get away with only pressing half of your buttons doing so is not really recommended you should read your abilities and figure out the rotation luckily there are many guides out there you can find discord communities such as the balance which have a bunch of guides for all the jobs on their discord server and if you're really struggling you could probably ask someone in your fc for some tips once you have a general understanding of your job and its rotation there's one thing that all beginners should do the thing that's going to have you start really dealing a lot more damage than any other players with a similar amount of play time is practicing your rotation on a striking dummy you can find one of these very early into the game at summerfort farms in la nacia spend some time familiarizing yourself with your actions and without being distracted by mechanics by being really good at instinctively hitting the right buttons you're going to have a big advantage over other players you'll be able to do so more consistently maintaining your uptime and also have more time to figure out mechanics as they happen it's kind of like driving a car sometimes all it takes for a beginner player to improve heaps and bounce is to spend an hour on the dummy give it a try time and time again i see new and veteran players with a complete disregard for where they position themselves in relation to the rest of the party the first and probably worst mistake i see is players spreading out over the whole arena instead of staying relatively close together this is important because there are various area of effect abilities that allies can use to help you such as heals damage buffs or mitigation while some mechanics require spreading out as a party it is better to spread out only when absolutely needed and otherwise stay relatively close then doing the opposite this will allow healers to keep everyone's health up more easily and ensure you don't miss damage buffs this is especially important for ranged dps when i first switched from playing tank to trying machinist i was running all over the place because i was so happy i could finally move around without dragging the boss behind me and being forced to essentially stay in the same spot and i can tell you my healers hated every second of that so don't be like me when i unlocked machinist and stay close to the healers so they don't rip your head off at the same time your positioning can also help you avoid mechanics particularly if you're new to the game staying next to experienced players and seeing what they do can help you avoid incoming attacks this is also true for experienced players if you see many people running in one direction chances are there's something incoming that you've missed this will save you many deaths in the long run and it's really easy to implement the last mistake that i see a lot in terms of positioning is people staying too close to the tank tanks in this game get bombarded with ground airways they get hit by cleaves that deal aoe damage and they get hit by tank buses that also deal aoe damage and trust me you do not want to stand inside of those for our next tip i want to talk about a little bit of a niche mechanic and help you figure out the hitbox in 14. the game uses many area of effect abilities that the players have to dodge you might have noticed that by now most enemies have multiple of these so it's crucial that you get really good at dodging them when an aoe marker appears on the ground anyone standing inside of it will take damage once it resolves what some new players don't know about is that the damage is completely independent of the animation an enemy will do the damage is in fact calculated the second the aoe disappears you can imagine it like the game taking a photo of that moment and any player whose hitboxes inside the ground aoe at that moment will take damage this is called snapshotting this means that even while an enemy is doing a scary animation you're able to run into that animation as long as the damage has already been calculated you can use this to your advantage in a few ways for example melee players can gain uptime by being able to get close to an enemy more quickly after they use a point blank aoe it's worth noting that the player's hitbox is less of a box and more of a dot this is the approximate location of the dot and if this is inside of an aoe you will take damage if it's outside you're fine that means you can theoretically be safe inside the tiniest space between aoe markers provided you manage to be pixel perfect for our next tip here's something i was surprised to learn many people didn't know about i realized this wasn't common knowledge when i got an angry comment under one of my healer guides about how my mp calculation for the blah blah it's very boring some actions will apply their damage or healing over a set period of time many players don't know the details of how this potency is applied however when you use an action that deals damage or heals over time it will tick every 3 seconds steadily applying its damage over the full duration this means that actions have multiples of whatever potency is listed in the description for example the white mage spell regen applies a heal over time effect for 250 potency every 3 seconds this leads to a potency of 1500 and not 250 as the commenter was assuming so keep this in mind when you try to figure out your abilities next up is something for mel dps but other jobs are going to find this pretty interesting too in case they ever play the role and also to help melody dps play around it all melody dps and 14 have so-called positionals these are actions that deal increased damage when executed from the correct side of the boss which can be either the rear or the flank actions that have positional requirements will tell you so in the description you get a better understanding of why this is actually really easy to play around let's have a look at this dummy i mean the target dummy when you target an enemy a ring will appear around them if this ring is open at the back opposite the arrow which indicates the enemy's front it means that positional requirements apply to this enemy some enemies however will have a closed string meaning all positional requirements are lifted and your positional abilities are going to deal their full damage either way the rear of the boss is the open end of the ring while the flanks are either sides of the ring to hit positionals many beginner players will move to the very center or the very flank of the enemy this is actually not required because if they position themselves right where the ring starts they would be able to move slightly towards the open side to hit the rear positional and shift ever so slightly to the opposite side to hit the flank positional this doesn't matter much on the dummy but on larger enemies it can be helpful to avoid having to move around too much when you're inside the boss's hitbox positionals will still apply correctly as long as your orientation along the boss's hitbox matches the positional requirements in other words continue positioning yourself along the ring inside the boss's hitbox and your positionals will still apply it's also worth noting that whether the positional is hit or not depends on the time of using the ability and not the animation so you can safely move away after pressing the button for the next tip we're going to talk about reviving other players or getting revived during combat the aggressive combat rezzes are a fairly unique mechanic in 14 with all healers and the damaged either summoner and red mage having the ability to revive dead party members whoever gets revived gets inflicted with a debuff called weakness this reduces their primary attributes by 25 percent effectively weakening their damage if the player gets revived with weakness active again they instead get brink of death which will reduce all primary attributes by 50 percent this means that the single biggest damage loss in the game not even figuring in the time that you're gonna spend dead is actually dying so while revives can easily save a run excessive dying is still heavily punished in the game and you want to avoid getting in that situation at all cost one mistake i see new healers make a lot is trying to hard cast their revive meaning they will stand still for the full duration of the cast and keep in mind revives are long casts of up to 8 seconds while this can be good situationally to save runs a lot of the time this is done at the risk of the rest of the party because the player is unable to heal while casting all jobs with the ability to revive others also have access to the roll action swift cast which can be used just before the revive to turn it into an instant cast instead another trick that will save you many deaths is knowing about raise immunity after getting revived the player is immune to most types of damage for about 5 seconds which can be cancelled by using an action moving around during this time is fine however keep this in mind whenever you get revived inside an aoe the next time or the boss is dealing rate wide damage just don't panic don't press any buttons and you'll be fine for a second to last tip i want to talk about limit breaks you may have noticed the weird bar that appears inside duties which slowly fills up over time this is the limit gage there are three bars to the limit gauge and reaching each one of them allows the use of a different powerful limit break ability light parties meaning four players only have access to one bar while full parties of 8 players have access to all three the effects of the limit break vary depending on your role but to summarize it casting tank lb3 will apply mitigation healers will revive all dead party members to full hp and mp or alternatively if they weren't dead they will just get full hp and mp and magical as well as ranged dps will deal aoe damage and finally mali dps will simply deal a large amount of single target damage here it's important to note that damaging lbs ignore any damage buffs on the player and can't critically hit so generally it's a good idea to use this outside of damage buff windows during boss fights lb3 is generally safe for the melee dps to deal a large amount of damage to the boss however healers should feel free to use it if multiple party members are down in an effort to save a run the exception to this perhaps being when the boss is at really low health and one of the mello dps is up and the melee lb might just finish him off magical and ranged dps lb3 is used only rarely but inside dungeons it's a good idea to spend lb-1 on a large pack of enemies whenever it becomes available to clear the dungeon faster this is generally better than using lb1 on the boss and healer lb1 is pretty useless too essentially as a new player keep track of the limit gauge inside dungeons and trials and see if anyone uses it even experienced players tend to forget about the limit gauge every now and then if they don't use it feel free to use it yourself to not let it go to waste it's not some sacred resource that's not supposed to be used by any sprout the last tip that i have is mostly for healers this is one thing that's very different in final fantasy xiv than in other mmorpgs in this game healers are generally expected by the community to contribute a lot to the overall damage and the dropped designs absolutely allow you to do so while healers generally don't deal as much damage as tanks or damage dealers their contribution to the overall damage dealt is absolutely significant it doesn't matter very early on into the game but once you start tackling more demanding duties lack of damage on a healer who only heals will become very obvious and people will start calling it out now i understand if you're coming from another game and you used to only play healers and you're not used to it or maybe you just don't play that many games and you don't feel comfortable to risk letting your party die or maybe perhaps so far you've only had bad experiences with dealing damage in dungeons it will just take some amount of time for you to get comfortable yes there will be times when hits the fan and you'll be casting heels back to back and this is especially true in early game dungeons because a lot of the tanks don't understand that many of the jobs very early on don't actually have aoe abilities so the pulls become much harder than they should be in addition to this very early on you don't actually have that many abilities at your disposal you're mostly dealing with gcd heals later on into the game you start unlocking more abilities that allow you to heal while also damaging so if you're not getting into this right now give it a few levels and maybe your jobs will start making more sense in that direction when i leveled my healers the most fun part of the role for me was optimizing my play to get as much damage out of them as possible while also keeping everyone alive the only hp that matters is the last one those were my 10 combat tips for beginner players if you enjoyed this video you should check out this one which youtube thinks you will like for some reason thanks for watching and i'll see you in the next one peace

Channel: Jolsn

Views: 160,901

Keywords: ffxiv, ff14, final fantasy 14, final fantasy xiv, combat, mechanics, sprout, ffxiv beginner's guide, ffxiv combat guide, gameplay, damage, ffxiv parsing, deal more damage, deal more damage as a sprout, tips, tips & tricks, ffxiv tips, ff14 tips, final fantasy xiv tips, gameplay tips, how to improve

Id: Ky7Z-vYHFAc

Length: 18min 18sec (1098 seconds)

Published: Sun Aug 21 2022