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I mostly play tank/dps and i want to take a break and work on my white mage. I'm only lvl 52 right now, but I'd like to know what materia i should be melding on my way to 70. CASTER DPS: Summoner: Summoner Rotation All disclaimer and rights to the guys at tha Balance Discord.

Allow me to start this off with an apology. I’m sorry that I didn’t pick your favorite class as the best one ever. There, on to more important matters. I’ve been playing a lot of FFXIV lately, and unlike my first few years playing the game where I only played Dragoon, I’ve diversified quite a bit this time around. And in my ongoing quest to alienate just about everyone who follows me, I’ve decided to create a ranked list of all of the Final Fantasy XIV classes. The criteria are simple. Is it fun? Is it effective? Does it feel like its own job? Here we go!

18. Blue Mage

Yes, this feels like a bit of a cop out. Does FFXIV’s attempt at Blue Mage play like a Blue Mage of old? Kind of. You do learn abilities from enemies, kinda. You do customize yourself to suit the situation, kinda. And Blue Mage is a for realsies job in FFXIV, kinda. Being Square Enix’s first attempt at a so-called limited job, the class feels more like an afterthought than anything else. If you want to try something kinda cheesy, give it a go, but in general you can skip Blue Mage.

17. Astrologian

Woof, where to start with Astrologian. Obviously, power levels of classes rise and fall with the patch, so I’m trying not to use their strength as a big judge of where they rank. That said, Astrologian is not in a great place right now and that might be influencing my perception a bit. Astrologian was Square-Enix’s first attempt at introducing a new healer, and it probably explains why we haven’t gotten another one since. There’s only so many interesting ways to flavor “restore HP to allies.” The divination theme is nice, but it ends up just being a lot of prep work before each fight to accomplish the same thing White Mages do.

16. Summoner

Summoner checks in at number 16 not because it’s weak. In fact, it’s one of the stronger DPS in the game right now. The problem with Summoner is what it always has been. It really doesn’t feel like a Summoner. Going all the way back to Final Fantasy III, Summoner (called Sages and Evokers back then) has had a pretty simple concept. Summon a big beefy dude to deal a bunch of damage to your opponents. Flavor wise, it’s technically not a big leap from Black Mage. Expend lots of MP to deal lots of damage. Early days Summoner in FFXIV was awful, and while adding in Bahamut has definitely helped with the feel, the class still feels more akin to a Beastmaster.

15. Paladin

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The first tank on our list is Paladin. I like that it can throw a heal every now and then with Clemency. I like the Shelltron ability, even though it always makes me feel like they just wasted the limit break for a moment. My problem with Paladin is that it feels dull, but to be fair, so does Paladin in most games. It’s a meat-shield that can do some light curing. And that’s what it is in XIV as well. Effective, what I expect, but not fun.

14. Bard

Just… what? Bard was the first true victim of the holy trinity. Bard has been a pure support class in just about every Final Fantasy game it appeared in. So what do you do with it in a game that requires all jobs to be Healers, DPS, or Tanks? Spoiler: You don’t make it a freakin DPS. When I think about playing a Bard, I don’t think about archery. I picture singing songs to inspire my team forward.

13. Warrior

This might be some of my personal bias here, but I hate Warrior. I hated it in XI, and I hate it in XIV. It’s dull. It’s bland. And it’s all the minutiae of Paladin without being able to toss the occasional cure. They’ve had eras of being incredibly powerful with Fell Cleave, and in fact, there was a time when 6 Warriors and 2 healers was a pretty broken combination. Maybe I’ve still got bad memories of that era. Sorry Warrior, you’re a great class in the game, but #13 on my list.

12. Ninja

So as we move out of the lower third, we’re now squarely in the classes that are acceptable. And when I think of Ninja, that’s what springs to mind. If you want to live out your Naruto fantasies, Ninja is the class you’re looking for. It’s a difficult job to learn, and you’re rewarded with good, but not great damage. They have decent utility, and can be fun to play. Overall though, I still rank them pretty low as far as the DPS classes go.

11. Monk

Monk is a job that SE understands in theory, but can never seem to get right. They certainly didn’t benefit from being the ‘star’ of Stormblood like Dragoon did from Heavensward. Monk has always felt a little off-balance, which is ironic given the theme of the job. The good thing Monk has going for it is when you’re playing it right, the constant flow of punches and kicks makes you feel powerful. There’s very little downtime in the class, and that feels good.

10. Scholar

Scholar is fine.

9. Samurai

My roommate is a Samurai main who described it as “the weeaboo fantasy for idiots who can’t figure out Ninja.” Now that said, Samurai is also the DPS power-trip fantasy. It lacks utility, but it has a simple rotation that puts big pretty numbers up on the screen. More importantly, it does feel like Samurai should feel. It’s straightforward, and it bonks. What more could you want from your DPS?

8. Machinist

I think Machinist stands as Square-Enix’s best attempt at a pet class in Final Fantasy XIV. Let it be know that it wasn’t always that way. At launch, Machinist probably would have placed lower on the list. These days, the job has really begun to come into its own. Machinist was one of the first other DPS I tinkered around with, and I found myself really enjoying the rotation. It also benefits from me not having a lot of context for what a Machinist should be in the Final Fantasy universe. It gets to create its own path forward.

7. Dancer

Coming off of Dancer’s strange hybrid support/DPS role in FFXI, I had no idea what to expect from Dancer. I was certainly not expecting what I got. I’ll be the first to tell you that after months of playing a DPS role, your rotation starts to become boring and repetitive. Dancer’s almost mini-game like gameplay prevents you from just memorizing the best chain of abilities and instead forces you to be reactive. It’s engaging, but also can get a bit annoying when you just want to get through your 8 millionth leveling roulette.

6. Dark Knight

Square-Enix’s first new attempt at a tank went a lot better than their first new attempt at a healer. And color me surprised. Coming from a Final Fantasy XI background, I certainly did not expect Dark Knight to be a tank. I also struggled with how they were going to accomplish the ‘spend HP to deal damage’ theming of Dark Knights. They settled on running a more high-risk, high-reward gameplay style. The bad news about Dark Knight is you’re king of the edgelords. The good news about Dark Knight is you’re king of the edgelords.

5. Gunbreaker

If you had told me in 2015 that Gunbreaker would be in the game eventually, I’d have called you a liar. I had no idea what to expect for how this class would play, but I love what I ended up getting. A tank that focuses less on buffs and more on chaining together DPS combos? Yes please. The class is only okay at level 60, but once you hit level 70 and get the Continuation ability, it really kicks into high gear. Fast paced and fun, Gunbreaker takes our first slot in the top 5.

4. Black Mage

When you think about Black Mage, you expect a magic based job that does big nukes and makes your opponents turn to dust. And by and large, that’s what you get with Black Mage in FFXIV. The system focuses on switching between Astral Fire and Umbral Ice, one which deals the damage, and one which helps you restore MP quickly with which to do more damage. The Enochian ability is simultaneously what makes the job fun and challenging, but also endlessly frustrating. Still, you’ll never be bored playing Black Mage.

3. Dragoon

Full disclosure, I’m a Dragoon main. I wouldn’t main the job if I didn’t think it deserved to be fairly high on this list. I had to long ago accept that Dragoon in XIV wasn’t going to be like Dragoon in XI. Gone is the pet class, and here is a Dragoon that draws inspiration from its FF4 and FF5 counterparts. Jumps and lance tactics are the flavor of the day, with tons of Off-Global-Cooldown abilities to weave into your rotation. It never stops moving and jumping across the battlefield, and has kept me entertained for years.

2. White Mage

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Ahh yes, White Mage. So to be clear, this list assumes you can find fun in all three roles. If you detest healing, obviously this class would be worse than number 2 for you. However, there is no greater example of a class being exactly what you expect it to be. I want my White Mage to be a healer, who can’t do much damage and keeps my allies alive. And the White Mage delivers exactly that. The AoE stun with Holy is a welcome addition to any dungeon, and gives White Mage the edge over the other healers. Incidentally, I have no idea how they’ll make Apothecary work if that is indeed what happens next.

1. Red Mage

I said no class is more representative of what it should be than White Mage, and that might be true except for Red Mage. Square-Enix had their work cut out for them with Red Mage. It needs to DPS, but also heal, and use a sword. But it also has to fit into the holy trinity. Somehow, they managed to pull it off. Red Mage can nuke, it can heal, it can toss a raise, and then it also dives into the front line and melees with its sword as well. Red Mage is often defined as a jack of all trades, and Square-Enix managed to make that concept work even here. Congrats Red Mage, you take the number 1 slot.

And there you have it. All of the Final Fantasy XIV classes ranked. I’m sure you’ll have your own opinions, and I’m sure most people are going to absolutely hate this list. Which is fine! I invite you all to share your questions, comments, criticisms, critiques, qualms, queries, and conundrums with us over on Twitter.

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Lead Image courtesy of Square Enix

Last updated: 8/17/2019

Contents

• 1 Overview
• 2 Global Cooldown (GCD) Actions
  • 2.6 Positionals
• 3 Off-GCD Actions
  • 3.3 Do-More-Damage Buttons
• 4 Multiple Target Situations
  • 4.2 Three or More Targets
• 5 The Opener
• 6 Optimization Station
  • 6.2 Action Specifics
    • 6.2.1 Geirskogul and Nastrond
  • 6.3 Gearing Up
    • 6.3.1 Best Sets Available

Dragoon is a very static melee dps Job. You have strict, long combos to execute and timers within those combos that need to be maintained. Unlike other Jobs – especially other melee – which rely upon a priority system for their basic GCD rotation, Dragoon instead has static buttons to press in a specific order with very little variance. Shadowbringers brings with it a new reliance on hitting proper positionals to trigger new skills.

The Brains Behind the Operation

Eve Malqir (Ultros) – the primary writer of this guide; always open to answering questions!

Contact: Evie#1153 on Discord | Twitch

Xiu Ye (Midgardsormr) – the most active Mentor on The Balance Dragoon Discord

Provides the video content that will be sprinkled throughout!

Contact: Xiu Ye#0560 on Discord | Youtube | Twitch

Resources

1. Gear Comparison tool (More accurate, but slower version)
   Allows you to fill in your current [Level 80] gear and melds and figure out roughly which set will perform better.
2. Rotation Builder tool
   Allows you to input stats (either your character’s stats or ones made with the above Gear tool) and then build a rotation with them to get a more accurate readout of your DPS. You can use this tool to compare multiple rotations with the same gear to see which one outputs more. This tool causes some substantial load, so be cautious when using.
3. Controller Guide
   A simple guide to setting up your controller to play this Job. Old setups are listed within, but I’ll be working soon to get updated ones in there!
4. Tethercalc by Platinum Xephera on Ultros
   An incredibly useful tool that you can use to see which member of your party is the proper tether target. You just inject your fflogs link to the fight in question and it’ll tell you who you tethered and show you who was the best target. Before you ask any questions about how it calculates the damage in the 20s window: anything you think it might have issue with has already been properly solved. It may not be updated for 5.0 yet, but I’m sure it will be before Savage.

The bread-and-butter of your rotation, so to speak, these are the buttons you press most frequently. They’re broken down into several combo chains with various effects and uses.

The Chaos Thrust Combo

This combo has our basic damage buff in Disembowel alongside our damage-over-time skill, Chaos Thrust. These two effects are essential to dishing out proper amounts of damage.

The Full Thrust Combo

This combo uses our strongest weaponskill, Full Thrust, and that’s about it. It’s essentially just a filler combo whenever the aforementioned effects are active.

Raiden Thrust

This action functions as a direct upgrade to True Thrust after you’ve successfully completed one of the above combos. If you land your proper positional on the final/fifth hit, True Thrust upgrades to Raiden Thrust!

The Coerthan Torment Combo

Our new and freshly upgraded area-of-effect combo now packs Coerthan Torment as a third hit finisher! This is primarily used when dealing with a group of enemies numbering 3 or more.

Basic Rotation

Putting all of this together with the timers, we come out with one single string of actions. In general, under normal circumstances, we want to maintain this sequence of GCDs for as long as we are capable!

The Other Guy

Currently not used. You are safe to unmap it from your bar. With us having two 5-hit combo chains and this button breaking either combo at any stage and the longer runoff for combo maintenance, there is almost no way that this skill will ever find use. If it does, this section will add those niche cases.

Positionals

Several actions in the kit deal more damage from the Side of a boss, and several deal more from the Rear. You want to be sure to set up to hit these for extra damage whenever possible.

How do I know if I’m at the Side or Rear of a target?

Side Positionals

Rear Positionals

Positional Parity

The DPS disparity between landing every single positional and missing every single positional is approximately 4%. Meaning, if you would do 10,000 dps while hitting every positional, then you would only deal 9,600 if you missed every single one.

In other words: You should always strive to land every positional in any situation where it is easy to do so, however, there is a priority system to what you should be focused on while learning to optimize a fight.

1. Handle Mechanics
   If you fail a mechanic, you lose the fight, so it doesn’t matter how much DPS you gain if it causes you to miss a mechanic.
2. Stay Alive
   Dodge death puddles, avoid standing in boss cleaves, etc. Don’t die for DPS, because a death has a negative impact you won’t overcome by keeping uptime up until you died.
3. Maintain Uptime
   ABC – Always Be Casting. If your GCD stops spinning, you messed up. Assuming you are handling 1 and 2 properly, focus on keeping your rotation flowing and your GCD staying in constant motion.
4. Land Positionals
   Never let your GCD stop spinning in order to make it to a position for your flank or rear positionals – this helps no one and costs you DPS. Focus on landing positionals only after you have mastered the first three steps. Some fights and some strategies will require you to eschew positionals to handle mechanics, stay alive, or maintain uptime. This is okay.
   It is not the end of the world if your group stacks on the face of the boss.
   The DPS loss is not worth causing wipes over.

These actions have individual recast timers, allowing you to so-called “weave” them in-between your GCDs.

Dragon Spaghetti

One Giant Leap for Dragoon Kind

Do-More-Damage Buttons

Basic Buff Rotation

Our buffs fall on timers that function pretty well together in the duration of an encounter. Generally speaking, every six minutes our three buffs should automatically re-align. Talking in seconds, our buffs should align like so:

Buff Duration and Optimal Placement

If you have decent practice properly delaying your buffs within the gcd, you should, ideally, be able to get 9 gcd actions under each cast of Lance Charge, Dragon Sight, and Battle Litany, assuming your gcd is in our ideal Skill Speed window. Otherwise, you will get 8.

As our rotation is now 10 GCDs and our buffs last 9, we want to ideally miss only the weakest actions in our rotation with them – Disembowel or Raiden Thrust – while making sure first that we catch both finishers – Chaos Thrust and Full Thrust – and then that we catch both 4th and 5th hits – Wheeling Thrust and Fang and Claw. That said, below is a graph.

The two rows beneath the GCDs show the total potency gain for using Lance Charge after the above GCD and catching the amount of GCDs listed in the left column. Color coded to show the trends. These values shift if you’re using Life Surge on your Full Thrust. The numbers beneath it would shift in favor of covering that Full Thrust quite significantly.

Using any buffs after the redspaces will cause you to suffer substantial losses.

The yellow spaces are reasonably good enough in comparison to red.

The green spaces guarantee maximum output of your buffs.

We will be operating under the assumption that the fact that our multi-target combo does not extend Disembowel buff is an oversight. We’re the only melee that doesn’t get that benefit, so it’s likely a mistake. Someday, based Yoshida will notice us and fix it. Maybe.

Two Targets

When up against two targets, you’ll get more gains out of simply spreading your Chaos Thrust damage over time effect to both targets and keeping them both active. This is done by a simple modification to our basic rotation:

Three or More Targets

When dealing with any more than two targets, we want to roll into our Coerthan Torment Combo. You want to keep pressing High Jump, Mirage Dive, and all of the other buttons, especially Dragonfire Dive and Geirskogul, as they also hit multiple targets. Once you get your 2 Dragon Eyes, you can roll into Life and drop Nastrond and Stardiver to unleash destruction on a level where only Black Mage can compete.

Should I use Disembowel?

The answer to this question is kinda complicated. When you decide to use Disembowel during trash pulls, you sacrifice the potency of the above combo for two GCDs to apply a 10% damage buff to the subsequent four combos. The question of whether or not this is a gain is a very valid one.

The short answer is yes, you should be using Disembowel during trash.

The long answer is that using it causes you to lose potency overall if you’re hitting 4 or more enemies with the above combo, but that potency is very easily made up by any of our various off-gcd area-of-effect actions – Geirskogul, Nastrond, Stardiver, and Dragonfire Dive.

Applying Disembowel is 290+320 = 610 potency

Coerthan Torment combo is 200 potency per gcd per mob – 400 over 2 gcds

Essentially: if, sometime during the duration of Disembowel, you will press off-gcds that sum together to equal the potency needed to break even (AoE skills only need to hit the potency per enemy column) then you should apply it.

At 3, it is always a gain. At 4, you just need 75 potency! Geirskogul alone is 270. Of note is even at 15, you still need less than 1200 – the potency of 3 Nastronds.

This table also assumes that monsters will last the full (or most of the full) Disembowel duration.

The formula to directly generate the potency needed per enemy column, knowing the amount of enemies (n) is:

1600 – 6100/n

Because of the nature of this formula, it has an absolute maximum value of 1600 – meaning that, no matter how many enemies you are facing, if you have over 1600 in per-target area-of-effect off gcd actions available to use in those 30 seconds, Disembowel is always worth using.

I know a lot of you have skipped ahead to this section, since you feel like you have a solid grasp on the fundamentals, and I think that’s great! The primary use of the Opener is to prepare your cooldown alignment for the rest of the encounter. With our new Job design, it’s possible that we’ll actually have fight-specific openers down the stretch, and they’ll all be added here!

These openers have not been too thoroughly tested as of yet, so please take them with a grain of salt, and if you discover anything that flies counter to what we have listed here, please don’t hesitate to ask!

Standard [2.36-2.5]

This buff order gives much cleaner alignment with better GCD hits down the road. It mucks with the second Dragon Sight timing a little, but overall it’s better! Recommended for when we’re going somewhat slower.

You can delay Spineshatter Dive until after Geirskogul and shift Dragonfire Dive after Life Surge, but should only do so if that change will result in future alignments with raid buffs. This opener causes High Jumpand Geirskogul to be separated enough so they don’t accidentally collide too easily. Similar for Spineshatter Diveand Dragonfire Dive.

Gotta go fast [2.35 and below]

The delayed High Jump looks strange, but ends up lining up better down the stretch. Everything is placed so that this speed tier feels more comfy than it would with things in different places. It’s all designed with you in mind.

This section requires playtesting. We are in the process of fleshing it out, now. Thank you for your patience!

GCD Rotation

Disengaging from the target can cause your rotation to get forcibly shifted around. When re-engaging (be it after forced disengages or because you felt like taking a lap around the arena), you always only have two options for what you will lead with. Nothing particularly changes, either way, since your ten-GCD sequence will never actually shift.

1. Disembowel has less than 10 seconds remaining:
   
2. Disembowel has more than 10 seconds remaining:
   

That’s, honestly, all there is to discuss, here. This is more of a judgment call, honestly – anything up to around 12 seconds remaining could be clipped, but 10 is the basic cutoff for getting all 5 hits of your Full Thrust Combo with Disembowel’s buff before it falls off. You would lose the buff on Raiden Thrust and Disembowel after the fact, but that can be overcome.

The only exception to this rule is if you are going to hit an off-GCD action in that period of time after Disembowel wears off. In that case, you absolutely will want the refresh beforehand.

Action Specifics

Geirskoguland Nastrond

The general cycle for Life of the Dragon is very straightforward:

Not so obviously, following this rotation is not always optimal. If you do follow this throughout the encounter, your output will, in general, be just fine. It’s just that there are some cases where you will want to delay your Life cycle by a single Geirskogul cast.

The basic idea is to choose between pressing Mirage Dive before or after Geirskogul when the Mirage Dive would fill your second Dragon Eye. The decision forces you to ask the simple question: “Will my Nastrond and Stardiver fall under more buffs (Lance Charge and Dragon Sight, primarily) by entering Life now, or if I enter in 30 more seconds, instead?” You should be considering the remaining time on the recast timers for your buff actions when making this decision. The following chart should help to make it more clear.

Nastrond and Buffs

Because our buff actions fall into a rather static rotation (as seen above), we can extrapolate these concepts over the course of six minutes and get a general “Life of the Dragon Rotation” so to speak, which shows us when we hold it and when we don’t. This will only hold true if we have six minutes of continuous uptime – that is, we can land every one of the High Jump, Geirskogul, Mirage Dive, Nastrond, and Stardiver hits listed in this visual representation, while ideally dropping zero gcds in that same window. As such, it is very rarely ever going to be the optimal approach, and the above chart will serve you better in most situations.

After the final buff window, the rotation repeats from the 30s column, quite obviously.

As you can see, the only place we currently even employ this strategy is for our very firstLife entry. After that, we just let the skills fall where they may and they naturally align neatly with buff windows. Keep in mind that this could change if a boss jumps out of the arena at an odd time, so you should still learn the general idea behind the priority system!

Dragon Sight

You need to be close to the target of your affections to properly give them a buff. If the target moves away from you, however, youwill retain your buff. So it’s really only their loss. You can usually just worry about activating the skill and then stop worrying about whether or not it stays on your target. As of this expansion, you can now activate the skill without a target, though this is NOT RECOMMENDED, because you will only receive the 10% damage buff, and the 5% buff will be lost for that use, completely. No one gets it.

This skill is notoriously hard to use, already. Optimal handling:

Mouseover (<mo>) macro if you play mouse and keyboard.

Soft targeting (up/down on d-pad) without a macro if you play with a controller.

Different options are listed below, with varying degrees of usefulness/ease of use.

For controller, I recommend learning to soft-target and dropping all reliance on macros.

For keyboard/mouse, I recommend 1-3 specific ally macros for reliable friends and a mouseover as a backup (or primary, your call).

Gearing Up

As things appear to be right now, our stat priority has not changed!
Critical Hit Rate > Direct Hit Rate > Determination > Skill Speed

I recommend you use the gear comparison tool in the resources section to actually get a better idea of how melds affect your DPS!

Just meld (with 6’s; 8’s have a 40% removal chance and you will want to save those for bis!) and wear highest item level gear, for now!

Best Sets Available

The 2.49 set provides you with a particularly slow GCD speed for people who prefer that for one reason or another. You are also incapable of getting 9 GCDs (still unable to get fewer than 8, as well, assuming you don’t delay any GCD) under your buff actions at that speed, so if you’re feeling lazy about trying to push as hard as you can, it’s a very good alternative.

2.45 is, in my opinion, the most comfortable of the sets. It’s slow enough for easy double weaves, but fast enough for 9 GCDs in buffs if you push for it. It will parse well (arguably the best among them under certain conditions), and just overall feels good.

2.38 is a bit faster than the above sets, but could theoretically also be the strongest among them. The faster speeds will make double weaving tougher with high ping, but also makes 9 GCD buffs much much easier than the 2.45 set. The rotation similarly feels nice and smooth and flows really well.

These three sets are interchangeable for your best in slot needs. The latter two (2.45 and 2.38) can actually both be built on one character and freely swapped between. The way I’ve organized the melds is very particular in that they meld the exact same materia into every piece they share, so you’ll just need to swap which pieces you have equipped to change between the sets! Cool, right? Yeah, it is.

DPS Comparison Between Sets

Below is a graph comparing the total DPS of each of the three above sets over time. I’ve clipped out the opener to avoid having a super zoomed out graph to show the peaks (which are around 23,000, in case you were curious). Please note that the Y-Axis only shows values from 14,250 to 15,750 which results in seeing huge gaps between the mins and maxes which make the variation appear to be much larger than it actually is.

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I’ll be retooling rotations to get a graph that extends to 7 minutes to catch the 6:00 burst at a later time.

How Fast Can We Go?

Our sweet spot for GCD appears to be somewhere between 2.25 and 2.47.

Life Surge’s 45s cooldown means that once we go faster than 2.25, we’ll start to severely delay it if we want to keep it on Full Thrust.

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Chaos Thrust having a 24s duration means that if we go slower than 2.47, we will see noticeable dot dropping, between recasts. This, in general, will not be a significant issue, but it is worth noting.