Raid Prep & DPSing (& Improving Overall)

Primer to Raiding

Raiding collectively refers to the hardest content in the game FF14 has to offer. These are Extreme Trials, Savage Raids, and Ultimate Raids in increasing difficulty. These fights demand a strong understanding of your own toolkits and movement before learning the unique mechanics and patterns to each fight. You must be dealing adequate damage to kill the boss and go through phase changes and beat what is called "Enrage", the hard time limit you are given for a fight.

This will be a checklist of things to master/start mastering as you begin your journey into high-end content (or just to improve your overall gameplay).

All Players

ABC's

ABC's stand for "Always Be Casting"! Aim to always be hitting a Global Cooldown (GCD) button (Weaponskills and Spells) to be constantly dealing damage throughout the entire fight. Of course, it is most optimal to be applying your actual rotation or Damage over Time (DoT) skills when they run out, but any button pressed, whether it breaks a combo or it's just a ranged attack because the boss is too far away, is better than not pressing any buttons and dealing 0 damage.

READ YOUR TOOLTIPS & Notable Universal Defensive Skills for Raids - MUST READ

Be familiar with everything your Job can do, damage skills, damage bonuses, damage mitigation, DoTs, unique properties. ESPECIALLY THESE!!

Arm's Length/Surecast: These Off-Global Cooldown (oGCD) buttons (Abilities) are absolutely essential for Raiding, not for applying Slow or being able to cast Spells uninterrupted but for nullifying most knockback and draw-in effects. These will save you from being thrown around the arena for certain attacks and potentially even maintain damage uptime!

Interject/Head Graze: These buttons can outright Interrupt certain attacks and save the party from taking damage which means less damage for them to heal and more damage they can deal back to the boss.
The first attack cannot be Interrupted. The second attack CAN be Interrupted as indicated by the outline around the cast bar. 

Reprisal/Feint/Addle: These buttons decrease the boss' outgoing damage! Use these on Raidwides and Tankbusters to help with party survivability and decrease the load on your healers!

Second Wind: This is a self-heal that can be used as you can see fit, after taking some accidental damage, or after being Resurrected to decrease the load on your healers.

Job-specific Utility Skills: These are skills like Reaper's Arcane Crest, Dancer's Shield Samba, and Dark Knight's Dark Missionary. There's too many to list here, but PLEASE familiarize yourself with your Job and try to squeeze out as much utility (both Party and Self utility) and damage out of it as possible!

Openers, Rotations, & Where to Find Them

Pressing buttons is great and all, but maximizing your damage output means doing a certain damage "Rotation", or specific order of attacks. These Rotations are calculated by the people over on The Balance and on their Discord and are a good source for specific information on your Jobs. There are also Rotations based on your GCD Cooldown so be sure you're studying the ones that match your Cooldown or that you're gearing towards a specific Cooldown you want.

Weaving

Weaving refers to casting your oGCD Abilities in between your GCD Weaponskills/Spells to use them as early as possible but still maximizing your GCD uptime. If you're looking at The Balance, these are the buttons hovering above and in-between your main GCD skills.

Weaving 1-2 oGCDs is the most optimal depending on your GCD cooldown timer and completing fight mechanics. Anything that locks you out of pressing your next GCD button on time is what is called "clipping" and delays your entire GCD rotation. One instance of clipping won't derail you and decrease your damage too much, but multiple and major clipping will result in a big decrease in your overall damage in the long run.

Maintain your Combo Actions

Your main attack combos provide extra damage, Job Gauge meter gain, self buffs, and enemy debuffs if you complete them correctly! Be sure you're completing your Combo Actions properly as breaking them too often can really decrease your overall DPS.

Equipment, Materia, Food, Potions, & Grand Company Buffs

Gearing up is another incredibly important aspect to preparing for Raiding. The "best-in-slot" (BiS) sets and information can also be found on The Balance.

Try to have the highest Item Level (iLvl) and/or strongest Equipment available for your Job whether that be from Artifact Gear, Tomestones, Capstone Dungeons, Extreme Trials, Normal Raids, or Savage Raids! There are also specific combinations of gear for what is called "Best-in-Slot" (BiS) for different builds that can also be found on The Balance.

Materia further increases your Equipment's substats to bring out its maximum potential! BE WARY THOUGH as each piece has a limit on how much of a specific substat it can provide! It is often better to upgrade a different substat to make the most out of your Materia than use one to cap out a substat. A fantastic way to save money on Materia is to exchange any Cracked ________clusters with Rowena's Representatives under "Combat Supplies" for the highest level Materia.

Food is another way to "permanently" increase your stats for fights. Be sure to be Crafting or buying the high-quality foods for the biggest buffs.

Potions on the other hand provide temporary buffs that you can use about twice in a fight for 30 second damage buffs. However, potions are more expensive and should only be used when you need to squeeze out a little more damage in a fight to pass Enrage. These are meant to be woven into your combos so you can practice weaving potions with cheaper, weaker potions.

If you want to save money on food and equipment repairs, complete the Grand Company Squadron Missions for Squadron Rationing Manuals and Squadron Gear Maintenance Manuals. Food buff durations increase by 15 minutes and equipment durability reduction is decreased by 30%!

Finding maximum uptime & Greed

With boss' Area of Effect (AoE) attacks, the only thing that determines whether or not you take damage is if you're standing in the puddle when the attack is cast or "snapshots". This means you can stand in a puddle at your effective range as long as possible and keep dealing your maximum damage until the very last moment to dodge and attack.

This is referred to as maximum uptime and Greed. This will take practice and is something you will have to learn on the fly in actual combat but could potentially enable you to see the next mechanic or clear a fight because you dealt enough damage.

If you cannot be within your effective range or have to be on the move, use whatever zero cast time ranged attacks you have because some damage is better than no damage.

HOWEVER, when learning a fight, focus on learning the fight and the timing for all the mechanics and then find areas where you can greed for more damage.

Don't die! 

Damage is important, but so is respecting the mechanics and not dying! Getting yourself killed means resources and time your healers and mages are spending resurrecting you and not dealing damage and when you come back, you deal reduced damage!

If you do die, be careful when Resurrecting!

When you receive a Raise from someone, you have a full 60 seconds to accept the Resurrection and then a few seconds of invincibility once you're back alive as long as you don't press any buttons aside from movement.

Be careful about when you choose to Resurrect so you don't immediately die afterwards and require yet another resurrection.

Buff Alignment

In the current state of the game, self and party buffs are on either 60 second or 120 second timers. These buffs do stack on each other and become more and more potent the more buffs you are carrying at a time so save these buffs for these windows (if they become unaligned due to things like clipping, missed inputs, and deaths) so the entire party can reap the benefits.

Maintain your DoTs

If you have a DoT skill, make sure they're cast on the boss as much as possible! It does have a small potency, but throughout the course of a fight, it actually becomes one of your biggest sources of damage depending on the Job and it's very passive damage too! They only need to be cast once every 30 or 60 seconds.

Reapply your DoTs during burst phases! Even if there's still plenty of time left, reapply in Burst phases so the DoT itself gets all the extra bonuses from shared buffs.

Be familiar with the Normal versions of fights

Extreme and Savage versions of fights typically incorporate combinations or variants of mechanics in the Normal versions of fights. Not everything will translate over into the harder versions, but it would still help you get in the mindset of what to look out for!

Actually measure the damage you're doing!

Stone, Sky, Sea provides a place to fight Training Dummies that simulate the amount of damage your Job is expected to deal for any given fight in a vacuum. It is a test of your combat skills and gear preparation and if you're not clearing at least these Training Dummies with ease, you have more optimization to do before going into the fight itself. HOWEVER it's not the best adjusted for Healers' and Tanks' stats. They might have some issues clearing the damage checks.

Other tools are ACT - Advanced Combat Tracker, FFlogs, and xivanalysis to look at all your damage numbers and performance BUT PLEASE KNOW that these are 3rd party tools and do NOT mention them in-game. These are against the Terms of Service and I really wish that there were first-party tracking tools.

ACT gets uploaded into FFlogs to show you your raw damage numbers. It is recommended to at least register your character on there so you can gauge your progress. HOWEVER, a lot of players fixate on what they are "parsing", or how they stack up against all other players in the different categories, particularly Damage Dealt. A player's parse is only how they are performing when compared to every existing run up until that point and is not indicative of a player's actual performance.

xivanalysis takes a run from FFlogs and shows how you are performing in relation to your Job, like if you're maximizing GCD uptime, accruing and spending your resources, and maintaining buffs, debuffs, and DoTs.

Clean your HUD and Hotbars!

HUDs and Hotbars indirectly influence a player's performance. The more time spent with your eyes darting around the screen to find information means the less time spent focusing on the actual fight and you will be worn down from playing sooner.

Clean and tidy HUDs and Hotbars make it easier and faster to find and interpret information. Less brainpower spent on finding critical information means more brainpower available to focus on the fight! See my Keyboard Player Hotbars & HUD guide here for detailed information!

All Ranged (Physical Ranged, Magical Ranged, and Healers)

You can attack from range but...

If you stand too far away from the action, you will be missing out on heals and buffs from your party members and be unable to provide your party with your own buffs and/or healing. You don't have to stand as close as melee classes, but it is optimal to stand pretty close to the boss and party.

Phys Ranged

If you still need MORE movement on top of your free movement as a Phys Ranged DPS,

Bards and Dancers have additional free movement buttons to get around the arena.

Bard's Repelling Shot: Jumps 10 yalms away from CURRENT TARGET. Use this to get out of sticky situations. It unfortunately cannot be used in the same manner as Dragoon's Elusive Jump.

Dancer's En Avant: Quickly dash 10 yalms forward. You can use this to quickly and easily travel across the arena and you get up to 3 charges by level 90.

All Casters (Magical Ranged and Healers)

Slidecasting

A common difficulty that Casters have to contend with is remaining stationary while casting GCD Spells. You often will be caught having to dodge a mechanic mid-cast. HOWEVER, there is a short grace period at the end of a cast about 0.5 seconds long where you can start moving without breaking the cast timer. This is referred to as Slidecasting and requires a lot of practice to master, but with enough practice, you can potentially move across entire arenas without ever breaking your GCD uptime. If you need some additional visual assistance, place an Emote on a Hotbar and you can start Sliding when the Emote button lights up again.

Healers

Try to rely on your oGCD heals!

Most of healers' kits are oGCD heals. This means that healers are designed to heal via weaving with GCD healing as a last resort! More time spent doing GCD healing means less damage dealt on the boss after all!!

BUT if you have to rely on some GCD healing, do some GCD healing as a death is almost always a worse outcome than the time and effort spent on keeping a player alive.

Communicate with your co-healer!

You are never alone in healing! Work with your co-healer to share the burden and if you have a Summoner, Red Mage, or even a Paladin (PLD is absolute last resort), you can ask them to do some healing and Resurrecting for you or in case you or your co-healer dies.

Don't hold out on using healer LB3's!

If you have a full Limit Gauge and have at least 3-4 party members down, might as well use your LB3 because otherwise, that run and prog is lost forever! Be wary that there is a lot of "animation lock" where you are unable to move so try your best to use it during downtime or let your team know to try and resurrect you after getting the rest of the party up!

All Melees (Melee DPS and Tanks)

Pay attention to your Positionals!

For the Melee DPS classes, combo finishers typically gain even more bonus damage if activated when facing the boss' rear or flanks. The circles at the bases of boss' feet communicate whether or not you actually need to perform positionals to gain the bonus damage and where to stand. (see first image)

If the boss has a complete circle around them/goes completely behind them for oversized bosses, you do NOT have to worry about positionals and only have to worry about dealing damage and completing mechanics. (see second image)

Both images are from JoCat's A Crap Guide to Final Fantasy XIV - Melee DPS video and I do not claim ownership of this diagram and screenshot

If you absolutely cannot land positionals, just use True North and it will negate the positional requirements and still provide all the bonus effects.

Finding "max melee" range

The damage circles around enemies give a clear indicator of where you can stand to hit the boss, but around every boss is a thinner, invisible circle that allows you to stand a little further away while still landing all your melee attacks. 

This is what's known as the true "max melee" range and is something that has to be felt to know where max melee is. Practice moving in and out of displayed melee range, max melee range, and out-of-melee range on a Striking Dummy and other fights like Dungeon Bosses to learn where max melee is. This will make it easier to respond to mechanics and maintain as much uptime as possible.

If you absolutely cannot safely stand in max melee range, play it safe, step back, and use your ranged attack as some damage is better than no damage.

Tanks

Know where your Tank Stance, Provoke, and Shirk buttons are!

These buttons are absolutely necessary for these types of fights, particularly for Tank Swaps, but rather than reiterate everything, here's a link to the section in my Tank guide where you can read up on those buttons and other Tank-related information!

Always position your boss facing north/predetermined position

If you are Raiding in Party Finders/with random players, the predetermined position to face the boss so that other players don't get hit and melee DPS can land their positionals is north.

If you are raiding with a static and would prefer a different predetermined position due to a boss' facing during/after a mechanic or travel time for melee DPS to start landing positionals again, go for it! As long as everyone is on the same page and no one is dying and you're clearing mechanics, it doesn't matter where the boss is facing.

Find a happy middleground for your self-mitigation skills

Like with tanking in all other content, the more mitigation skills you stack, the smaller returns you get depending on which mitigations you are using.

Use enough mitigations to not take (near-)lethal damage but not so many skills that you run out of mitigations for the next hard hitting attack.

Be wary of Bleeds

Bleeds (especially in Pandaemonium: Abyssos) are extremely potent and are a large source of deaths among Tanks. BUT if you cast a mitigation skill like Rampart before receiving a Bleed, your overall Bleed damage will be reduced and will decrease the likelihood of dying and burden on your healers.

Miscellaneous

PRACTICE AND PRACTICE AND PRACTICE PRACTICE 

If you don't practice and apply these concepts to your regular play, you either won't improve or will have very incremental gains if you are only practicing in the high-end content. Practice during Roulettes, miscellaneous dungeon runs, and overworld FATEs. Practice on Striking Dummies you can find near most Aetheryte crystals in the overworld. Always Be Practicing!

Static Leader vs Raid Leader

If you find yourself in a leadership position of your static, there is the Static Leader and the Raid Leader, but it doesn't necessarily have to be two different people.

The Static Leader helps facilitate gear distribution, scheduling, reminders, and finding substitute members. They do not necessarily have to be the ones most familiar with a fight, but should still be generally more familiar with a fight and the other members' roles and niches to support the static.

The Raid Leader is much more like a field commander, familiar with the fights and able to read the arena and call out mechanics.

HOWEVER, even if you're not in a leadership position in the static, it is literally a group collaborative effort and ideas and insight should be openly shared.

Gear/Loot Distribution

This is relevant mainly for the Static Leader(s). Determine your group's needs and facilitate Gear Distribution based on the group's needs. If your raid damage is lacking, providing gear to your DPS members first can make damage checks easier and possibly help avoid Enrage if it comes to that. If your damage is fine and you want more stable progs, invest your gear into your Tanks and Healers.

Below are four videos from JoCat and specstre that I have pulled some of the information presented here from. All of these are short and sweet, under 10 minutes long.

Closing Thoughts

This is a lot of information (way more than I thought I would be writing at the start of this) and you probably won't master everything in a couple of days. This WILL be a process, but will also help you get into the mindset of Raiding in that learning and practicing a fight with 7 other people will also be a process. 

Hopefully, with all the information here, you and/or party members who use this guide/practice this material won't be the reasons you wipe to mechanics and/or Enrage and be the reason you successfully clear a fight!