Tales from a Damage Dealer

It's been a while since my last blog, but things haven't been the same in Final Fantasy land.  Specifically, I haven't touched my Paladin class for, like, over a month now.  Instead, I'm mostly playing the opposite.  With my goal of getting all the advanced jobs, I've had to put aside my high lever classes in favor of finally starting to build up some of the others.  Amongst them is the archer, the thaumaturge and the arcanist.  Yes, all three are damage dealing classes!  So I've basically gone from tanking to it's polar opposite.  And I've learned a lot of lessons as a result.

 

No, these aren't the only damage classes I've had experience with.  My Dragoon and Monk are both DPSers at quite high levels, but playing as these three other classes are totally different.  For one, all three do damage from range.  Maybe I'm just playing Monks and Dragoons wrong.  It’s possible.  But I've never really done so much damage with them that I grab aggro from the tank.  But with the thau and the archer, it's a whole different story.  And I've seen yet another level of 'bad tanking' never experienced before. 

 

See, while Monks, Dragoons and Arcanists do damage, they mostly do damage to a single target at at time.  If you hit the same target the tank is currently attacking, the chance of pulling aggro is practically nil.  But not so for archers and thaumaturges, for they have abilities that hits whole groups of enemies, and hit them fast and hard.  I've lost count of how many times I used a single fire attack, hit three enemies, and immediately find myself beset by two of them.  Now I know why some tanks hate mages/archers who use area of effect attacks.  As a tank, I hated it too, until I managed to compensate for it.  But now, I finally know WHY it happens, and it's very simple to explain.

 

It's POWER.

 

You see, archers and thaus hit as hard as anyone else but being ranged attackers give them unprecedented consistancy in their damage dealing.  For one, they don't have to chase their enemies, they just stand and shoot.  Therefore, they are in the position to exert maximum force for maximum duration.  Blasting fools with fire or turning them into pincushions is a power trip.  It's positively intoxicating!  And their ability to hit multiple target only make abusing their power all the easier.  That is why they often pull aggro from tanks, or hit things they shouldn't.  Because they just can't help themselves!  If they are in the group to do damage, then by god that's exactly what they'll do.  No holding back.  Mwahahahahaha.  Now that I've experienced this power for myself, it's easy to understand why so many damage dealers find it difficult to let go and hold back.  And that's why a great tank is a godsend to these people.  Because they don't have to!

 

Alas, that's not always the case.  Focusing on my DPS classes, I've been disappointed many times.  Twice now, I've see tanks that didn't even bother tanking.  They just hit one enemy till it dies, regardless if there are any other enemies.  Even against just one foe a competent DPSer can easily strip aggro from these tanks.  The arcanist in one dungeon had to pull out gold Carbunkle to tank, and in another instance the healer tanked the trash mobs.  Other tanks are not so bad.  I was doing a dungeon with a friend of mine… I'll call her Rosana… with a tank that knew what to do, but just couldn't do it.  In other words, he knew that a tank is supposed to hold all the aggro but just didn't know quite how.  I don't actually hold anything against this guy.  I was once like that, so no judgements.  But, in a prime example from what I wrote about in my last Tales from a Tank entry, we had to compensate for him.  Basically, Rosana and I held back.  We COULD have gone nuts with a thousand arrorws of death raining from the sky and rings of fire but we didn't.  Well, mostly.  After we realize he couldn't handle it we just stopped.  It was sad.  Trigger finger was very itchy.  in the end, we successfully completed the dungeon anyway.

 

Now that I've had experience with all eight playable classes, my understanding of FF14's game mechanics have increased 10 fold.  It's really, really fun walking a mile in the shoes of some of these classes because at first glance it's easy to dismiss some of them as annoying.  I know a lot of tanks don't like archers and thaumaturges for their perceived recklessness but now, at the very least, I understand where that recklessness comes from and it's not always a bad thing.  Remember those two bad tanks I mentioned earlier?  Well, we ended up beating the dungeons but that's only because of the skill exhibited by the damage dealers.  If we weren't there, doing all that we can, no holds bared and no holding back, we might not have made it.