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Jobs

Since Cálei wasn't my first character, I had a pretty good idea of what I wanted to do when I made him. He started as a lancer (this did not last, I hate playing dragoon) and spent a lot of time as a scholar so I could learn how to play it (failed), but I always knew how he would end up.

I have hit the level cap on all jobs each expansion, and Dawntrail has been no different. I'm the kind of player who will level up everything even if it's not really my taste. Thank goodness it's so easy to level in this game.

Red Mage

I already knew how to play RDM thanks to Reis, so this was really where I settled into it being my permanent main, beyond just playing through the story. The lore suited Cálei quite well and the gameplay style is my favorite in the entire game. I like a lot of jobs, but this is the one that clicked to the point that I genuinely enjoy playing for thousands and thousands of hours. (You do not want to know my /playtime.)

ShB red mage was very good. EW red mage took what few pain points it had (that terrible AOE combo) and improved it. DT eliminated my remaining gripes and then added such perfect new skills that I fell in love all over again. At this point, I have no idea where RDM could go next. If they screw it up I will be devastated. Just make me the strongest caster, thanks. (This will never happen. Thanks raise tax.)

Actually, my one complaint is that I don't have any way to heal myself without sacrificing DPS. This is usually not a concern, but as the only job with no weavable self-heals or personal shields/mitigation, I definitely have struggled at times if my healers haven't been on the ball. (No, I am not going to use Vercure to heal myself, are you insane.)

Truly, though, I love red mage. It is the job I pretty much always want to play. Am I the best red mage? Absolutely not. Optimizing it is tricky. But I'm competent enough to get the job done, and that's enough for me.

DPS

There's only one other DPS I can play at a high-end level, and it's summoner. Everything else, I only play casually. Don't ever ask me to play melee in high-end content, I hate positionals.

I can play almost every job to a basic level of competency (i.e. I know what the rotation is supposed to be), excluding monk and black mage. I have not played monk in any content past level 50; I hated it in ShB, learned I could level it through PVP, and never looked back. Don't ask me how to play monk, I genuinely don't know. As for black mage, I get how it works, but I don't find it enjoyable at all, so it also gets all of my PVP EXP.

Every other job I can at least tolerate enough to play in roulettes. Of those, my favorites are reaper, dancer, viper, ninja, pictomancer, and machinist. The rest are fine, but nothing something I tend to reach for.

Healers

I like healing a lot! In FFXIV a healer is really just a DPS who sometimes heals, which I find very engaging even if healers don't have interesting DPS rotations. Admittedly I don't usually do high-end content as a healer, so most of my experience is via roulettes. Even then, I've had many runs where I've had to use all of my tools to carry a party across the finish line.

I do feel that healing and tanking is made substantially easier if you have more familiarity with the game and content. I have a good memory for this kind of thing and I've played most duties a lot, so I tend to have a good idea of when and what I need to heal. I'd like to try high-level content as a healer sometime, since I usually default to red mage.

My favorite healer is sage, which was a surprise to me because I spent most of the leveling process uncertain how to play it. Scholar has never clicked for me, and I really struggled with learning how to play sage in dungeons. It took a lot of guides and practice for sage to finally click, and since then it's been my go-to healer.

I do enjoy all of the healers, though. I will never be a fantastic astrologian simply because I can't weave cards that fast on a controller, but I enjoy it anyway. I hate white mage at low levels (GIVE ME LILIES) but it's easy to use once you get your full kit. And scholar... will eventually make sense to me. Surely.

Tanks

I find tanking really easy. I credit this entirely to having a good memory for dungeon layouts, mob locations, and enemy attack names. I've also just plain played the game a lot, so it isn't much trouble to get dropped into an unfamiliar duty and muddle my way through.

Tanks consistently get some of my favorite glamour in the game, so I have spent a lot of time farming content as a tank for outfits. I went most of Endwalker without playing paladin or dark knight at all; I only recently picked dark knight back up. Paladin I still find unenjoyable, sadly.

Aesthetically, my favorite tank job is gunbreaker, which you can probably credit to my love of Squall and Lightning. However... I am really, really bad at it. Like, don't get me wrong, I can play gunbreaker in dungeons fine, I know how to mitigate and pull and everything. But put me in a trial or raid with no downtime and I will somehow completely misalign my cartridges and buff window. I keep practicing anyway, so perhaps one day I'll be more proficient. But man, the slightest mistake is a killer on this job.

In contrast, warrior is as simple as it gets — and has the most broken kit in dungeons. It will always be satisfying to hit Bloodwhetting at low health and instantly heal back to full. And on top of that we just get to do more Fell Cleaves every expansion?! I love it.

Blue Mage

This gets its own category because it's weird.

On paper, I should love blue mage. It's one of my favorite classic Final Fantasy jobs. You have literally over a hundred spells to choose from. You get to use some of the most powerful boss attacks in the game!

And yet in practice, I really don't vibe with it. Part of this is due to how it works: blue mage can spec as tank, healer, or DPS, with access to 24 skills at a time. Of these, tanking and healing don't really work like they do on the normal jobs since at heart you're a caster. This leaves me with DPS, which is... fine, but I don't like how the optimal rotation requires you to squeeze every hit into your opener and then literally do nothing for 15 seconds.

I appreciate that blue mage exists. I don't think it would work as a normal job in this game; spell collecting is intrinsic to being a blue mage and that aspect of it I quite enjoy and have completed. But in practice, it falls short for me. I also don't like the Masked Carnivale, the blue mage-only solo arena that's mostly just gimmick fights. Like, I've completed almost all of them, but... meh.

Because I don't enjoy playing it that much, I really have no interest in raiding as a blue mage, so I might never get the mount locked behind it. Maybe I'll change my mind one day, we'll see.

On flavor

I have a macro for each of my jobs that, along with changing my HUD (I use a different one for healers/tanks versus some DPS), changes my title and spawns a particular minion. Most of the time I keep it relevant to the job at hand, but sometimes I just want to use a particular title. Here's a list of my favorite title/minion pairings.

For crafters and gatherers, I usually use whatever title I've been working on or like a lot, such as Master Carpenter or Featherfall's Finest Culinarian. (I need more crafter titles.) BTN and MIN are paired with Malone because the Diadem is suffering and indeed have Diadem titles. FSH's buddy is Crabe de la Crabe, which is very important. I am not a fisher main even a little bit, so I don't have any impressive titles there.

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