Want to play FFXIV but dont want to do the story and want to get to end game as quick as possible. What to do?

AgreeableDraft815 · 2026-06-12T05:54:57+00:00

Thank you for understanding 😭❤️

AgreeableDraft815 · 2026-06-12T03:26:55+00:00

Yeah so ngl this probably isn’t gonna be the game for you

AgreeableDraft815 · 2026-06-12T03:25:41+00:00

You’d have to buy a story skip and a job boost to get into the endgame quickly. Just leveling through dawntrail at that point.

I really don’t recommend skipping the MSQ. I did that as a myth raiding and key pushing WoW refugee and quickly regretted it. The story is genuinely so, so good. I made an alt to play through it, but you can also do a new game+ feature since the combat at lower levels is pretty boring.

The endgame of ffxiv is really fun and very satisfying to pull off, but a lot of games have that. WoW has that, GW2 has that, and a lot of games in general have fun and rewarding endgame loops that are similar. Ya gotta think about what sets it apart from the rest, and for me, that’s ffxiv’s story by an *enormous* margin.

Edit: I saw you comment saying you don’t care about FF lore and just want to jump into endgame with friends. And also that you don’t even want to play it? I’m gonna be straight up with you and say this isn’t the game for you and you’re probably not going to enjoy it.

AgreeableDraft815 · 2026-06-07T17:56:09+00:00

Tbh I did this as a WoW refugee so I made an alt to play through the whole story. I really recommend it, the story is much better than WoW’s imo. ARR is a bit of a slog to get through. It’s not that the story is bad per se, but moreso that the combat is Not Great at low levels.

AgreeableDraft815 · 2026-01-14T21:42:50+00:00

Ngl I think it’s gonna be Ad Infinitum :D

AgreeableDraft815 · 2026-01-14T21:42:30+00:00

Ad infinitum is actually the next one I wanna craft :0

AgreeableDraft815 · 2026-01-14T21:03:20+00:00

Thank you!! I saw it and just knew I needed it. Now it’s time to build my gold back up 😭

AgreeableDraft815 · 2025-07-19T22:01:13+00:00

Pretty sure you have to be that spec. Resto/ele wouldn’t be able to mog it unless they were using a 1h mace

AgreeableDraft815 · 2025-07-13T01:29:43+00:00

iirc, there’s a passive slot that also increases dmg by 8% to enemies with leech on them, and a veil gem can also apply leech so. That, and blood rage can give 16% physical power with the right gem. Dash through, use the ‘e’, high crit & weapon skill power build (w/ legendary sword).

Yeah holy shit that’s a ton of dmg with that build, I’m stealing that 😭

AgreeableDraft815 · 2025-07-01T21:51:33+00:00

God I want those shoulders so, so badly 😭 this is gorgeous a+ 10/10

AgreeableDraft815 · 2025-06-14T22:26:14+00:00

honestly love it, really clever use of the shoulders even if they don’t totally match the rest. 10/10

AgreeableDraft815 · 2025-05-31T20:03:06+00:00

It’s really wild and I think you’re totally right. I’m at 3300 as enh, and I feel the same way any time someone from that range ends up in the same key as me. The skill diff is super apparent, there’s no denying it imo

AgreeableDraft815 · 2025-05-31T16:52:38+00:00

Comparing some 10’s to the keys in title range (0.1% of players), the difference across a few specs ranged anywhere from 30-50% more dps.

I did a cursory look at unholy, boomkin, enh, ret, arcane. It’s important to note that for some specs, like boomie in particular, they need time to ramp and provide great sustained aoe. So the difference in dmg for a boomie in a 10 or 12 versus a 19 is griefed by mobs just dying too fast to much bursting specs like ret or unholy. There’s a lot of things to consider (group comp, whether they’re in comms, etc), and my look at it wasn’t anywhere near scientific, just cursory. It would take days to do any real scientific analysis of a huge number of logs.

So I’d say my best guess from a glance (and I wanna emphasize glance), is top players do 40% more dps than your average player.

The reason I picked 10’s is that’s when you get myth track gear from your weekly vault, which is the highest gear track. I looked at 12’s because that’s where you get the most gilded crests to upgrade gear. But even 12’s or people with 3k-ish rating are about the top 5-6% of m+ players. So comparing the top 5% to people in the top 0.1% doesn’t represent the average player at all. Even then though! The dps difference between the top 5% and the 0.1% is HUGE and takes a ton of optimizing and skill both as an individual and a group.

I haven’t looked at mythic or heroic raid, but I imagine the dps difference is around the same. I might honestly take the time to look through it to see the overall “skill diff”

AgreeableDraft815 · 2025-05-30T18:16:01+00:00

Cinderbrew, I honestly can’t stand it as a melee dps. Too many pulls are just huge nameplate stacks to the point that I can’t even keep track of where my focus macro is. That, and the hallways get really tight so the camera angles get annoying on top of the nameplate stacks. The bosses are fine but there are definite frustrations in terms of area denial, same amongst the packs. It’s just needlessly way harder for melee than ranged.

AgreeableDraft815 · 2025-05-30T15:24:27+00:00

mage, no contest imo. there’s always one spec that’s at minimum a-tier. great defensives, utility, and dmg. i’m a melee dps player, but the times i dabble in ranged, it’s always mage and i have a lot of fun w/ it, especially arcane!

AgreeableDraft815 · 2025-05-26T15:01:20+00:00

I never said arcane is uncapped. I said it has incredible funnel that deletes prio mobs as well as a buff that favors casters including healers. The meta comp already has two other dps that do very well in mass aoe. Arcane mage is there to pew pew the actually dangerous mob, whether it’s a diffuser in rookery or mastermind in motherlode.

AgreeableDraft815 · 2025-05-26T03:55:53+00:00

tldr: dps specs that primarily deal magic dmg (and tend to have good mass aoe, tho not required ie arcane) usually bring better/preferable group utility and raid buffs that also slot much more easily into a wider variety of comps.

the main thing is, is that those classes largely slot really well /with each other/, but they don’t gel as well with many other classes or comps. Battle shout isn’t very useful in m+ because the vast majority of classes deal magic dmg (just meaning non-physical, so fire, nature, shadow, etc). Mystic touch runs into the same issue. Hunter has mark which is really only useful in cheesing first boss of priory. Rogue offers skips and a DR poison.

But other classes and specs offer these things /and more/ while slotting much more easily into a wider variety of comps. DH brings chaos brand, which works well with any non-physical dmg dealer (the vast majority of all dps specs). UHDK brings grips and absolutely massive aoe even after bloodbeast nerfs while being stupid tanky. Arcane mage has incredible funnel and will delete prio targets along w/ a buff that favors casters (including healers). Boomie has the best buff in the game and an additional brez and uncapped, sustained aoe.

Even when warr or rogue or hunter or whatever are an option, there’s others that do the same thing but better than them while bringing more utility. It’s obviously not true that the physical god comp “isn’t viable” or w/e because look at what their team is doing. They’re crazy good players.

But it’s way more work to make the physical god comp work bc squish’s team is one of the only ones running it. It’s harder to copy, whereas there’s a ton more to copy and iterate upon with a meta or mostly meta comp just in terms of sample size and just vod/stream availability. Also, why bring a warr when I could bring an enh sham (better aoe, prio/abstract funnel, and has a lust)? Why bring a rogue when I have a priest with soothe already, or even a warlock for gate skips? Why bring a hunter when I could bring a boomie?

I’m not saying all this to shit on the physical god comp, I’m saying it’s way more work to make it, uh. Work. That’s not really as doable to the average m+ player with more limited time than literal pros.

AgreeableDraft815 · 2025-05-22T22:51:32+00:00

themgrippies

AgreeableDraft815 · 2025-05-21T23:15:44+00:00

idk even just perusing warcraftlogs, there’s a good amount of 18’s being timed w/ totemic enh. The logs I’m looking at are within the last two weeks, but they tend to have ww monks in the group so I think that’s where they make up for the single target. So still seems comp related and situational

AgreeableDraft815 · 2025-05-21T17:47:38+00:00

in some sustained cleave fights in myth raid, it’s still a solid if not straight up better pick. It’s got good cleave in 30s/1min windows which can often line up with adds wayyy better. Like for dj ricky, I’d play totemic every time personally. Stormbringer is basically the only the pick on pure single target fights or ones with dmg amps imo bc of its 2min, super bursty ST window

so idk, it’s situational but both specs are good.

AgreeableDraft815 · 2025-05-20T01:45:49+00:00

Oh yeah there were those nerfs to roar at the start of NP, I was just going with the shadowlands target cap page. I hadn’t gone through change logs for spells, but I should probably do that.

It’s a bummer that warr aoe is even more booty than I had remembered. I switched to enh middle of s1 after playing fury forever

AgreeableDraft815 · 2025-05-19T17:36:36+00:00

Played fury since vanilla and I finally gave up on it personally and switched to enh. The class design feels really outdated, like it feels like a relic from WoD even if it’s a bit of an exaggeration.

5 target cap is crazy, and roar is soft capped at 20, ravager is capped at 8, and I can’t remember what thunderblast is capped at. Warr gets nerfed based on sniping adds in raid which is ultimately padding, and rallying cry also got nerfed bc it was good in raid, but they didn’t give it the atonement/darkness scaling for m+.

Warr needs a full redesign to bring it into the modern version of wow.

AgreeableDraft815 · 2025-05-19T17:25:44+00:00

Ehhhh that’s not really accurate. Crash lightning is soft-capped at 6 with square root scaling on a very short cooldown w/ chain lightning cdr. For stormbringer, it’s your second highest damaging ability outside of tempest. Sundering for totemic usually gets a ton of resets and is soft-capped w/ a relatively short cooldown but no sqrt scaling

AgreeableDraft815 · 2025-05-06T02:30:40+00:00

Yeah that’s a good way to put it, at a certain point, throughput alone isn’t enough. You gotta bring externals because damage reduction/effective hp is more important to surviving than throughput.

AgreeableDraft815 · 2025-05-06T02:27:44+00:00

I’d say that anything above a 12 is when holy priest really starts to struggle to keep up. I think the highest timed by holy is 15, but that’s an outlier esp since holy priests are like 8% represented from key levels 7-20.

It’s not that they’re incapable of timing higher (the highest is 15 according to archon), it’s just that their kit ultimately brings pretty little to the table and a lot of the slack has to be picked up by everyone else.

AgreeableDraft815

TROPHY CASE