Beginner’s Guide to FFXIV Raiding Essentials

Everything you need to know to get started

For beginners, FFXIV raids can be a daunting activity. There are so many things to learn about, and the voice chat often ends up in chaos. Plus, the more experienced members in the group might throw out some unknown jargon beginners might not understand. All of that can discourage a new player from attempting a raid, so they’re likely to go back to farming FFXIV Gil the normal way.

Unfortunately, most of the best equipment in the game is from raiding. If they don’t muster up the courage to do raids, they’ll miss out on some of the best content in FFXIV. Here are some of the essentials so you have a foundation your group can build on.

Important FFXIV Raiding Terminology

Enrage – A feature to discourage hangers-on and leeches in parties. The logic is to prevent poorly performing parties from completing a raid. Each member must pull their weight in the party. It has different mechanics depending on the boss, but the status will make the battle eventually unwinnable. Most enrage mechanics function as a DPS check. 

There are two versions of Enrage mechanics: Hard and Soft. The former is in the form of a buff that builds up slowly. Take too long in defeating the boss and it eventually gets powerful enough to shrug off pain and wipe the party. Hard enrage doesn’t provide a buff, but if you take too long, the boss will whip out an OHKO attack that will guarantee a wipe.

In any case, you’ll want to avoid taking too long when engaging the bosses in raids.

Minimum iLevel – This is a minimum requirement for the raid. Being underleveled means that you won’t have the requisite DPS or defenses to survive the raid. Due to the enrage mechanic described above, all raid groups will require you to meet this to join a group.

FFlogs – A site that analyzes logs created when in combat. Afterward, it’ll give you a summary where you can see areas to improve on in the next raid.

Parsing – Related to the above, parsing means extracting some invisible data, usually through a third-party program such as FFlogs. Mostly used for DPS, players will call on other players with a ‘(color) parse’, with the color denoting a certain ranking. The colors are gold (highest), orange, purple, blue, green, and gray (lowest).

Server Tick – The game has its own way of keeping time, known to players as a ‘tick’. These ‘ticks’ control the timing of some ground AoE skills and damage-over-time and healing-over-time abilities. One tick is every three seconds. Some ground AoE abilities can also be avoided by knowing how this mechanic works.

Snapshot – A mechanic that makes an attack’s strength and target fixed. Different skills have different snapshot timings, which can be beneficial in combat. Knowing when the timings can make certain attacks easy to dodge. Conversely, with bad timing, this can make enemies hard to hit.

Ping – The time information takes to travel to the server and back. High ping means laggy gameplay, so you’ll always want to keep this low. High ping may also lead to the next term.

Desync – A discrepancy in what you see and what the server ‘sees’. More likely to happen with high ping, due to the relative slowness of the transfer of information. This is something like moving away from the range of the attack, but the server thinks that you didn’t move, resulting in you still getting hit.

General Rules of Thumb

When raiding, here are some things to take note of and some general tips.

• Be polite
• Ask questions (don’t be shy, you’re new to raiding, after all)
• Know the roles of each class, their ins and outs (when you know your class and your group’s classes, you’ll be able to ease the burden on your team)
• Communicate
• Accept that wiping is normal
• Research about the raid beforehand

While in a raid:

• Dodge attacks if you can. (This will reduce the time you’ll need healing, letting the healer/s focus on the tanks.)
• Learn every encounter (attack patterns, timings, etc.)
• Know when to fold or sacrifice yourself so the others can go on
• Make use of the ‘Transcendent’ buff when resurrected
• Make things easier on teammates (depending on your class, requires knowledge of the other roles as well)
• Again, communicate with the team

For specific classes:

• DPS characters should keep track of their positioning and mitigate incoming damage as much as possible.
• Healers should have their main priority be themselves, followed by the tank. If they’re safe, the tank is the priority. As much as possible, don’t overheal and save swift casting and instant-cast heals for sticky situations.
• Tanks also have to mind their positioning so DPS characters can wail on the boss for longer. They and any DPS have to mind aggro as well.

Everybody should be utilizing their cooldowns (except healers who have to be on top of keeping everyone alive).

Conclusions

Of course, you’ll have to be learning as you go. These are just tips to get you started with raiding so you can get FFXIV Gil and other items that you can’t get from FFXIV stores (NPCs and the Mogstation shop). The most important tip of all is to have fun raiding in FFXIV!