Any DPS that people feel is fun to play/engage with?

Hello,

I've been a BLM main for a while and kinda just want to play something else at this point. Tried to keep playing it after 7.2 but I'm finding myself just not having much fun with the job anymore and feel very unengaged. It turns out how the job played was much more important to me than doing big damage lol

I'm curious what the consensus is over jobs that feel more fun and rewarding to play. I've played a good amount of them to 100 already and have a general understanding of how most DPS'es function rotationally but the only job I've poured a ton of time into getting good at is BLM, and I suppose I'm looking for something that feels like there is a decent amount of depth to and has a rewarding learning curve.

It might be hard to find a helpful “consensus” since people approach the game in different ways, play different types of content, and have difficulty with different things. What works for you will depend on what you enjoy.

What type of content are you playing, what things did you enjoy about playing BLM, and what type of things do you generally find challenging/engaging when learning to play a job and when learning to optimize with it?

If you do endgame raids, then asking about jobs in The Balance discord as well might be worth it. People with experience playing a job in that context could answer.

Red mage or ninja if you're looking for something more managment centric

DPS I enjoy and why:

* Red Mage, because the management of the inherently drifting resource generation + CDs is interesting vs where in each fight you are, since you can use the extra movement at various placed but need 4.5s in melee reach first. Also, those backflips are still one of the best animations in the whole game.
* Reaper is soooo satisfying when you provide group regen every 30s or so, and also when you land that perfect teleport out->in timing.

The DPS I find the most fun are BRD, MNK, and RDM. All jobs with some amount of RNG to them, but they feel less gambley, and more reactive.

There is no DPS I truly find fun or especially rewarding anymore.

Edit: Don't expect anything on pre 7.2 BLM levels, but i'd suggest BRD if you want something with depth and don't mind the clunk. It is not about casting uptime, but you can go pretty far in how much of a delicate and whimsical clockwork keeping the rotation to the exact second can be, and there is rng and priority/triage during bursts.

rdm definitely comes closest to blm. Rotation has a nice rhythm, going between hard casting and dualcast has movement limitations similar to blm, gap closers like melee, some decision making on when do spent resources and optimization potential, not as "hectic" as melee jobs.

From what I played so far I'd say RDM and BRD were the most fun to me.

RDM has a satisfying rotation compared to the other casters I played, even though the way it does damage is just raw damage (it has no DoTs, for example). It also has some nice support abilities that mitigate damage and increase the healing received.

BRD has a lot of different things going on like the songs, DoTs, some RNG you have to pay attention to, support abilities, and personally I really like its AoE rotation, especially under Mage's Ballad. I picked up BRD recently so I have a lot to learn yet, but so far it has been fun.

No job was as engaging as old black mage so your out of luck if you want something of similar levels.

Sadly Black mage was considered "outdated" design like other jobs were because people found them too engaging and interesting, but they want us to focus on dancing our dance fights instead of having fun job design.

Yeah, as much as RDM used to be "the easiest pick" it's probably now the hardest caster just for the fact that everything kind of naturally drift and no try is the same as before. You need to pay a constant attention to your procs.

BLM now has 0 rng and, unless you're chasing the 100th percentile, is now a breeze to play with so many instant and faster cast.
PIC probably has as many instant but on top of that you can weave (even on the alternative paint as 2.3cast 3.3 recast or even the motif with 3s/4s cast recast!) So I'd take it's even easier. Even the recent nerf to the hammer being a DPS loss, "technically", makes it easier because now you've got an extra mobility tool. Before you had to keep the hammer for burst, now you can just use it wherever you want (provided you don't mind loosing a tiny whinny bit of potency, which is always better than loosing a whole gcd)
SMN ... no comment?

You can ask one person and they will say all the DPS are unique and engaging.

You can ask another person and they will say they are all simple, easy and boring.

You will find that people's definition of complexity and sophistication varies a lot.

Summoner is hardest job to play. It is hard to not fall in sleep while playing with it.

Honestly Reaper and Machinist are good options too. reaper has one of the most cohesive and satisfying kits in the whole game. 2 gauges that actually interact with eachother, a debuff to keep up that rewards gauge upon the afflicted enemy's death and interesting tools for when you need to attack from range. Machinist is a fun job especially in single target content. You get to launch flashy attack animations including full metal field, the best capstone skill in dawntrail, drills, flying circular saws and summon your automaton queen to beat a guy before piston punching him! Hypercharge adds a short phase where you shoot off 5 fast gcds. One of them is heat blast which takes 15 seconds off your gauss round and ricochet cooldowns. It feels really satisfying to go heatblast weave heatblast weave during hyper charge. Machinist has a weird issue where the aoe rotation is missing a little umph. Autocrossbow the aoe equivalent to heat blast lacks the cooldown reduction for some reason despite gauss round and ricochet getting upgraded into aoe skills. Flamethrower looks cool but the damage is lacking on packs that arent over 4 enemies large... Still it is really fun to play and can be really engaging to master while also having the comfy mobility of phys ranged.

I used to really like non-standard BLM in roulettes and I'm bitter that they took that away from me. Since then I haven't played roulettes very much.

My job refuges have been:
For general ex/savage raiding - Monk. It has a fast GCD and has to do some thinking to maintain uptime in Dawntrail fights. Sometimes you end up holding your Fire's Reply or Wind's Reply until the perfect moment when you disconnect from the boss, that's satisfying.
For random casual content - Samurai. It functions well at most levels (whereas I only like Monk at 100). The fun bit is timing your Meikyo Shisui so that you can refresh your DoT exactly as it runs out. The cast times make melee a bit more interesting too.
If I need to tank - Paladin, just for Cover.


If you enjoyed the movement budgeting of Black Mage, then Pictomancer and Red Mage are the natural options to try.

Monk has a great feel to it! I find myself saying 'bam, bam, thump, whack'!

I always find satisfaction in playing red mage. As simple and elegant as it was when it first game out.

Also been getting back into reaper. Was really into it at the beginning of EW and then dropped it like a hot brick because gearing more than one armor class at a time is exhausting to me. I do wish reaper had fewer redundant buttons/maintenance buffs.

Why have Shadow of Death and Whorl of Death when they both do the same exactly the same thing, why not have them be a single button that does increased damage to a single target and less to others. Why have a button that's only function is "increase damage dealt" at all. It's not very exciting to press. Same business with Soul Slice/Soul Scythe, two different buttons that share a cooldown that do exactly the same thing, the only difference is AoE/ST