Official Job Guides and Community Job Guides

[Ultima]

I've noticed over my years of playing FFXIV that there is a core problem with a lack of transparency in how jobs are meant to play and how the community has parsed them to play. Rather than try to take away the tools that made this possible, I propose a solution that can come from both the developer and the community's theorycrafters.

Each job should have a help guide that details the basics of what their job is meant to do and what their skills do in a short summary. To add onto this, there can then be a dev-created Opener and Rotation, the same Opener and Rotation used by the dev team in testing content like Savage and Ultimate.

This would help solve some heartache at level 70, though truthfully the problem starts much sooner because many Jobs change their rotation entirely throughout their leveling process such as Black Mage who changes playstyle completely at Enochian for example.

Since we cannot put all the effort on the developers, I would also propose that there is an in-game list or official FFXIV subsection of the Lodestone where the community can post and upvote their own Opener and Rotation, the highest rated ones would be displayed first. It could even detail the experiences of a Job at 1-30 then 30-50 and what not if the writer so wished.

Look at SMN, Dreadwyrm Trance isn't very difficult to understand but then you have Summon Bahamut and it plays nothing like your normal rotation or your DWT rotation. The optimal way to play Demi-Bahamut phase was only discovered via theorycrafting the data. Why? Because Demi-Bahamut will attack for every GCD and oGCD that affects the enemy, thus you have to wait for Aetherflow to be available before you activate Demi-Bahamut, then you'll have to use Ruin II and all oGCDs such as Addle to maximize your wyrmwaves.

The tooltip does not tell you anything about that, it just tells you it summons him and he attacks your target.