The Last Dance: Gearing Paradigms For A New Age

Yellow text at the top of screen. I. Want. PM a link?

It is named Infobar and has been a windower plugin for years. It is kinda badly outdated now, but still useful sometimes. Shows the HP% of monsters with hidden bars, iirc.

I like that it tells what they aggro on honestly.

Updating first post: Main Healer

Level 75 and all the joys that came with it (colibri holocaust) are long gone and this battle archetype essentially went with it. In ancient times, six person parties containing some combination of DNC/BRDx1-2/DDx3-4 were effective merit parties where dancers were able to live the "front line main healer" dream to the fullest.

Such a setup is technically still viable, and in fact, dancers can still be highly effective in such a party. Unfortunately, there is exactly zero content which is currently conducive to such a setup in today's metagame.

Still, dancers can main-heal low-man groups for various random niche activities, so discussing how to perform this role is still somewhat worthwhile.

Your goals when adhering to the main-healing archetype are as follows:

• Keep your TP gain rate high such that you are able to keep up waltzes faster than your group loses HP*

• Upkeep haste samba (it increases your TP gain rate as well as everyone else's). As an aside, Drain Samba is a joke.

• Debuff support with steps (mainly as a byproduct of generating TP)

• Don't let people die (obvious) and keep off debilitating status effects

• Don't die (obvious)

*If you're waltzing a lot (your party is taking a lot of damage), you'll probably want to use a Praxidikai OA2-4 or Store TP Centovente to increase your rate of TP gain at a significant offensive cost. If your party requires less attention, just use daggers that are more focused on damage. If you're constantly sitting on TP, then you're playing too defensively. Remember, the dancer class is in a perpetual balancing act. You only need to be as defensive as you have to be. Any extra defense is wasted.

You may wonder, "but if I'm main healing, shouldn't I avoid hate as much as possible, so wouldn't reducing my damage output be a good thing?" Well, that's important to a White Mage. But, Dancers can take hits. In fact, if you're main healing, a lot of times it may be BETTER if you have the enemy's attention, because it's less likely to hit you than anyone else.

Things you'll need:

• A good TP set (this doesn't vary)

• A hybrid evasion set

• Optimized waltz sets - WALTZ RECAST ANWIG REQUIRED

You may want to consider dropping some potency from your Waltz III set for reduced enmity. Not sure how worth it it is, honestly. You're likely to end up with hate no matter how much enmity reduction you toss in there if you are curing a lot.

You may also want to invest in your weapon skill sets (well, you should have these anyway). It's not likely you'll need to waltz constantly on the sorts of groups you'll be supporting, so you might as well stab stuff when you have some free time. A lot of our weapon skills have useful additional effects anyhow, but ***, I'm starting to get into the territory of the next archetype.

Seriously though, this isn't too complicated:

1. Engage

2. Get TP

3. Samba

4. Steps, Reverse Flourish etc.

5. Waltz (as needed)

6. Weapon skill if you have the free time / TP

It's actually harder to find content on which this is a viable strategy than it is to actually execute. As a side note, Phurba is likely not worth the offensive sacrifice.

The following information is pertinent to all battle archetypes, so you should read it no matter what:

Waltz III is our most efficient waltz (still) when it comes to HP cured / second. In general, if you're doing a lot of healing in succession, you should be using Waltz III.

If you're attempting to main heal, you'd better have your Anwig Salade agumented with Waltz recast -2 or you should just go home. To be honest, you should really have this augment for DNC if you're serious about it anyway.

Anwig should be used for Waltz III and Healing Waltz. If you're using IV/V, generally you're going for something more potent and not efficiency. As a result, you get to use the +7% potency from Etoile Tiara +2 on those. (A good example of when you might use IV/V as a good choice over III is topping yourself off between Saber Dances while soloing or when your waltz demands are not particularly heavy and you want to minimize damage lost to JA delay. If you're taking damage quickly, Waltz III with recast timer augment is more likely to keep you alive as long as your TP gain rate is fast enough.

By the way, if what you're fighting uses a lot of AoE damaging moves, inflicts a lot of debilitating status (especially if AoE), or resists physical/piercing damage, you're wasting your time bringing Dancer as a main-healer (assuming it wasn't a waste of time to begin with).

The all-end-all thing to remember for this battle archetype: Dancers are not White Mages. Don't pretend you are one.

Going back to Sira's SSs im gonna ask a dumb question: how do you change the name of your JAs in recast? Im pretty sure i have the latest version but stuff still shows up as unknown ability.

In regard to you question, Kalima's: I'm not sure if there is an even more up-to-date version of this out now, but it's a link to the resource.xml I've been using and I haven't noticed any JA/Spell names missing yet.

http://www.ffxiah.com/forum/topic/27397/a-favor-from-all-windower-users#1662775

That's probably useful for a lot of people, thanks :)

Go find ability.xml on resources folder in your resource folder and edit that information
resources.xml is strictly for spellcast. Recast reads the values from xml in the resources folder.

Ability updates from resources when you log in or use //updateresources.

If you update resources.xml, type the following commands:

//updateresources
//unload recast
//load recast

It'll fix it.

as for the tanking selection i was wonderin about shadow ring and shadow mantle

how hard is dynamis lord to kill now? those are two pieces i have really wanted for quite somee time now

dancer tanking has always interested me <3 i used to do it in ANNM's, go dnc/pld and fan dance, wait til its almost ready to pop again and pop the nm's. people take main while i tank mini's, was some fun stuff

Got it backwards. Resources.xml is used by Recast, ability.xml is one of the Spellcast files within the resources folder.

No guarantee it was actually updated for this past update though. Check the version that's on the windower wiki and make sure it matches.

also i think it's worth mentioning on the weaponskills selection, the variety of debuffs we get with our weaponskills

PK - lowers enemy eva
EX- lowers enemy acc
RS- weight (if i remember correctly is something like eva -20)
Shadowstitch- bind... lol

I posted a more updated resources version here:
http://www.ffxiah.com/forum/topic/28457/dnc-merit-priorities/3/#1747883

Oh, neat :O

So entering dyna just before JP midnight isn't even worth it if you missed doing dyna the day before.

It's just not worth the heartache.

At least you wouldn't have to worry about linking too many mobs!

Didn't even get that far, I spent 75 minutes chasing the wandering TE and then D3'd.

>.< Ouch that's rough. Just /sea'd dyna-valk for the lols. 41 people here on Siren. Just why.

I entered ~9am ish and there were 18 people, not terrible. By 9:15, there were 40.

"Hey guys, let's all enter Dynamis at the same exact time! It'll work out!"

Yep. We tried this once. Never again unless it's just for the lulz and we have nothing better to do.

To be fair, going there was at least a chance of getting something. But, I could have been crafting or something with a definite payout.

Exenterator: Lowers enemy. Useful if you're a taru dancer and want to do more than bite the mobs ankles.

lolll

thanks for pointing that out XD fixed

Ok so I have 2 jobs to gear. Dancer and ninja. I know they can both solo really well but which one would be better for empy farming? I have 3 jobs I want them for (ga dagger and katana) and I figured get the job that would be able to do it best theirs first. Oh and +2 items for them but that prolly comes with lots of empys. Can dancer solo +2 items without +2 themselves? I know dancer gear is more important than most but I don't see any other realistic way of getting +2 that isn't solo or a random shout group. So yeah need a recommended priority list please ^^

Ninja is more useful for Empyrean farming. Dancer is really only useful for dicking around in Abyssea.

Didn't dawnn solo glavoid on dnc? May have been byrth not 100%. If its possible to get my +2 and twash using dnc without +2 and twash until I get them I don't mind it being inefficient I enjoy dnc a thousand times more than nin. Unless you really think that with nin it would be so much more efficient. Would it be possible with non kannagi nin whm and blm to do it? Maybe a war for red?

Double ninja edit post:
Don't want to sound like a creeper but I'd like to end up like you, beig able to keep up with ukons and masas in vw on dnc. I understand it's a lot of work but I think it would be worthwhile.

I mean, I think Dawnn did solo Glavoid on DNC, but soloing Glavoid would be a last resort for me.

Like ... mega last resort. The opportunity cost is just too high.