In Final Fantasy XIV, Astrologian is a healing job that uses divination and stars to heal allies. It can only be played after reaching Level 50. Divination is an ability that provides a 6 damage buff to all players within the executed radius for 15 seconds, stacking with cards placed on other players. Starting at level 50, it is generally preferred to save damage buffs and oGCDs for your Divination windows.
The game first adds Divination, giving Eric 106 damage. Then, it multiplies that by 1.08 for Lord of Crowns, effectively giving Eric +14.48 Damage. It is possible to use Divination and Oracle if they are available, but not unless the enemies are about to die and the buff would be wasted.
The most effective way to use Divination is after the Astrologian has placed the card. DoTs do damage based on buffs that were up when they were applied, so if you used all your buffs and a Dex pot, you’ll be able to use Divination effectively.
In summary, Astrologian is a healing job in FFXIV that uses divination and stars to heal allies. It is recommended to save damage buffs and oGCDs for your Divination windows, as it can stack with cards placed on other players. The most effective way to use Divination is after the Astrologian has placed the card, as everything stacks and DoTs do damage based on buffs that were up when they were applied.
📹 An Idiot’s Skills/Abilities Guide to SAMURAI!!! | FFXIV Endwalker
(6.0) New guide and this time on Samurai! I had a lot of fun making this guide this time around, so I hope you guys enjoy it! Discord …
📹 Why Determination & Direct Hit are NOT the Best stats in FFXIV!
I explain why Determination and Direct Hit are kind of the middle of the pack stats, not the best, not bad either, alongside the …
This is, out of every other Samurai article I watched, the best one to learn from scratch about Samurai. I just started FFXIV a week ago. I hit Lv50 and immediately equipped Samurai, and was extremely overwhelmed by all the secondary energies (sen, kenki, meditation stacks) as well as the oriental names of the skills. After an hour and a half of reading through skills while cross-referencing this article, I know what every skill does, and have started planning my rotation without even having the skills yet, lol. Great article, thank you so much!
If my memory doesn’t fail me, I think Fuka also reduces your auto attack delay and casting time by 13% as well, though, it doesn’t actually reduce the time needed to use Iaijutsu. Also, after the latest patch, Midare and Higanbana can be cast from 6 feet away, which is absolutely hilarious. They’re like spells now lol
Thanks for the article! It’s been a while since I played SAM. I think stopped because I was super tired when I unlocked Kyuten to really figure out when to use it and was like, “eh, I’ll get back to that” and just…haven’t lol. But the way you explain that and the other stuff makes sense. I’ll have to give it a go again!
I finally got my Sam to lv 81 and got my action bar feeling right including a gapcloser and a backstep very mobile now I’m trying to find a dps food to buy in bulk been eye the Chicken fettuccini or the More (the skill speed buff would complement Sam well imo, smoother cooldowns a big selling point to me haha. 9 level till I max it then my Sam HAS to have resistance relic stage 4 that red glow is super epic to me haha
The fact that you list all the moves that use the Kenki gauge was the exact thing I have been looking for. I understand the rotations of the Sam at this point and am trying to set my skills up for use on my controller. So knowing all of the abilities that I should have and be using is a struggle to figure out where they need to be on my cross hotbars. This is going to help me a ton. I am sure once I get the abilities set in a good spot I will be doing a much better job than I am now. One of the better articles I have seen. I am going to go see if you have one for Paladin now 🙂
Correction about Determination explained in this article: While the tooltip itself literally says it only affects healing spells, I’ve been doing some more testing for a future article (that I might just link here when it is made), and it is very very very likely that Determination affects all healing effects, and that the stipulation that it only affects spells is completely incorrect! :_caetsuLightbulb: Sorry for the confusion! Nonetheless, it isn’t like people were choosing Determination much over Direct Hit for the healing it did anyway right? :_caetsuBlush: Link to article showing off the correction: youtu.be/Dln7u8oSZJI (Thing number 8, “Determination is Weird!” at 11:55)
The imbalance of the substats doesn’t bother me too much. Even if they buffed det again, buffed direct hit to try to make them more equal, something is inevitably going to be more valuable than the others. Crit is overwhelmingly valuable, but even if it was only very slightly better, melds would probably still look much the same. And ultimately outside of sps and sks materia, they don’t change how the job plays, so I see materia as just the necessary requirement for doing enough damage in high end content. If determination was buffed to be better than crit, then you’d just meld more determination, and nothing about how you actually play the game would change. Though there is an argument to be made that critical being as valuable as it is makes damage output immensely variable, so I do think it’d be for the best if crit was reigned in, or det was buffed more, or some such.
I learned something very helpful and surprising about article game stats from my experience playing the stockholm syndrome and gambling addiction developing game Genshin Impact. Let’s say you have 3 stats that affect your attacks, Speed Strength and Luck, and they give you 1%, 2%, and 3% more damage per point (linear) respectively. They all multiply each other, meaning if you balance the points well, you’ll get way more damage than if you spend them all on the strongest stat. But that’s not the interesting part, the optimal balance of the stats is dependent on how effective they are relative to each other. You start with the biggest one, Luck which is 3% per point, let’s say you spend 100 points in Luck. Strength gives 2% per point, so it’s 66% as effective as Luck, therefore it’s optimal to spend that proportion of points relative to Luck, 66 points in Strength. Speed gives 1% per point, it has a third of the effectiveness of the most effective stat, therefore it gets a third of that stat’s points, 33 points in Speed. Reminder, they each multiply each other, so: 33 points of Speed = 1.33x damage multiplier. 66 points of Strength = 2.32x damage multiplier. 100 points of Luck = 4.00x damage multiplier (it’s 3 + 1 because multiplying by 1 gives you the same number) The base damage is 100. The minmaxed result is 1234 damage. Now let’s confirm it’s better than spending all the points on the most effective stat. 199 points of Luck = 6.97x damage multiplier (it’s 5.97 + 1 because multiplying by 1 gives you the same number) The base damage is 100.
Thanks for the article. I really wanted to be the ubertank with a full tenacity meld, but the game is really built around tanks naturally returning health during attacking. This caused me to have far more survivability by using a crit and direct hit build on pld over tenacity. The tenacity was really nice in sub 40 dungeons tho
I think biggest qualm with the current Materia system and I hope to see addressed in 7.0 is the unimportance of some Materia types like Piety and Tenacity outside of Progging. I feel like role materia like those should have some more benefit to the role to incentivive use compared to most BiS going Crit, DH, Det/SkSpeed for Tanks which is the role I mainly play which stinks because I think Tenacity could be a great Defensive Materia for jobs that lack healing tools like DRK that only has Abyss Drain and Soul Eater. I don’t know much about game design I do admit, but I always wondered what the point of Tenacity is when I never seen it being used despite being the Tank Materia. I think it also increasing Block/Parry Chance would be interesting. I guess my point is that I want to see more diverse Materia use for tanks like how there is for BLM.
hey! love your articles quick question: if i have 2600 crit which is above the threshold where you say crit is better than both dh and det, would it be worth sacrificing them to get more crit? for example, i have room for 16 more crit materia points in my helmet. would it be worth it to sacrifice that 36 dh or det for 16 crit?
Fun fact, I only learned what Direct Hit did this year and it replaced hit chance. I get the logic (replace chance to miss for chance for a harder hit.) But Crit already does that. With your various stat articles, it’s gotten me thinking about a question. What do we actually want from stats? Do we want to dump points into a single stat to create specific builds (Crit builds, Speed builds, etc)? Do we want break points where we have to spread points to different stats to maximize damage? It’s one thing to want stats to be more impactful, but it’s good to have a vision of what that means.
I never really do Savage Raids (because I’m shy and already fail at the “socializing” part, having to create a non-randomized group and working together, lol), so I don’t have to worry about maximazing my stats to the point where 50 extra damage makes a difference when I’m dealing in the 10 thousands to begin with, but I like perusal these articles nevertheless because I find the logic/ maths interesting (multiplication, am I right?) If I may, I have a question: how much are base stats worth? How does your job’s “main attribute” increase your damage output, exactly, and by how much? Or to use a concrete, comperative example: if as a healer I had a helmet that by default (gear’s built in stats) gives me maximum crit and lots of determination (so that I could slot in direct hit as per your article’s instructions :P) should I consider changing it for a higher ilvl helmet (say, the current limited tomestone, blue rarity helmet) if that helmet gives me spell speed and piety instead? (I usually have no mana management problems at all, so for simplicity’s sake let’s just say that piety is completely useless.) I could meld back in some of the lost crit, for example, but definitely not the other stats. Would the extra 20-30 points of Mind and Vitality be worth so much that I should give up some of my “secondary stats” for it, or is it more benificial to willingly remain on a lower average item level in favor of having higher “ideal secondary stats”? Not sure if this is worth doing a full article on, but if you don’t mind doing some more maths, I would love to know the answer simply to satisfy my curiosity.
My radical hot take about substats and gear in general is that with gear stats having a purely number-based effect on gameplay, there would be effectually no difference if they just removed all stats on (combat) gear. You might ask what then would motivate people to play through the content? Well, ultimate weapons will always ultimately become effectually cosmetic based on their stat loadout because of how the continually escalating push of item level works, and yet people still do that. I think that at the end of the day people just want to do the content. Maybe it’s my own sensibilities but grinding current content to get BIS just is not something I value when the end result is so unbelievably uninspired as “I do 3% more damage”. Making it purely a numbers game also means there (with *very few exceptions*) is a correct answer for every job for how to meld materia or choose your gear. With such a change in place, I feel like they could go with a more open effectually horizontal-style method of progression. Focus less on the continual ebb and flow of introducing new equipment, and put that into new forms of reward structure. I’d like to stress that this extreme option is not something I believe in because I dislike the part of RPGs that involves tweaking numbers and character building, I mean I like TTRPGs. But the element of that in XIV is so bare-bones and surface level I just think that it may as well not exist. But the game lives in a catch-22 where if they introduced new stats or made the equipment part of the game more interesting, it would inherently affect the fine-tuned balance that allows for such tight, tense encounters.
The funny thing is that all theory aside, the actual best meld choice between det/dh at any given point is going to boil down to, “Which results in better tiering/less substat waste?” The values of each substat are so close all the way down the line that you’re generally better off just ensuring you don’t waste substats.
I really like this game, however the stats and equipment leave much to be desired, for me at least. It just seems weird to me how much of a characters power comes specifically from their equipment, like if a warrior of light loses all their clothes in a tidal wave and somehow loses their armoury chest they’re screwed, can’t even have a job without a weapon.
seems like secondary offensive stats are fundamentally fucked to their very core. devs tried so hard to not be overpowered, that they barely do anything instead. Even primary offensive stats do same thing, Strength, Dexterity, Intelligence, Mind all are base damage stat. They equal to “attack power” for said class/job so just call it that. Giving different names to what is essentially the same thing is hollow depth. Same for spell speed/skill speed, just call it attack speed for all instead. Of GCDs, should be fixed amount no matter the level, and this amount differentiates based off said class/job i.e. puglist/monk GCD will be small, while black mage big. Varites from 1.4 all way to 2.0, cuz 2.5 default is still too damn slow period. GCD how it is now always gets scaled back when new level cap happens, so level syncing older content our GCDs are super fast like roughly 1.5 doing ARR content its insane, its an accidental haste buff when “rebalancing” for new level cap. So having fixed GCDs across the board which remedy this. I often wish for a massive overhaul of games stat systems entirely, may come 7.0 if be