Is lancer weak?Follow

No its not weak. Your just going to have a hell of a hard time keeping up your damage boosting buffs up on mobs that your fighting alone. They move around and turn, and the only reliable way to apply your buffs is when they stop to cast or use skills on you.

Keeping your buffs up is essential to maximizing that class/job. Your stats should all go to STR. Are you using appropriate weapons and gear for your level also? That might seem like a no brainer...but it makes a difference.

It might help to start your fights with Heavy Thrust or Leg Sweep > Heavy Thrust if you aren't doing it already. Also, using Life Surge before you combo Vorpal Thrust should restore a nice chunk of HP. Feint is also a nice solo skill for low levels.

imo, MNK has it worse in the kind of situation you describe. Way more emphasis on positioning with its attacks than LNC, and generally lower defense to boot.

With solo LNC, it's still possible to sneak around a mob you're fighting 1-on-1 and get things like Heavy Thrust and Impulse Drive off on it if need be (one's success with pulling this off will likely largely depend on their level of lag). Trying to maximize MNK's output in the same kind of situation though would be a nearly constant dance of frustration.

I never had such difficulty on any job to the point where I had trouble clearing leves, though. The only times I've come close to dying on any of them is when I was being stupid and letting mobs pile up on me.

I feel like you all are ignoring his question (as annoying as Duo's questions are). He isn't asking about endgame content where you'd be a DRG: he's asking about early levels of LNC.

And, quite frankly, out of all the classes I've leveled, I had the hardest time leveling LNC and MRD to 15 and above more than the others. It starts out incredibly slow but once you get into your 20s on LNC, its strength should be readily apparent. The problem is you just have to get through those first 20-24 levels. :P

MRD does have the benefit of picking up after 15 quite fast due to duty roulette now. No need to solo if you can just level through dungeons constantly as a tank. LNC doesn't have that much luck.

I feel PGL is better at handling the early level situations because of early self healing at level 8 and a lot of damage due to the buffs from 2.1.

I feel like you kinda ignored the last 2 posts in the thread, which directly answered what Duo was asking. Not to mention, I found MRD to be probably the easiest to level 1-20, because of the added defense of the heavier armor coupled with fairly good DPS and bloodbath to recover HP. It was the first class I leveled, and I still think it was probably the easiest 1-20. Unfortunately, I think the early levels are way too situational to say which is easiest/toughest. I mean, with the proper cross-class skills, any class can do pretty well. I will say I found gld to be the most tedious and time-consuming thus far, but I could just be biased because I found the 2 skill rotation outside of dungeons to be boring as all hell. Not that the other classes are crazy involved at that level, but at least there are more than 2 skill options when solo.

Without really having to argue about this, have you leveled either of these post 2.1? I've done both post 2.1 on my alt:

http://na.finalfantasyxiv.com/lodestone/character/6324284/

and the first two classes I had to level were PGL and LNC for the 2nd time. I opted to go PGL first because I remembered having trouble on LNC. There are a few factors:

1) The hunting log, mob types, and starting area quests favor PGL
2) Featherfoot, second wind, haymaker, and greased lightning make mobs trivial even when not taking flanking/rear attacks into account. What usually happens at this level range is you end on a snap punch and your next bootshine is then critical hit if you can get it off before opo form wears. It's just like THF in 11 while soloing: set up SA on a passive (or active sight) mob and position from the rear before engaging.

LNC has no self heal until 18, feint isn't as high potency as haymaker/isn't practical to spam/doesn't have as long a slow, your first combo is at level 4 with vorpal thrust opposed to PGL's combos at 2 and 6, and impulse drive's rear bonus only being of potency 180 while most PGL abilities have base potency similar to these and gain higher potency from flanking/rear bonus.

To top it off, MNKs obtain greased lightning very early on while you must wait till level 12 for heavy thrust's flanking bonus.

You can set up mobs in the starting areas in a position that favors the particular bonus you want. True strike has higher potency, bootshine is a guaranteed crit on opo, snap is 180 on the flank and adds greased lightning: adding 9% attack and 5% attack speed. All of this before level 6.

LNC's positional abilities start with a mediocre ability at level 8 and finally starts to pick up at level 12 when you gain a 15% attack bonus from a flanking attack and leg sweep which allows you to set up flanking/rear combos while in combat.



Actually, what happened was I had opened this thread (and several others) at the beginning of the day and left them up until the time I responded. I had not seen your reply or Fynlar's and forgot to refresh before I responded.



They're situational, yes, because of CC and because you only do them once normally. Less you make an alt...

I did find GLD to be the slowest/most mind numbing.

Like I said: I don't find LNC to be weak past the life surge phase but before then, it definitely wasn't the fondest memory I had when soloing. When thinking about making an alt, I never thought of releveling a class as being painful except for GLD and LNC due to what I mentioned above.

Edited, Jan 30th 2014 10:29pm by HitomeOfBismarck

The basics of lnc/pug (drg/mnk) make them extremely weak solo compared to other jobs.

BRD / BLM/ SMN can do the same dmg from where ever, but for lnc/pug to do good dmg they need a tank to hold a mob still so they can get to different sides of it. LNC not as much as PUG, but both suffer from the same issue of needing flank/rear for specific things.

GLD (PLD) and MAR (WAR) both are tanks and have lower dd so it might take them longer to kill things, although a well geared war with + str gear can easily keep up with solo content.

IMHO , pug (mnk) and lnc (drg) should have their dd balanced on the assumption they are meleeing 100% from infront of a mob with no access to flank/rear. Any monk can crank out 300+ dps on a training dumby that doesnt move, but go fight something like titan where it is constantly turning and 50% or more of your attacks that are supposed to be on the flank/rear end up not getting their side bonus because he either turned, is turning, or you have to dodge a weight of the lands.


Personally i think brds need a nerf to the follow so people stop having rng onry parties
1) Their bow shots lose dmg/dont work at all if they are close to the enemy
2) their bow shots lose dmg/have an increased chance to miss while moving.

apparently they just start slow.. once i got true trust I was dropping enemies 5 lvls higher than me with ease

Ill say it for you... solo, both of these classes are weak because they rely on positional requirements. Their dd was set and balanced on the assumption you have a tank and can get to any side of the monster at any time. If you dont believe this, go find a training dummy and pump out the best dd you can from the front only and compare it to the best DD you can pump out from any side.

If that isnt true (no tank holding a mob steady), then the 10% dps lead they should have on blm/brd/smn goes to a 20-30% penalty, making it considerably harder to solo. DRG suffers less than MNK at lower levels, but its the same story.

I'm going to try this for my twin snakes - snap punch combo asap. thanks for the tips!!