A dedication

So first off, I was inspired to write this out in case it helps someone, because I recently learned a dear friend and role model of mine, Short, had passed away. Her blog (https://www.abilitypowered.com/) is pretty much THE place for guides on MMO accessibility, and I figure the best way to honour how much she's done for me over the years is to contribute, however poorly, to the body of work she started building.

As such I'm going to go through all the FF14 classes I'm familiar with and just answering the question I see on reddit all the time. "I'm disabled, what class should I play?" As I've discussed before in an earlier post. I have some hot takes on this subject. :P

So let's start with my current main, Viper. It's new! Just got added in Dawntrail, and as such doesn't start at level 1, and you need to be level 80 to unlock it, and own dawntrail, which is really sad, because it is THE melee class for people with my particular set of disabilities imo.

Viper is what I'm going to recommend to any disabled folks who come to me with basically any disability. Without a doubt.

It's new, I only picked it up recently and it has become my main. It's fun, it's fast, and it's complicated.

Most importantly, it's all of these things AND it has I think the least button bloat of any class. They've experimented with using the PvP style actions that replace their button with the next button in the combo, but given you two to alternate between to let you make the kind of decisions you can make on other classes, but with only two.

There's a ton of reuse of button real estate, the basic combo buttons obviously, but also all the follow up double weave oGCDs use the exact same two buttons, for both the AoE and the single target versions.

The more powerful ranged option also uses these exact same double weaves. With my hands I FEAR double weaving, but the combination of extremely forgiving timing (They're 1S recasts, you basically can't miss em!), and being in the same place every time means I acutally love to do them. They feel like a little flourish after a combo/positional well done. The visuals match this too!

My main complaint on this front is that the AoE vicepit, and single target vice winder each have their own two buttons to select which buff you want first and for the single target, the flank or rear positional. These moves are basically identical otherwise, why the heck do they break the wonderful trend! It almost feels like they looked at everything else and went. "Well now it has too few buttons" and added two extra useless ones.

The burst window: Snilk!

I refuse to call the awakening bar anything but snilk. It's a white liquid in a container with a snake on it. It's snake milk, and you're gonna drink it!

You get some from doing combos, and you also get a big ole bottle of snake milk every now and then that allows a free awakening combo.

When you do you get to do a combo that boils down to hitting all of your buttons sequentially with a weave in between, then a big finisher at the end. Not much to say about this, it's accessible, it's fun, it's super flashy, you can pack in two fo them into a pot window if you're into optimizing damage. It is snake themed. You can keep saying snilk over and over to make people cringe.

Snilk is great 10/10.

Ranged attacking and Dashing

The ranged attack comes in two flavours, a bad "free" one, and one that uses a resource but does great damage. The resource burner has those weaves too, on the correct buttons, as such I love it!

The other thing you can do when you're out of range is what you really want to do as a melee DPS. Get back in range RIGHT NOW. To do this, you have a targeted dash. This thing is great, you can dash to enemies, you can dash to friends, basically if you can target it, you can probably dash to it.

This limits the amount of movement I actually need to do, so I can focus on other things. I can also intentionally stand in a telegraph for longer, and dash to someone who is safe, allowing me to focus on my rotation, which is the real challenge for me. It sometimes does weird stuff with server ticks, don't leave dashing to the last minute, but if you like me, need some focus to do your long awakening burst. Slither is a god send.

The elephant in the room: Positionals

People tell disabled folks on reddit not to try melee because of positionals. We clearly can't do positionals, we should play summoner or something! I hate the attitude that when people hear disabled gamer, they go right to making things easy.

I however love to be challenged, and I think this is the challenge for those of you who want to have some complexity in their rotation, but also like me, have some serious accessibility concerns.

I am telling straight up you that you CAN do positionals.

I am disabled in such a way as moving and pressing keys at the same time is difficult if not impossible in most cases. (I can really only press 1 key at a time). They're almost always mixed in with a weave/double weave too, I have to hit three buttons AND move to the next positional.

On paper, I can't play this class, in practise, I hit most of my positionals. I won't lie, it's probably where I'm losing the most DPS right now, but I hit probably 80% of them when stressed by hard content, and usually all of them in normal content.

You just have so much time to hit it all, then move. If you miss it, it's 100 potency, basically no big deal, if you only play normals, it doesn't matter, if you wanna try extremes? I killed all of the current stone sky sea dummies without hitting ANY positionals to test it out.

You also get to pick your positionals for vicewinder, which is a godsend, sometimes I can't move, so I'll make sure I'm placed so I hit one, and can true north the other. There's a lot of people who want them removed, but I adore them. Finding the spots in the fight where you can run into the danger zone, to hit a positional, then dash out at the last moment are what I'm living for right now.

Treat yourself to a positional! I believe in you!

Finally: The aesthetics

I kind of dig viper as I'm a double partial hand amputee and the very idea of me dual wielding anything is ridiculous. I love a little irony in my virtual identity. Also snakes are cool, they don't even HAVE limbs and everyone is scared of them. This doesn't really matter to how it plays. I just figured I'd mention it!

#final fantasy xiv #Final Fantasy 14 #ffxiv #Accessible gaming