Foreword
Welcome to the basic Dancer guide. Within this document, you’ll find all the information you’ll need to learn to play the job. Other links will be included below for further references and resources. Any further questions can also be directed to the Dancer channels in the Balance’s Discord.
Useful Resources
What is a Dancer?
Dancer, alongside Bard and Machinist, is one of the three physical ranged DPS. Dancers focus on providing sizable damage buffs to the party through a big two-minute raid buff and a single target buff to one party member of their choice. Like other physical ranged DPS jobs, Dancer’s skills are instantly cast, and thus allow for nearly unrestricted movement.
Dancers also bring a good amount of defensive utility, having skills like Curing Waltz to provide an AoE heal originating from you and your Dance Partner, Improvisation for a channeled regen effect and small shield, and Shield Samba for a party wide 15% damage mitigation.
Understanding Your Job Gauge
Dancer’s Job Gauges are central to their gameplay.
On the top, you see up to four green Feathers appear. These represent your available stored uses of Fan Dance (also known as Fourfold Feathers); these charges have a chance of being generated when using certain abilities. Each displayed Feather allows a single use of either Fan Dance, or its AoE counterpart, Fan Dance II.
The yellow bar, with the corresponding number, is your Esprit gauge. This resource is unlocked at level 76. Esprit is generated as you or your dance partner use GCD weapon skills or spells. After using Technical Finish, your entire party also will contribute to generating Esprit until the raid buff expires. This resource is consumed by using Saber Dance, a very hard hitting GCD. During burst Saber Dance is replaced by Dance of the Dawn for the first use allowing for a large damage skill. Tillana also provides 50 Esprit during burst to guarantee a use of Dance of the Dawn. Use it proactively to avoid wasting Esprit, you can also carry over some Esprit into burst in order to have more strong skills under buffs, but you may find that you have more than you can spend during those bursts.
The second gauge we have shows us our step actions. Dancer has two dance abilities, Standard Step and Technical Step. When initiating these dances you are given random steps to press. Two steps for Standard Step, and four steps for Technical Step.
These step abilities will replace your main single target and AoE abilities and turn into the dance step of their corresponding color.
To perform these dances correctly, you simply look at the gauge and perform the steps from left to right. The next step in a dance will also be highlighted on your hotbar. If you make a mistake, your progress within the dance will not change. It’s important to do all the steps before completing the dance, since both the Finish’s potency and the magnitude of the buff granted depend on how many steps were performed.
Standard Step should be used on cooldown since it is one of our highest potency skills. You will alternate using one of these and Finishing Move, granted by Flourish, every 30s. Both Standard Finish and Finishing Move grant you Last Dance Ready allowing you to use the skill Last Dance as a follow up. You have 30 seconds to use Last Dance before the ability expires Keeping your raid buff Technical Finish on cooldown is integral to party play throughout the game in raids and trials. It makes sure that you are buffing your team’s strongest skills and having your strongest skills buffed as well.
Understanding Dance Partner
Dancer’s main gimmick is the Dance Partner mechanic. Using Closed Position on a party member sets them as your Dance Partner, allowing several of your skills (Standard Finish and Devilment) to buff said party member and to provide significant boosts to their damage output.
You therefore want to put your Dance Partner on someone that does a lot of damage and is able to utilize said buffs to their fullest extent.
Differences in gear and other factors can have an effect on who the optimal Dance Partner is in any given situation. Weigh the pros and cons of each of your party members and decide a dance partner based on your own discretion.
In a vacuum where gear and skill level is equal the priority would be such:
SAM > MNK/PCT/NIN/RPR/VPR > DRG/BLM > RDM > SMN > MCH > BRD > DNC
Dance Partner does stack, so if you’re ever in a situation where you have two Dancers in a dungeon, you should partner each other.
The biggest factor in determining Dance Partner is how much damage they put into your Devilment buff during burst windows, followed by how much damage they do outside of burst with your buff generated from Standard Step, lastly how much Esprit they could generate. Note that Esprit generation is fairly standardized across jobs to average out to gaining Esprit approximately 20% of the time.
There is also a Dance Partner calculator which you can use to determine exactly who the best value Dance Partner is. It can be found here.
Dancer Rotation
Before reading this part of the guide, it might be wise to read up on all of Dancer’s abilities here.
The backbone of Dancer’s rotation is a set of four GCD combo actions that are simple, yet flexible.
The first two of these actions are Cascade and Fountain. Cascade combos into Fountain. Both Cascade and Fountain have a 50% chance of unlocking (“proccing”) a separate GCD – Cascade can unlock Reverse Cascade, and Fountain can unlock Fountainfall.
Reverse Cascade and Fountainfall can be used flexibly in any order, and they can be used between Cascade and Fountain without breaking combo. While flexible, there are still some rules to follow regarding these actions:
- Don’t use Fountain uncombo’d, and don’t use Cascade when a combo’d Fountain is available.
- If you have Reverse Cascade available, avoid using Cascade, and similarly for Fountainfall and Fountain. Reverse Cascade and Fountainfall have a 50% chance to generate a Fourfold Feather, which can be spent on Fan Dance I or Fan Dance II, which are oGCDs.
Graph of our procs:
You can store up to four Fourfold Feathers before overcapping. Try to hold on to at least three for your two minute burst windows. Simply use any fourth generated feathers you gain to prevent overcapping.
We use Saber Dance similar to Fan Dance I. This weaponskill can only be used if you have above 50 Esprit built up. We want to enter our burst windows with as much Esprit as possible since Saber Dance is a very hard hitting skill. The way we do this is to only use saber dance when we risk overcapping at 80 Gauge or higher. If your Esprit is not 80 or above, simply hold on to the gauge.
Next we have the main dance, Standard Step. This skill should be used on cooldown, alternating with Finishing Move granted by Flourish every minute. After executing Standard Finish you will receive a proc to use the skill Last Dance. This is a strong followup to Standard Step and should be used before it expires and trying to use another Standard Step or Finishing Move.
At very high levels of optimization, there can be exceptions. These exceptions are outside the scope of this document, but can be asked about in the Balance Discord.
Flourish is our one-minute cooldown. It grants all possible procs: Fan Dance III, Fan Dance IV, Reverse Cascade, Fountainfall, and Finishing Move Ready. It is important to only use Flourish if you do not have Fan Dance III already procced, to avoid overwriting. Do note that your Reverse Cascade and Fountainfall procs earned outside of Flourish stack with their Flourish versions.
Lastly, your two-minute cooldowns are Devilment and Technical Step. Devilment grants you and your dance partner 20% Crit and Direct Hit rating, while Technical Finish gives your entire party a 5% flat damage buff and the ability to generate Esprit for you. Both of these buffs last 20 seconds, and as they have the same cooldown, it’s best to keep them aligned with each other. During its duration, Devilment also grants access to Starfall Dance, a hard hitting GCD, Saber Dance turns into Dance of the Dawn for its first use, and Technical Finish transforms into Tillana, which generates 50 Esprit.
These abilities are on a 2 minute cooldown and should be used on cooldown. You want to use Devilment after you use Technical Finish to ensure you align with your party.
Opener and Two Minute Burst
Your opener and two-minute burst will never be the same. This is why you should learn the priority of our procs and how to deal with them in the correct order.
For the opener, we begin Standard Step 15.5 seconds before the pull. Do both of the random steps, but hold off from finishing the dance until .5s before the pull.
We recommend using Peloton before the pull, as it will help your melees and tanks get into range quickly.
Use the appropriate Dexterity potion at 1.5 seconds left.
After pressing Standard Finish you should immediately go into the Technical Step.
Use all four steps and do Technical Finish, weaving in Devilment. Use Tillana, weaving in Flourish.
Next, use Dance of the Dawn, weaving in Fan Dance III.
Follow that up with the Last Dance generated from the opening Standard Step, weaving in Fan Dance IV.
Afterwards use Finishing Move.
Now this is where RNG starts to factor in. From here on out, focus on spending all your Fan Dance I’s and their corresponding Fan Dance III’s whilst preventing Esprit from overcapping by using Saber Dance as much as possible. The first chance you get you should use your Starfall Dance as it expires when your Devilment buff expires. Beyond that you want to use Last Dance and Saber Dance as much as possible and only use the Fountainfall and Reverse Cascade procs (in that order) if you do not have enough Esprit for Saber Dance or Last Dance available.
For the two-minute burst window, the idea is pretty much the same, but if you enter burst with 50 or more Esprit you should move Tillana into the later section of the burst when you have 30 or less Esprit to help dissuade overcapping. Make sure to use your Last Dance you carryover from the 1:45 Standard Step before using Finishing Move and keep Finishing Move on cooldown.
If due to Standard Step drifting (not using it on cooldown immediately as it becomes available), your Standard Step comes off cooldown less than six seconds before Technical Step, then hold the ability. It’s more important to perfectly align your Technical Step than it is to keep your Standard Step on cooldown.
It is worth noting that the opener and two-minute burst are the most difficult parts of the rotation. It is recommended to practice the opener several times before stepping further into the rotation. You can do so at the Stone, Sea, Sky dummies or any training dummies, you can also use Diamond Weapon EX solo so that you can jump off the edge when you finish the opener. Dancer’s opener is a lot less wild if you do it without an active Dance Partner and party providing you Esprit. Therefore, when practicing the opener, it’s probably more beneficial to do so in an eight player setting, consider trying content such as normal raids.
Gearing and Melding
Our stat priority is as follows:
Crit > Determination > Direct Hit » Skill Speed
Most of the time, higher item level pieces are better than lower item level pieces, regardless of the substats they hold. However, Dancer is one of those jobs where we want to avoid Skill Speed in its current iteration. You can use the gear calculator to double check whether a gear piece is an upgrade or not.
Utility
As previously mentioned, Dancer brings a lot of utility to the raid. By properly using these, you can lessen the strain on your healers by a sizable amount and allow them to spend more time DPSing. This makes your kills faster and in turn also gives you more DPS as they will be pumping more damage into your raid buffs.
The noteworthy abilities are as follows:
- Shield Samba - This ability has a 90 second cooldown and applies a 15 second buff to all nearby party members that reduces all damage taken by 15%. This is one of the strongest damage mitigations a DPS can bring, as you do not have to target the boss, it doesn’t favor physical or magical damage, it prevents more damage, and because the duration is considerably longer than other DPS mitigation abilities. This ability will not stack with the Bard and Machinist versions, Troubadour and Tactician.
- Curing Waltz - This 60 second cooldown heals party members in a five yalm range around you and your dancer partner for a small amount. That said, if you and your dance partner are stacked up the heal becomes notably more potent. Having your party stack up within this five yalm circle can heal a good chunk of damage on a fairly short cooldown. While it is worth coordinating the usage of this ability in a static, I do not recommend getting Party Finder groups to play around this ability. In Party Finder, simply use it on cooldown when the party is stacked up and is not at full health.
- Improvisation - This ability, when used, provides a regen on all party members within an eight yalm range. It also grants a stack of the Rising Rhythm buff every three seconds up to a maximum of four stacks. When used Improvisation turns into Improvised Finish which grants a barrier based on maximum HP. The barrier strength scales with the duration that it was channeled 5-10% depending on how many stacks of Rising Rhythm (0-4) you have when you use Improvised Finish. Using this ability makes it so you are unable to deal damage and will not auto attack. It is recommended to only fully channel the ability if there is downtime with no boss or adds targetable and you cannot prepare either Standard Step or Technical Step during the downtime instead. The best use during full uptime is flashing the skill and finish to provide the regen and a small shield to your party.
- En Avant - This oGCD has up to three charges and allows you to quickly dash for ten yalms in a straight line. Using this ability at key moments makes you very mobile.
Final Notes
If you have high ping, you might have issues with double weaving or single weaving after Standard Finish and Technical Finish. This can cause significant issues with clipping. Single weaving between GCDs and not weaving outside of Devilment following Technical Finish after dances is completely fine and the job will not suffer for it.
XIVanalysis is a useful tool to help you analyze your rotation. Simply put in your FFLogs report to see what you can improve upon. I recommend using this frequently whilst learning the job.
Things to look out for include maintaining good GCD uptime (as close to 100% as possible), avoiding weaving mistakes, always having a dance partner, avoiding broken combos, not overwriting or dropping procs, and making sure keystone skills such as Technical Finish, Devilment, Standard Step and Flourish are used as often as possible.
If you have any questions regarding the Dancer job, or what is covered in this guide, we are available in The Balance Discord in the dnc_questions channel in order to help.
- Have any questions?
discord.gg/thebalanceffxivAuthors