They’ve recently seen more popularity and recognition as the result of FFXI updates that have steadily increased their power, turning them from healers with damage dealing capabilities, into damage dealers with healing capabilities! A dancer’s flexibility means you can freely pick subjobs that boost all the various facets you’re capable of. Although many players will often focus on offense. But let’s have a look at the better subjobs to the oomph in a dancer’s steps.
5. Ninja
Ninja, while not offering much in the way of utility at all to a dancer, is still highly useful for what it does offer: Survivability! Utsusemi shadows are still essential to some fights in the game right now. So that means when damage is unavoidable and large, this’ll be the go-to subjob.
4. Rune Fencer
Here’s a useful defensive option for dancers to try out. Due to a dancer’s self-sustainability, adding rune fencer into the mix means you can massively reduce the magic damage you take. This goes well with Fan Dance, a dancer’s ability to expertly mitigate physical damage. To further add to the sturdiness of the two jobs combined, you’ll also gain the Magic Defense Bonus trait! The spells that rune fencer provides are helpful too, ranging from Stoneskin and Foil to Aquaveil and Blink. Furthermore, should your dancer ever run out of MP, you can restore it with Aspir Samba. And let’s not ignore rune fencer’s specialty, either! Their ward abilities allow them to significantly reduce the damage they suffer from status ailments, in addition to reducing magic damage. Alternatively, you can use Runes to add considerable potency to your already frequent auto-attacks. Using rune fencer as a sub should be a dancer’s first choice if they’re planning on tanking a fight. This is because of all the massive tools at your disposal, capable of mitigating damage of any type – but it’s an especially important pick if magic damage is the leading concern.
3. Warrior
Ah yes, a dancer’s strongest physical damage dealing option in FFXI. Double Attack helps your TP generation by giving you a chance to double up your auto attacks. And the natural Attack Bonus trait here is very helpful in bumping up the numbers you can dish out. Berserk and Warcry are partners in crime too, and offer massive attack bonuses. In the case of Warcry, it’s AoE, so it might be a smarter idea to synergize this with other warriors, or players using warrior as a subjob to maximize the benefits. Aggressor also helps a dancer’s impressive accuracy that much more, too. And although this is situational, a warrior’s Fencer trait can be incredibly useful if you ever find yourself in situations where you’ll be using just a single weapon. This might be to reduce the amount of TP you give to an enemy, or simply for tanking with a shield. Either way, this is especially potent on weapon skills that see large amounts of fTP bonuses, like Rudra’s Storm or Shark Bite.
2. Dragoon
Now this job has become very popular recently among damage dealers, due to its Weapon Skill Damage trait. Because it’s exclusive to this job, the dragoon itself (both as a sub or main job) has really garnered a lot of attention. When it comes to maximizing damage done per weapon skill, the dragoon is a hard choice to beat. Dancers should definitely be considered using this support job if the goal is to be closing as many skillchains as possible. In situations where you don’t want to be the center of attention, High Jump will let you shed enmity. And it goes well with the increased damage output that this job provides, in addition to the enmity generated by Divine Waltz. A dragoon subjob also provides the Attack Bonus trait, giving dancers a little bit more muscle to their attacks across the board. And Conserve TP provides a nice supplement to a dancer’s weapon skills, too. Since you might weapon skill often, you can save some TP for your dances, which are entirely dependent on TP as a resource. Dragoon doesn’t offer dancers much utility, though, since it focuses purely on increasing their weapon skill damage. But it’s more than welcome as a subjob meant to deal high damage already.
1. Samurai
This is truly a fantastic support job for dancers in all aspects of offense and defense, and most likely the samurai is the subjob you’ll be using in most situations. The main purpose for other jobs subbing samurai is Hasso, but this isn’t used by a dancer… yet almost everything else is! So instead, this combo provides a bunch of other useful abilities and traits, like Store TP – which is immensely useful on a job that uses TP as a resource for abilities. In addition to Store TP, Meditate allows you to passively gain TP regardless of if you’re in battle or not. This gives you a helpful buffer before starting a battle, or just for the increased use of weapon skills. Sekkanoki allows you to strategically only use 1000 TP for your next weapon skill, saving the rest for dances, steps, or otherwise. And Zanshin still works for 1-handed weapon users, so in the event you miss, you still get a 25% chance to attack again! I also want to mention Third Eye, which allows dancers to further bolster their incredible sustainability since they can completely evade the next single target physical attack—valuable against attacks that deal high amounts of damage. Combined with Fan Dance, this is a real strong setup. Enemies will find it hard enough to get past a dancer’s evasion because of Third Eye. But if they eventually do, they’ll have to contend with the massive initial 90% physical damage reduction provided by Fan Dance!
