izanaki-kun7773: I personally think Miner is the hardest melee dps

winters.paradise: caetsu dropping the video at exactly reset time to make msq roulette bearable

KokoPearl: All the jobs are easy and I am always hard

deadeus5248: for rpr, yeah the job at face value is very easy to play, but wanting to properly optimise the job is HELL, gluttony drifts, shadow of death/perfectio not generating gauge, the timer itself, each fight demands specific timing, depending on how your design timer you want to enshroud or not etc im shocked its this low but i guess for the vast majority of player it never comes up as an issue

karman3k012: Honestly for the lols i can believe mnk being the hardest melee for one fact. It gets reworked every expansion so you practically have to relearn it every expac. Tho its my main melee dps.

musikmann95: AS soon as I saw Reaper as second easiest, I could tell this poll was mostly done by casuals

merkykrem: IMO the hardest thing about VPR is not letting your filler combo drop while you spam multiple Reawakens, Vicewinders and Uncoiled Furies back to back.

EK86-m9e: as someone who plays all melees at a high level the hardest to optimize imo are: rpr > sam > mnk > drg > nin > vpr ranked from most difficult to least difficult

siinuxxblume5123: So samurai in optimization has full uptime a 7 min rotation, needs different entry points for burst, so like 6 different pre burst set up, needs to factor in 2 buffs and a dot into all of this, manage kenki and preferably line up its longer range attacks with mechanics. Third Eye is harder to use and positionals arent nothing like on reaper.

I guess a lot of the ranking is carried by casual content, but for optimization samurai is by far the hardest imo.

Mono-XIII: I will always sing Viper’s praises. Returning back to the game as a legacy controller player trying to learn M K, it was so nice and fun to learn with Viper. Love that everything just flows so nicely with it and allows some flexibility!

BygoneContraption: When I started FFXIV in 1.0 I was a Pugilist, and although I didn't spend much time in 1.0, when I returned for ARR I played Pugilist again. I unlocked Monk and only made it to around 37 or so, and switched over to playing Lancer / Dragoon, partly because I needed to unlock Blood for Blood. I ended up liking Dragoon much better, and continued to play the job pretty much all the way through to the end of Shadowbringers, where the job has remained for me (level 80). I have since leveled Monk to 73, but I admit since it had received multiple reworks and changes I can honestly say I wasn't great at the job before and have no clue how to make the job work now either. My Samurai is at 60 something, and I don't really play the job so I can't really comment on it's placement much.

I got Ninja to level 50, and I can definitely see why it would be considered so difficult. You have a lot of button combos to remember, along with timing them to line up with damage buffs it's just too much for me. Oddly enough, although I have both Reaper and Viper at level 100, I have almost no experience using the jobs in much content outside of a few leveling dungeons since I mostly leveled them up through PvPing to avoid the something horrendous DPS queues in Duty Roulettes. I can say that Viper to me feels like you're pressing way more buttons, so I'd put Viper over Reaper simply because of having way more abilities to manage at one time.

So for me the order goes Reaper, Viper, Dragoon, then Samurai, Monk and finally Ninja.

doublelarriet: The flattened text was cute!

nemamiah7832: Now this one is fascinating to me. I don't have much playtime on Melees and don't have a hard opinion on "who's the hardest and why". So it's just interesting without a chance of me not agreeing. Nice to not have an opinion :D

TheArnoldification: only hard melee is high end rpr because it's badly designed and goes very resource negative so optimization revolves optimizing around jank

Space-Queen-Nazu: Im a touch biased because DRG main but

Viper > samurai > Dragoon > Monk > Reaper > Ninja

I like how its the same general order as Cae; agreeing that DRG is harder than Samurai and Monk is easier than Reaper with DT changes, but I find Samurai and Dragoon easier than Monk.

Death's Design, Harpe, and Reaper's charged up attack contribute to its difficulty to me, but more importantly the ping-dependent and store-and-spend Enchroud burst is a knowledge/practice check that i find to be unique among the melees. All of these push Reaper to, ironically, the second hardest Melee job to me.

SREDISKRAD: I prefer samurai but I am very much more of a "freestyle samurai". I have done that in savage before and it becomes a lot more of "freestyle and fit 'this' into the burst windows". I know burst windows are supposed to be super strict but it really is just "you have 20 seconds to hit your best buttons" which the opener "orders for simplicity of reapplication" and I did learn the samurai opener. But I trust party finder about as far as I can throw an elephant and given that's where I mostly raid, I'll take the rotation with the least reliance on getting what I want.

Personally in terms of ease I rank them VPR

AliciaWhimsicott: The polls for this were miserable, RPR getting beaten by everything but VPR shows that the vast majority of people voting on the polls literally do not actually play jobs in a way that actually requires optimization, which is the only part where "job difficulty" even exists. Also even if we're going for skill floor, current MNK could literally play itself it's so easy lol.

marvinhammer3147: Your ranking shows that you have never played in an optimised environment. It really hurts my eyes seeing samurai 3rd. Samurai definitely got a lot easier over the years but so did every other melee, especially ninja. Ninja's real difficulty comes from getting a grip on oneself to not throw your keyboard across the room when your IPS does the funny to make you bunny for the 1000th time.

Eventide_Star: At the beginning, and as someone who has all the Melee DPS jobs maxed currently, my guess is, from easiest to hardest: Viper, Monk, Reaper, Samurai, Dragoon, Ninja.

Well, unexpected results but I did get Viper, Samurai, and Ninjas placements correct. I heavily disagree on Monk being hard but it's still nice to see explanations and such for everything.

hevidog66: Ok but whats the most difficult job if you aren't illiterate.

Gendo.: The headbang at 15:36 was fantastic

StormhawkeRose: The more I watch these, the more I think I probably have no idea what I'm doing

dbull620: The leveling experience is also no small part of the reason Ninja is difficult to pick up, as there are several changes in which mudras to prioritize/avoid throughout the leveling cycle. Then in the level 70-89 range, you finally start to pick up on the flow of the job and its rotation only to be introduced to the Raijuu skills at level 90. The Raiju skills are an extremely unforgiving extra step to your rotation due to losing "Raiju Ready" if you use another weapon skill, which you will likely do many times in practice due to the muscle memory you built over the previous 19 levels.

cloneme5: Can't forget just how many times you see Ninjas use Doton on a single target which is very unfortunate how often I see it...

Strider_Shinryu: I definitely all into the category of finding Reaper and Viper harder, but that's mostly because I pretty much never play them. As such I do often find myself running into the situation outlined in the video with Viper where I have all of the glowy buttons lit up and don't know which one I'm supposed to press. Not to mention not making proper use of my ranged options simply because I sort of forget that they're there.

And I actually find Samurai the most fun of the melee jobs because of that sort of dual mindset element mentioned in the video, where you can just sort of go with the flow and feel the job out but also have elements to really hone in on with timing, alignment and resource management if you really want to.

DodgeJohnson1: I think we're in a very weird spot at the moment in general where every job being played "well" revolves around the 2 minute burst, and all of the optimisations involve altering your playstyle around the 2 minute window, even if it means leaving your abilities just lingering there ready to go for 40 seconds. But the weird spot to me comes from the fact that the 2 minute window isn't going to be around for too much longer, with it apparently kicking the bucket in Evercold.

Now yes, I never bothered to learn the 2 minute window optimisation stuff because it just seemed frustrating and boring to me to stick to the exact same routine every time a fight started, so I always have just sort of winged it and hit my fun buttons when I felt like it because that was more fun to me. It's not like I'm a hardcore raider or anything, but at this point it feels like if I wanted to optimise my job play, it would be wasted effort considering the significant changes to the combat flow that's coming in Evercold. A kind of "why should I learn "how to play properly" if the "proper" way to play will be gone in a few months anyway?" kind of deal. It makes me wonder if the best advice for new players should be to learn the 2 minute window now, or to just wing it and adapt to what Evercold brings?

NorggroN: I put some time into figuring out what i no longer like about dragoon, and its the rapid positional requirements. For sam and monk, what ive played the most, you have 2 GCD to be in position, but dragoon its right in a row, and that is too much for my small brain to handle.

Aug 03 2026

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