It’s hard to point out the best solo classes and jobs in Final Fantasy XIV Endwalker. The choice of class for solo play is less about the class itself and more about the player’s preference.
While Final Fantasy XIV is a game centered around party play, many changes were made so newcomers to play by themselves. There are also missions that force you to play solo. While these main scenario missions are not too hard, you may have trouble doing public FATEs by yourself depending on your class.
Best Solo Classes in Final Fantasy XIV
The game’s design ensures that all classes are viable for solo play, with each offering a unique flavor while adhering to the core principles of their respective roles. Whether you’re a tank, healer, or DPS, the community is generally supportive and understanding, especially toward newcomers. Still, there might be some newbie-friendly classes that demand less effort from newcomers, such as:
Warrior
As outlined in the tank tier list, Warrior has great solo sustain. combine that with decent damage and the tankiness of well…a tank. Since the main issue you will run into with FATEs is dying playing as a tank class seems like an easy fix. However, even a tank with low sustain will have trouble staying alive while trying to solo a FATE and if you have to focus on healing yourself then you won’t be able to do enough damage to finish the FATE in time.
But with Warrior, you don’t need to decrease your damage to heal yourself and you have plenty of sustain to stay in the fight the whole time. Warrior also doesn’t have the worst damage out of all the tanks, so as long as you focus you should be able to kill boss FATEs within the time limit.
Red Mage
When you think of a jack of all trades DPS, Red Mage should come to mind. in previous Final Fantasy games, the Red Mage was also an intermediary class between Black Mage and White Mage, and this idea holds true in Final Fantasy XIV. The class is a firm mix of caster, with a little bit of melee burst that you use for your bit combos.
The big draw of this class for solo play is the ability to instant cast a heal as many times as your mana will allow. You can do this because of the free swift cast Red Mage gets after every full spell cast. If you cast a shorter spell to deal some damage, you can then consume the swift cast charge to cast a quick cure on yourself.
Related: The Best Food for Every Job in Final Fantasy XIV
While the heal is a nice bonus, you do still need to be careful as this will put a drain on your mana. As long as you dodge a few AOEs from a boss or give yourself a bit of regen time between smaller fights, you should be fine though.
Of course, the reason you are playing Red Mage instead of a tank or healer is that you want to do a lot of damage. Don’t worry though, Red Mage has you covered. Use your swift cast charges to cast bigger more damaging spells and keeping a balance between both your white and black mana is the core of Red Mage. Following those guidelines will allow you to build up enough of both kinds of mana to use your burst damage combo.
Sage
Taking a healer into a FATE may seem like an even worse idea than playing a tank, but Sage is the new edition to Final Fantasy XIV and just like the healer tier list, it came to change a few things. While most healers don’t deal a lot of damage and have mostly heals and buffs, Sage works a little differently.
With Sage, you can heal and deal damage at the same time. This will help you make up for having low defensive stats by keeping yourself healed up the whole time. While other healers can easily keep themselves at full health during a FATE, they would have to sacrifice dealing damage to focus on healing.
However, Sage can mark a player and heal them for a percentage of damage done, you can apply the mark to yourself and heal yourself as you do damage. Sage also has some very damaging moves to use when compared to other healers.
If you do start to lose more health than you can heal back with your damage, you can just use some of your off-gcd healing skills to quickly get your health back up. With all of these little perks of Sage combined, you run into a very scary solo job. while you won’t hit as hard as a DPS you can keep yourself in the fight the whole time and slowly whittle down and FATE.
Paladins have many aspects that are desirable to both new players and solo players. This versatile class assures that you will have some survivability, heals, and damage to handle most situations. This class has the privilege of being more than decent on all basic fronts. New players get to commit a few mistakes and rely on the Paladin’s defenses. Also, solo players can make sure to stay alive with self-healing abilities while being able to handle enemies with the Paladin’s good damage output.
This class is also pretty easy to master. It has a simple rotation and slowly introduces more complex elements, allowing players to learn the systems without getting overwhelmed by them. The Paladin might not have the most flashy abilities, and might not be the best healer in FFXIV, but it’s an efficient and reliable class.
Summoner
Another DPS class for you to solo with if you want more of a focus on damage for your activities. Your main issue with playing this class for your solo activities is going to be the same issue you run into with any DPS class being played solo. Having enough sustain to finish a fight. Sometimes stellar damage just won’t cut it in Boss FATEs and you can’t manage to kill them before you die. However, much like Red Mage, Summoner has a bit more sustain than your average DPS.
Since Summoner and Scholar use the same base class, you have access to a basic cure and resurrection spell. While the resurrection spell won’t be of much use to a solo player, having a cure is a nice bonus over the minute cooldown melee DPS healing spell. The only downside is that you need to slow cast it and it is just a basic cure, so it won’t heal for a lot.
Summoner did also receive a rework with the recent expansion, so you should have a lot of new features to explore with the class. While it may not be one of the top damaging DPS classes at the moment. You should be able to clear any FATE or main scenario mission with a bit of focus.
You do need to keep in mind that this class is no tank and the heal is slow and basic. So you can’t just eat all of the damage a creature throws at you and expect to come out on top. Just make sure you avoid AOEs and if you notice a tank-buster-like move coming, be ready to heal after it. If you need any more help with Final Fantasy XIV make sure to check out our other guides.
Final Fantasy XIV is available on PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Mac, and PC.
