Ping is an awful thing to deal with, especially when you are playing a multiplayer game that requires you to deal with Combat. I can’t tell you how often I would get frustrated when playing League of Legends when I still lived in Canada and having my Champion teleport back and forth especially when I was playing a Champion that required a lot of movement or spell casts.
The unfortunate truth about playing FFXIV is that it is similarly unbearable to play when you have a lot of ping. Though for the most part combat is manageable as you can avoid the majority of AoEs with ease and at most you will have lag spikes that will teleport you or place you in a weird limbo where you can see yourself chucking out your skills/abilities, but you’re uncertain if you’re dealing damage since all other players will appear to be standing still.
While these moments can be frustrating, the real frustration is when playing certain Jobs with ping. Jobs that require a sequence of inputs to trigger high damage-dealing skills or abilities tend to be the worst, such as the Ninja. Players with high ping may run into situations where one of the Mudras doesn’t register or may even witness the wrong animation for the Spell that you cast.
Jobs that apply Damage Over Time (or DoTs) may also notice that the DoT is not applied or Jobs like the Dancer which has a whole different subset of Abilities when they use Standard Step and Technical Step may end up getting stuck in this section of the rotation. I personally have issues when playing Dancer on my Alt character since I live in the EU and my Alt is on an NA server. I have gotten stuck in my “Dance Mode” while running Savages a few times and have even had attacks not go off, though, in comparison to most Jobs missing attacks, it’s not as big of a deal on Dancer.
Though ping often has to do with the player’s internet connection, there are times when the Square Enix servers are the culprit. These occurrences are relatively rare, but when they happen it will affect all players on the server that is facing issues no matter the content they are running.
Note: If you have any questions about FFXIV that you want me to cover feel free to leave them in a comment below, you can also ask me while I am streaming on Twitch, YouTube or in our community discord.
HOW DO YOU CHECK YOUR PING IN FFXIV
Unfortunately, there is no way to check your Ping directly in FFXIV, but if you are on a PC you can simply use the command prompt on Windows to check.
To begin press the Window Key and R, or you can search Command Prompt in the search bar. Here type in “resmon” which will open the Resource Monitor.
You are going to need to search for “FFXIV_DX11” and when you click on it it will pull up the statics and resources of FFXIV including the Ping.
IS THERE A WAY TO REDUCE MY PING ON FFXIV?
Realistically there isn’t a way to reduce Ping that is specific to FFXIV. General solutions include using ethernet instead of WiFi and ensuring that you close any programs that consume too much bandwidth (Programs to take a look at include Discord, OBS if you’re streaming, or game launchers that have passive updates). In regards to streaming the game, it can be helpful to hard limit your output Bandwidth and lower the quality of the game, though this will have to do with both your internet speed and the ping of the server you’re broadcasting to.
If you’re a player who uses a VPN, there’s a strong chance that it is giving you a chunk of Ping. Now, I understand how important internet security is so I’m not going to advise you to turn it off if you don’t feel safe to do so, but I would recommend trying different locations to see if one is able to reduce your Ping.
Some days I can’t seem to reduce the ping on my VPN and depending on the difficulty of content I’m running I have to put the VPN down or I risk my team suffering.
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