The Dancer is a proc engine bolted to a raid buff. Its damage is low by design — its job is to multiply everyone else's, and to be moving while it does it.
Standard Step runs on a 30-second cooldown; Technical Step on 120. Standard Finish grants 5% to you and your Dance Partner — Technical Finish grants 5% to the entire party for 20 seconds.
Initiating any step locks the GCD to 1.5 seconds, and the step actions themselves run on the same truncated timer.
Esprit fills from your weaponskills, your partner's under Standard Finish, and the whole raid's under Technical Finish. It caps at 100 and spends on Saber Dance at 50 — and the first Saber Dance after Technical Finish upgrades to Dance of the Dawn.
Fourfold Feathers generate on a 50% roll from combo procs and cap at four. They feed Fan Dance, which itself rolls for Fan Dance III.
A proc has a 30-second life. Let one expire and you have deleted damage you already owned — the single most common unforced error on the job.
Flourish grants every combo proc at once, so you must enter it with a clean board or a forced proc destroys a natural one.
The weave constraint. A normal 2.50-second GCD lets you weave two oGCDs. A dance step — and every step input inside it — allows exactly one, because the recast is 1.5 seconds. Clipping a GCD during the step sequence is how a Dancer quietly loses an entire GCD from the burst window. Everything about how this job is played descends from this one number.
Dawntrail did not repaint the Dancer. It added three capstones that made the burst window both heavier and stricter — and normalised one timer that had quietly dictated gearing for years.
Standard Finish and Finishing Move both grant Last Dance Ready for 30 seconds. 540 potency · 60% AoE falloff
This raised the cost of drifting Standard Step: a missed cycle now loses the finish and a 540-potency payload.
Flourish grants Finishing Move Ready. While active, Standard Step becomes Finishing Move — a free Standard Finish. 850 potency · 60% AoE falloff
The arithmetic that matters: a manual Standard Step sequence eats 5.0 seconds (1.5 initiate + 2×1.0 step + 1.5 finish). Finishing Move occupies a single 2.5-second GCD. Inside a 20-second window, that condensation is the whole point.
Technical Finish grants Dance of the Dawn Ready for 30 seconds, turning a Saber Dance into a line AoE for the same 50 Esprit. 1,000 potency
It is the single largest button in the kit and it must never be spent outside a buff window.
In Endwalker, Tillana sat on a fixed 1.5-second GCD and forced awkward Skill Speed maths to keep the GCD wheel aligned with the two-minute cycle. Dawntrail returned it to a standard 2.50s recast.
The consequence is exact: at a strict 2.50s GCD a Dancer executes precisely 48 GCDs per 120-second loop, so Technical Step and Flourish drift back off cooldown exactly as the wheel rolls. There is no longer any reason to carry Skill Speed.
The whole sequence exists to fold Tillana, Dance of the Dawn, Last Dance, Finishing Move and Starfall Dance into one overlapping Technical Finish and Devilment window — while the rest of the raid stacks its own buffs on top.
Why −0.5 and not 0.0. Standard auto-attacks carry an innate delay of roughly half a second on engage. Triggering Standard Finish just before the boss becomes targetable forces the auto-attack cycle to start instantly instead of losing a swing to the delay. It is a fraction of a second of damage, and it is free.
Closed Position first. Assign the Dance Partner before the pull — priority is covered in section 07.
| Timer | GCD action | Weave | Why it sits here |
|---|---|---|---|
| 0.0s | Standard Finish | — | Applies the 5% buff and grants Last Dance Ready. |
| 0.0s | Technical Step | 4 step inputs | Opens the burst; channels roughly five seconds. |
| 5.0s | Technical Finish | Devilment | Party 5% plus 20% Crit/DH to you and your partner. Weaving Devilment here mirrors its 20s duration onto Technical's exactly. |
| 7.5s | Tillana | Flourish | Generates exactly 50 Esprit and grants every proc plus Finishing Move Ready. |
| 10.0s | Dance of the Dawn | Fan Dance IV | Spends the Esprit Tillana just guaranteed, for 1,000 potency. FD4 adds 460 more. |
| 12.5s | Last Dance | Fan Dance III | Consumes the proc from the pre-pull step — and must resolve before Finishing Move overwrites it. |
| 15.0s | Starfall Dance | feather dumps | Auto direct-crit GCD granted by Devilment. |
| 17.5s | Finishing Move | feather dumps | 850 potency, refreshes the Standard Finish buff, grants a fresh Last Dance. |
| ~20s | Saber Dance | feather dumps | Spend pooled Esprit before the raid-wide generation overcaps the gauge. |
| — | Priority GCDs | feather dumps | RNG-dependent: Saber Dance above 85 Esprit, then Fountainfall, then Reverse Cascade. |
It guarantees exactly 50 Esprit, which is the cost of the Dance of the Dawn on the very next GCD. Delay it and a burst of party weaponskills in the first three seconds can cap the gauge and waste that 50 — because during Technical Finish the entire raid is generating Esprit for you.
Not after Technical Finish. Fired earlier, its granted procs and Finishing Move Ready risk timing out or capping your feathers. At 7.5 seconds every proc stays live comfortably into the cooldown phase, so you spend them methodically instead of panic-weaving.
At ~15s it lands 850 potency inside the peak of the window — your Devilment and everyone else's, Ninja's Mug, Astrologian's Divination, Dragoon's Battle Litany — while refreshing Standard Finish before it can drop.
Last Dance must resolve before Finishing Move, because Finishing Move grants its own Last Dance Ready. Reverse the two and you have thrown away 540 potency.
The fifteen-second sequence assumes an orchestrated raid. Most of the game is not that, and the Dancer has to have an answer for both.
Party Finder tanks pull short. Attempting the full pre-pull means Standard Finish lands seconds after the boss is engaged, which drags Technical Finish with it and knocks your whole burst out of phase with the raid. The answer is ugly but correct: open with Standard Step as your first combat action and accept Technical Step arriving about five seconds late. The delay cascades; it is still better than the alternative.
The tempting fix — skip Standard Finish and dump Technical Finish on GCD 1 — is rejected everywhere outside sub-minute kill times. It costs you the opening Last Dance proc, and it means Technical Finish itself misses the 5% Standard Finish multiplier. Two losses to buy a timing fix.
In encounters like Futures Rewritten, The Omega Protocol or Dragonsong's Reprise, bosses go untargetable or invulnerable exactly on the even minutes. Looping rigidly puts your buffs on a wall. The raid agrees to hold: you drift Technical Step, Devilment and Flourish to the re-engagement, and in the meantime you park resources at exactly 4 feathers and roughly 80–90 Esprit, ready to unload the moment the call comes.
Fan Dance has a 1.0-second recast, so two can fit one GCD — but only one order is safe. FD1→FD1 is error-prone; FD1→FD3 needs the server round-trip under ~60ms. The universal answer is FD3→FD1: fire a proc you already hold, then a fresh Fan Dance. No confirmation is needed mid-weave, so the inputs buffer and ping stops mattering.
Between bursts the Dancer is reactive — but it is never free-form. Three rigid clocks run underneath every proc decision, and everything else is scheduled around them.
Refresh the buff and take the Last Dance proc. From Level 96 you alternate: at the even minutes Flourish hands you Finishing Move, which does the same job in a single GCD instead of five seconds.
Flourish grants every combo proc, a free Fan Dance III, Fan Dance IV and Finishing Move. Clear your board before pressing it — an overwritten natural proc is a direct loss.
Technical Step and Devilment together. For the 20.5 seconds after Technical Finish, every player in the raid can feed your Esprit. Enter with 80–100 Esprit, 3–4 feathers, and an empty board.
If a mechanic makes you late on Standard Step, hold it. Technical Step is the clock that matters — never let a drifted dance push the raid buff off the two-minute mark.
With no combo to follow, the Dancer reads the state of its timers and gauges each GCD and takes the highest rung available. The ranking is not arbitrary — it is sorted by how expensive it is to be wrong.
Cascade rolls 50% for Reverse Cascade; Fountain rolls 50% for Fountainfall. Each proc carries its own 50% roll for a feather. So the loop is two layers of coin flips, and the priority list above is how you handle two heads in a row.
Feathers cap at four and never regenerate on their own. Never hold four unless you are within ten seconds of Technical Step. At four feathers at the one-minute mark, spend one immediately — so the next proc you roll is not silently discarded.
The partner receives your permanent 5%, your Curing Waltz healing, and the whole of your Devilment — a 20% Crit and Direct Hit steroid. Picking wrong is the largest single lever on a Dancer's raid contribution.
Fast jobs used to win the partner slot by feeding Esprit faster. Dawntrail weights the internal coefficients by each job's natural GCD speed, so a slow Black Mage and a fast Monk generate roughly the same Esprit over a sustained fight — about a 20% proc rate. Burst timing no longer changes with composition.
How well the partner converts the twenty-second Devilment window into damage. Concentrated burst scales hardest; flat sustained damage scales least. That is the entire ranking.
They may partner each other — the self and partner buffs stack cleanly. They cannot partner the same third member: identical buff instances overwrite, so the second Dancer's contribution vanishes.
A well-geared, skilled Black Mage beats a poorly geared Samurai who dies twice. Your rDPS is tied to the partner's actual damage during the window — partnering a corpse multiplies nothing. If your partner takes Weakness, macro-swap Closed Position to the next-best DPS immediately.
At the top of the parse ladder Dancers swap mid-fight — hold a Samurai for the sustained 5%, then macro-swap to a Pictomancer about two seconds before Devilment to catch the overtuned burst, then swap back.
PartnerCalc, fed by ACT logs, models exactly how much rDPS an alternate partner would have yielded in a fight you already ran. It is the only honest way to answer "who should have had it".
Savage progression wants raw item level with natural Crit/Det. Ultimate encounters impose syncs — Futures Rewritten syncs to i735 — and substat caps compress on the way down. A high-ilvl piece bloated with Skill Speed scales down worse than a lower-ilvl piece with perfect Crit/Det. Ultimate raiders use Ultimate weapons or calculated legacy accessories to max Crit/Det without wasting a point.
At three or more targets, Cascade/Fountain become Windmill/Bladeshower and the procs become Rising Windmill/Bloodshower. Feathers spend on Fan Dance II — which still rolls for Fan Dance III, and FD3 cleaves, so it stays a priority. Everything else is unchanged, because every one of the Dancer's big buttons is already an AoE.
Start charging Standard Step while the tank is still running between packs. The steps deal no damage and generate no aggro, so you can prepare mid-run; the instant the tank stops, Standard Finish lands, and Technical Step rolls straight after.
15% party damage reduction in 30 yalms for 15 seconds. It shares an overwriting category with Bard's Troubadour and Machinist's Tactician — they do not stack, so it must be scheduled on the mitigation sheet, not pressed on instinct.
It emits 300 potency of healing from you and a mirrored 300 from your partner. If the two of you stack precisely, the radii overlap and the raid inside the overlap takes a 600-potency burst heal — on a 60-second cooldown.
It channels regen and builds Rising Rhythm for a 5–10% max-HP party shield. In full uptime, flash it: activate and finish via an oGCD double-weave for the base regen and a 5% shield at no DPS cost. Hold the full channel for untargetable phases only.