Tool stack
The FFXIV raider toolkit
The six tools that hold up Final Fantasy XIV's endgame — job guides, BiS planning, log analysis, crafting, and quality of life. The stack for savage raids and ultimates.
Final Fantasy XIV's endgame —savage and ultimates— demands a precision the game doesn't teach you directly. You need to know your rotation in detail, know which gear to chase, and analyze why your pull failed. That whole layer lives outside the client, in community tools most serious raiders keep on hand. This stack gathers the six essentials.
A raider's workflow
The theory base is The Balance: the community source of job guides, with rotations, openers, and priorities maintained by theorycrafters. It's where you learn to play your job correctly.
With the rotation clear, Etro lets you plan your target gear set and calculate stats before farming anything, so you know exactly which pieces to chase and how to meld. After each pull, FF Logs turns your fight into data: percentile parse, uptime, and rankings against the rest of the world. And XIVAnalysis complements it with automated analysis flagging concrete mistakes —a dropped cooldown, a rotation drift.
Two more tools handle daily life: Teamcraft covers crafting and gathering —material lists and routes— to supply your own consumables, and XIVLauncher is the alternative launcher with quality-of-life plugins that speed up login and a thousand small frictions.
Why these six
Each covers a part of endgame without redundancy:
- Theory and rotation → The Balance
- Gear planning → Etro
- Performance analysis → FF Logs + XIVAnalysis
- Crafting and consumables → Teamcraft
- Quality of life → XIVLauncher
You don't need all six for normal content, but for high-difficulty raids they're the standard set. Each tool has its full analysis in the codex.
What's in this stack
- The BalanceFree
The community source of job guides: rotations, openers, and priorities per job, maintained by theorycrafters.
FFXIV's unofficial theorycraft Discord with guides maintained by community job leads: openers, rotations, sims, and patch meta calls
- EtroFree
The gear set and BiS planner: build your target gear and calculate stats before farming it.
The dominant FFXIV BiS planner: build your gear piece by piece, calculate optimal materia melding, and share the link with your party
- Final Fantasy LogsFree
Combat logs: parse, uptime, and per-fight rankings to measure your performance against everyone else.
The dominant FFXIV parser: upload your combat log, see cross-world rankings by job and boss, and compare parses pull-by-pull against the world's best
- XIVAnalysisFree
Automated per-fight analysis that flags concrete rotation and cooldown mistakes.
Automated FFLogs analyzer that suggests concrete fixes for rotation, buff alignment, and missed cooldowns on a per-job basis
- FFXIV TeamcraftFree
Crafting and gathering: material lists, farming routes, and everything to supply yourself.
All-in-one toolkit for crafters and gatherers: HQ rotation simulator, mats lists, gathering node alarms, inventory sync, and desktop companion app
- XIVLauncherFree
Alternative launcher with quality-of-life plugins that speed up login and daily play.
Open-source alternative launcher with auto-login, stability fixes, and access to the Dalamud plugin ecosystem — the de facto standard outside the official launcher
