Call me delusional, but I think I—well, a collection of sharp eyes from the Final Fantasy 14 community—have cracked what Final Fantasy 14: Evercold’s next job is going to be. We were introduced to the Bastion during the latest fanfest, but we’ve still got one more job to go—a job we happen to know is a ranged physical dps.
Pardon me while I gather my corkboard and red string—I’ll be starting off with the strongest evidence to the weaker stuff, but I think you can make a compelling case that the job will be some sort of bird tamer with a crossbow. Firstly, because of lead composer and sound director Masayoshi Soken’s tease at the fanfest, clipped here by Reddit user ParvatiLikeaRockstar.
New ranged dps teased by Soken at Berlin fanfest
from r/ffxiv
In the first clip, we hear a magical charge-up, a click—like a crossbow string latching or being fired—and then an explosion. In the second, we very clearly hear a bird assailing an enemy, and more sounds akin to something being fired.
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In the recently-extended trailer itself, we see a miqo’te named Visna being harassed by her pet bird while checking a wand-like object for flaws. She flinches, touches the tip of the wand, and it explodes into a rune—a rune that looks suspiciously like a job stone symbol and, if you squint at it right, bears a resemblance to a crossbow.
Then there’s the “wand” itself—which I think is more likely to actually be a magic crossbow bolt. It has a sharp tip, and it activates when Visna touches it—which would make sense for something that’s meant to be fired into an enemy and detonate on impact.
While Visna’s connection to the noises Soken shared is pretty obvious in case of the bird, have a careful listen to the explosion that happens at 2:59, then the explosion from the first sound clip from Soken—they sound very familiar.
The crossbow link’s also tied to the potential job itself. It’s a ranged physical dps, which means it’ll need a physical weapon of some kind—and while it’s not out of pocket to suggest that you could have a job entirely built around hucking a bird at people, it’s a FF14 job, which means it’ll need a physical weapon that can be crafted and found, and I somehow don’t think blacksmiths will be synthesising full birds anytime soon.
It also makes further sense that a bird will be included because of Evercold’s ties to Norse mythology—in which birds are pretty dang prevalent. There’s Veðrfölnir, a hawk that sits between the eyes of an unnamed eagle at the top of the world tree—and Visna’s bird has a hooked beak, sharing that in common with both hawks and eagles.
And now the most conspiratorial of evidence—told you I was saving the weakest for last. A few months ago, there was a bugged lalafell jump animation, which you can see in action below courtesy of Reddit user BruohWK.
Bugged Lalafell DRK Animation?
from r/ffxiv
This video on X also shows the lalafell seemingly holding something from beneath in one hand, while having a hand on the trigger in the other. And given there aren’t any existing jobs in the game that use, say, a rifle, there could be a shadow of a chance that this is an animation from the new job that got mixed up in the files somewhere. Maybe.
Throw all that evidence together, and it’s looking incredibly likely that the new job will be a falconer with some kind of crossbow—there is also the off-chance they might use a boomerang, based on director Naoki Yoshida’s traditional t-shirt hint of “guess who’s back?” Though that could just as easily be referring to the eagle/hawk/falcon returning to the user. Avian mysteries abound.
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