A group of Final Fantasy 14 players has discovered a potential and exploitable bug while playing as the warrior job in combat. While the bug has proven difficult to replicate, players were able to confirm reports of the bug and posted their findings on Reddit as a warning for other Final Fantasy 14 players to take note of.
It goes without saying that using any bugs or exploits to gain an unfair advantage in most games is a severe violation in most online games, and Final Fantasy 14 is no different in that regard. Though Final Fantasy 14 does not use an intricate anti-cheat system like other games, Square Enix keeps track of players that have used exploits without reporting them. Furthermore, they can take action against any player that abuses a bug for either personal gain or to greatly affect the outcome of a fight. The punishments may range from a warning to a temporary or permanent account ban from the game.
On the r/ffxiv subreddit, a Reddit user named DeathOfTheHeavens reported that the bug was discovered while playing as a warrior during standard gameplay. They subsequently replicated it while training on a striking dummy, and then sent a bug report directly to Square Enix using the game's bug report form. As a Tank, the warrior job is notorious for its self-healing capability, using abilities such as Bloodwhetting, Shake It Off, and Thrill of Battle to do the job. When Final Fantasy 14 Patch 6.3 was released, Shake It Off received an additional heal-over-time buff to bolster its capabilities.
Following server maintenance on January 13 that addressed some unrelated issues, the Shake It Off ability was reportedly affected by a bug that made its healing go for ridiculous amounts. The bug was replicated by using Bloodwhetting and Thrill of Battle before using Shake It Off to trigger a larger heal. Though the bug has been inconsistent in its duplication, other users on r/ffxiv have reported that the healing component can go as high as the millions, or not trigger any healing at all as protection against overflowing numbers. When Endwalker was released, a stat squish was introduced that affected damage and healing calculations. Though a level squish could be added to Final Fantasy 14 in the future, only time will tell if and when that will come to pass, given the effects of the current stat squish.
Users stressed that if any players tried to use this exploit to bypass any challenges, such as the Mount Ordeals trial, Square Enix would administer punishments accordingly to any offenders. Though no fix for the exploit has been deployed to Final Fantasy 14 servers at the time of writing, it is only a matter of time before the development team gets to the bottom of it.
Final Fantasy 14 is available now for PC, PS4, and PS5.