Stacking in Final Fantasy XIV refers to a mechanic in various boss fights throughout the game. It’s when players group up at one (or several points) all together. There are many situations where stacking is useful, even if it’s not the intended mechanic of the specific fight.
Stacking can sometimes help with the cohesiveness of the party, but usually, it’s just to spread damage with the rest of your party instead of taking it all yourself.
There really isn’t much to stacking, either.
You’ll be doing it several times as you make your way across Eorzea.
It’s never done out in the world of Eorzea, though… to my knowledge anyway.
Typically stacking is always done in boss fights as one of the fight mechanics. Unless you go into a savage raid, or a fight purposely meant to be hard, there will always be some kind of indication.
Normally, a mechanic that requires stacking will have a big orange circle around indicating where players should group up.
Stacking will usually result in the damage being split amongst everyone who stands there. A lot of the time this is necessary in order to not, y’know, die.
It’s also possible that the party will need to split into two groups of four to stack at two different locations. This is pretty uncommon, though.
Primary Stacking Uses
Now I said that usually stacking is used to mitigate damage between party members.
So what about the other times?
Let me give ya an example.
Way back in the before time, before FFXIV had any expansions, Titan was the biggest baddie there ever was.
Titan EX was dangerous as heck. And stacking helped make the fight a little easier.
Players used to all converge right under Titan’s butt. See, the Titan fight was kind of something like a dance where if you didn’t follow the exact steps, well… bye-bye.
Stacking and moving as a team minimized the chances of getting hit by a stray mechanic.
And really, those are the only situations in which stacking would be meaningful!
You’ll stack for mechanics, almost always to split damage.
