Final Fantasy XIV progression, like most MMORPGs, is driven by gear, consumables, and socket enhancements. And all these inventory items are repeatedly and categorically replaced by new ones as players level up, to the point that most of them are all but obsolete every ten levels or so. Consumables are probably hit the worst of all, often outstripped by newer better options every major patch, and there are few reasons to keep ‘last season’s best’ around given how much cheaper, better, and more prevalent the new flavor of the week always is.
Except one. There’s a single potion, included in the game on release in 2010, that has never stopped being useful and you should spare a slot on your hotbars for every tank and DPS class. It’s cheap, it’s stackable, it’s sold everywhere, it’s…
The humble Spine Drops are not flashy and don’t seem particularly notable at first glance. They’re not even that unique, being just one of a whole swathe of debuff-cleansing tinctures most players receive from early ARR quests and probably don’t even use, never to look at again. But in this article, I’m making my argument as to why you should graduate from “doesn’t use consumables except Phoenix Down and the current best health potion” to “as before, but also uses Spine Drops”!
A Brief Summary of Debuffs
As you adventure throughout Eorzea, you will face a motley menagerie of monsters, many of whom are capable of inflicting nasty status conditions beyond simple damage. Most of these debuffs fall into two camps: largely ignorable (poisoned, blinded, burnt) and debilitating (petrified, terrified, doomed.) The former you can generally just keep doing your thing and wait for it to fall off, maybe your healer needs to tag you with Esuna or heal you slightly more. The latter either disables use of items, cannot be cleansed, or doesn’t have consumables that cure it anyway.
Paralysis falls into the rarer middle ground of “problematic and curable”, as it’s a common status condition that punches above its weight class in how it disrupts play. It causes the player to randomly stop moving every few seconds, as well as prevents the use of any actions during this time. Not only does this wreak hell on your rotations, it’s also quite good at getting you hit with AoEs because you randomly stop running to safety, and tanks can find Paralysis preventing them from putting up mitigations before being hit by tank busters. It’s a frustrating and underestimated status condition that can be entirely countered with a cheap consumable.
(The other debuffs in this category, such as silenced and pacified, I don’t personally find important enough to cleanse with potions. They don’t interrupt your movement so you can just focus on dodging, they’re only relevant for certain classes, and hotbar buttons are on something of a premium at this stage in FFXIV’s life.)
The Argument Against Consumables
Generally, the FFXIV community dislikes or ignores consumables, and I know multiple players who refuse to deal with them entirely. I totally understand why, they’re fiddly and expensive and have a terrible shelf life for all the reasons mentioned in the first sentence of this article. But Spine Drops aren’t like that, they’re dirt cheap and never need to be replaced. Just buy 99 of them, stick the stack somewhere on your hotbar and treat it like a “never be paralyzed again” button. (And remember, you can use Spine Drops on other players too! If the healer’s paralyzed and struggling to self-Esuna, consider cleansing them and doing the whole party a favor.)
I know like this article reads like I’m shilling for Big Spine Drops, and my character is canonically an alchemist so I’m not an uninvested party, but I just think they’re nifty and my heart breaks a little every time I see my partymates coming to a screeching halt and eating 50 Flavors of Damage when they could have eaten a potion instead. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of Cure II!
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