Dancers have all-around average stats. Their HP and VIT are a bit on the lower side, while their TEC and AGI are a bit on the higher side. They don't particularly excel at any given task in battle, but at the same time, they are capable of performing several very disparate types of tasks in battle, and are able to do them good enough.

As far as class skills go, this is one of the stronger ones. The less time a dancer has to spend re-applying their buffs to themselves, the more time they have to use active skills or items. In effect, this punishes dance skills on characters that have Dancer as a subclass far more than subclasses are usually punished. Not only do skills only have half their usual max rank, but once you get to Master, a Dancer subclass's dance skills will have roughly half the duration compared to a Dancer mainclass.

Even if you're only getting some dances just to fulfill prerequisites for other skills, this is absolutely worth putting points into ASAP.

Before we go any further, if you're coming from another EO game but haven't played EO4, there is something to be aware of with Dancer's buffs. Unlike Troubadour, Sovereign, or Shaman, dances are only directly applied to the user. Other player characters in the user's row then gain the effects of that dance, as well as the user themself, so long as the buff stays on the user. The upside of this is that if you aren't using multi-target buffs (which are less common in EO4 than in other games), this makes buff slot management for other characters much easier. The downside is that if you are using multi-target buffs (which, unfortunately, includes the element Runes), your dancer ends up either having less buff slots to work with, limiting the amount of dances you can apply, or they're forced to waste turns on reapplying dances that got shoved out by other buffs. No-one likes dealing with buff slot asymmetry, and dancers are common victims of it.

Waltz dance skills focus on defensive support. As such, its starting point is an HP regeneration buff. Regen Waltz is no replacement for higher-potency reactive healing, but it does help keep a dancer's row in healthier shape from turn to turn, especially in random encounters, where damage per turn is generally lower than in fights against FOEs or bosses. It's more valuable for dancers in the front row than the back, obviously, since the front row just naturally takes more damage.

Unfortunately, all of the Waltzes suffer from the same...not really a bug, but just a bad code flow decision, where they get marked as expired before they have a chance to activate on their final turn of duration, effectively reducing their duration by 1 turn. This isn't great, but there's also not much you can do about it other than remember to reapply Waltzes a turn earlier than normal.

Refresh Waltz is an incredible skill. For the cost of one buff slot, one of your two rows gain the temporary ability to reduce the duration of ailments down to just the turn they're applied. While not as strong as nullifying the ailment before infliction ever happens, this is the next best thing. You will still have to deal with the effects of most ailments on the turn they're applied—the severity of which is dependent on how early in the turn the inflictions occur—but after that, you're home free. I say "most ailments" since poison just gets completely stomped on by Refresh Waltz. In a code flow decision that actually benefits you, unlike the Waltz duration issue, Refresh Waltz cures ailments before poison gets a chance to damage you, making it a complete non-issue.

One side benefit to consider with Refresh Waltz compared to avoiding inflictions in the first place, incidentally, is that while you do have to deal with the ailment on the turn it's inflicted, you also gain accumulative resistance from the infliction, in exchange for less than a full turn's worth of ailment duration.

In short, Refresh Waltz is incredibly good, and you don't even need to put more than one skill point in it to get its full value and continue progressing through its branch of the Dancer skill tree. There's little reason not to get that value point, at minimum.

Tango skills have a somewhat loose theme of augmenting the user's row's capabilities.

We move onto that most common and valued of buff types: the attack buff. As with much of EO4's inner workings, we are still playing by EO3's rules, so Attack Tango only affects physical damage. Runemasters and arcanists get left out in the cold here.

That said, Attack Tango is still incredibly good. Simple multi-target attack buffs are just always really good! You deal more damage in a shorter period of time, and characters get more value for their TP compared to unbuffed attacks. Unless you have a party composition that results in neither row having more than one physical attacker, Attack Tango is worth getting early and maxing out probably before the midgame rolls around.

Guard Tango is not as generically useful as Attack Tango, but it has its place. Being limited to physical damage isn't as much of a downside as it'd seem, since FOEs and bosses prioritize physical damage more in EO4 than they do other EOs. With that in mind, a 40% incoming physical damage reduction is actually pretty high compared to other similar skills in the series's history. Combine that with overall enemy-to-player damage being lower in EO4, and Guard Tango can significantly increase a row's survivability.

If you're killing FOEs and bosses before you take too much damage, of course, Guard Tango doesn't have a lot of value. As such, if your party is designed for speedy kills, you can probably skip Guard Tango. Otherwise, it's at least worth considering grabbing it (not even necessarily maxing it out) to make riskier strategies more viable for non-speed kill parties.

The last type of dances, Sambas, focus on enabling proc-based attacks, both from the user and from other party members in their row.

Counter Samba is the least good Samba, but do not confuse that with it being bad. It's cheap, it has no prerequisites, and it provides the most immediate value in random encounters. More enemies making attacks means more opportunities for it to activate, after all.

One thing to note about the fact that Sambas inherit their properties from the user's equipped weapon, by the way, is that they benefit from elemental forges. If you want a character utilizing Sambas to deal as much damage as possible, then slap as many elemental forges on their weapon as you can. Four elemental forges of the same type against an enemy that has a 100% vulnerability to that elemental type with a max rank Counter Samba would up its damage from 135% to around 172%. Contrast with the same amount of ATK forges, which would take the damage to around 151%.

Chase Samba, numerically, is all-around weaker than Counter Samba. However, the numbers belie the fact that Chase Samba comes with a much easier activation condition than Counter Samba. Additionally, if you put the user in a row with two other party members, Chase Samba is unambiguously stronger in single-target battles. If you're making use of offensive Dancer skills, then Chase Samba is worth investing it.

Fan Dance is a great passive. As I've stated multiple times in the main updates, evasion is a riskier form of defense than damage reduction, but comes with the additional benefit of, if a character successfully evades an attack, they also get to avoid any additional effects on that attack, such as debuffs or disable inflictions. If you have a character with access to Dancer skills, Fan Dance is worth, at absolute minimum, that first rank. One skill point for a flat extra 10% chance to evade attacks is an incredible value proposition. Beyond that, while it isn't strictly necessary, I would say maxing out Fan Dance is worth serious consideration.

Most everything I said about Refresh Waltz applies to Freedom Waltz. Binds are rarer than ailments, but are arguably much more debilitating. Freedom Waltz can render them almost a complete non-factor. If you have access to Dancer skills, and there is an FOE or boss fight coming up where you know that binds will play a huge part, get Freedom Waltz. Your life will be much easier.

I'm not sure if I would recommend most dancers max out Healing Step, but I also can't say it's not worth having around. Its healing power is, at every level, exactly equal to Party Heal, a skill that is mostly held back by its extremely steep TP cost and very harsh -6 speed modifier. Healing Step's TP cost is high, but it's not as high as Party Heal's, and it actually won't heal for much less than Party Heal would (Medic class skill aside); medics and dancers have pretty comparable TEC at basically every level. The big thing, though, is the speed modifier. A neutral speed modifier, it probably goes without saying, is much easier to work with than a -6 speed modifier, especially given that dancers have much higher AGI than medics.

One thing to consider is that Healing Step does have a prerequisite for being used: the user needs to have a Waltz buff up. If you're playing more defensively, this is a non-issue; you're probably making use of Regen Waltz in most situations. If you're going for quick kills, and are trying to stack, say, Attack Tango and two Sambas, then any skill points you've put into Healing Waltz are effectively useless.

Overall, if you have an arcanist, I would probably leave Healing Step alone in most situations, since Dismiss Heal is pretty much superior in most every way. If you're building your dancer for full-on offense, even if you're taking other Waltzes to prevent interruptions to your strategy, I would also leave Healing Step alone. If you're taking a more cautious approach to your party, or if you have no other methods of party-wide healing, Healing Step is a decent investment.

Energy Tango is an odd skill. Its usefulness is very binary—certain classes will barely notice its TP cost reduction, while others will very heavily benefit from it. Bushi, in particular, love Energy Tango's TP cost reduction. Every point of TP is valuable when you naturally cap out at 100 max TP at level 99. Fortresses also greatly appreciate it, though to a lesser extent.

Wide Dance is, yet again, very situational. You're giving up the user's turn to spread the defensive benefits of Waltzes and/or the offensive benefits of Tangoes to the opposite row. You could, in theory, use it to pack your front row full of physical damage dealers that need to be in melee range, and then shunt the user to the back row to keep them safer from physical damage while still applying Attack Tango. However, if you need to interrupt spamming Wide Dance for any reason (say, because you need to reapply Attack Tango, or something has gone wrong and you need to have the user spend a turn using an item), then the plan kind of falls apart.

Where Wide Dance shines more is in its defensive uses, specifically with Refresh Waltz and Freedom Waltz. There are several bosses that can inflict ailments and/or binds on both rows in the span of one action (be it through being party-target or hitting completely random party members). If you get the timing right, either through prior knowledge or just making a good guess, you can get your entire party back to normal condition at the end of the infliction turn. Normal use of Refresh/Freedom Waltz would mean you'd still need to purge the inflictions off of the other row, potentially losing multiple actions on that turn.

Trick Samba inverts the dynamic of the previous two Sambas: rather than the user doing the attacking, the user makes other party members attack. How useful this might be in your party will mostly come down to this question: is the user in the front row? Party members in the back row, for the most part, are not very proficient at making STR-based attacks. Party members in the front row, for the most part, are. It's also, as with Counter Samba, more useful if you have the user in a three-person row, rather than a two-person row.

The obvious benefit of compelling other party members to attack is that full-on damage dealer classes are, of course, probably better at dealing damage than someone that can use Trick Samba (especially mainclass dancers). They've got better weapons, they've got better stats, and they've almost certainly got better passives. Nightseekers, for example, will very much appreciate getting to hit ailing enemies for an extra 240% damage (at max Trick Samba rank).

The caveat with Trick Samba is that if you have party members that like to use Charge/Charge Edge, or party members with Blood Surge, those obviously need to be taken into account. Trick Samba attacks will gladly take the Charge/Charge Edge effect you may have meant for an actual skill, if the user is able to attack before that party members can get their intended skill off, and attacks done as a result of Trick Samba will still incur the Blood Surge HP/TP loss.

Rush Dance is essentially Chase Samba, but it's not a buff, it can activate off of any party member, and it has a much higher cap on potential activations. It's, in my opinion, the best of the one-turn dance type capstones (i.e. Healing Step, Wide Dance, and Rush Dance, not including Beat Dance). If you can hit the maximum amount of activations, not only is it some pretty decent damage (even with mainclass dancers having meh STR), it's also a fantastic source of attacks for Link skills to follow up on. I would very much recommend grabbing at least the first rank—Rush Dance is usually a better option for filling a dancer's turns after they've gotten all the buffs they want out and you don't need to use any items.

Sword Dance is a funny passive with some fringe practical uses. Its value is directly proportional to how many extra effects the user activates on normal attacks, be it through passives or forges. Every extra attack that Sword Dance provides is an opportunity for the extra effects to activate.

Is Sword Dance a good passive for general use? Not really. Is it a good passive for certain fringe strategies? Absolutely.

Burst Saver is a nice-to-have passive. It's not a huge deal, and I definitely wouldn't say it's a good argument in favor of taking Dancer as a subclass, but if you've got skill points lying around, why not grab it?

Turn order manipulation, my favorite. Quick Step is not a skill that you spam every turn, but it has far more uses than I could potentially list here. These include: guaranteeing a healing skill goes off before your party can take more damage, speeding up an important attack to kill an enemy before they can act again, making a Drive skill go first so its user doesn't have to spend the entire turn taking 1.5x damage from all sources, ensuring Weak Shield gets activated before enemies start attacking, and attempting to inflict a disable through a circle or Snipe before the targeted enemy can act.

It has no prerequisities. If you have anyone with access to Dancer skills in your party, there's little reason not to have at least the first rank of Quick Step.

Beat Dance has a very annoying prerequisite to use it, and it's extremely slow, but that's for very good reason. If you could just fire it off at any time in a random encounter, nothing could realistically threaten you. Any battle against multiple enemies goes a lot faster when everyone in your party gets to perform a 155% damage all-target attack on top of their normal turn. And that's if you're not fully committing to the bit and just loading up everyone's weapons with elemental forges! Assuming a neutral vulnerability to the associated elemental type, six elemental forges on a weapon would result in a max-rank Beat Dance dealing around 220% damage. If you have multiple party members who are good at dealing STR-based damage, and you commit to the bit and load all of them up with elemental forges, adds in boss fights will die amazingly quickly to Beat Dance.

The same caveats as Trick Samba apply, though: if you're dealing with charges or Blood Surge, you do need to be careful and make sure you're not screwing up your own plans by blowing a charge too early, or having someone be left with too little TP to actually use the skill they intended.

Now this is an incredible passive. Note that Dance Mastery's increase is not just for the user, it's for everyone in the party. If the user has three dances active, at max Dance Mastery rank, and all five party members perform an action, that's a full-on extra unit of burst every turn on top of your normal burst gain, and then some. Even just two dances is 80 burst, nearly a full unit. Basically any character that actually uses dances should get Dance Mastery and max it out.

Much like Sword Dance, Mist Dance is a passive with fringe (but potentially very powerful) uses. By that, I mean that if you stack Sword Dance, Mist Dance, and the Arcanist skill Ailment Boost, you can give whoever knows all of those passives shockingly decent odds of stunning any enemy in the game, even if they only have a 1% vulnerability to stun. Is this a reliable strategy? Absolutely not, it's dependent on quite a lot of RNG. Is it more reliable than you would think? Almost worryingly so! If a dancer with Arcanist as a subclass procs four attacks through Sword Dance with a rank 5 Ailment Boost, they have around a 34% chance of at least one of those attacks stunning a target through Ailment Boost alone. If we go the other way around, an arcanist with Dancer subclass (so rank 5 Sword Dance and rank 10 Ailment Boost), that's around a 38% chance to stun. The actual base chance of Mist Dance doesn't matter much in this situation, though.