Enhacing the low level combat

With the amount of new players as well as the bigger servers that are coming, I think it's time to again look at how the low level experience can be improved.

There has been a lot of discussions on how low level stuff should work, stuff like if level syncing should take away skills or not. However I think this problem would be solved simply if getting down synced didn't feel so horrible. One of the biggest ones is AOE. EVERYONE should have at least one AOE skill by Sastasha, like come on DRG gets its first at level 40?! And speaking of Sastasha, everyone should also by then at least have some form of a 1-2-3 combo. I will keep using DRG as an example because its my most played class. At level 15 they have 4 class skills, one being a buff and another a ranged ability. I would sneak in Full Thrust somewhere before that and just give Doom Spike at level 15.

Next, that wonderful line of "Trust me the job gets better at level 50". Some classes before that point don't even have their core mechanic by then. DRG gets Blood of the Dragon at 54, so any ARR content can say bye bye to that. I believe that instead these core mechanics should be given, when you get your soul stone. This is something that works well, to some extent, on some classes, like BRD gets its first song or NIN gets its first gang sign. These two I would still change, like give them instead of one song, two instead, or two gang signs instead of one.

And for these level 30 changes, how about a special mission where you actually get to learn how to use your core mechanic? Just something really simple like "Keep Blood of the Dragon up for 90 seconds". Just enough that you can get familiar with it.

I do believe that the best way to solve a lot of slow feeling combat that new players feel would be to move some of the later skills down. And changing it so that things line up over all the jobs, like every DPS gets their AOE at level 15, every healer gets an oGcD heal at this level and every tank gets a gap closer at this level.

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This is a pretty reasonable complaint honestly. The new player experience is rather subpar to the rest of the game. I know anyone with an open mind and a group to play with will stick through with it, but not everyone has that. It took me several tries to get 'into' this game before it finally stuck.
There are a LOT of various ways to fix this but I don't know if it'll get the attention it deserves. It is way more important than people realize.

I'm personally really down for squashing the skills all down earlier and/or spreading them out a bit more evenly. If I recall, there are some classes that have significant dry periods in action acquisition during the leveling process already.


The idea of introducing the class mechanics earlier is paramount, however. This should now be introduced to the player at a much earlier level as it gives the player significantly more time to learn and master the new mechanics. They just seem too far forward, especially since some of the them are rather complex.


As for AoE, I think this is a leftover design from the older combat system when TP was still a thing. For those reading unfamiliar, All AoE attacks were huge TP drains (A combat resource for high damage/AoE physical DPS attacks) and huge 'trash' pulls were very uncommon since you'd run out of TP within just a few executions of an AoE attack.
There's really no reason for this not to be changed now since TP has long since been removed and huge trash pulls and AoE spam are the norm.

Side note though: You can really see the design shift in later classes like DNC who have SO MANY AoE attacks!

The one thing I'd really like to see at a lower level on BLM is Aspect Mastery. The introduction of Enochian etc. comes at about the right time but Aspect Mastery makes a huge difference to the flow of the job.

Also, I'd probably swap Sharpcast for Triplecast... purely a POTD thing.