Gauge Management is Fun, Actually

A buff that gives half of a bar of gauge is far more interesting than a buff that gives a free use of the gauge because one of these requires any thought to use at all.

If it is possible for my OGCD to overcap my gauge I have to actually put thought into when I use it, and manage my gauge around its cooldown. This is fun.

If my OGCD gives me 30 seconds to use the gauge for free, this means gauge management holds no meaning.

This is why Dancer's gauge management is fun, and the gauge management of RDM, VIP, MCH and probably other jobs I'm not thinking of at the moment is not fun.

The possibility of failure is what makes success matter. How is it the MSQ of EW hammers this concept home, but the gameplay design has completely ignored it more and more since SHB?

The problem of DNC's gauge management is that sometimes during burst there's simply nothing you can do to avoid overcap with RNG, and it's extra bad because the spender is a slow GCD.

While I do agree that resource management can be fun and pressing a 120s button just to unlock another button is dumb, it was frankly cancer on MCH considering how the (non) loop went and I'm glad it's gone.

Resource management can be fun for sure, though this change was inevitable given SE's current design philosophy.

Any form of actual resource "management" has been stripped out of the game over the last few expansions. To the point where skills which use resources are basically just another cooldown.

For a world where an ability gives resource instead of a buff to make sense we need to have more diverse resource management in general. Or really any resource management at all. Multiple resource spenders with different gauge costs, and variable resource builders with procs that allow for different amounts of resource to be gained under certain conditions. This just isn't the world we live in with the over-simplified job design right now, sadly.

Yeah, gauge management being deprioritized is just a symptom of how they've been designing the game unfortunately.

If they cared more about these things, they'd bake the solutions for overcapping resources into the toolkits of the jobs themselves. Different or faster ways to spend gauge, ideally ones with real decision making and tradeoffs involved that don't just fall into a static rotation. All these things would take more effort and creativity than what they've shown in the PVE side of the game, much easier for them to just brute force the solution via methods like this.

Go even further back into the history of the game and you'll see that this has played out multiple times too. Stuff like the removal of TP, MP becoming less and less important. Instead of designing the gameplay to mesh well with all these underlying systems, easier to just give every job a special snowflake resource that doesn't conflict with any of those. You can always count on them to take the easy way out.

I agree, but for some job it was simply necessary to grants these "ready to" buff.
MCH is an example where you simply had too much gauge at your 2 minutes and was forced to delay Barrel Stabilizer or overcap.

It wasn't a "possible failure" it was a "forced failure". On the other hand, GNB works perfectly fine with the current Bloodfest. I doubt VPR would work if it gave the job 50 gauge.
RPR, I don't think it was necessary as the implied rotation already required you to spend your gauge before Plentiful Harvest.

In short it depends from job to job.

I prefer having MP management.. keeping this consistent without having multiple stickers in my screen that I have to manage

I agree with the sentiment but gauges have never really been that interesting or fun on most jobs. WAR having an actual stat on its gauge was interesting, multiple smaller increment spenders were fun.

Yeah I mean, I don't get all these changes that removed the gauge increases, either. And sure, as an experienced player it really makes zero difference, as you already knew how to play around it. But it's weird that it got removed, anyways. As you say, gauge management is fun. Dancer in particular is amazing with it, having to genuinely worry about overcapping three different things all the time.

Honestly, I have an entirely different problem with the changes from "gauge increasers" to "ability unlockers": It feels like they're setting up the framework to either remove the gauge, or never add any other complexity to it, ever again.

Take RDM for example. In the past, the base function of Manafication was to add 50 Mana to both the Black and White gauges. Now, it gives three uses of your swordplay that do not consume your Mana. These two effects are functionally exactly the same (especially after the (welcome) changes to Moulinet that lines up its Mana consumption with your single target combo) as your swordplay is the only thing you can spend your Mana on. But there's no reason to take away this unique flavor of the Mana bars, or just give us the option to restore Mana when we're out of combat for whatever reason.

Across pretty much every job they've made a worrying shift toward making everything managed by buffs rather than by combos or your job gauge. So many DT capstones give "X Ready" buffs. It's frustrating, and makes me feel like they're paving the way for dumbing down resource management even more.

(BLM seems to be somewhat exempt from this, but probably only because their gauge is already a complicated mess. Did we really need a seperate UI element for Flare Star?)

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Originally Posted by NegativeS

Take RDM for example. In the past, the base function of Manafication was to add 50 Mana to both the Black and White gauges.

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I think it's worth noting that wasn't even the original function of manafication either. In even earlier points in the job's lifespan, it worked by doubling your mana levels across the board.

The reason it was changed was twofold, first people complained it made the opener unusually slow to ramp up (since you first needed to build up enough mana to be worth doubling), and secondly because it was a big failure point for less experienced players. You could brick your mana bar quite badly if you used it with uneven mana levels (20/40 becomes 40/80 taking a long time to fix).

So you have a skill that was originally designed in a flavourful way to match a specific job identity, then it got homogenized into a generic gain 50 gauge skill that half the jobs in the game have a carbon copy of. And eventually even that level of abstraction wasn't enough and they went about sanding off even more rough edges. Which basically sums up their approach to job design from Stormblood onward.

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Originally Posted by CKNovel

I agree, but for some job it was simply necessary to grants these "ready to" buff.
MCH is an example where you simply had too much gauge at your 2 minutes and was forced to delay Barrel Stabilizer or overcap.

It wasn't a "possible failure" it was a "forced failure". On the other hand, GNB works perfectly fine with the current Bloodfest. I doubt VPR would work if it gave the job 50 gauge.
RPR, I don't think it was necessary as the implied rotation already required you to spend your gauge before Plentiful Harvest.

In short it depends from job to job.

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There was some voodoo tech you could do to delay the burst hypercharge by one GCD so it would fall behind stabilizer, or on the other hand delay stabilizer by one as you said to adjust to unsolvable heat plans which happened at specific points in the rotation. It was possible to move and re arrange where WF, Stabilizer and HC stood within the burst but it had its limits and could only be done a specific amount of times before throwing everything into drifting.

I understand that in a way it was a smart way to juggle with your tools to dodge the problem, but the problem wasn't baked into the class design and it felt like a clever but limited band aid you could use to dodge it until it stopped being dodgeable.

Like Myon said if we have had other spenders than HC, like the old Cooldown (SB Heat Blast), spending like 20-25 gauge for it, it could probably have allowed to readjust heat with one GCD instead of cumbersome Hypercharges that could not fit absolutely everywhere before a burst. That would have been some gauge management, something that DNC has been able to do for an extent for example with Sabre Dance before a burst. Not gonna lie, something like FT (on the GCD like today) spending 10 heat per tick to readjust your gauge with good damage benefits before a burst could also have been fun... maybe?

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Originally Posted by Mecia

I agree with the sentiment but gauges have never really been that interesting or fun on most jobs. WAR having an actual stat on its gauge was interesting, multiple smaller increment spenders were fun.

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SB MCH Heat gauge was a unique and interesting gauge mechanic and I do feel that all gauges should strive to model creative things like this one did. It was all about managing heat, staying above 50, but not reaching 100 until you were ready to do it for burst. Depending on the rotation chosen and the fight uptime where downtime could change the whole heat plan, you'd have to use (or not) tools to keep your heat in check in order not to overheat early and throw everything out for a loop.
Most gauges today are either a resource spender on a scale of 100 (Kenki, Ninki, Rage, Fairy, Soul, etc), or an UI sticker counter (Feather Fans, AST cards, SAM Iajutsu, etc). It's a bit unfortunate, and perhaps that they also contribute heavily to job homogenization.