Don't misslead people about what their job does, please

[Felis]

But at no point in any FF game has it been anything other than DD/Healer.

FF XIII - Sentinel = tank

In boss fights you gave one of the party members the Sentinel paradigm role, to drew the boss attacks to him/her

Sentinel is a paradigm role in Final Fantasy XIII whose main function is to shield allies from enemy attacks with enhanced defense. They can counterattack after taking on enemy attacks, making them similar to a Viking. The role is symbolized with the initials SEN and the color yellow.

And the Vikings in FF III

"Vikings have the ability to lure enemies into attacking them instead of other members of the party, but it's gonna hurt!"
—In-game description

[Mhikail]

This sounds like a job for Clippy.

Hey Clips, you goin' to tell me why the WHM keeps DPSing and not healing and gets me killed after popping every cooldown
I had as a PLD?

Seriously, if you aren't going to do your job, then be a different job. A lot of these WHM's forget what they're doing these days.

[Echoloc]

ff1 warrior = tank

Heavy armor/shield/less damage delt than the others.
Took up the top slot to be the primary soak.

Try and put your healer in that spot and see how much harder it is to progress. The monsters hit around, but the upper slots got hit more than the lower ones.

[Billeffingmurray]

Honestly, coming to this game with no prior experience, the descriptions are vague. I read all the info on mdr before I picked it, and nowhere did it say "your job is to make sure everything is hitting you all the time". It's not like I didn't read the skill notes either. "Increased emnity" doesn't mean anything at all if you don't understand how emnity works in the game (I understand what emnity means when used in a sentence, but in regards to the game I had no idea). It started to click around level 20 (forums are super helpful), and I finally got a handle on it. If someone clearly isn't getting it, don't be an @$$. Just explain what's going on and what's expected of them. If they still don't get it: Vote Kick <--- that will teach them eventually.

[FaizeD]

Yeah, I kinda agree that if one of your first abilities is called CURE and you still don't realise you're supposed to be a healer, even with the aid of a colour-coded DF menu with big letters saying HEALER - then there is no hope for you. But then again I never understood people that don't do any research. When I hit 15, I googled "FFXIV Sastasha" and tons of information came up. Why would you not do this? This is an MMO. You are playing with other real life people. I don't know. If a game tells me YOU ARE GOING TO GROUP WITH OTHER PEOPLE NOW, I would at least want to be somewhat prepared so as not to ruin anyone else's game time out of ignorance. All I get from people who want to "experience the game, not read about it" is Me, Me, Me, screw you other 3 (7) people.

[m3eansean]

IMO the first class quests are abundantly clear about what your role is.

Add the guildhests that spell it out for you and the color coding of the classes, and it is quite hard to miss.

If you can't realize your role by level 15 when you get the first dungeon, I'm sorry, but it is a personal problem by this point. Nothing the game can do to make it easier for you.

[Jican]

Actually, when I first started playing, I had this issue with one single job. Archanist. You get a healing spell and some attack spells, and a pet that heals and attacks. I thought I was a healer job until my first dungeon and then I was like o.O wtf?

[MStowastiqVahlshdeh]

As for myself, I am still trying to learn my roles in a party because I have a unique situation in that I avoided partying and soloed every possible thing I could until I had no choice if I wanted to advance in the main scenario.

Finally dinged my first 50 this month. :|

The Guildhests are the most helpful thing I have found as far as actual real time tutorials on roles.

The next thing that is helping me other than kind players just telling me when I ask for help, is just good old fashioned, repetitive, real time practice in a party.

Actually, when I first started playing, I had this issue with one single job. Archanist. You get a healing spell and some attack spells, and a pet that heals and attacks. I thought I was a healer job until my first dungeon and then I was like o.O wtf?

Yea it is confusing to a beginner especially having access to Resurrection.

In my limited experience in partying, even though the party role says "DPS", and I understood it to be DPS from the beginning,
I have found myself sometimes needing to support the healer in a pinch but I have to pop a Mind potion to do anything helpful.

If the healer dies or is busy, I am next in line to raise people.

Having soloed so much, it is also difficult to not default heal myself when I need it and instead just rely on the healer so I can focus on Dps.

[Niwashi]

I started my first character as a gladiator, expecting to be a damage dealer. I'm someone who does pay attention to what the game's telling me, so by the time I entered my first dungeon I knew I was supposed to tank, but even so, that would have been pretty late to find out if I hadn't planned on doing everything at some point anyway.

For somebody who didn't want to tank, getting 15 levels in and only then finding out that the class they'd been leveling that whole time isn't even the role they wanted would be quite a blow. (Those of us at 50 or 60 now may not think of the first 15 levels as amounting to much, but to a new player who's only gotten that far they are. Many people feel very invested into their characters within just the first few levels, and when it's the entirety of what you've played so far, it's a lot.)

It's all the more important to be clear about roles in a game that's moving to a different genre than the majority of its franchise. I think XIII is the only one of the single-player FFs to even have a tank role, and some don't have a dedicated healer either. The notion of group roles as they exist here is more of an MMO thing.

[Jayjohn]

So let me get this, you guys want to make it clearer what classes do?

You do know your class icon colors denotes to what you are expected to do. Blue for tanks, Red for DPS, Green for Healers.

Oh and wait for it, your low level class quests pretty much hand hold you and tell you what exactly to do.

Lastly in this day in age, Google is your best friend, if you cant even use resources available to you, people need to start rethinking how they view things.