Tactful ways to inform people that they're playing badly?

[MikuMitsuko]

BLM has a lot of options when it attacks, many of which cause people to stray into suboptimal rotations. There are a lot of ways for BLM to screw up, and it shows a lot in the DF. "Ice mages" are just one of the ways this can happen; they're just the most egregious form of it.

I wouldn't call it a simple job; it's simple to *you* maybe because you play it. Most other jobs outright highlight the next GCD you should take by making its icon get a glowy outline. BLM doesn't really do that, and the few times it does get a glowy outline (Thundercloud, Firestarter, Foul/Xeno), it still doesn't mean it's an action that should be used right away. In fact, usually it isn't.

I don't actually play BLM that often... mostly WHM and leveling NIN. It doesn't matter anyway - the AOE is literally 4-5 buttons baseline. Keeping your buffs up is almost braindead. The opener and rotation are pretty obvious to figure out if you read the tooltips and look at a guide. And if you're doing expert dungeons or higher, you should look at guides and know how to play your class.

[Dreakon13]

As a relatively new player, two months in, I'll just say you can level up really quickly if you hit up the leveling roulette every day... and what I've played of the story so far, it's not very difficult/demanding. I'm a 50 DRG and a 40 PLD just from playing very casually by MMO standards.

I say this because I think it's pretty easy to get to level 50+ content and not know how to play your class optimally.

I personally try and soak in as much knowledge as I can but optimal ability rotations are still a pretty foreign concept to me (cooldowns in particular, attack combos are pretty straightfoward). I'm always open to advice so maybe I'm the exception and not the rule... but if someone came to me with a "how the hell did you get this far without knowing that" attitude, I may not be particularly receptive to that. Thankfully I haven't run into many unfriendly people and I've had some enlightening experiences running dungeons... but I'm also not too far in the MSQ yet so we'll see how higher level content goes lol.

...

Oh, and 99% of the guides you find floating around out there are horribly outdated. Even stuff from a year or two ago.

[Nora_of_Mira]

Oh, and 99% of the guides you find floating around out there are horribly outdated. Even stuff from a year or two ago.

Yep, jobs can change drastically each expansion and sometimes in between, randomly. Usually the guides found on The Balance have beginner guides to jobs as well as endgame optimization, so you dont have to overwhelm yourself until you feel ready to.

[SerLuke]

The other Day in Expert Roulette, wall to wall pulls, my AOE DPS was ~26k, while our BLM was at ~7k. Do I know how to play BLM? Nope. But I still know that they were definitely doing something wrong :P Did we get through the dungeon without problems? Yes. Still, someone doing only 20% of what they should be doing does not classify as a "nitpick" ^^

I mean that’s pretty odd that someone isn’t aoeing at 80 in ex roulette, yeah that would be worth mentioning since it’s can significantly slow the run down. By nitpicking I meant more along the lines of yelling at someone for casting Foul in Fire stance instead of ice, I know I struggled with BLM when I was lvling but I played around with it in Heaven on High and Trust dungeons and it helped I had a super BLM friend that helped explain how to play it and maintain enochin and what not. Those triple Flares and Triple Fire IVs were quite fun...

[MikuMitsuko]

Oh, and 99% of the guides you find floating around out there are horribly outdated. Even stuff from a year or two ago.

Not to be rude but is it that hard for some people to type in "*job name* rotation guide 5.0/5.x" ? So they don't get outdated stuff?

[Violet_Galaxy]

Don't. Just kick them. Me personally, I've reached my thresholds trying to reason with stupidity.

[Nora_of_Mira]

Not to be rude but is it that hard for some people to type in "*job name* rotation guide 5.0/5.x" ? So they don't get outdated stuff?

would a new player know to do that?

[Miracle_Diva]

would a new player know to do that?

Know what? How to google?

[MikuMitsuko]

would a new player know to do that?

You can see I was talking about Expert dungeons and higher content earlier, not sure newbies are doing that. Besides, I managed to look up those guides just fine despite only starting this game a week before ShB came out since... I know how to use google lol

[misterbones]

you can't really, a lot of NA players go through multiple classes 1-80 and never read their skills, they just don't want to because they know you will carry them.
Want to do something about it? leave. more than half the time these dead weights will freak out on you and report you, they don't understand what theyr e doing wrong and they don't want to