What did your favorite job used to play like?

[ItMe]

ARR summoner
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Scholar
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There are a bunch of extras such as Super Virus, Eye for an Eye, Protect, Stoneskin, Aero... but if I talk about everything I'll exceed the character limit.

Man, very calm is right. ARR SMN sounds super chill. Sounds like, in that respect, it's kind of in the place BLM is now?
SCH def sounds more compact. Where there just less abilities on your hotbar back then? Or are those just the main ones?

And yeah, if you have more to say and that pesky character limit is getting in your way feel free to make another post. I'd love to hear more.

2.0 PLD, 1 combo that got used. All the defensive cds.
Made it way easier to call fight mechanics out when you didn't have to focus on a rotation.

Hahaha considering I started tanking so I could pay attention to my hotbar less and help my group with callouts I can see how ARR's PLD would have been very cool~

I appreciate that the first post in this thread is about old DRK. Since there was already a small explanation of how it used to work up above, maybe I could give a more personal story about being a DRK main, rather than just saying "used to be good, is bad now."

Wow, that was an intense story. Thanks for the really thorough response.
I picked up DRK about 3 weeks before Shadow Bringers dropped, and in that time wasn't able to really play it enough to understand what I was doing. Hearing all this though, perhaps ironically, gives me hope for the future of the job.
I'm sorry to hear that things have fallen so far for you. If you ever try Ultimate or take a break and play PLD let me know how it shakes out for you. Who knows, maybe that's just what you need.
Either way, I'll be rooting for you.

[Ririta]

Man, very calm is right. ARR SMN sounds super chill. Sounds like, in that respect, it's kind of in the place BLM is now?
SCH def sounds more compact. Where there just less abilities on your hotbar back then? Or are those just the main ones?

And yeah, if you have more to say and that pesky character limit is getting in your way feel free to make another post. I'd love to hear more.

Compact in terms of healing, I meant. Because we branched off a DPS class, most of our healing abilities came from the few job quests that we had between 30 and 50. It was only: Lustrate, Adloquium, Succor, Leeches (Esuna), Physick, Ressurrection... and that's it. Plus Eos' 3 cooldowns if we count her as us. Want to fill everybody's HP quickly? Hope you didn't spend Eos' healing increase and AoE HOT cooldowns... otherwise, you'll have a hard time. I believe every scholar who was left to heal alone in Titan Hard learned this quickly haha.

Maybe I was just messy, but because I didn't like using the bar I binded the fairies' abilities together with my own. So I had to use 2 bars and a half of stuff. In general, the first one I left the healing stuff, the second one, DPS stuff, with the same layout as summoner plus Embrace and Lustrate. Then on the third, pet stuff: summon, their cooldowns and Swiftcast to get them quickly. One silly thing that I loved was how long the summon cast was. I think it was 8 seconds? It's stupid, but I liked the "investment" that was getting your pet out... while, of course, you get the cute orbs around you.

Summoner was chill but by chill, I mean ultra chill. Maybe even too much? Unlike today's black mage, you didn't care about anything... boss is no longer targettable? No problem, you're not in a hurry. And you didn't have to keep any job mechanic up so... there's no rush to do anything. Just refresh your DOTs, cast your Ruins, use your stacks. Maybe I'm exaggerating because I played it so much that I got used to all the timings and such, but in general, you never really felt punished by anything. Not even death really punished you... get raised, just pop up an Aetherflow, do an Energy Drain or two to get MP, summon your pet and you're back in action.

As for little extras that didn't super make the job, but was fun to have:

Eye for an Eye on the tank, to reduce the physical damage they took by roughly 10%.
Ressurrect people. Still around, but it was more important because white mages just couldn't spare too much MP.
Addle was Supervirus. Extremely valuable when used by summoner and scholar because it lowered 15% INT and STR (other classes only lowered STR). And was it good... so good that they nerfed it in 2.1 so when you put it on an enemy, nobody could put it again for 60 seconds. People coordinated those Virus so the tank could survive punishing mechanics such as Twintania's Death Sentence, a tank buster that was absurdly strong at the time.

Due to the nature of summoner DPS, they were absurdly strong in the first raid we got, the first Coil. First boss splits itself in two? Keep your DOTs on both of them! Third boss is a series of enemies? Keep your stuff on all of them. Even the ones that reflected damage back at you! Twintania summons a bunch of things? DOT. Them. Up. Summoner (and scholar, by extension) was just... ridiculous with their DOTs. Every time you could DOT more than one thing, your DPS rose exponentially. They trivialized even a wipe mechanic - on Coil's last boss (Twintania), occasionaly she would summon a Dreadknight thing that slowly marched on the direction of a marked player to kill them. The common strat was naturally to stun him and... summoner/scholar to do their rotation on them. Because of the disease aspect of the Miasma, it became be so slow that as long as people stayed somewhat away from the middle, they wouldn't die.

A similar thing happened in Turn 2 of Second Coil, where you had face & petrify a slow moving add so they don't one shot people, and then a marked person runs behind the petrified add so they didn't petrify everybody. I imagine that the idea was to petrify the add when possible and then the raid adjusted accordingly. But then people discovered that you just make the summoner aggro the add, position it in line with the boss and completely stop it with Miasma. So nobody has to move... trivializing the mechanic.

One last thing that I forgot to mention... summoner and scholar pets acted like characters of their own.They could get hit by mechanics, you had to put them out of harm's way... or abuse this fact by using them to do the mechanic for you hahaha. In Twintania there was a mechanic where you had to stack to soak a fireball that did a lot of damage. But you couldn't stack too many people or else another mechanic became stronger. So what people did? Stack pets on off tank. Whoever gets the marker should stack with the pets. They took reduced damage from AoE, so it was easier to cheese the mechanic this way.

The reduced damage also allowed us to completely trivialize Ramuh extreme. His main mechanic tankbuster was an area effect damage on the tank... players thought, if the tank was Titan egi? Suddenly, the mechanic was much easier to deal with! And of course, the healers healed the tank... that was your chicken nugget. It was funny and fun, but sadly got nerfed.

I loved how the pets could be both an asset and a hidrance.

The hilarious thing about this post is how you call ARR smn simplistic and calming...because that's exactly how it felt for me as well but the people around me were usually perplexed because for them, smn was just this overly complicated, button bloated job. I mean, they were probably right about that last part but to me, playing smn was like playing a piano at different tempo.

Yeah, it's kinda weird. It's probably because when using actions we had massive freedom compared to other jobs that were limited by combos and such.