Quote Originally Posted by ItMe View Post
I think it's largely an issue with our kits.
If all jobs had AoEs and at least 1 nice good to weave with at low level I think it would go a long way.
Real quick:

Please forgive the devil's advocate here, but what if we instead went the opposite direction, to where things were dangerous enough that AoE would be something much more situationally applicable, and CC, focus targeting, and the like were brought back to the fore?

For instance, back in ARR's release, speedrun dungeon leveling among more veteran 1.x players wasn't just running to the end and AoEing everything, but was instead often a matter of your mass-DoTing, sleeping non-focused ranged enemies, and your bard or healer kiting a melee enemy while damage quickly focused down the remainder so that your party needed virtually no heals over a given fight. (That or it tended to involve abusing AST/SMN's long-as-heck Heavy effects and kiting the entire dungeon at once, so long as there was a way to wheel around the collected mobs, especially before Int/Mind split around level 41, until which time SMN was just a more efficient support --and that's more of what healers were in dungeons back then, rather than merely healers, even if everyone else was similarly more coordinated and cross-role-- than SCH because it offered more damage.)

Admittedly, I miss that, as short-lived as it may have been. I miss the quickest way to clear a 4-man dungeon varying with your comp, having more and broader means of engagement/impact in any role, and, despite mobs hitting harder, being able to clear with atypical comps if and only if there were a lot more coordination* (e.g. active dodging the breath attacks from Stone Vigil bosses--which I last night confirmed you can still do--or Stoneskin/Adlo beforehand and immediately Second Wind after while rotating Quelling Strikes to swap threat). *(Apart from the aforementioned cheese.)