The general direction of job changes is straight asinine. Literally NO ONE benefits.

[xAFROx]

Wrong (ring Xenosys' bell)
you're in the wrong for 1 simple reason, you're telling someone he/she is playing the game wrong (which is against ToS now btw)
you can report that person, but that person is innocent since spamming cure 1 can be a legit strat to save mana, so you're actually trying to say "play it my way!" (i do agree on the cure 1 spam, it's pointless, but if you call out the player doing it, YOU are wrong in the eyes of GMs and devs)

That sounds asinine. If someone is spamming cure 1 for free heal procs, that's essentially griefing.

[Ruminous]

That sounds asinine. If someone is spamming cure 1 for free heal procs, that's essentially griefing.

Asinine, but true. I had this happen to me in a Mt. Gulg while I was playing paladin and I was begging the whm to do more than cast cure on me when I'm rotating all my saves. We only got through that instance because I had to keep casting clemency on myself and I slowed down my pulling. "But free cure 2 is so good!" was the reasoning I got. His logic basically made the instance take longer than it should due to needing to play around a guy who wouldn't use more than a few things in his toolkit...At 80, when whm has a lot of tools to protect their group.

Because the devs' stance is we can't tell others how to play their jobs, even if we're nice about it, we're at the point where the rest of the group has to put up with the scrub player holding them down like a lead weight. No correction by the community, players get to play as poorly as they like. And get protected for it, while the rest of us have to suffer them. At least if you're doing PF you can kick them or simply reform a party, but the other times? Well tough luck, you're at the whims of others. To me it's disrespectful, but the petty bitch in me sometimes plays as well as they do just so they understand what it's like. Too bad they don't get it either...

[cjbeagle]

Playing devil's advocate for a moment here, but I find it odd how common it seems to be to hate on healers who try to be mana efficient and/or who don't dps much, if at all.

Like, sure, them not knowing what they're doing makes the run go slower, but the same is true for bad dps, and even more-so for bad tanks.

I see bad dps more often than I see bad healers, and those dps are underperforming by a bigger margin than a healer who is doing 0.

I don't see bad tanks all that often, but nothing slows down a run like single-pulling trash.

Yet the dps and tanks seem to get compassion or pity instead vitriol - why is that? "They're just bad at their job"? "They're probably new"? Same for the healers though, right? None of them are likely doing it out of malice - they just don't know better. Why don't we afford healers the same leeway as tanks and dps?

Even without guidance, someday the tank will pug as a dps or healer and have a real tank show them how it's done.

Even without guidance, someday a healer will pug as a dps or tank and notice that the healer is dpsing - thankfully healers can have this epiphany even as a healer thanks to 2-healer trials.

Dps are the ones we should be worried about - there aren't any simple revelations that they can "ah-ha" from other players to instantly make them drastically better.

[Amh_Wilzuun]

That is subjective. I personally don't find EW MNK's burst any more or less interesting than how it functioned in ShB. We just now prioritize maintaining Twin Snakes/Demolish over squeezing out as many Bootshine/DKs as possible.

As for skill expression, I will reiterate: it always had it in one way or another, whether it be Shoulder Tackle management, alternating dirty/clean PB, positionals in general and all of the True North/Riddle of Earth management that came with it (especially on fights like E9S and E11S), and well- the entire rabbit hole that was Greased Lightning.

I mean it just feels like you are overemphasizing the complexity of the version you liked and downplaying the depth of the version you don't. EW burst needs more though than what you are describing. I don't feel like listing it out, just go on the balance like everyone else can

[Liam_Harper]

100% agree with the OP.

I remember back when I started ff14 and played around ARR/HW. I picked up a NIN. It wasn't simple. Enmity was a thing, Diversion, smoke bombs, TP, there were cross class skills, DoTs and so on. I wasn't an MMO veteran who picked things up quickly either. I was the classic bad player. I macroed almost every oGCD to my 1-2-3 combo. I pulled Aeolian Edge off my bar and just used Armor Crush. I jumbled ninjitsu all the time.

...And it was great fun! I didn't break down crying from stress because my tiny new player brain couldn't handle it. I just went from 1 to max level and sucked and had a good time with lots of other people who usually sucked too and we somehow muddled through the entire game and felt satisfied with each step of the journey with our eyes set on that eventual goal of one day being the sort of amazing player we occasionally saw and admired.

What happened to that... ?

From what I've seen, the type of player who doesn't want to put in any effort will never be satisfied. You can never make the game easy enough. If the game requires 75% effort and you see they're struggling and design your content so that 75% effort will result in everything being easy ...they'll put in 50% effort and still struggle. If you nerf it again, they'll put in 25% effort and continue to struggle. This is because they only want to put in the bare minimum.
The player will seem a little happier that the bare minimum is lower so they can be lazier, but having a short attention span they're liable to quit or get bored of your game very easily. Also they're likely to cause uproar if you create any content that requires more than the bare minimum they've become used to. Why was the game handed over to them?

[Grimoire-M]

Playing devil's advocate for a moment here, but I find it odd how common it seems to be to hate on healers who try to be mana efficient and/or who don't dps much, if at all.

Because the most efficient option IS to use your cooldowns and DPS as much as possible. The vast majority of cooldowns do not cost ANY mana at all, and those that do are the same cost as your baseline DPS spells. Some (Lilies, Addersgall) also refund mana on top of being lossless. And if you actually pay attention and preemptively apply regens and mitigation to maximize their effects first you’ll find that tanks do not take much damage at all, and the DPS you provide also kills the mobs faster and makes use of the GCD you’re not pressing very well. Combined, the healing your cooldown kit provide is not only free but enables you to prevent more damage in the long run because not only can you DPS more to turn off the outgoing damage on people, but you’ll have far more mana when you actually need to heal with your emergency tools (which are your GCD heals in this case).

The goal here IS to make the best use of your resources. And players that do are unfortunately rewarded with boring gameplay because the barrier to being that efficient is so low that it literally is just a perception problem at the entry level. Once you can actually gauge how powerful your resources truly are (which literally takes an evening if you put your mind to it) game stops being fun.

It’s why I’m equally okay with just hitting half the healing kits with the “nerf or outright remove” hammer to begin with. It’s unnecessary because the problem is the lack of resource stress and interaction between the DPS and healing elements of your kit begin with, and the easiest way to gain it is to remove the abilities gained from ShB onward and replace them with more appropriate DPS tools.

[Souljacker]

The devs can't prevent people from being assholes and sandbagging on purpose. But the players can very well report something like Cure Mages. Yes, you can do that. It's legitimate. If they refuse to deal damage, even after you ask them to improve, you are in the right.

This is precisely the attitude that caused me to just put WHM away. And all other healers, at least in group content. Not interested. Why would I ever want to play a healing class to do damage when I can just... do damage and not have to worry about anything else?

You know what? SE does need to sit back down with the jobs and figure out some kind of a real vision, because what they have now is a complete mess. Healers aren't there for healing, they are there for damage as you so eloquently stated. DPS? Just the same handful of buttons, hell even BLM's nuance is gone with the Enochian changes so it plays more like the melee dps do. I have basically the same muscle memory on almost every class. Tanks are so faceroll easy and paladin in particular so broken that why even have a group?

And the worst part is that even though it's mind-numbing, it's not really possible to distract yourself with some nice conversation in the party because must. keep. moving. must. mash. buttons.

FFXI was braindead too, but at least you could take your fingers off the hotkeys for five seconds and type out a message to your mates.

And now we're at the point where they can't even really add new abilities, it's just level appropriate versions of the same abilities replacing buttons. How engaging.

There's big issues here, not the least of which being that "Cure Mages" is an actual term....

[cjbeagle]

Because the most efficient option IS to use your cooldowns and DPS as much as possible. The vast majority of cooldowns do not cost ANY mana at all, and those that do are the same cost as your baseline DPS spells. Some (Lilies, Addersgall) also refund mana on top of being lossless. And if you actually pay attention and preemptively apply regens and mitigation to maximize their effects first you’ll find that tanks do not take much damage at all, and the DPS you provide also kills the mobs faster and makes use of the GCD you’re not pressing very well. Combined, the healing your cooldown kit provide is not only free but enables you to prevent more damage in the long run because not only can you DPS more to turn off the outgoing damage on people, but you’ll have far more mana when you actually need to heal with your emergency tools (which are your GCD heals in this case).

The goal here IS to make the best use of your resources. And players that do are unfortunately rewarded with boring gameplay because the barrier to being that efficient is so low that it literally is just a perception problem at the entry level. Once you can actually gauge how powerful your resources truly are (which literally takes an evening if you put your mind to it) game stops being fun.

It’s why I’m equally okay with just hitting half the healing kits with the “nerf or outright remove” hammer to begin with. It’s unnecessary because the problem is the lack of resource stress and interaction between the DPS and healing elements of your kit begin with, and the easiest way to gain it is to remove the abilities gained from ShB onward and replace them with more appropriate DPS tools.

So you're saying they're bad at their job? I agree. Did you actually read the post or just the first line?

[VentVanitas]

I mean it just feels like you are overemphasizing the complexity of the version you liked and downplaying the depth of the version you don't. EW burst needs more though than what you are describing. I don't feel like listing it out, just go on the balance like everyone else can

I'm not here to argue which iteration of Monk is better, because frankly speaking it doesn't take a genius to figure out that ShB MNK was terrible in many regards. My main point is that it's disingenuous to claim that 6.X MNK is suddenly the iteration introducing all these new things like skill expression or multiple openers when they were always apart of the job, even at its lowest.

[rewd]

Playing devil's advocate for a moment here, but I find it odd how common it seems to be to hate on healers who try to be mana efficient and/or who don't dps much, if at all.

Like, sure, them not knowing what they're doing makes the run go slower, but the same is true for bad dps, and even more-so for bad tanks.

I see bad dps more often than I see bad healers, and those dps are underperforming by a bigger margin than a healer who is doing 0.

I don't see bad tanks all that often, but nothing slows down a run like single-pulling trash.

Yet the dps and tanks seem to get compassion or pity instead vitriol - why is that? "They're just bad at their job"? "They're probably new"? Same for the healers though, right? None of them are likely doing it out of malice - they just don't know better. Why don't we afford healers the same leeway as tanks and dps?

Even without guidance, someday the tank will pug as a dps or healer and have a real tank show them how it's done.

Even without guidance, someday a healer will pug as a dps or tank and notice that the healer is dpsing - thankfully healers can have this epiphany even as a healer thanks to 2-healer trials.

Dps are the ones we should be worried about - there aren't any simple revelations that they can "ah-ha" from other players to instantly make them drastically better.

Are we playing the same game or reading the same forums?

If there is a role that gets compassion, pity and leeway, that's healer. It's the only role in the game that lets you afk and a portion of the playerbase will encourage you to do so.