The Dead Ends: The Dungeon that gives unending despair

[Wolwosh]

Thats because they level their way to 80 doing 50 alliances

[Amarande]

Thats because they level their way to 80 doing 50 alliances

That's probably the big elephant in the room, TBH.

Most of the smart means of leveling in this game unfortunately come with the side effect that they lack an important element of leveling, namely actual character progression.

The sanest way to level jobs (especially alt jobs, which most players are probably doing at this point in the content cycle) is via roulette, and roulette actually skews AWAY from learning your character progression because the highest level eligible duties, the ones that would actually exercise your whole kit, are the ones you usually get least often. Frankly, the skew is bad enough it even almost defeats the purpose of roulette existing in the first place (I mean the whole idea of offering roulette rewards is to provide a steady pool of players to fill in whatever others are specifically trying to queue for, but a lot of roulette-enabled instances still have uncomfortably long waits, like the Ivalice raids for instance still are chronic long waits because of the many factors that result in Alliance Roulette mostly pulling people into Labyrinth and Syrcus).

So you gain abilities you should be learning to use as you level, but instead where are you? Labyrinth of the Ancients, Fist of the Father, and Sastasha or some other ARR dungeon. Over and over again. Occasionally you get Sohm Al. Last time I was doing leveling roulette much I hardly ever saw Stormblood dungeons, let alone Shadowbringers ones (it could be people were using Trusts often enough for ShB that simply not enough folks were queuing those dungeons to pull rouletters in).

That's on top of the fact that optimal rotations keep changing as you level, so I'm not even sure how much benefit it would be to consistently get to use still-incomplete kits anyway. Few classes seem to have an organic progression of "okay you got this, so just slot it into the rotation here" - Black Mage comes to mind (and this despite people actively complaining about the BLM rotation shifting at every level), maybe Machinist, but I can't think of much else offhand (compare how free SAM felt at 70 to how stilted at 80). And the community in this game frequently treats people who try to learn but skillcap below full optimization nearly as badly as ice mages and 1-mashers, TBH, so I'm not even sure just how hyperbolic complaints about skill even are usually ...