What if Support Role was Added to FFXIV?

[Mikey_R]

Your core rotation? No.

But could support be done in such a way as to make it feel like a bonus?

For instance, if normally I have to Twin Snakes every other form-cycle on Monk, but a Haste buff would push me to where I instead can Twin every third, or Demolish goes from every third cycle to every fourth, that'd be something I can leverage decently smoothly, yet wouldn't make my old way of doing things necessarily feel cruddy or "nerfed" by way of contrast. If I normally could get out of a huge AoE in time, but would have to give up a GCD and a half of uptime in doing so, and a support tool could instead get me out in half a GCD, cool. The fight can't just murder me as a form of composition check, but that bonus would feel pretty good.

You see, that's fine for Monk, because it's combos are so flexible, however, what about something like Dragoon? With it's more rigid combo structure, there is no way you would be able to make it fast enough to get another 5 GCDs in before you needed to refresh Chaotic Spring/power Surge, so you will be clipping the Chaotic Spring DoT early, which could lead to a DPS loss. Then you have to take into account the potential for misaligning your rotation compared to raid buffs, which is one of the reasons why poeple didn't like Arrow/Spear (the other was resource management, using up MP/TP quicker, except BLM, they enjoyed Arrow alot).

Similar things can be said for resource generation. Giving Monk an extra Chakra is different to giving Samurai Kenki, then what would you do with Dragoon? There's just too many potential pitfalls when messing with someone else's rotation that I can't see the benefits outweighing the drawbacks.

I played AST before the change. It was actually interesting. I don't know how they fared DPS-wise (which is the barometer everyone uses for everything in this game), but it was very enjoyable to play.

Completely depended on the party and card RNG however, it went from really weak to really strong. I don't think a suitable middle ground was really found however.