Musings over raid buffs: MP, gauges, and roles

[kajv95]

Stopped playing Bard during Shadowbringers over being bored to death due to not having more to consider other than the DPS. When they took off all the weird parts that were sticking out of Bard that happened to be the raid buff things, I simply stopped enjoying it. It's not like I was dealing damage either. Apex Arrow was/is a clunky addition and they doubled down on it in EW it seems so I don't go back other than to flex jobs if needed on the odd occasion.

Red Mage is the job that gives me the feeling of still being more than a DPS, but that has the issue of casters being a bit weird in balance.
The main problem is that the battle system is incredibly simple - most of it is either "get more/less damage" or "deal more/less damage"

Even with the trimming of the battle system to its most barebones state, they *still* ended up making certain jobs better than others in certain situations. Like cutscenes that force enochian to fall off on BLM for example, because they last longer than 15 seconds. Sure, it's not much, but when some jobs simply don't have to worry about it (even having cutscene downtime be a borderline benefit through relativity) it really feels like even the simplest of battle systems isn't being properly designed for.

There's an odd fixation of having Machinist in the rphys job type being a selfish dps which blocks the entire role from being a support role instead, and so we get what we have today. Bards and Dancers that do about as much raid buffing as your friendly neighbourhood punchy monk.