What happened to job inter-play? Was it any good?

[Jeeqbit]

I have been informed DPS used to have much more interplay. Ninjas could lower enmity of jobs like blackmages for example.

In Stormblood, it was "manage eachother's MP like crazy". Bards/Machinists could regenerate the MP of other players, allowing for example, a Paladin to spam Holy Spirit (which had to be nerfed into the ground as a result), and to generate more MP for healers to heal and resurrect with.

Astrologians could also regenerate MP in a similar way. Most of the time this wasn't useful, but in situations like needing to rez a lot or PLD it could be. It was discouraged on BLM because they managed their own MP and it didn't affect DRK. I don't think it mattered on SMN or RDM (unless they needed to rez) so the MP wasn't that useful overall.

There was also an ability on casters to "Mana Shift". It allowed you to transfer your MP to another and was often used to transfer Mana to a healer, allowing them to rez. This was especially helpful if the healer had just died and had no MP, and could significantly turn around the run where it would otherwise wipe due to lack of healer MP.

But there was argument to be made that MP buffs altering PLD's attacks so significantly, and being capable of affecting others so drastically, that it could have undesirable balance effects, so I suppose SE changed it so everyone just manages their own MP to keep it simple.

Meanwhile, we had TP, which was a physical version of MP for physical attacks. Most of the time, you didn't notice that it existed so it was pointless, but if DPS was low during trash pulls, you would notice it and need to use your TP restore abilities. At this point, Astrologians could apply a TP buff (depending on card RNG), while melee DPS could apply Goad to regen TP on a party member. Again this was useful only if the DPS was low really. It was a flat out annoying mechanic the rare times it mattered, so it's little wonder TP just got removed.

Tanks used to generate enmity in two ways: turning on tank stance and attacking (but this also reduced their incoming and outgoing damage), and doing a special enmity combo. So typically you would turn on tank stance, do your enmity combo while in stance to generate enough enmity, then exit tank stance and do your highest damage combos.

However, the amount of time required to stay in tank stance, if any, depended a lot on the DPS and enmity generation of the party. If they were not very good players, you wouldn't even need tank stance to hold the boss. If the healer spammed heals, they might rip the boss from you. If the DPS were really good, they might rip the boss from you as well. This could be prevented by doing the enmity combo 3 times in tank stance usually, but the party could reduce the need for this by using their enmity reduction abilities such as Lucid Dreaming, Diversion and Refresh. This became extremely common to see in Expert roulette, but as you didn't really know if the players would do it, you couldn't always count on it anyway.

But again, there were issues with stances. Many of the "raider" tanks would use DPS stance as close to 100% of the time as they could, while non-raider types would "believe" that "tanks" should use "tank stance" 100% of the time because it reduced incoming damage. But it also reduced outgoing damage, and that's hard for a lot of MMORPG players to accept so many of them will try to get away without it if they can!

You would even get a tank that would spam their lower-damage enmity combo in stance, when they could mostly get away with using their damage combo in stance at least, if they were going to remain in stance. So SE just did away with stance dancing and enmity combos, and made incoming/outgoing damage adjustments a trait you can't remove (so tanks will always have reduced damage as a trait now). And tank stance got massively buffed to make up for enmity combo removal and just playing a tank like a DPS makes enemies attack you now. So there was no use for enmity control actions on other jobs now.

I really like the idea if dps having support capabilities I could activily think of and when I know what I am doing take full advantage.

I like the idea of them but they were also not used that often by people tbh. We had Erase to do a small heal and remove DoTs on people. We had Apocatastasis to reduce magic damage on a party member and Palisade to reduce physical damage on a party member. Drain on casters to heal them whilst also attacking (this is basically Blue Mage's Blood Drain, virtually only used for soloing). If people used them, you knew they were trying to be good and that was nice to see, but just was rare to see in this game full of casual players so I guess they couldn't justify keeping them.

Did your main job have more interplay in the past and what did it look like?

Arguably, tanks have more interplay than in the past in the sense of being able to apply things to other players, such as: Nascent Flash, The Blackest Night, Intervention, Aurora, Heart of Corundum. They also didn't used to all have raid-wide mitigation like Shake It Off and Dark Missionary. Reprisal used to exist in the form of specific damage downs (STR down or INT down) as part of the tank combos, but it's more versatile as an ability that can work on all damage types. So overall, I actually find tanks have more interplay than before.

Although we had Apocatastasis and Palisade to reduce magic and physical damage as DPS, we have Addle/Feint/general damage reduction on physical ranged DPS instead. Although we had drain, SMN gets a good heal with Phoenix now, RDM can heal themselves and BLM is just hardmode like usual but has a powerful shield.