Quote Originally Posted by ovIm View Post
gods I wish I could give you more than one like right now. I feel those issues deep in my soul.
The only last bastion of fun in this game is PVP for me, really. That feeling of HW and SB... those games did hit differently.
This actually made me remember what made support roles actually interesting and miles ahead of what they are today. Sure, they had a few other battle mechanics, but they also had variable rotations. As a healer you didn't have more than tetragrammaton for example in HW as an OGCD heal, the rest, you had to hard cast. This fundamentally changed your rotation since you had to adjust to incoming damage profiles and encounters, and also to what your allies did. As a healer in dungeons you had to manage your MP a lot and the time taken to take down a pull and how much you needed to heal the tank would inform how many holy you could cast in between, and between pulls you wouldn't recover your MP like today either. As a caster besides BLM, MP also mattered (remember when Ruin III costed 1300MP to cast out of Dreadwyrm?). This in turn made rphys role fundamentally important. As a tank, you also had to adjust to aggro management and what your allies would do, as well as the party damage output and the encounter layout. This meant that your rotation would also not be static as you'd have to go between your aggro combo and your damage combo. All of this in spite of tanks and healers never having any RNG elements in their rotations whatsoever (AST excepted with cards). Fully deterministic toolkits, and yet the whole battle design made it so that you constantly had to adjust.

What's support today in comparison? It's so bland and braindead I have even stopped playing those jobs.