What most turns new players off from FFXIV?

[Shurrikhan]

I think the game could greatly benefit from having active skills come in alot sooner in the leveling process with the passive traits coming in later, namely weaved into your "job" levels so you are still getting an active every 5 lvls. This seems like a nice compromise between the current "to bring in new players into the genre" and the vet mmo-er that might want to give this a shot. Could also lead to a faster entry into teaching a new player their roles, for example if a player gets shield oath by 15 he has it as his tanking toolset when hes tanking already, then could get sword oath at 30 to potentially start toying with the idea of stance swapping for dps/phase pushes etc.

One of the big things I'd like to see is just that we get our skills at a level in which we feel like we could really put them to use, or are basically just what were were looking for around the time we got them. The 10% Rampart mitigation at level 2 does nothing for a GLD at its point of acquisition. There's no situation at which we're going to find use for it until we're actually tanking multiple enemies, which only need occur if enemies link or someone in the party has an AoE (and even the earliest of those isn't for a while). Similarly, 51 levels, or 9 from the level cap seems an awful late point in which to add GLD/PLD's single hit burst mitigation. Every additional skill can be a way to add something to what it means to tank on your job, or recommend or allow some additional step or new paradigm in what it means to be a tank in general, and yet so many of our most identity driven abilities are given late, the basic scalar abilities (e.g. Rampart, Foresight) given too early to have a noticeable effect, and numerous other skills just provide more of the same (neither Bulwark nor Sentinel really all that different from Rampart; useful, but lackluster). If the game could just give a sense of class and job identity that much sooner, whether that involves accelerating ability acquisition in the beginning (and therefore slowing it later) or not, I think that'd help a lot with retaining trial players.