Job-UI driven design...

[Vhailor]

With the introduction of the job gauges, I'm noticing some obvious questionable design issues. It seems that job mechanics have been designed around the new UI, rather than the other way around.

Eh.. how can we put this on a UI? Eh no idea.. well, let's remove the mechanic, makes it easier for us to display it on a gauge.
If we put this on the UI as well, it gets really full and a mess.. Well, let's remove the mechanic.. or just keep it as buff.

The idea of the gauges was to improve the information shown to the players, however because every job NEEDS a gauge, things that were more functional as buffs were moved to the UI, and some jobs still have buffs to monitor, which causes you to have to split focus between the buff bar and the UI, which actually makes it harder to track things.

What are your thoughts about this?

I think it varies, but yes, for some jobs, it feels this way. RDM, for instance, feels like a very natural fit for the Job Gauge; WHM, on the other hand, feels like it was forced in. I don't think anyone would have felt overwhelmed by Lily stacks being represented as icons, and it would have been more convenient from a HUD perspective. That's not to say it doesn't work for WHM, it just kind of feels like a superfluous sparkly toy that I have to figure out how to integrate into my HUD rather than some badly-needed improvement.

Edit:

The only reason this is even a problem is that SE forced the Job Gauges to be visible, and removed the corresponding icons so that people have to rely on them. BLM, for example, had perfectly serviceable icons for Astral Fire and Umbral Ice, but now they're gone from the status bar screen. I'd have much rather seen the Job Gauges integrated as an optional component that presented the same information in a different way, rather than as an exclusive source of needed info.

[Draxxion]

I play SMN and now RDM. With RDM it feels manditory to use the gauge because how else do you track the mana levels. SMN though are just representations of already existing mechanics that you could track else where. So, I can see what the OP is saying as RDM feels designed around the gauge and SMN it is just a visual perk.