
Originally Posted by
inhaledcorn
I've seen this being the general consensus when it comes to gauges that's not SAM or RDM. I mean, heck, for SCH, it is literally tacked on at the end (except for Aetherflow). I think NIN integrated it better than most, and I can understand why it exists (to give less skilled players large visual queues that light up for doing certain things that you want to be doing for your Job). Like, for NIN, you want to be on the boss as much as possible for those Auto attacks, thus the gauge fills up for each one. For SAM, hitting positionals and using each of your skills builds up your gauge, again, showing and rewarding players for doing what you should be doing. SCH's fairy gauge builds up for using your Aetherflow instead of sitting on it (though the reward itself is very lackluster).
People argue if WHM's "reward" is worth spending the actions to get it (since good healers don't really want to cast Cure I and Cure II if it can be avoided, so this teaches bad WHMs less optimal play), and some essential job functions were just moved to the gauge which can be a detriment in trying to figure out who has what buff (it mostly hurts double AST comps the most, but there are probably other cases). And, weirdly, other important buffs, like DRG's Heavy Thrust, MCH's Hot Shot, and RDM's dualcast (a job that was designed with the gauge in mind, btw) weren't put on the job gauges, making them buffs that need to be tracked in the buff bar. This goes against the reason these gauges exist (they wanted to make it easier for buffs to track, and these three buffs are extremely important for these three jobs). So, not all design choices seem to be uniform.