Has Gauges helped you a lot?

[Rokke]

Of the classes I've leveled its only useful on RDM. WHM and AST are borderline useless. BLM and BRD make me have to bounce between my abilities, my procs, and my gauge.

I hope we get those simplified versions soon, I find them more distracting then anything :c

[JunseiKei]

The AST gauge and the newly forced undraws are annoying. I preferred being able to click off my cards without needing to hit a specific button to do so.

Bard gauge... honestly, it's mostly just me, but I have to have the gauge a bit out of the way from how large it is (even with it sized smaller) to be able to see clearly. Unfortunately, that's led to me playing without songs sometimes. I'd have much rather liked a small sound effect for when songs are playing (like the sound put in place when your gauges are full/all procs gained). Or have a visual aura, like DRK's darkside, WAR's stance (before this was having 5 stacks of Abadon- don't know what it is now, haven't touched WAR yet since 4.0), MNK's greased lightning or BLM's astral fire/umbral ice. Something like the songbird emote (when you first activate that emote, you get music notes float around you for a little bit).

RDM definitely has the most useful gauge, but the job is pretty much built around that gauge.

WHM.... really the only time I even look at that gauge is to see if I have a lily to use Divine Benison. Otherwise, I pretty much ignore it.

[kikix12]

The gauges look nice, but for healers or summoner, they led to more issues for me than help. I can't even count how many times I've wasted Aetherflow just cause I looked at the buff bar and didn't see it there. Besides, who in their right mind thinks that having to look at THREE spots that are ways aside from each other (the aetherflow bar) instead of one makes it easier?! It is far easier to discern between I, II and III than it is to discern between three "lights" that are distanced over few centimeters. Humans are hunters by nature and have very limited area of optical focus.

And I keep wasting cards as Astrologian cause the three "undraws" are pretty much identical. I don't use them often enough, so it's a pain to learn by muscle memory alone. It shouldn't be difficult to make it possible to "click" them off of the gauge at least...

It does help as a warrior though. Can't say I actually care about the gauge itself, but I like the new way of "paying" for the skills behind them, that lets me conserve more to use them in quick succession at the beginning of a battle or if things go south, or spend them as available to speed up progression in easier content.

[Enla]

Only one I find useful so far is MCH, but that's because it's hard built into the class now. The ones for SCH are downright tacked on and I hate the fact that my party can no longer see how many aetherflow stacks I have because they tied them to the one of our two gauges. It's caused more than a few tanks to erroneously think they have more wiggle room than my cooldowns actually allow and an endless supply of stress. Likewise I turned the faerie gauge off because I have yet to find a genuine use for it beyond "oh shit, my other healer is useless" moments and maybe two tank busting instances. It also doesn't help that it's a 70 skill when most of the instances where it'd currently be useful are in leveling dungeons with overzealous tanks with generally poor gear. Plus I have my faerie macro'd heavily so it's honestly a useless skill to me. I can heal much better with my current set up and have just as much up time for DPS in most situations as someone who relies on it.

[Sandpark]

Could some use refinement? Oh hell yes.

I like the concept of gauges which is to allow me to watch the onscreen action versus staring at multiple bars across the screen. I set mine pretty small and directly beneath my character so less need for the eyes to wander. Need each gauge to be revised to hold as much info as possible without becoming too big.

Best job wise for me so far?
Sam and Rdm

[Jade3173]

It does help as a warrior though. Can't say I actually care about the gauge itself, but I like the new way of "paying" for the skills behind them, that lets me conserve more to use them in quick succession at the beginning of a battle or if things go south, or spend them as available to speed up progression in easier content.

I don't think the gauge itself helped WAR since all they really did was double the number of stacks you'd have gotten in the old system. inner Beast, Fell Cleave, Steel Cyclone, and Decimate used to cost 5 stacks and now cost 50 gauge, they tacked on a 0 at the end and doubled your max count.

In no way am I saying this is a bad thing, but the gauge had nothing to do with it.

For most classes the gauge doesn't really add much to it. Exceptions being RDM and SAM since they were designed with the gauges in mind. To me it, like others have said, it's counterproductive to (at least one of) the reasons they supposedly added the gauges, to have less to look around at. BRDs have to look for their DoTs, Straight Shot buff, and keep track of the new gauge. AST's has caused it to increase button bloat cause hey, can't click off cards now. WHM, PLD, WAR gonna go with SMN and SCH as well, might as well not exist for all they "add" to the job. BLM can go either way really since all (to me) that it seems to do is track Astral Fire/Umbral Ice and the proc for Foul but I just more pay attention to when Foul lights up then the countdown to it. The MCH heat would probably be easier to track in gauge form than stacks but that's more personal tastes I think and the bullets, don't see why the needed an entirely separate gauge from the heat one, sure they could have made it aesthetically pleasing to have both tracked on the same icon. MNKs seemed to track just fine before since who wasn't clenching watching that timer during boss jumps before? NIN's are alright I guess?

long story short, gauges didn't help me, I feel they caused more hassle then they were worth and really wish I could have everything back to how it was in 3.X and keeping track of my (De)Buff bar instead of that and a gauge. If they help others, more power to you.

[Enkidoh]

I generally find them annoying and distracting to be honest - they take up so much room on the screen I often find my eye being drawn to it meaning I miss an AoE telegraph or enemy attack. Really it seems nearly all Jobs don't even need it, in that the info shown on them could easily be covered by an existing icon and timer on the status bar, other than RDM, as JunseiKei mentioned, it seems the entire concept was designed specifically for RDM and then the development team realized "Oh bother, now we need to adapt this concept to every other Job otherwise it will overshadow them". It was basically a solution in search of a problem.

Of course the secondary reason for it's introduction was players didn't notice certain status icons were active (like PLD and oaths active or deactivated) and hence the gauge was meant to make that "more noticeable", but that was simply due to human tendency to desensitize visual clutter which they become used to and not because the icon wasn't noticeable enough. In fact, it made the problem worse, in that because it's so ostentatiously large, the mind is even more determined to ignore it, hence making the whole point of it backfire. It became more a hindrance than a help. Or at least, it's like that for me.

I'm sorry to Yoshi and the development team for this as I know they are trying to make things easier, but it was a change that I personally do not think was really necessary, and like many I would prefer an option to disable it completely on a Job by Job basis, and just have it's info on a small icon and timer on the status bar, as how the Job Gauge is at the moment is ultimately superfluous.

[kikix12]

That's kind of why I said I don't particularly care about the gauge. Though in reality, unlike for Scholars/Summoners, the tanks gauges are actual gauges, and so they DO work to give information at a glance. And it is a bit easier to just glance at the gauge to know whether you can use two heavy-hitters or not than it would be with stacks. Not significant...but hey. At least it's not a detriment like for some other gauges.

[Cidel]

other than RDM, as JunseiKei mentioned, it seems the entire concept was designed specifically for RDM and then the development team realized "Oh bother, now we need to adapt this concept to every other Job otherwise it will overshadow them". It was basically a solution in search of a problem.

This is exactly what I've been thinking for the entire job gauge system for the longest time. Most of the jobs I've played have no real need for it and as others have already said, it just gives me yet another spot I need to look at (and I was so accustomed to checking my own buff/debuff bar for job-specific things like AST's cards and SMN's time left on Dreadwyrm).

The whole thing really does feel like something they shoehorned into the rest of the jobs because a new job(s) was designed with a special gauge in mind and they needed to justify designing it that way.

I will concede though, I suppose it does give the devs some elbow-room to be creative with new jobs in the future...

[AkashiXI]

Bard isn't that bad, it feels seamless once you get the muscle memory down. The buffs can be a hinderance, however it's easy to work around. Overall I like Bard's UI.

Ninja is great, absolutely no complaints about it.

PLD feels latched on, it doesn't really need a gauge.

Astro feels good too, the additional buttons are somewhat annoying, but they're so situational that is not a deal breaker.

White Mage feels latched on too, but not as bad as PLD.

Monk is even worse than PLD, imo. There's no reason for it.

Those are the only jobs I play at 60-70 :x