Quote Originally Posted by mario710 View Post
It feels like many DPS and select tank jobs function off of build and spend play styles with the advent of the gauge system (Stormblood)

I dislike this.

I dislike it and yet I don't know what good it would do for the game if it were deleted.
The origin of the Gauge is Wrath stacks for Warrior. They sought a cleaner and more efficient way of reflecting a spendable resource. Back before Job Gauges, we had stacking buffs. Aetherflow still has its buff to be sure, but the visual representation of the state of our charges is cleaner and easier to see. Especially as I can have quite a few buffs on my bars in certain party comps.

Long story short, Gauges are just visual representations of the buffs we would ordinarily be squinting at buff bars to see.
They just gave us a HUD mechanic for tracking those specific buffs, and in some cases, like Warrior where Wrath stacked to 5 and capped in 2.0, it allowed for them to essentially stack Wrath to 10.