Quote Originally Posted by Billythepancake View Post
If you find that fun, then great, I'm happy for you. However, it is bad design that a class would require knowledge of other classes in order to be played well. Not only that, you also need a parser, because who says your DPS are doing their rotations right? Unless you plan to open the battle tab and keep track of literally read every single spell cast that goes out while keeping track in your head where they are in their rotation (and if you can do that, I'll gladly mail you a medal because you would genuinely deserve it for the Galaxy brain that would require) which is ridiculous. A class should not require a parser, a keyboard and mouse setup, and knowledge of other classes to be able to be played at a competitive level. Meaning if you play on PS4 AST is completely out of your reach if you ever want to play optimally. For a game that has a huge PlayStation playerbase, that's bad design.

And before anyone brings it up, you don't need a parser to play a class well, the best PLD I've met, who has oranges on every fight this tier and every fight last plays on PlayStation and does not use a parser themselves. They will be parsed by someone else, but that will not help you in real time. This same person could not do AST at the same level because AST demands too much for anyone on the same setup.
Personally? I disagree with the idea of a class needing to understand other classes rotations to optimize their own being a bad thing. If anything, we need more classes that specialize in being team players.

I will throw you a bone in the sense that I do think the ffxiv team has been overcautious with the pdps of classes like AST and DNC out of a fear of their buffs making their dps contribution so strong. But considering they did address this in the current live letter by mentioning that said classes are getting potency buffs I'm going to keep being optimistic as I've always had.

It's a two way street, my job as the AST is to provide the damage boosts at optimal times and it's the responsibility of said dps to take advantage of it and play optimally. People are random and it can't be helped, I agree that AST needs a touch more pdps to accommodate this randomness and for solo situations but at the same time I fail to see the issue with relying on team synergy to reach your fullest potential? Is it because WHM and SCH don't? That WHM and SCH are more selfish with their damage? I dont mind that.