Quote Originally Posted by Hasrat View Post
Besides, how's the new player going to learn to play "effectively" by watching veterans rolling with skills and rotations that the new player doesn't even have access to?
Oh they'll just google "white sparkly attack white mage" and magically get instantly directed to a page that talks about Glare without much of any digging needed.

Stupid jokes aside, I have watched players and thought "oh, maybe I should try that" but this was long after the point of being a new player. This was when I recognised what the spells were because I had them already for quite a while so I was able to understand that they did take a different approach to me. Furthermore this is also when I was in the position of being able to pay attention to what someone else was doing. In fights that demanded a lot of my attention I didn't have much time to keep a close eye on many of the abilities someone else used.

And honestly even today, from a healer's perspective, I don't know what melee dps are doing a lot of the time because they rarely have castbars showing up in the party ui. I have to read their buffs and pay very close attention to their ability animations to figure out what they're up to. It's pretty easy to spot what casters are doing because they hardcast so much, but even then it's impossible to see everything because they also have instant casts and not all of them leave an effect behind like a dot.

Players learn best by the act of doing, and they learn best by learning their class gradually instead of jumping ahead several lvl brackets and trying to figure out how to use spells they don't even have yet. Sure some curious players do look up what classes can do in higher lvls, but in my experience I have only seen players who are not new to mmos do this frequently.