Quote Originally Posted by SniperCT View Post
Back in the day if you so much as suggested a druid could dps or a paladin tank in WoW you got called a heathen. I think for a lot of players there's this ingrained sense of how things are that has to be unlearned for FF14

It's not that the classes didn't have a toolkit to allow dps, but players set an expectation early on. Plus some of these games the content required healers to spend most of their time healing and any attempts to DPS could lead to a wipe.

It's a really hard mindset to shake off.
It was a situation where classes didn't have a toolkit for dps in EQ. My DoT and direct damage as an enchanter was pretty much pointless. I didn't even use them charm soloing. That's because my kit revolved around support. I was keeping the group hasted, keeping up mana regen, slowing the mob we were focused on, and making these 7 mobs drool on themselves while I mind-controlled an 8th into fighting for us. If I felt froggy, I got my pet Shiny Bob out and let him do his pitiful damage on the focused mob. The game was designed with the idea that certain classes kept to specific roles. We could work outside the box sometimes, like the night a party couldn't find a tank so we let a troll shaman kite mobs around in a circle while our rangers and mages plunked away and I kept things slowed, but it was incredibly slow going because that group was missing a key role that made normal camping groups work. So, yes, in early MMO times it was a case where tank and support classes didn't have the tools for dps because the game expected they would fulfill a certain role and made that role necessary.

If XIV required the same amount of support to a party and had dps skills that were less effective, then we'd see a game design that supported a similar mentality. The difference is that XIV does provide an adequate toolkit for dps and fights aren't designed in such a way that they expect certain classes will always be busy with certain roles. It's a shame, really. I rather enjoyed early in this game when we still did things like Sleep/Repose the big guy in the second Brayflox fight, because the team needed to focus the little guy down. And you would bring slightly different things to the table depending on which other classes you had leveled up to get cross class skills from. But that's a place where player expectation bit us on the ass, ie every healer *must* level a THM for Swiftcast. I'd have loved if our choice as healers to dps really was a balancing act but it's turned into just a default we do because the game doesn't make us responsible for anything else and doesn't even make healing something we always need to be doing.