Hello! Here is why I think Manipulation should be a shared skill for DoH:
  • It's an essential skill, mandatory to reliably HQ a lot of 80-90 crafts
  • It's too long: Doing 65 levels of class quests once is time consuming enough. Over an hour with flight in all zones, Trained Eye, buying most meals/mats and skipping all cutscenes.
    Having to do it 8 times (152 quests) to unlock the same skill is too much! It makes me resent class quests instead of getting me excited about them
  • It makes the story secondary
I found Facet and Studium deliveries more engaging gameplay and story wise, which made me think: what if there was a similar system to unlock Manipulation? There could be lvl 65 quests for BSM/ARM/GSM, CRP/LTW/WVR, ALC/CUL that unlock Manipulation for the class set. In my opinion, that would make it a lot more digestible while keeping a decent amount of grind.

Now some might think this takes away incentive to do class quests, to which I would say... Gear, xp and story. That's why I did ALC class quests up to 50 back when it was my first DoH, actually read the story and enjoyed it. But if you don't do DoH class quests as they come, you end up with a huge time sink and no desire to engage in the story when there are so many other things to do.

Separating Manipulation from DoH class quests would bring focus back to the story, and turn a chore into a bonus for newcomers and lore hunters.