What if Support Role was Added to FFXIV?

[Shurrikhan]

Yeah, 3.0 AST seem to be a prime example of the rose-tinted class. It was changed because it was just a lot of fat nobody wanted.

It was changed because any legitimate attempt, even, to balance it was apparently beyond the devs and because they axed the systems underpinning a third of its cards. As soon as it went from a nuetral to controversial fact that it was balanced around luck as much as it was about leveraging tools (in no small part simply due to the lack of synergetic features like a CD-less spread or second charge on Draw and a retroactive Royal Road).

Yeah, every card doing the same thing sucks, but that's because there is nothing else that they can do meaningfully.

Except that's only due to having screwed over the underpinnings of each. If the devs had actually tuned content, stance modifiers, and the opportunity costs in such a way that tank stances could actually be danced (outside of bardic legends of shitshow Savage PuG runs), then external mitigation tools, too, could retain relevance since that lever wouldn't have been made passive. If MP were an actual mechanic in this game, instead of a Rez-Meter, so would Ewer. Etc., etc.

_______________

Dude. Did you even play NIN when the mudras where off the global cooldown? Bunny Medium, bud. Bunny Medium all day, every day. Placing the cards/play on the GCD is just a suggestion. Don't lose any sleep over it.

I did, at 130+ ms ping and frequent packet loss. Bunny medium, very rarely. Bunny Medium maybe once per few hours of raiding, under lag spikes.

I don't particularly care one way or the other about Cards being moved to the GCD (so long as their duly empowered in compensation for the added opportunity cost), but we needn't pretend some vaguely similar system indicates that oGCD Cards (which are, right now, still working just fine outside of the same problems that plague the spot-usage of any and all oGCDs on controller-using healers) have been doomed all along, nor pretend that oGCD mudras were worse than they were.

(Moreover, none of that would have been a problem if the game had just flipped the switch, as done by plugins since late HW, to allow oGCDs to be queued. They'd had the ready and obvious solution all along. We needn't constrain our ideas to the most ass-backward approaches just because the devs' way out of a paper bag may be to eat the whole damn thing.)