Quote Originally Posted by Gserpent View Post
Yes, it does. Because that is literally the only thing in the entire game that is (loosely) in the hands of the players. Healing? It's done automatically, and damage is scripted with minimal variance. Mitigation? Once again, done automatically and *rigidly* scripted. DPS is the only thing that's left, and even there they've been taking away player interactivity with it by making rotations increasingly "automatic" and removing things that might cause variance like melee having to lose uptime for mechanics or lose positional bonus because of the boss hitbox being small, etc.
Apologies if it were unclear. My statement was more that job resources don't have to be exclusively generated for DPS. Oath Gauge being used defensively provides a much more interesting and meaningful decision than making it just another "Get 50 and Fel Cleave" option.

I agree with all your points on the combat system as they've decided to try to evolve it beyond Stormblood. There's a lot of potential options and design space that they cut out during ShB that further cemented the DPS meta in place and the Devs have been actively making decisions to enforce the DPS-centric meta. So I hope they do something in 7.0 to help alleviate this in the future, but I'm not really counting on it.