What is your RPG playstyle?

[Jeeqbit]

I wanted to start a discussion about what you feel your preferred playstyle is when playing RPGs and how that fits into FFXIV.

I usually try to experience the story and feel the story in the fullest way possible, and use other subtle aspects of the game like sidequests, walking and interactions to add to the character and feel of the experience.

So how it fits into this game is that I enjoyed ARR unlike a lot of people. I just make the most of things.

I especially liked the emotion aspect of it because that appeals to me.

Having only 1 or 2 attack buttons is pretty irrelevant to me, as long as I can attack, so this not being an issue for me in games made it not an issue like it is for others.

My logic toward other games doesn't entirely apply to this, because I was playing it due to it being an MMORPG specifically as well for social reasons.

Something I've learned over my years of gaming is there are certain things I always gravitate toward and try to achieve in games

In terms of actual achievement hunting like mount collecting, I never really cared about it until I saw others around me doing it, so it was a way of participating.

The game is also just not very fulfilling without achievement hunting ie. you do it once and the entire patch is done for the next 4+ months. But by achievement hunting it makes it more like other games in this genre that draw out the content with grinds.

On my part, I'm the kind of person that likes to take supportive characters or classes and augment them to be more aggressive.

I like to play what would logically make me able to survive in a roleplaying context. For example, I saw Bard and thought "the enemies would just run up to melee range and I would be defenseless". So I looked at Paladin, saw the offensive sword and the defensive shield, and thought it was perfect. The benefit was also bosses actually facing you since they just stood still earlier in the game.

I do want to augment a support character to be more aggressive though. That was always my goal on Paladin, even in Heavensward, where its damage was atrocious compared to the other tanks. I felt I was satisfied if I could attack an enemy on my own and feel like I'm making progress. I started to feel this was the case when stacking Strength, especially into Stormblood, and given how they've been simplifying the game, tank damage continues to feel good - we tanks can wreck mob packs in dungeons in a way we never could in the past with our little 100 potency AoE (or no AoE for PLD ).

Naturally, when I started playing FFXIV, Scholar was exactly my playstyle

What made SCH my favorite healer was when I discovered I could use it to heal without casting, in a way that felt superior to WHM at the time, who spread it across multiple OGCDs one of which had a long cooldown. I also literally did not need to cast a heal - not even a regen like I was doing on WHM.