Quote Originally Posted by reflettage View Post
One of the greatest failings of FFXIV in its current state is that it doen't teach you how to play. Sure, when you start the game it teaches you how to move your character, the myriad steps involved in doing a basic fetch quest, how to use aetherytes, and more through never-ending "Active Help" text dumps that look like ads just begging for you to close them. But while the game has evolved significantly since its release nearly 11 years ago, most of the early game has not.

Watching the boss's castbar is integral to modern FFXIV fight design, and yet its default position is this tiny little toothpick-sized speck tucked away in the upper-right corner of the target bar. THAT'S why we have people say mechanics are "seemingly random" or "come out of nowhere" -- because they have no idea they should be looking at the cast bar for information, they might not even know it's there. Think the final boss of the lv89 dungeon -- he can cast half-room cleaves called Left Firaga and Right Firaga, where Left and Right indicate what hand he's gonna cast the cleave from. The cast bar is the only indication this attack is coming until it's too late to dodge it intentionally. It's an incredibly basic mechanic, but if you didn't know to look at the cast bar, you'd be thinking "Wtf? How was I supposed to know?"


The game seriously needs to start expecting more than the barest of bare minimums from players way, WAY earlier, so they can learn iteratively throughout the entire 1-100 leveling experience.
I second this. The Smith's "tutorials" are almost offensively useless. Basically, unless you have friends or make friends, the game doesn't teach you the basics. It assumes you know the basics.

Now once you have the basics they do a good job of teaching you mechanics - showing it bit by bit and ramping it up over time and instances - but as for how to play your job? almost nothing.

Yesterday I did an Ala Mhigo with a PLD player who did 0 AOE, hit random cooldowns (like wings/cover) on trash pulls, and Tank LB on CD. He was relatively new, but did not read/reply to chat at all. This play is unacceptable, but someone should have taught him something somewhere.

As for looking at the castbar, that is sometimes difficult when the fight is new or you're on an unfamilliar job, yet nowhere in the game do they give you any indication this is important.

While this onboarding isn't anywhere near as bad as some games (think LoL), it could be improved.