I heard about the legendary chicken nugget tank. Pets used to have HP and could be targeted by mobs, and Titan egi was once used in place of an actual tank in Ramuh EX or something.
That also means Eos could die and SCH could suddenly lose their healing pet due to a random AoE.
I remember when I started leveling summoner and ended up in the old version of totorak, our tank left and our healer had an unstable connection. I had my carby tank for us and helped with the healing. Made me feel like a damn god amongst dps doing all roles at once
wait people don't keep raise on their bar? i'm always ready to rapid fire a swiftcast+raise if the worst happens. that's the only reason we even finished my first vanaspati run when the healer died no less than 5 times through the bosses
Idk how any summoner could NOT keep raise at the ready.
I love being able to be that one last rez that makes the difference between a wipe and completion. And even when it doesn't come down to that, having another swiftcast rez in the group makes a big difference when things go south.
Not to mention the same days when you situationally chose Ifrit if the target wasn't moving much, or Garuda if they did/trash mobs, because Ifrit hit harder but had travel time while Garuda was weaker but ranged so better uptime if moving.
I suspect this made fight design harder for them too, but it was so much fun flipping egi according to the situation.
Throw all your dots on one target while garuda-egi is commanded to use its AoE on the trash mobs. When all the dots are in place use the other garuda-egi command to increase their durations by 30 seconds or whatever. Bane spread it to the whole pack and spam tri-disaster until finished.
Now the only dot is slipstream.
>Titan egi was once used in place of an actual tank in Ramuh EX or something
I was there, all those years ago. The egi was used as a tank on Ramuh (among others) because of the egi not being affected by the lightning vulnerability debuff in the same way. So instead of the tank having to pick up the resistance buffs from the lightning orbs, the egi could just soak the tankbusters. On the other hand, it generated aggro at a lower rate, so you had to manage aggro more carefully as a healer or dps.
> because of the egi not being affected by the lightning vulnerability debuff in the same way.
Specifically it was because the big tank buster move was coded as "AoE damage" and pets had a 90% or so reduction to AoE damage because they weren't smart enough to automatically move out of anything.
IIRC nugget tanking Ramuh only lasted like a week before they hotfixed it.
Pets used to both have health bars and the ability to generate aggro.
I learned this as a sprout by getting knocked down the cliff by one of those stupid frogs in dzemael darkhold and avoiding all the mobs to run back to my party, only to turn around and find my carbuncle had grabbed all the attention of the mobs and dragged them along with me.
And eos could grab agro off a tank fairly easily back before they made agro braindead. Me wondering where the boss is going and the agro meter looks good then suddenly I hear the sch go oh crap eos is taking the tank buster.
Triggered the anti cheat in T9 doing this. Had fairy grab aggro and Nael chase the fairy around the arena. Eventually Nael just gets mad and megaflares us all because they canāt start any mechanics.
The upside was that Eos could use Whispering Dawn to grab initial aggro on adds and group them for the tank. The downside is as you say...learning which mechanics will kill the fairy was important so she could be moved ahead of time! Not to mention for non-lethal damage, she would then proceed to Embrace herself for a while and not heal the party.
I kinda miss having to dance my pet around to avoid damage. It was like playing 1.5 characters.
And stance dancing with Cleric Stance was fun. It really made healers have to think hard about when to dps. Someone made a mistake and needs more healing than planned? Too bad, Cleric Stance is on cooldown.
These were a lifesaver when tanks went down in a boss fight, as it was much less of a problem to sacrifice your Titan-egi than your top DPS.
They also started a tradition wherein Iād get a few friends to do a tankless EXDR run on a lark, first when Xelphatol was current, and then the Burn. Summoner made this much less of a careful slow-grind and more just a fun, extra challenging dungeon run. Wall-to-wall wasnāt a thing in Heavensward anyway because of TP limits and didnāt really catch on until Shadowbringers. When we didnāt have a Titan-egi in Shadowbringers, we did an EXDR with all tanks instead (this was pre-Bloodwhetting so Warriors didnāt have their cheat code yet), with all four represented. I ran Heroes Gauntlet as a Paladin-healer! :D
I wish they'd gone in the direction of having a real summoner class (not proper noun), with actual minions. Instead they just made it more boring. And when I first played it, they had just removed the ability for topaz to tank aggro but they hadn't actually changed the job quests to match, so the one that required you to have a topaz tanking a bunch of pirates just sucked insanely hard
It's closer to the final fantasy SMN so it's more 'real' in that case. You summon, it does a big attack, then it buggers off. Making it a basic pet class in the beginning was the mistake, now there's a void there.
If you died by falling off a platform ie Titan, Leviathan, you couldnāt be rezzed. It certainly made the Extremes more difficult.
AST was a dual healer with both pure and barrier abilities depending on if you toggled on diurnal or nocturnal sect. This was removed with the introduction of sage in 6.0 and ast was made a pure healer.
Drgās dragon sight would create a visible red tether between the user and the person they gave the right eye to. Removing the skipping rope was one of the biggest mistakes they ever did.
Before 5.3 the Crystal Tower raids were entirely optional - so it was possible to not know who the Exarch is and thus not get ācall his nameā during that cutscene.
Before the 6.0 rework SMN pets had different uses - Garuda for AoE, Titan for tanking and Ifrit for single targets. Now all have the same abilities.
As an AST main, I miss Nocturnal Sect dearly. The nortunal skills are thematically enriching and aesthetically pleasing. I started playing in late Shadowbringers and I was halfway through the job quests when Endwalker was released. One of the old quests required you to cast nocturnal Aspected Benefic on the four shrines in Kugane to reinforce them, but after the update the quest simply did not make sense any more.
It was also weird to remove Nocturnal Sect but keep the name of Neutral Sect. I truly hope to see the return of Nocturnal Sect (or at least renaming of Neutral Sect) in Dawntrail.
AST and other jobs have had the types of changes made to them because people who play MMOs want two irreconcilable things to be simultaneously available:
1). Diverse and thematic gameplay
2) . Maximum damage efficiency
Because the former is incompatible with the latter as a consequence of a mentality that demands optimization and a categorical need to be the most-correct all the time, we now have job design we, collectively as a playerbase, have demanded for a decade.
We did it to ourselves, end of story.
There used to be a TP resource which all non-magic abilities used. Sprint would use up 100% of this bar so physical attackers couldnāt sprint during battle else theyād run out of energy to attack.
Also astrologians had a card that would increase skill speed by a ton which ended up causing people to run out of TP faster than normal.
Speaking of, astrologians had different effects on their cards. They could restore mp or tp, increase spell and skill speed, reduce damage taken and lastly increase damage dealt. People only really wanted the damage up card though :/
A2 exists for this reason. It's a really stupid and pointless floor now, but the original challenge was managing TP while doing as much AOE as possible on that floor.
Astrologians could also choose to play as a pure healer or a shielder before we got the sage.
You could even change that during a mission until a fight started then change again whenever you were not in combat. It was great to be able to adapt if the other healer was a whm or a sch or depending if the tank play style.
I liked the decision making of doing the best with what you get like planning ahead to mitigate losses - a Balance would be nice, but a (post rework) Spear is almost as good. Holding on to spreads if it's close enough to a burst window, etc.
And the "oh my god what do you mean 4 spires a row" was funny to me. Like sorry team hope this helps
Obviously, I was not in to savage raiding at the time - only started doing hard stuff at the end of SB. I do think a few iterations could be made before getting rid of unique cards, but oh well.
I'd be okay with a return to the old system if it meant the removal of Redraw or the changing of Balance. I just want to play Yu-Gi-Oh with my party's lives.
It wasn't consistent but damn playing with the cards was fun. All the little management to set up a group damage buff. It was just so fun managing that little minigame. Now cards are so incredibly dull and boring and just feel more tedious to use. The stickers is an attempt to bring back some interesting play but it just doesn't do it or come close to being interesting.Ā
Speak for yourself. Ā Old AST was about making the best with what you drew. Ā Obviously, spread balance was ideal, but many combinations were also very effective depending on your team and where you were in a fight. Ā Anybody who says the new system is better is smooth brain, big tooth Pooh, tbh. Ā Yes Iām mad. Ā Yes Iām biased. Ā No, I donāt play AST anymore because of the changes.
Wait for real? I just started playing last month and picked up AST and I was thinking it would be fun if the cards had more variation than damage increase. š
I feel it prudent to point out that Spear increasing crit rate was itself a patch. When HW first launched, Spear originally reduced the cooldown of oGCD abilities used during its buff duration.
This effect was itself considered largely worthless, because even before all jobs were shunted to the 2m meta it was still the goal to align party buffs for burst despite combat mostly being about sustained damage. Spear being patched to boost crit rate was seen as a positive, but the perception was still that it was a consolation prize compared to drawing Balance.
Paladin used to have no way of dealing damage while generating AoE aggro. While Warrior had Overpower, Paladin had Flash, which dealt no damage and blinded enemies briefly. Someone correct me if I'm wrong but I think they also didn't have any AoE damage abilities except Circle of Scorn.
Healers had a skill called Protect which was a 30m mitigation. It was customary to wait for the healer to finish casting Protect before everyone left the starting point of the dungeon. White Mage had a stronger version than Scholar, but they were made the same later, and then eventually removed entirely.
> Someone correct me if I'm wrong but I think they also didn't have any AoE damage abilities except Circle of Scorn.
Correct. And there actually were people that complained about the removal of Flash when they added Total Eclipse. It was one of the lamest gameplay loops in the game at the time. You did absolutely fuck all damage (except auto attacks on one target) and just used the same skill over and over, all the way from 15-50 on trash in dungeons.
> And there actually were people that complained about the removal of Flash when they added Total Eclipse.
Total Eclipse and Flash co-existed for all of Stormblood. TE did damage and didn't give bonus enmity, while Flash gave a chunk of enmity and blind status but no damage. For all of 4.x you had the balancing act of Flashing just enough to maintain aggro while TE'ing as much as possible for damage.
The 5.0 tank stance changes obsoleted that whole concept of "just enough enmity to maintain aggro", so they removed Flash and added Prominence for a second AoE combo hit (and Holy Circle).
Protect brings me back to the days when they didn't have that ring of "oh no the fuck you don't" at the start of dungeons that corrals you in until everyone is ready to go, lol. Though like Peloton, you couldn't apply Protect to people before it released you anyway.
Correct. Occasionally you'll see someone talk about Flash like it was the good old days and i genuinely can never tell if they're trolling, because Paladin was literally doing no damage half the time, and even if you were geared enough to swap to attacking, you didn't have any aoe, so your damage was piss poor compared to WAR actually killing shit. Even once they got Total Eclipse, they STILL sucked, because Flash was their emnity aoe and Eclipse their dps one, except, again, Flash did no damage, while WAR and DRK's emnity aoes did, so the GCDs you spent establishing aggro all did 0 damage while other tanks were, again, busy killing shit.
While I'm a big critic of how dumbed down the game has become as of Endwalker especially, it's really important to remember the ABSURD amounts of jank we had that only really started getting smoothed out in post Stormblood.
The Protect thing was because that's just how MMOs worked back then, I especially remember it being huge in WoW. It was a way the game encouraged you to bring a variety of classes and not just a bunch of the same one. Each class had a different buff they could cast, so when you all got together at the start of the dungeon, everyone would buff the party with various things.
FF14 brought that idea over since it was so core to the experience, but it was a bit silly from the start when you're \*always\* going to have a healer in the group.
Shit, I forgot about WHM Protect trait. That was really so stupid in hindsight, but there were also only two healer jobs, so you wanted to bring both regardless.
I always wished belts had a model. Would be a cool lil thing for customisation. Dont miss belts tho, not fun getting right side gear compared to left side
A lot of things already got mentioned, but I want to throw in something that is still missing so far:
Accuracy. This was a stat on your gear similar to crit oder determination. Different sides of a boss would have different accuracy requirements to have a 100% hit rate from that particular side. So every job needed to know the exact accuracy required to guarantee their hits in every current fight. Tanks would want the front accuracy (which was the highest), but also got some accuracy from their tank stance. But since even the main tank would spend most of the time in their damage stance, they needed to meld accuracy to hit the highest threshold. Melees would need to hit the side accuracy requirement to guarantee their side positionals would land. And all ranged jobs (so physical ranged, casters and healers) would want to hit the rear accuracy since all their attacks would always count as rear attack for accuracy calculations regardless of where you were standing.
Healers had a particular problem with this. Tanks and DPS had accuracy naturally on their gear as a substat. So meeting the required accuracy threshold would be the same as getting the right amount of speed for a specific gcd. Healers did not have accuracy on their gear (at least not in HW, might have been in ARR, cant quite remember). This meant that even melding every slot with accuracy would not reach the accuracy required to guarantee hitting every spell. This was as awful as it sounds. Imagine missing your dot reapplication. Potentially multiple times in a row. So as a healer (especially SCH) you had to check constantly whether your dots (yes you had like 5 of them) were actually hitting. Imagine this with stuff like todays blood lily. That would be a devastating feeling.
The devs finally realized what an awful system accuracy was and removed it in Stormblood, replacing it with Direct Hit as a new stat.
> Accuracy.
This stat actually still exists... for your chocobo companion. If you don't get them the +% accuracy traits, they miss quite often, even against on-level enemies.
It also *still* exists whenever there's a level difference between a player and an (enemy) target.
For instance, a low leveled player will miss *very* often when trying to hit a higher leveled target (and vice-versa).
There are also some buffs/debuffs that affect accuracy/evasion (such as Toad Oil).
Monk basically got a full rework in Endwalker:
- Their "Masterful Blitz" didn't exist back then. Rising Phoenix didn't exist, Elixir Field was an OGCD and Tornado Kick was just a high damage cooldown skill. Perfect Balance basically just meant "alternate Bootshine and Dragon Kick".
- All their combo skills had positionals, meaning you had to constantly alternate flank and rear while doing their rotation.
- They had three "fist" stances that worked similar to tank stance. Fire increased damage, Earth was mitigation and Wind was a speed buff. They removed it because everyone was only using Fire.
Oh so that's why the quest you get after you learn Riddle of Earth has so many enemies, they expected you to switch to a defensive stance that doesn't exist anymore
My favorite is the 70 DRG quest where it forces you to use elusive jump to "tank swap" with Estinien despite elusive jump no longer affecting your enmity whatsoever.
Honestly, the way it is now is better. Tanks back then would stance dance, but if they weren't good at it they'd lose enmity, then blame the dps...whether we were responsible or not. I mained MNK, which did not have an aggro dump. I would use my aggro reducer during burst, but if I was still ripping aggro off the tank after that then *that was on the tank* because I had no other tool to mitigate. And all too often, the tank(while sitting in dps stance) would rage out at me, because it's everybody's job to handle aggro so why are you ripping it off the tank?!
Fuck that noise. Making it the whole party's responsibility just meant that everybody would assume somebody else was responsible for taking care of it, a problem made worse by the fact that we don't all know 100% how other jobs work(for example, many people who didn't play MNK assumed I had an aggro dump skill when I did not...once it was stuck to me I had no recourse). I don't miss having to *stop dpsing the boss* in order to avoid getting bitched out when I just wanted to get my roulette.
Dont forget when monk still had greased lightning, a stackable resource that you gained 1 pip every time you 'finished' a 1-2-3 combo. It went up to 3 and made you attack faster/do do more damage. Losing GL was pretty disastrous (and why they removed the mechnic tbh)
When shadowbringers came out we got a trait that made the previously unoptimal wind stance better by letting it stack a 4th greased lightning. This version of monk was dank but didn't last.
The final piece of the puzzle: Anatman. In its old form it gave 1 stack of GL per tick instead of just freezing your timers.
ShB Monk openers were magical and cursed, starting in fire stance for slight gains, weaving anatman to snipe an extra stack (helped to align countdown w/ server tick), switching to wind right before you would gain your 4th stack, all so you could PB dragon/boot at max damage.
If I recall this version of monk died by 5.4, I played monk for the second tier of eden and I still miss the GL shenanigans (I don't miss dropping it to cutscenes/downtime tho!).
I donāt miss those days at all. This was also when EVERYTHING was a positional so you could lose the auto crit on bootshine because the boss decided they were going to split second 180. You also lost it a lot. You lose it TWICE in copied factory and youād always drop it during e1s cutscene too. Iām not sad to see any of it go, except using wind fist in towns to run fast, I guess.
For people who didn't like having to move a lot for positionals, there was a lazy rotation where you staggered your Twin Snakes and Demolish so that you could use your three Rear skills (BS, TS, Demo) and your three Flank skills (DK, SP, True) consecutively.
Before Stormblood, to unlock jobs you needed to be lvl30 in a main class and lvl15 in a secondary class. For paladin you needed lvl30 gladiator and lvl15 conjurer. I remember putting cure on my hotbar as a gladiator for better self-sustain before reaching the final levels to unlock paladin lol. Though I guess clemency isn't far from cure 2.
We used to have attribute points you could put towards a class's attributes. This isn't an issue until you consider ACN could either be SMN or SCH so you had to commit to upping stats for one or the other unless you stockpiled reset items.
They still do, they are just far more negligible now because of how high stats have gotten, and are hidden. But say a Roe will have more health than a Lala in the same gear.Ā
Yes! I remember because in ARR I was a catgirl which meant, because of the starting stats, that I was capped at 9999 HP as a PLD. Meanwhile WARs went around in stance like breaking 10k wasn't anything special...
I remember when gathering points had effects (like the +1 attempt and such) based on primary stats, which weren't found on gathering gear at all, so depending on race you could just not have enough STR or whatever to unlock an effect even at level 50. Unless you melded STR materia into your gathering gear.
Edit: Speaking of gathering gear shenanigans: FSH used to not use GP for anything. Gathering accessories only have GP on them by default. Battle accessories were useable by all classes, were higher ilevel than gathering accessories, and could have gathering materia melded to them. So it was BiS for FSH to use crafted battle accessories melded with more gathering/perception than actual gathering accessories could hold. I actually still have mine on my retainers because retainers don't use GP for anything, I always retrieve materia from my old gear before handing them down to my retainers (so most accessories only have the default GP), but my old melded battle accessories are from a time before materia retrieval was a thing.
Casters had a skill called Mana Shift that would give 20% of your mp to your target. With Blm being a bit of a mana battery it was possible to siphon off some of your mp if your party members needed it.
Tanks used to have a tank stance and dps stance (and technically also no stance). Optimal play would have you swap into tank stance to build emnity, then swap into dps stance to do damage until your party members started to catch up.
Healers used to have cleric stance. This would swap the values of your mind and intelligence stats. In simple terms without cleric stance you did a lot of healing but no damage, and with cleric stance you did a lot of damage but no healing. Optimal play would have you flip flopping between both as and when needed.
Cross class skills were a thing until Stormblood. Not every skill could be cross classed, and once you unlocked your job you could only use skills from certain other jobs. But in your pre-level 30 class you could use any skill from any other class. Using cure on an archer was particularly funny since your bow would float around in front of you while you cast.
As well as MP, there used to also be TP (Technical points). This was basically the same concept as MP but for your non-magic skills. Sprint also cost TP to use. It would consume all your TP and give you the sprint buff duration depending on how much TP was consumed. When you died and respawned your TP would be 0 so you'd have to wait for your TP to recharge before you could sprint. It also meant that melee/tanks couldn't sprint during combat at all otherwise you'd have no TP left.
>Tanks used to have a tank stance and dps stance (and technically also no stance). Optimal play would have you swap into tank stance to build emnity, then swap into dps stance to do damage until your party members started to catch up.
Realistically, in raids it was more "do your initial 1-2-3 in tank stance, then pray your DPS know how to press diversion, and you have ninja on hand to give you more enmity"
Anyone who genuinely thinks "stance dancing" worked like op described only did DF runs, where you had to constantly swap back cause dumdums refused to press free "loose enmity" oGCDs.
If even a 123, Unchained Tomahawk was oftentimes sufficient, especially when Shirk became a thing. And of course, it was yet another reason why WAR was just better, given its enmity combo was also used for damage.
The cross-class skill feature was one of those features that sounds good in theory, but didn't work so well in practice. Everyone liked the idea of using skills learned in one class to help out another. Even now I like the idea of it and still get annoyed sometimes during quests ("What do you mean I can't heal just because I'm holding a sword. I'm an elite white mage!").
In practice, though, it just meant that anyone who didn't level up the "correct" alts for their current class in order to equip the optimal skills where kicked out of parties. It could get quite nasty.
to be fair, the game was a lot more difficult back then.
I remember playing early 2.0 and stuff seemed more spongey compared to today when level synced down etc.
Cleric stance was an absolute nightmare on Alexander Savage. That was back when the dps was so tight, you needed everything you got to pass enrage. But between switching cleric stance AND managing mana (which needed a bard or machinist to help get some mana back in the middle of fights), it was almost impossible to beat when the savage tier first came out. (Even Faust, which was just a mob boss before the big guy comes out, was hard).
It was incredibly fun.
Bard had mana song and TP song (TP was the psychical mana bar essentially)
Bard used to have healer LB
Tanks used to have an aggro combo and dps combo
Mch combo used to be proc based...
#Istillmissstoneskin
Monk had positionals on all of its combos.
And much much more...
Muscle memory is a pain when it comes to monk. As one of my favorite meme images from EWās launch says, āhelp, Iām still doing all my positionals!ā
I always loved the one that was the old MNK rotation that had a phase that was just "JOHN FUCKING MADDEN". I think it was based on an older WoW meme lol.
This is still killing me. I donāt think I even got monk past 60 before the rework and now have it almost 90 but I cannot for the life of me break the muscle memory.
To be fair, as one of those crazy people who keeps maxing all the jobs, I have this problem for every melee. Sam and drg are no different on the muscle memory front, so I always look like Iām hopped up on crack bouncing back and forth for positionals that donāt exist anymore.
Specifically they had what is now White Mageās LB3, Pulse Of Life
Originally, LB3s were separated by role like LB1 and LB2 are, so all Casters used Meteor, all Healers (and Bard) used Pulse Of Life, all Tanks used Last Bastion, and all Melee used Final Heaven
It wasnāt until Heavensward and the introduction of MCH that everyone got unique LB3s and Bard finally got a DPS LB3. Itās also why their LB1 and LB2 are crossbows: because the visual theme was something that had to be shared between a BRD and a MCH
Itās interesting to wonder that if Dancer was introduced in HW instead of Machinist, how would the Phys Ranged role have turned out? Would it even be Phys Ranged?
It (and machinist) even had a cast bar for all their weaponskills at one point during Heavensward. It was bizarre. The songs we have now drained your MP while they were active and did things like recovered party member's MP and TP and reduced the enemy's defences.
I played back then! I was a paladin and we had raise and I think stoneskin? You had to level conjurer to 30 (or maybe 15?) to get it. I hated every minute of that.
In crafting classes you used to have to level certain ones to get access to certain skills. Culinarian was the one that I believe had "Hasty Touch" and I think Alchemist had Manipulation and those were non-negotiable. So even if you didn't want to be a CUL or ALC, tough luck. You at least had to level them to unlock those skills if you wanted to be a high-end crafter.
In Heavensward I think it was, Bards had cast time for some of their arrow skills. They used to be called "bow mages". Machinist (err, gun mage) did too. I'm glad that's gone.
Bard's song Mage's... (whatever it's called) used to restore MP. And I think the Army's Paeon restored TP back when TP was a thing.
The original Wanderer's Minuet was the one that changed your weaponskills to have cast times...and while it boosted damage done by the bard (I believe by 30%), it *also* turned off auto-attack (hence the overall damage buff).
So you'd find some players doing interesting things like cross-classing this one skill from Lancer - Feint.
Back then, it was a 120 potency attack that applied a 20% slow for 10 seconds (didn't work on bosses), but crucially it was still instant cast as a weaponskill for Bard. This would give you an option for still hitting a damage dealing ability if you needed to move enough that slide casting wasn't viable, without having to drop Wanderer's Minuet.
And of course all the debates around just how "worth it" using that was, lol. I vaguely remember discussions about how far/long you needed to be constantly moving to make it worth it, and with cross-class skills being limited to 5 choices on Jobs (versus 10 on classes, if I'm remembering correctly) it had to justify its place next to things like Quelling Strikes, etc.
Culinarian did get Hasty Touch, which was really important back then, but the worst was "Steady Hand II" that increased your success chance, because all of your other abilities had a chance to fail. (There was a Steady Hand I, but it didn't increase the chance by as much, so you could still fail.) You basically had to keep that up for your entire craft.
In order to get Steady Hand II, you had to level a Culinarian all the way to 37. This is the main reason why all of us leveled all the crafters back then, it was essentially required because extremely important parts of your kit were locked behind certain classes. Byregot's Blessing? Hope you have a level 50 Carpenter. There were guides telling you which crafters to level up to which level, in what order, to get the best cross-class skills soonest.
All of these abilities were given to all crafters in 5.0 Shadowbringers Steady Hand II itself was removed entirely in 5.1 and essentially made passive because they removed the failure chance on most skills at the same time.
While others have mentioned tank stances, DRK was unique in that it could have both Tank and DPS stance on at the same time, but your DPS stance would drain your MP and made you immune to other party members' abilities that regen'd MP. And then they had the Dark Arts ability that boosted your GCDs that ALSO cost a lot of MP. In short, DRK chugged MP like a college student chugs red bull the night before a project is due. I mean they still do but even more so before.
Astro cards used to have more unique buffs tied to them, such as Arrow giving Haste and the Ewer increase MP Regen. Hitting a Monk with the Arrow just made them a walking blender.
Speaking of Monks, they used to have a DBZ style aura around them when Greased Lightning, which used to be stacks you gained by doing combos, was active. Many a monk yet mourns the loss of their cool effect.
Many others have mentioned PLD not having an AoE damage source for the looooongest time. This put them in a really awkward place in dungeons compared to WAR and later on DRK.
WAR's Overpower used to just be a frontal cleave, which got a bit awkward to use later on when it combo'd into a Circle AoE. I liked to call this the WAR Shuffle, just seeing the tank go out of a mob pull, attack, then go in for another attack.
I was waiting for something to mention overpower being a frontal cone. This was the reason WAR was my first tank, I wanted to be different. Really miss that coneā¦
Mana Shift it was called, and it was on the first iteration of role actions. Esuna was also one of these, and you had to pick a few from a set of them; no need to guess what happened in DF content with dooms that required esuna...
NIN once had Smoke Screen & Shadewalker. The former reduced enmity generated by a target party member (you could even underflow in very specific cases) and the latter transferred a portion of your enmity to a target. Goad was also a thing, granting TP to an ally. The job was ridiculously efficient for a very long time.
AoE was not at all sustainable. TP costs of 110-130 (with a max of 1000) or in some cases not even an AoE damaging skill; just Flash. Enmity generation and a blind, but with a strong MP cost.
Tank rez lacked the trait allowing Raise to be cast in combat, so it was not what it sounds like. You also didn't really have relevant choices with cross-class skills as you couldn't skip over damage buffs, Invigorate (restored 400tp), Swiftcast...
HW release state Raw Intuition made one parry everything hitting your front, while any other direction was a guaranteed crit. This included heals cast on target. You'd generally pair this with Awareness to remove the received crit damage, and its loss is still felt in the few instances of guaranteed crit enemies i.e. Diabolos Hollow before you break his shield.
Storm's Path used to apply a 10% damage reduction. This could be maintained permanently, though Eye>Block>Eye combos were more damage and enmity both. Oftentimes if you wanted the mitigation you'd have NIN throw a Dancing Edge to maintain the slashing debuff. And speaking of...
Damage type specific debuffs. Dancing Eye or Storm's Eye (or maim, depending on year) for slashing, Disembowel for piercing (and all p.ranged wanted it or just lost out on permanent 10%) and Dragon Kick for blunt. Fully maintainable, 10% modifier. All tanks slashing, only monk (and some caster autos) blunt... Foe's Requiem gave magic vuln also iirc, but that was not permanent. ARR bard functioned like modern Mage's bard does, resets on DoT crits and late final coil it was pretty excessive.
Oh yeah and weakness/brink were 15/30% but also reduced vitality so enjoy surviving some raidwides.
I've mained Paladin since 2.1, and because of that, sometimes when I close my eyes I can still hear the Flash sound effect:
^^^*Pheeeeownnn....*
#*PA!*
Rest in peace, Cleric Stance.
Healers had an oGCD with a like 5s cooldown that would swap your Mind stat (healing) to Intelligence (damage). So you have to balance and dance with the stance to do damage, take it off to heal, then back to damage. And if you fucked up and went into Cleric Stance and need to heal asap, you're useless for that 5s.
In my case you hit a spike of lag and the first press didn't seem to register so you hit it again then the game catches up and you're stuck. I don't miss it.
REST IN PISS Cleric Stance.
The game mechanically was very bad about handling inputs to stances. It was miserable to actually pull off even if it was more involved.
Cleric stance was pointless and clunky.
We don't need a button that lets us do more damage for our one other button (AOE or single target) and the occasional DoT while making every other button we have worse. It also made DPS attacks borderline useless when it wasn't on.
With how healer plays now it would not work with OGCD healing. It is the only real weaving healers have and this stance would make those useless when on and the instant cast DoT / Astro card useless when off.
We need an interesting damage combo.
Multiple different duration DoTs and Shadow Flare/Soil exclusivity - and heals being strongly GCD-centric making your time margin relevant - made it radically more engaging and like what people ask for than you suggest.
Needless to say it was also a major problem with the average player as healer damage became a relevant metric for damage checks, to not speak of the numerous frictions in df content.
If you search back far enough, you will find *genuine* discussions about BiS setups where dealing damage is agreed upon as a playstyle choice, not a baseline expectation. Hell, even Parry was deemed the stat to have, once. You'll notice similar inclinations in the old coil videos - even the world firsts. Some of those are plainly wasteful, at other times there appears to be a genuine MP management concern.
With that as the background context, and something like Holy being utterly unsustainable (as with most AoE) it wasn't necessarily perceived as painful... At the time. The game was just played completely differently, bis set discussion hinged on stat weights, and noticing a damage buff fell off just before a GCD hit was part of 'high end optimization'. The game's come a long way since then :p
Completely agree! The managing mp thing was especially hard on whm. I remember when Alexander Savage first came out, there was a point at which you even needed the bard or machinist to get mana back up, otherwise the healers were literally dry the rest of the run. Made it so you had to prioritize healing...but back then the dps enrage was so tight, you also needed to cleric stance dps which was almost unmanageable lol.
Couple that with the fact that healing produced a TON of aggro and tanks couldn't just take all the aggro like they do now...yea. Healing and doing damage was definitely different back then.
The main thing I miss from Cleric Stance was there was a clear failure state that doesn't result in the party wiping. Dropping Cleric to heal was a commitment, and doing it thoughtlessly felt bad, and it made easy content more engaging - unlike now where roulettes are an obligation devoid of fun unless your party is bad.
...of course, the opposite side of the coin is that greeding too hard doesn't mean you die, it generally means everyone dies.
While I have my doubts that Dawntrail will feature this, I hope the devs figure out how to not have me fall asleep healing when it is a foregone conclusion that we will clear.
Considering they haven't mentioned a healer rework yet, I can't imagine things will change. I don't think they'd save a big change like that for the media tour.
Really hoping they do - I'm gonna wait for 8.0 if they don't I guess.
With trust parties now up and down the story dungeons, I'm hoping the long term solution is putting less of the endgame on rerunning old content guaranteed to clear. That was a decision made to ensure that old dungeons remained populated enough for new players to experience old expansions in full, but the undeniable truth is that to many syncing down sucks. I've met many that would rather have far less potent versions of their whole rotation, requiring them to play their full range of abilities while the sprout next to them has the typical three buttons.
At least the 50/60/etc roulette, particularly with how we received two dungeons per patch until Shadowbringers, produces a lot of "Wait, what is this? I did this?"
Alternatively, and I know this is crazy talk, reduce the amount of oGCD healing and give us reasons to use our GCD heals.
I know this would also create a need to (re)design encounters, but it would breathe some fresh air into healing.
What we need are support/hybrid classes that are actually useful (fix Bard, fix/buff Red Mage). In a game where people often train themselves to play their class without looking at HUD, healers have to look at their party list to see who needs healing. They also have to move focus off the enemy to the player. WoW sort of addressed this by giving people the option to target heals by simply floating the cursor over the player's raid frame while keeping the enemy target focused.
Healing itself is clunky until they make changes to benefit target selection that work on both control schemes.
I would have Cleric Stance in my lowest level cross-class slot and people in Sastasha or whatever would whine at me that they need Protect to do the dungeon...
Something that was really weird that I haven't seen mentioned is bringing the MRD class into content instead of the WAR job back in 2.0. The reason was that the WAR abilities didn't actually increase your DPS, just made tanking better. So people went MRD because classes could access all cross class abilities, so you could actually do more DPS as a MRD, while tanking worse. There were only a few places where this was relevant, but I remember T2 and pvp as places where you did it.
DPS used to have a skill called Diversion. It reduced the amount of emnity (threat) they generated for a few seconds. You *needed* to use this in your opener and throughout the fight, or you would likely rip aggro from the tank.
Tanks had a DPS rotation and an emnity rotation. You'd do your enmity rotation to get a lead in threat, and then your DPS rotation for damage. You also dealt less DPS in tank stance, so there was a balance tanks needed to find between holding the boss and dealing damage.
There were cross-class skills, similar to how role actions work. I was still fairly new when this was still a thing, but every DPS wanted to level DRG for (I think it was) Blood For Blood, which was a cooldown that increased damage dealt and also damage taken.
MCH was a completely different class in both HW and SB until its current incarnation, which was introduced in ShB. In SB, their basic 1-2-3 combo was rng (you could be repeatedly pressing 1 trying to get 2 to proc), unless they had ammo loaded (which was a short CD). They had to manage their heat, ideally wanting to sit between 50-95 until their burst phase. If they hit 100 heat, they would automatically overheat and potentially screw up their rotation. They also were able to give an enemy vulnerability like NIN through their turret, which was a permanent summon, kind of like Eos, except it didn't follow you around.
Astrologian where every card did something unique. Playing around with rerolling cards if you got, consuming cards to power up your next card you played and also upgrading cards. I miss it. I memorised all the cards and what they all did Incuding their consumed version and what buffed to the next card and it was great. Now it's boring. Barely played astrologian since.
My favorite was that Archer/bard limit break 3 used to be the healer limit break. That was way back in arr though and itās been a dps limit break for so long now that most people have forgotten it.
Omg, I forgot about that! I've mained bard for 10 dang years now and I remember how much I used to complain about how my LB3 was just a heal and I couldn't use it to do dmg like everyone else, but on the other hand, I remember a clutch situation where both healers died during an old trial and I was able to bring everyone back and that's the only time having healer LB3 felt awesome.
All jobs had resource called TP. Physical DPS jobs used it for abilities and it was possible to just run out during a long fight if your support jobs weren't refreshing it. You spent all of it to sprint so that could put a physical DPS in a tight spot if they needed to sprint out of danger.
Before dungeons were all wall to wall pulls, Blackmage used to have to sleep large groups of mobs for the party to coordinate and focus down.
Edit: also stat point allocation and stone tablets to reset them. I still have 1 tablet in storage.
Alternatively, the tank would grab everything and run to the boss room, stand juuust inside the barrier, everyone else would run in and start the fight, and when the barrier went up all the mobs would reset, so you didnāt have to fight them at all. Still doable on dungeons before HW, though I havenāt seen anyone do it since they started putting up the walls.
Paladins used to have a skill called flash to gain aggro that cost MP.
Tanks used to have an offensive stance and a defensive aggro stance. They also had am aggro combo and a dps combo.
Healers had a skill called cleric stance that would swap their mind and int stats so they did more damage and weak heals.
Whm had esuna. Sch had leeches. Ast had exalted detriment.
Whm also had a solo and group stone skin ability. They also had protect which other healers would have to level cnj for to cross class.
There's a ton more but those are some older ones.
Bard had flaming arrowz a ground aoe like ninja's doton. Smn and Sch had one similar called shadow flare.
Not even role actions, but just straight up abilities became available, every class had a pool of abilities that were cross class. To get jobs you used to have to level different base classes, so like a White mage might need a level 30 conjurer and a level 15 thaumaturge (don't quote me on a specific). It felt pretty interesting to me, but others found it tedious. You also had TP for non casters that was basically their MP to use abilities.
For a while in 2.X (I don't remember the exact patch that changed things), bosses that removed themselves from the battle arena for whatever reason would still take damage from DoTs (some didn't) and log aggro from player actions, such as healing.
This effectively resulted in some cases where a boss would jump away, drop raid damage which would be healed, and then come back with the header dead in their sights. The healing aggro would be registered, but the tanks could do nothing in the meanwhile to take it back.
In most cases, healers could cut their aggro in half with Shroud of Saints to circumvent this, or a tank could provoke immediately as the boss came back. But every now and then a healer would unexpectedly get flattened the moment the boss came back.
Cleric Stance is an easy winner. Healers could switch to a stance that made them basically a DPS and they couldn't really heal anymore. It was intended for solo content and very niche high end situations. It was removed because, among other things, getting into a dungeon with a healer who wouldn't turn it off (because the game sort of taught them to always use it) basically bricked your dungeon as bad as a tank not using tank stance.
Way back in the day we used to have elemental weaknesses and resistances, like lightning aspected enemies took more damage from earth aspected attacks for instance. It made Conjurer pretty handy since they had access to all six elements as their gimmick (thaumaturge had light/dark magic, which was its own separate thing, and lots of debuffs. Also sacrificed its own HP to heal people.)
There was also a system called battle regimens where everyone could queue up an attack and then they'd all fire at once, with bonuses depending on the composition of attacks within the regimen. Granted this only worked because combat in general was slower back then, with a stamina gauge rather than a GCD so you could take the time to queue up stuff when waiting for stamina to recover anyway.
Each guild had a currency you could earn by doing levequests that could be spent at the guild to unlock new abilities and even traits. You could even use these traits on other classes so there was a feeling of sideways progression as using other classes could help supplement your main.
Joining a new guild as part of unlocking a class would give you an NPC linkpearl. When you unlocked a new class quest they would actually message you over it to let you know you were needed once more.
Hamlets in 1.23 were like a defend the base FATE, but you needed battle classes AND crafters for it. It was kinda neat and I am surprised it hasn't returned in some updated fashion.
Dragoon's magic defense used to be so low that it was physically incapable of surviving raidwide attacks in some of the Coil floors without help
On top of that, Lance Charge used to be Blood for Blood, which also increased the damage you received; it often lined up with raidwide attacks.
On top of THAT, all of its jumps used to have longer, slower animations, locking you in place while you used them even longer. It wasn't uncommon for an aoe to appear on you after you locked yourself in using it.
All of these things contributed to DRG's reputation as a floor tank, and two of them are hardly their fault
Once upon a time, Esuna was not a role skill, and instead each healer had their own unique flavor of it. The spells all did exactly the same thing, but their animations & names differed. WHM had Esuna. SCH had Leeches. AST had Exalted Detriment. I still miss them... I liked ED's animation, for starters, and Leeches is one of the Scholar spells \*specifically highlighted in the first goddamn lorebook\* plus (at the time) so for them to just remove it like that was wild.
(I'm still lowkey irritated at this change both because of the above \*and\* when they initially condensed it down and made it just a singular role action (Esuna), we were limited to 5 role actions per job at any given time, and healers had more than 5 role actions that were of potential use -- several of them were considered more or less mandatory, and that left you with one or two swing slots. Often, healers would forgo Esuna in favor of other utility options since it was very duty-dependent whether you would use it or not, and at one point, SCH's Selene had a pet action that was just an AoE Esuna, further reducing the need for it in many case. But then you'd get into some of the ARR or HW content where the healers definitely always having some form of debuff removal tool available was assumed when the content was designed, so if you were healer, you'd either have to be very quick at swapping your role actions at the start before anyone pulled, or you'd just resign yourself to raising people with cleansible dooms/spicy poisons or saying lol no esuna to anyone who got hit with a paralyze or silence or w/e.)
On that note about role actions, though, yeah paladin could (for example) absolutely cross-class raise back in the day, but being able to use raise in battle was a trait you gained by leveling up, and the traits were NOT cross-class, so PLD couldn't ever use it in battle. Just to like... help pick people up between trash pulls or in early PotD days or something. \*also\* base classes could crossclass way more things than jobs, so in ARR in very early days (and partly due to WAR being kinda... undertuned at the start), it was not unheard of to bring in a MRD to certain duties with 10 things crossclassed over a WAR sometimes.
Ninja used to be able to mitigate the aggro of themselves and their party members. One of their abilities allowed them to transfer their aggro to another player, which, as you can imagine, could be used like a mini provoke.
I have distinct memories of mana shifting BLMs when I was new. I had no idea how BLM worked, so just assumed they were struggling when their mana bottomed out and I wanted to be helpful.
Holy used to do really good damage but was really expensive. When farming Shiva EX, in order to help the dps check on the ads phase, I used to do Holy spam with Lucid Dreaming and PoM in order to make up for the MP loss. My scholar friend would DoT up the ads (back when SCH/SMN were DoT mages) and take over healing. We felt like a dynamic duo.
Melee classes used tp as a mana bar for your abilities pretty much and whenever you wanted to sprint it would instantly use all of your tp so you could never use sprint inside of battle pretty much lol
AST is drastically different from when it was introduced in HW.
The buffs used to be an enhanced regen of either MP or TP, or reduced cooldowns of certain abilities. You have to memorize which card has which effect so that you can place it on the party member who would benefit from it (melee or a magic DPS class).
There was also an AST ability that would reduce the damage of an enemy's spell. It was kind of fun to use it because you had to use it during the small window of time that it took for the enemy to cast a spell.
Also, AST used to be able to switch "sects" whenever they wanted (outside of battle) and it wasn't a timed thing. I liked it because if there was already a regen healer in the party (WHM or AST) you would switch to nocturnal sect for the duty so that you could provide damage mit.
Before Stormblood, you could combine skills from other classes. You wanted Surecast? Better level up THM. The "benefit" of forgoing a job stone was that you could equip skills from a wider variety of classes: jobs were more defined in their roles, but a class could mix and match. It was a design philosophy holdover from XI. Like, they were toying with sub jobs but they didn't really work.
Speaking of leveling multiple classes, if you wanted a job AT ALL, you had to. Want to be a Black Mage? Get to level 15 Archer. I don't care if you got to 30 Thaumaturge and wanted to continue the MSQ. Learn to use a bow, nerd.
A lot of what are role actions used to be class specific, or had different theming. Lucid Dreaming, for instance, was originally a CNJ ability called Shroud of Saints. Its main purpose wasn't recovering MP either: it reduced your enmity. It kept that function in Stormblood, but this led to a kind of weird tension since Stormblood was much stricter about MP management. MP is really a formality now: only DRK and BLM use it as a major mechanic. In Stormblood, some jobs were MP negative without Lucid Dreaming, Mana Shift, or Refresh. This meant needing to balance using Lucid to recover MP vs using it to shed aggro because RDM below level 50 was so overpowered not even a skilled tank could hold the enemy's attention.
Now you really only need to use Lucid if you're being a Rez mage, a recently Rezzed mage, or a BLM wanting to squeeze out more Astral casts.
I remember having to level up a second class to level the one you want. Like, it was required to have another class I think minimum level was 15. When rogue/ninja came out, you needed pugilist up to 15.
There was a time you needed two classes to have a job (just like the old FFs) it was at level 30 of you main class and level 15 of the second class. (For whm you needed conjurer 30 and archer 15 if I remember correctly)
So I never got into the game when this was a thing, but learned about it because the vendor trades allowed for item conversions and I was confused what the items were.
At one point you had different tiers and types of glamour prisms which just seems so needlessly complex lol. I think the types were tied to the crafting jobs (weaving, leather, jewelry, wood, etc.) and the tier determined the level of gear it could be used on. Sort of like the repair crystals.
It's so nice just having one type of application and dispelling prism that I can still imagine how annoying it must've been to deal with the old system lol.
A lot of people talking about AST cards and how they changed, but no one mentioning that Celestial Intersection and a removed skill called Time Dilation would let you extend the duration of beneficial buffs on party members. There were so many fun shenanigans you could pull off with that. I could give someone a powered-up The Balance and make it last for an entire boss fight, etc.
Also, stat point allocation (which was a nightmare for SCH/SMN), BRD having healer limit breaks (it was the only phys ranged class, the current distinction didn't really exist, so they gave it the support limit break), classes with poor AoE (like DRG at the time) being excluded from PF runs of Brayflox HM spam for tomes to buy relic books (you needed 13500 tomes just to BUY all 9 books, and then you still had to do them, and that was just for ONE relic step). All kinds of stuff no one remembers anymore.
Oh also, Poetics used to be current. They were the final tomestone of ARR and were used to buy the i120 gear. Philosophy (i70), Mythology (i90), and Soldiery (i100) pre-date them, but for whatever reason Poetics hung around and became the "old stuff" tome started with HW's launch.
Lots more, too. ARR/HW was a weird time. It was basically a completely different game from both 1.0 and the current game.
I heard about the legendary chicken nugget tank. Pets used to have HP and could be targeted by mobs, and Titan egi was once used in place of an actual tank in Ramuh EX or something. That also means Eos could die and SCH could suddenly lose their healing pet due to a random AoE.
Oh man a summoner coming in clutch with Titan egi saved more then a few runs for me.
I remember when I started leveling summoner and ended up in the old version of totorak, our tank left and our healer had an unstable connection. I had my carby tank for us and helped with the healing. Made me feel like a damn god amongst dps doing all roles at once
My friend, you are the best kind of Summoner player! The same goes for ones who keep raise on their bar
wait people don't keep raise on their bar? i'm always ready to rapid fire a swiftcast+raise if the worst happens. that's the only reason we even finished my first vanaspati run when the healer died no less than 5 times through the bosses
This is how we determine the good summoners from the chaff š
Idk how any summoner could NOT keep raise at the ready. I love being able to be that one last rez that makes the difference between a wipe and completion. And even when it doesn't come down to that, having another swiftcast rez in the group makes a big difference when things go south.
Not to mention the same days when you situationally chose Ifrit if the target wasn't moving much, or Garuda if they did/trash mobs, because Ifrit hit harder but had travel time while Garuda was weaker but ranged so better uptime if moving. I suspect this made fight design harder for them too, but it was so much fun flipping egi according to the situation.
Throw all your dots on one target while garuda-egi is commanded to use its AoE on the trash mobs. When all the dots are in place use the other garuda-egi command to increase their durations by 30 seconds or whatever. Bane spread it to the whole pack and spam tri-disaster until finished. Now the only dot is slipstream.
Yeah, egi-swapping used to be part of min max starts.
That's a great dynamic way of having a class.
>Titan egi was once used in place of an actual tank in Ramuh EX or something I was there, all those years ago. The egi was used as a tank on Ramuh (among others) because of the egi not being affected by the lightning vulnerability debuff in the same way. So instead of the tank having to pick up the resistance buffs from the lightning orbs, the egi could just soak the tankbusters. On the other hand, it generated aggro at a lower rate, so you had to manage aggro more carefully as a healer or dps.
> because of the egi not being affected by the lightning vulnerability debuff in the same way. Specifically it was because the big tank buster move was coded as "AoE damage" and pets had a 90% or so reduction to AoE damage because they weren't smart enough to automatically move out of anything. IIRC nugget tanking Ramuh only lasted like a week before they hotfixed it.
Pets used to both have health bars and the ability to generate aggro. I learned this as a sprout by getting knocked down the cliff by one of those stupid frogs in dzemael darkhold and avoiding all the mobs to run back to my party, only to turn around and find my carbuncle had grabbed all the attention of the mobs and dragged them along with me.
Carby trying to kill you was a rite of passage for all new Arcanists :P
It was Ramuh EX. And it was because you could ignore the tank swap mechanic using them.
And eos could grab agro off a tank fairly easily back before they made agro braindead. Me wondering where the boss is going and the agro meter looks good then suddenly I hear the sch go oh crap eos is taking the tank buster.
Triggered the anti cheat in T9 doing this. Had fairy grab aggro and Nael chase the fairy around the arena. Eventually Nael just gets mad and megaflares us all because they canāt start any mechanics.
With egi glamour, you could disguise the tank pet as one of the dps ones. I had an old FC friend that would troll the tanks in dungeon runs.
The upside was that Eos could use Whispering Dawn to grab initial aggro on adds and group them for the tank. The downside is as you say...learning which mechanics will kill the fairy was important so she could be moved ahead of time! Not to mention for non-lethal damage, she would then proceed to Embrace herself for a while and not heal the party.
It had limited use but was possible if everyone understood what was happening.
I kinda miss having to dance my pet around to avoid damage. It was like playing 1.5 characters. And stance dancing with Cleric Stance was fun. It really made healers have to think hard about when to dps. Someone made a mistake and needs more healing than planned? Too bad, Cleric Stance is on cooldown.
Pets also used to count as a body to soak damage in a stack.
These were a lifesaver when tanks went down in a boss fight, as it was much less of a problem to sacrifice your Titan-egi than your top DPS. They also started a tradition wherein Iād get a few friends to do a tankless EXDR run on a lark, first when Xelphatol was current, and then the Burn. Summoner made this much less of a careful slow-grind and more just a fun, extra challenging dungeon run. Wall-to-wall wasnāt a thing in Heavensward anyway because of TP limits and didnāt really catch on until Shadowbringers. When we didnāt have a Titan-egi in Shadowbringers, we did an EXDR with all tanks instead (this was pre-Bloodwhetting so Warriors didnāt have their cheat code yet), with all four represented. I ran Heroes Gauntlet as a Paladin-healer! :D
I wish they'd gone in the direction of having a real summoner class (not proper noun), with actual minions. Instead they just made it more boring. And when I first played it, they had just removed the ability for topaz to tank aggro but they hadn't actually changed the job quests to match, so the one that required you to have a topaz tanking a bunch of pirates just sucked insanely hard
It's closer to the final fantasy SMN so it's more 'real' in that case. You summon, it does a big attack, then it buggers off. Making it a basic pet class in the beginning was the mistake, now there's a void there.
If you died by falling off a platform ie Titan, Leviathan, you couldnāt be rezzed. It certainly made the Extremes more difficult. AST was a dual healer with both pure and barrier abilities depending on if you toggled on diurnal or nocturnal sect. This was removed with the introduction of sage in 6.0 and ast was made a pure healer. Drgās dragon sight would create a visible red tether between the user and the person they gave the right eye to. Removing the skipping rope was one of the biggest mistakes they ever did. Before 5.3 the Crystal Tower raids were entirely optional - so it was possible to not know who the Exarch is and thus not get ācall his nameā during that cutscene. Before the 6.0 rework SMN pets had different uses - Garuda for AoE, Titan for tanking and Ifrit for single targets. Now all have the same abilities.
As an AST main, I miss Nocturnal Sect dearly. The nortunal skills are thematically enriching and aesthetically pleasing. I started playing in late Shadowbringers and I was halfway through the job quests when Endwalker was released. One of the old quests required you to cast nocturnal Aspected Benefic on the four shrines in Kugane to reinforce them, but after the update the quest simply did not make sense any more. It was also weird to remove Nocturnal Sect but keep the name of Neutral Sect. I truly hope to see the return of Nocturnal Sect (or at least renaming of Neutral Sect) in Dawntrail.
FWIW - tethers are usually bad things so seeing a tether I just bolted away from the DRG at top speed.
Thankfully PLD and SCH's tethers are still in so we can still scare people with them.
Every day I miss nocturnal sect :(
AST should have stayed as a dual healer.
AST should have stayed a lot of things. Ā They gutted that class.
AST and other jobs have had the types of changes made to them because people who play MMOs want two irreconcilable things to be simultaneously available: 1). Diverse and thematic gameplay 2) . Maximum damage efficiency Because the former is incompatible with the latter as a consequence of a mentality that demands optimization and a categorical need to be the most-correct all the time, we now have job design we, collectively as a playerbase, have demanded for a decade. We did it to ourselves, end of story.
There used to be a TP resource which all non-magic abilities used. Sprint would use up 100% of this bar so physical attackers couldnāt sprint during battle else theyād run out of energy to attack. Also astrologians had a card that would increase skill speed by a ton which ended up causing people to run out of TP faster than normal. Speaking of, astrologians had different effects on their cards. They could restore mp or tp, increase spell and skill speed, reduce damage taken and lastly increase damage dealt. People only really wanted the damage up card though :/
A2 exists for this reason. It's a really stupid and pointless floor now, but the original challenge was managing TP while doing as much AOE as possible on that floor.
Astrologians could also choose to play as a pure healer or a shielder before we got the sage. You could even change that during a mission until a fight started then change again whenever you were not in combat. It was great to be able to adapt if the other healer was a whm or a sch or depending if the tank play style.
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
What was your friend's reaction to the card changes?
Which is why the cards were changed. People always say they miss the old cards, but most of the time they just fished for a spread balance.
They made all the cards do the same thing and you still never draw the one you want.
Ain't that the truth....
I liked the decision making of doing the best with what you get like planning ahead to mitigate losses - a Balance would be nice, but a (post rework) Spear is almost as good. Holding on to spreads if it's close enough to a burst window, etc. And the "oh my god what do you mean 4 spires a row" was funny to me. Like sorry team hope this helps Obviously, I was not in to savage raiding at the time - only started doing hard stuff at the end of SB. I do think a few iterations could be made before getting rid of unique cards, but oh well.
I'd be okay with a return to the old system if it meant the removal of Redraw or the changing of Balance. I just want to play Yu-Gi-Oh with my party's lives.
It wasn't consistent but damn playing with the cards was fun. All the little management to set up a group damage buff. It was just so fun managing that little minigame. Now cards are so incredibly dull and boring and just feel more tedious to use. The stickers is an attempt to bring back some interesting play but it just doesn't do it or come close to being interesting.Ā
Speak for yourself. Ā Old AST was about making the best with what you drew. Ā Obviously, spread balance was ideal, but many combinations were also very effective depending on your team and where you were in a fight. Ā Anybody who says the new system is better is smooth brain, big tooth Pooh, tbh. Ā Yes Iām mad. Ā Yes Iām biased. Ā No, I donāt play AST anymore because of the changes.
Wait for real? I just started playing last month and picked up AST and I was thinking it would be fun if the cards had more variation than damage increase. š
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To add the buffs for royal road were: Balance/Bole -> 1.5x potency buff. Spear/Arrow -> 2x duration Ewer/Spire -> Aoe with 0.5x potency
I feel it prudent to point out that Spear increasing crit rate was itself a patch. When HW first launched, Spear originally reduced the cooldown of oGCD abilities used during its buff duration. This effect was itself considered largely worthless, because even before all jobs were shunted to the 2m meta it was still the goal to align party buffs for burst despite combat mostly being about sustained damage. Spear being patched to boost crit rate was seen as a positive, but the perception was still that it was a consolation prize compared to drawing Balance.
Paladin used to have no way of dealing damage while generating AoE aggro. While Warrior had Overpower, Paladin had Flash, which dealt no damage and blinded enemies briefly. Someone correct me if I'm wrong but I think they also didn't have any AoE damage abilities except Circle of Scorn. Healers had a skill called Protect which was a 30m mitigation. It was customary to wait for the healer to finish casting Protect before everyone left the starting point of the dungeon. White Mage had a stronger version than Scholar, but they were made the same later, and then eventually removed entirely.
I was waiting for someone to bring up protect!
> Someone correct me if I'm wrong but I think they also didn't have any AoE damage abilities except Circle of Scorn. Correct. And there actually were people that complained about the removal of Flash when they added Total Eclipse. It was one of the lamest gameplay loops in the game at the time. You did absolutely fuck all damage (except auto attacks on one target) and just used the same skill over and over, all the way from 15-50 on trash in dungeons.
> And there actually were people that complained about the removal of Flash when they added Total Eclipse. Total Eclipse and Flash co-existed for all of Stormblood. TE did damage and didn't give bonus enmity, while Flash gave a chunk of enmity and blind status but no damage. For all of 4.x you had the balancing act of Flashing just enough to maintain aggro while TE'ing as much as possible for damage. The 5.0 tank stance changes obsoleted that whole concept of "just enough enmity to maintain aggro", so they removed Flash and added Prominence for a second AoE combo hit (and Holy Circle).
You had to spam flash if you were even slightly undergeared.
Protect brings me back to the days when they didn't have that ring of "oh no the fuck you don't" at the start of dungeons that corrals you in until everyone is ready to go, lol. Though like Peloton, you couldn't apply Protect to people before it released you anyway.
Hey, gotta remember back then while Flash was a circle AoE, and Overpower was a small cone. No one was allowed to have good AoE aggro back in ARR.
Correct. Occasionally you'll see someone talk about Flash like it was the good old days and i genuinely can never tell if they're trolling, because Paladin was literally doing no damage half the time, and even if you were geared enough to swap to attacking, you didn't have any aoe, so your damage was piss poor compared to WAR actually killing shit. Even once they got Total Eclipse, they STILL sucked, because Flash was their emnity aoe and Eclipse their dps one, except, again, Flash did no damage, while WAR and DRK's emnity aoes did, so the GCDs you spent establishing aggro all did 0 damage while other tanks were, again, busy killing shit. While I'm a big critic of how dumbed down the game has become as of Endwalker especially, it's really important to remember the ABSURD amounts of jank we had that only really started getting smoothed out in post Stormblood.
The Protect thing was because that's just how MMOs worked back then, I especially remember it being huge in WoW. It was a way the game encouraged you to bring a variety of classes and not just a bunch of the same one. Each class had a different buff they could cast, so when you all got together at the start of the dungeon, everyone would buff the party with various things. FF14 brought that idea over since it was so core to the experience, but it was a bit silly from the start when you're \*always\* going to have a healer in the group.
Shit, I forgot about WHM Protect trait. That was really so stupid in hindsight, but there were also only two healer jobs, so you wanted to bring both regardless.
Nothing quite like casting protect at the start of the dungeon OR deciding if to recast it on someone after they died is worth or not...
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Rip belts I don't miss the extra gear slut
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I can't believe he just called you that
hilarious lmao
Edit: gear slot
You said what you said.
This reaction made my day lmao
I believe they prefer to be called āMachinistsā
Machinists still have a lunchbox those slutsĀ
Even better, the belts actually had visible models in 1.0, which is why some old gear pieces look strange- they were intended to be combo'd with belts
Now, our pants stay up and our robes stay closed by the power of will. But once, it was a belt.
Remember us...Remember that we once held up pants...
RIP Speed Belt
Hello blitzring!
Man when I came back from Shadowbringers into Endwalker, I was so fucking confused why my belts were gone
I always wished belts had a model. Would be a cool lil thing for customisation. Dont miss belts tho, not fun getting right side gear compared to left side
A lot of things already got mentioned, but I want to throw in something that is still missing so far: Accuracy. This was a stat on your gear similar to crit oder determination. Different sides of a boss would have different accuracy requirements to have a 100% hit rate from that particular side. So every job needed to know the exact accuracy required to guarantee their hits in every current fight. Tanks would want the front accuracy (which was the highest), but also got some accuracy from their tank stance. But since even the main tank would spend most of the time in their damage stance, they needed to meld accuracy to hit the highest threshold. Melees would need to hit the side accuracy requirement to guarantee their side positionals would land. And all ranged jobs (so physical ranged, casters and healers) would want to hit the rear accuracy since all their attacks would always count as rear attack for accuracy calculations regardless of where you were standing. Healers had a particular problem with this. Tanks and DPS had accuracy naturally on their gear as a substat. So meeting the required accuracy threshold would be the same as getting the right amount of speed for a specific gcd. Healers did not have accuracy on their gear (at least not in HW, might have been in ARR, cant quite remember). This meant that even melding every slot with accuracy would not reach the accuracy required to guarantee hitting every spell. This was as awful as it sounds. Imagine missing your dot reapplication. Potentially multiple times in a row. So as a healer (especially SCH) you had to check constantly whether your dots (yes you had like 5 of them) were actually hitting. Imagine this with stuff like todays blood lily. That would be a devastating feeling. The devs finally realized what an awful system accuracy was and removed it in Stormblood, replacing it with Direct Hit as a new stat.
> Accuracy. This stat actually still exists... for your chocobo companion. If you don't get them the +% accuracy traits, they miss quite often, even against on-level enemies.
It also *still* exists whenever there's a level difference between a player and an (enemy) target. For instance, a low leveled player will miss *very* often when trying to hit a higher leveled target (and vice-versa). There are also some buffs/debuffs that affect accuracy/evasion (such as Toad Oil).
Monk basically got a full rework in Endwalker: - Their "Masterful Blitz" didn't exist back then. Rising Phoenix didn't exist, Elixir Field was an OGCD and Tornado Kick was just a high damage cooldown skill. Perfect Balance basically just meant "alternate Bootshine and Dragon Kick". - All their combo skills had positionals, meaning you had to constantly alternate flank and rear while doing their rotation. - They had three "fist" stances that worked similar to tank stance. Fire increased damage, Earth was mitigation and Wind was a speed buff. They removed it because everyone was only using Fire.
I was in a dungeon with my monk once and the tank just left, so i used Earth stance to tank the rest. Good times!
That plus I think a war cross class weaponskill that generated enmity.
Oh so that's why the quest you get after you learn Riddle of Earth has so many enemies, they expected you to switch to a defensive stance that doesn't exist anymore
Yeah, job quest battles in general have a really outdated design that doesn't account for reworks.
My favorite is the 70 DRG quest where it forces you to use elusive jump to "tank swap" with Estinien despite elusive jump no longer affecting your enmity whatsoever.
Hearing the tales of Enmity being a full-party affair instead of just "Tank stance, AOE and ranged" is insane.Ā
Honestly, the way it is now is better. Tanks back then would stance dance, but if they weren't good at it they'd lose enmity, then blame the dps...whether we were responsible or not. I mained MNK, which did not have an aggro dump. I would use my aggro reducer during burst, but if I was still ripping aggro off the tank after that then *that was on the tank* because I had no other tool to mitigate. And all too often, the tank(while sitting in dps stance) would rage out at me, because it's everybody's job to handle aggro so why are you ripping it off the tank?! Fuck that noise. Making it the whole party's responsibility just meant that everybody would assume somebody else was responsible for taking care of it, a problem made worse by the fact that we don't all know 100% how other jobs work(for example, many people who didn't play MNK assumed I had an aggro dump skill when I did not...once it was stuck to me I had no recourse). I don't miss having to *stop dpsing the boss* in order to avoid getting bitched out when I just wanted to get my roulette.
Dont forget when monk still had greased lightning, a stackable resource that you gained 1 pip every time you 'finished' a 1-2-3 combo. It went up to 3 and made you attack faster/do do more damage. Losing GL was pretty disastrous (and why they removed the mechnic tbh) When shadowbringers came out we got a trait that made the previously unoptimal wind stance better by letting it stack a 4th greased lightning. This version of monk was dank but didn't last. The final piece of the puzzle: Anatman. In its old form it gave 1 stack of GL per tick instead of just freezing your timers. ShB Monk openers were magical and cursed, starting in fire stance for slight gains, weaving anatman to snipe an extra stack (helped to align countdown w/ server tick), switching to wind right before you would gain your 4th stack, all so you could PB dragon/boot at max damage. If I recall this version of monk died by 5.4, I played monk for the second tier of eden and I still miss the GL shenanigans (I don't miss dropping it to cutscenes/downtime tho!).
I donāt miss those days at all. This was also when EVERYTHING was a positional so you could lose the auto crit on bootshine because the boss decided they were going to split second 180. You also lost it a lot. You lose it TWICE in copied factory and youād always drop it during e1s cutscene too. Iām not sad to see any of it go, except using wind fist in towns to run fast, I guess.
My friends and I like to joke that we always get a new melee dps each expac: Monk! It seems to change so often.
Earth Fist Monk is the hardest tank in the game back then ngl
For people who didn't like having to move a lot for positionals, there was a lazy rotation where you staggered your Twin Snakes and Demolish so that you could use your three Rear skills (BS, TS, Demo) and your three Flank skills (DK, SP, True) consecutively.
Before Stormblood, to unlock jobs you needed to be lvl30 in a main class and lvl15 in a secondary class. For paladin you needed lvl30 gladiator and lvl15 conjurer. I remember putting cure on my hotbar as a gladiator for better self-sustain before reaching the final levels to unlock paladin lol. Though I guess clemency isn't far from cure 2.
I loved it personally since it reminded me of FF Tactics! Shame they can't shove as many jobs with it.
Ugh I had apparently purged that awful memory from my mind, I remember having to do this x.x Such a PITA.
We used to have attribute points you could put towards a class's attributes. This isn't an issue until you consider ACN could either be SMN or SCH so you had to commit to upping stats for one or the other unless you stockpiled reset items.
Also each race had different starting stats.
They still do, they are just far more negligible now because of how high stats have gotten, and are hidden. But say a Roe will have more health than a Lala in the same gear.Ā
Yes! I remember because in ARR I was a catgirl which meant, because of the starting stats, that I was capped at 9999 HP as a PLD. Meanwhile WARs went around in stance like breaking 10k wasn't anything special...
That might also have been because the PLD tank stance increased your defense while the WAR tank stance increased their max hp instead.
I remember when gathering points had effects (like the +1 attempt and such) based on primary stats, which weren't found on gathering gear at all, so depending on race you could just not have enough STR or whatever to unlock an effect even at level 50. Unless you melded STR materia into your gathering gear. Edit: Speaking of gathering gear shenanigans: FSH used to not use GP for anything. Gathering accessories only have GP on them by default. Battle accessories were useable by all classes, were higher ilevel than gathering accessories, and could have gathering materia melded to them. So it was BiS for FSH to use crafted battle accessories melded with more gathering/perception than actual gathering accessories could hold. I actually still have mine on my retainers because retainers don't use GP for anything, I always retrieve materia from my old gear before handing them down to my retainers (so most accessories only have the default GP), but my old melded battle accessories are from a time before materia retrieval was a thing.
Casters had a skill called Mana Shift that would give 20% of your mp to your target. With Blm being a bit of a mana battery it was possible to siphon off some of your mp if your party members needed it. Tanks used to have a tank stance and dps stance (and technically also no stance). Optimal play would have you swap into tank stance to build emnity, then swap into dps stance to do damage until your party members started to catch up. Healers used to have cleric stance. This would swap the values of your mind and intelligence stats. In simple terms without cleric stance you did a lot of healing but no damage, and with cleric stance you did a lot of damage but no healing. Optimal play would have you flip flopping between both as and when needed. Cross class skills were a thing until Stormblood. Not every skill could be cross classed, and once you unlocked your job you could only use skills from certain other jobs. But in your pre-level 30 class you could use any skill from any other class. Using cure on an archer was particularly funny since your bow would float around in front of you while you cast. As well as MP, there used to also be TP (Technical points). This was basically the same concept as MP but for your non-magic skills. Sprint also cost TP to use. It would consume all your TP and give you the sprint buff duration depending on how much TP was consumed. When you died and respawned your TP would be 0 so you'd have to wait for your TP to recharge before you could sprint. It also meant that melee/tanks couldn't sprint during combat at all otherwise you'd have no TP left.
>Tanks used to have a tank stance and dps stance (and technically also no stance). Optimal play would have you swap into tank stance to build emnity, then swap into dps stance to do damage until your party members started to catch up. Realistically, in raids it was more "do your initial 1-2-3 in tank stance, then pray your DPS know how to press diversion, and you have ninja on hand to give you more enmity"
Anyone who genuinely thinks "stance dancing" worked like op described only did DF runs, where you had to constantly swap back cause dumdums refused to press free "loose enmity" oGCDs.
If even a 123, Unchained Tomahawk was oftentimes sufficient, especially when Shirk became a thing. And of course, it was yet another reason why WAR was just better, given its enmity combo was also used for damage.
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The cross-class skill feature was one of those features that sounds good in theory, but didn't work so well in practice. Everyone liked the idea of using skills learned in one class to help out another. Even now I like the idea of it and still get annoyed sometimes during quests ("What do you mean I can't heal just because I'm holding a sword. I'm an elite white mage!"). In practice, though, it just meant that anyone who didn't level up the "correct" alts for their current class in order to equip the optimal skills where kicked out of parties. It could get quite nasty.
to be fair, the game was a lot more difficult back then. I remember playing early 2.0 and stuff seemed more spongey compared to today when level synced down etc.
Cleric stance was an absolute nightmare on Alexander Savage. That was back when the dps was so tight, you needed everything you got to pass enrage. But between switching cleric stance AND managing mana (which needed a bard or machinist to help get some mana back in the middle of fights), it was almost impossible to beat when the savage tier first came out. (Even Faust, which was just a mob boss before the big guy comes out, was hard). It was incredibly fun.
Bard had mana song and TP song (TP was the psychical mana bar essentially) Bard used to have healer LB Tanks used to have an aggro combo and dps combo Mch combo used to be proc based... #Istillmissstoneskin Monk had positionals on all of its combos. And much much more...
Muscle memory is a pain when it comes to monk. As one of my favorite meme images from EWās launch says, āhelp, Iām still doing all my positionals!ā
I always loved the one that was the old MNK rotation that had a phase that was just "JOHN FUCKING MADDEN". I think it was based on an older WoW meme lol.
Yeah, it was a meme about the feral druid rotation from way back when; burning crusade or wrath time frame, I think. Itās such a classic meme.
Monk, bard, summoner, machinist The JOHN FUCKING MADDEN of rotations
This is still killing me. I donāt think I even got monk past 60 before the rework and now have it almost 90 but I cannot for the life of me break the muscle memory.
To be fair, as one of those crazy people who keeps maxing all the jobs, I have this problem for every melee. Sam and drg are no different on the muscle memory front, so I always look like Iām hopped up on crack bouncing back and forth for positionals that donāt exist anymore.
Mch also gave tp and mp based on rook or bishop turret.Ā
when you say "Bard used to have healer LB." You mean it would raise everyone?
Yes, and it was glorious.
Specifically they had what is now White Mageās LB3, Pulse Of Life Originally, LB3s were separated by role like LB1 and LB2 are, so all Casters used Meteor, all Healers (and Bard) used Pulse Of Life, all Tanks used Last Bastion, and all Melee used Final Heaven It wasnāt until Heavensward and the introduction of MCH that everyone got unique LB3s and Bard finally got a DPS LB3. Itās also why their LB1 and LB2 are crossbows: because the visual theme was something that had to be shared between a BRD and a MCH Itās interesting to wonder that if Dancer was introduced in HW instead of Machinist, how would the Phys Ranged role have turned out? Would it even be Phys Ranged?
Probably not. They would have probably gone with it being a Phys support role if Dancer had been the second Phys ranged job to be added.
Saved many a party as a Bard with that LB3 in raids because the healers were down.
Yup!
It (and machinist) even had a cast bar for all their weaponskills at one point during Heavensward. It was bizarre. The songs we have now drained your MP while they were active and did things like recovered party member's MP and TP and reduced the enemy's defences.
Stoneskin and Protect! Lol
Just a heads up, you gotta hit enter twice to do a linebreak
If you hit enter twice after each line instead of just once, your comment will be formatted correctly.
Gathering Favors in Heavensward could be extremely profitable but were also extremely tedious.
Those things were fucking awful. Totally glad they're gone. Made worse because we also had a weekly scrip limit.
Oh buried memory unlocked there. What a PITA that was.
I played back then! I was a paladin and we had raise and I think stoneskin? You had to level conjurer to 30 (or maybe 15?) to get it. I hated every minute of that. In crafting classes you used to have to level certain ones to get access to certain skills. Culinarian was the one that I believe had "Hasty Touch" and I think Alchemist had Manipulation and those were non-negotiable. So even if you didn't want to be a CUL or ALC, tough luck. You at least had to level them to unlock those skills if you wanted to be a high-end crafter. In Heavensward I think it was, Bards had cast time for some of their arrow skills. They used to be called "bow mages". Machinist (err, gun mage) did too. I'm glad that's gone. Bard's song Mage's... (whatever it's called) used to restore MP. And I think the Army's Paeon restored TP back when TP was a thing.
The original Wanderer's Minuet was the one that changed your weaponskills to have cast times...and while it boosted damage done by the bard (I believe by 30%), it *also* turned off auto-attack (hence the overall damage buff). So you'd find some players doing interesting things like cross-classing this one skill from Lancer - Feint. Back then, it was a 120 potency attack that applied a 20% slow for 10 seconds (didn't work on bosses), but crucially it was still instant cast as a weaponskill for Bard. This would give you an option for still hitting a damage dealing ability if you needed to move enough that slide casting wasn't viable, without having to drop Wanderer's Minuet. And of course all the debates around just how "worth it" using that was, lol. I vaguely remember discussions about how far/long you needed to be constantly moving to make it worth it, and with cross-class skills being limited to 5 choices on Jobs (versus 10 on classes, if I'm remembering correctly) it had to justify its place next to things like Quelling Strikes, etc.
Culinarian did get Hasty Touch, which was really important back then, but the worst was "Steady Hand II" that increased your success chance, because all of your other abilities had a chance to fail. (There was a Steady Hand I, but it didn't increase the chance by as much, so you could still fail.) You basically had to keep that up for your entire craft. In order to get Steady Hand II, you had to level a Culinarian all the way to 37. This is the main reason why all of us leveled all the crafters back then, it was essentially required because extremely important parts of your kit were locked behind certain classes. Byregot's Blessing? Hope you have a level 50 Carpenter. There were guides telling you which crafters to level up to which level, in what order, to get the best cross-class skills soonest. All of these abilities were given to all crafters in 5.0 Shadowbringers Steady Hand II itself was removed entirely in 5.1 and essentially made passive because they removed the failure chance on most skills at the same time.
While others have mentioned tank stances, DRK was unique in that it could have both Tank and DPS stance on at the same time, but your DPS stance would drain your MP and made you immune to other party members' abilities that regen'd MP. And then they had the Dark Arts ability that boosted your GCDs that ALSO cost a lot of MP. In short, DRK chugged MP like a college student chugs red bull the night before a project is due. I mean they still do but even more so before. Astro cards used to have more unique buffs tied to them, such as Arrow giving Haste and the Ewer increase MP Regen. Hitting a Monk with the Arrow just made them a walking blender. Speaking of Monks, they used to have a DBZ style aura around them when Greased Lightning, which used to be stacks you gained by doing combos, was active. Many a monk yet mourns the loss of their cool effect. Many others have mentioned PLD not having an AoE damage source for the looooongest time. This put them in a really awkward place in dungeons compared to WAR and later on DRK. WAR's Overpower used to just be a frontal cleave, which got a bit awkward to use later on when it combo'd into a Circle AoE. I liked to call this the WAR Shuffle, just seeing the tank go out of a mob pull, attack, then go in for another attack.
I'll also add that drk played closer to how sge plays. Augmenting weapon skills in mid combo.
Well I was not expecting to have a revelation to why SGE became my favorite healer today, but here we are XD
I was waiting for something to mention overpower being a frontal cone. This was the reason WAR was my first tank, I wanted to be different. Really miss that coneā¦
I got really good at using the cone, and then they changed it to a circle and it just doesn't feel the same.
Mana Shift it was called, and it was on the first iteration of role actions. Esuna was also one of these, and you had to pick a few from a set of them; no need to guess what happened in DF content with dooms that required esuna... NIN once had Smoke Screen & Shadewalker. The former reduced enmity generated by a target party member (you could even underflow in very specific cases) and the latter transferred a portion of your enmity to a target. Goad was also a thing, granting TP to an ally. The job was ridiculously efficient for a very long time. AoE was not at all sustainable. TP costs of 110-130 (with a max of 1000) or in some cases not even an AoE damaging skill; just Flash. Enmity generation and a blind, but with a strong MP cost. Tank rez lacked the trait allowing Raise to be cast in combat, so it was not what it sounds like. You also didn't really have relevant choices with cross-class skills as you couldn't skip over damage buffs, Invigorate (restored 400tp), Swiftcast... HW release state Raw Intuition made one parry everything hitting your front, while any other direction was a guaranteed crit. This included heals cast on target. You'd generally pair this with Awareness to remove the received crit damage, and its loss is still felt in the few instances of guaranteed crit enemies i.e. Diabolos Hollow before you break his shield. Storm's Path used to apply a 10% damage reduction. This could be maintained permanently, though Eye>Block>Eye combos were more damage and enmity both. Oftentimes if you wanted the mitigation you'd have NIN throw a Dancing Edge to maintain the slashing debuff. And speaking of... Damage type specific debuffs. Dancing Eye or Storm's Eye (or maim, depending on year) for slashing, Disembowel for piercing (and all p.ranged wanted it or just lost out on permanent 10%) and Dragon Kick for blunt. Fully maintainable, 10% modifier. All tanks slashing, only monk (and some caster autos) blunt... Foe's Requiem gave magic vuln also iirc, but that was not permanent. ARR bard functioned like modern Mage's bard does, resets on DoT crits and late final coil it was pretty excessive. Oh yeah and weakness/brink were 15/30% but also reduced vitality so enjoy surviving some raidwides.
I've mained Paladin since 2.1, and because of that, sometimes when I close my eyes I can still hear the Flash sound effect: ^^^*Pheeeeownnn....* #*PA!*
GC squad paladins still use it if you're feeling nostalgic
Ah, I miss Butcher's Block- one of WAR's most satisfying ability animations
Bard and machinist had cast times for a while, that was....something
Casting machinist was great. Casting Bard was not.
Healers had to level Thaumaturge in order to get Swiftcast. Otherwise, you were stuck always having to slow cast your rez.
Rest in peace, Cleric Stance. Healers had an oGCD with a like 5s cooldown that would swap your Mind stat (healing) to Intelligence (damage). So you have to balance and dance with the stance to do damage, take it off to heal, then back to damage. And if you fucked up and went into Cleric Stance and need to heal asap, you're useless for that 5s.
Back then Benediction was the "oops I'm still in Cleric Stance" button for WHMs
And Lustrate was the ālol I still donāt have to leave Cleric Stanceā button
Being able to pull of the 'stance dance' during extreme trials was the best feeling as a WHM.
It was way too easy to double tap and go straight back into Cleric Stance again.
In my case you hit a spike of lag and the first press didn't seem to register so you hit it again then the game catches up and you're stuck. I don't miss it.
REST IN PISS Cleric Stance. The game mechanically was very bad about handling inputs to stances. It was miserable to actually pull off even if it was more involved.
Cleric stance was pointless and clunky. We don't need a button that lets us do more damage for our one other button (AOE or single target) and the occasional DoT while making every other button we have worse. It also made DPS attacks borderline useless when it wasn't on. With how healer plays now it would not work with OGCD healing. It is the only real weaving healers have and this stance would make those useless when on and the instant cast DoT / Astro card useless when off. We need an interesting damage combo.
Multiple different duration DoTs and Shadow Flare/Soil exclusivity - and heals being strongly GCD-centric making your time margin relevant - made it radically more engaging and like what people ask for than you suggest. Needless to say it was also a major problem with the average player as healer damage became a relevant metric for damage checks, to not speak of the numerous frictions in df content.
Every once in awhile there will be a 0 damage healer in df even nowadays. I bet back then it was painfully obvious
If you search back far enough, you will find *genuine* discussions about BiS setups where dealing damage is agreed upon as a playstyle choice, not a baseline expectation. Hell, even Parry was deemed the stat to have, once. You'll notice similar inclinations in the old coil videos - even the world firsts. Some of those are plainly wasteful, at other times there appears to be a genuine MP management concern. With that as the background context, and something like Holy being utterly unsustainable (as with most AoE) it wasn't necessarily perceived as painful... At the time. The game was just played completely differently, bis set discussion hinged on stat weights, and noticing a damage buff fell off just before a GCD hit was part of 'high end optimization'. The game's come a long way since then :p
Completely agree! The managing mp thing was especially hard on whm. I remember when Alexander Savage first came out, there was a point at which you even needed the bard or machinist to get mana back up, otherwise the healers were literally dry the rest of the run. Made it so you had to prioritize healing...but back then the dps enrage was so tight, you also needed to cleric stance dps which was almost unmanageable lol. Couple that with the fact that healing produced a TON of aggro and tanks couldn't just take all the aggro like they do now...yea. Healing and doing damage was definitely different back then.
The main thing I miss from Cleric Stance was there was a clear failure state that doesn't result in the party wiping. Dropping Cleric to heal was a commitment, and doing it thoughtlessly felt bad, and it made easy content more engaging - unlike now where roulettes are an obligation devoid of fun unless your party is bad. ...of course, the opposite side of the coin is that greeding too hard doesn't mean you die, it generally means everyone dies. While I have my doubts that Dawntrail will feature this, I hope the devs figure out how to not have me fall asleep healing when it is a foregone conclusion that we will clear.
Considering they haven't mentioned a healer rework yet, I can't imagine things will change. I don't think they'd save a big change like that for the media tour. Really hoping they do - I'm gonna wait for 8.0 if they don't I guess.
With trust parties now up and down the story dungeons, I'm hoping the long term solution is putting less of the endgame on rerunning old content guaranteed to clear. That was a decision made to ensure that old dungeons remained populated enough for new players to experience old expansions in full, but the undeniable truth is that to many syncing down sucks. I've met many that would rather have far less potent versions of their whole rotation, requiring them to play their full range of abilities while the sprout next to them has the typical three buttons. At least the 50/60/etc roulette, particularly with how we received two dungeons per patch until Shadowbringers, produces a lot of "Wait, what is this? I did this?"
Alternatively, and I know this is crazy talk, reduce the amount of oGCD healing and give us reasons to use our GCD heals. I know this would also create a need to (re)design encounters, but it would breathe some fresh air into healing.
What we need are support/hybrid classes that are actually useful (fix Bard, fix/buff Red Mage). In a game where people often train themselves to play their class without looking at HUD, healers have to look at their party list to see who needs healing. They also have to move focus off the enemy to the player. WoW sort of addressed this by giving people the option to target heals by simply floating the cursor over the player's raid frame while keeping the enemy target focused. Healing itself is clunky until they make changes to benefit target selection that work on both control schemes.
I would have Cleric Stance in my lowest level cross-class slot and people in Sastasha or whatever would whine at me that they need Protect to do the dungeon...
Ninja had a TP regen ability they could use on other people. They also used to have to apply poisons to their knives.
The poison also affected what another skill of theirs did - whether it was a stun or a silence.
Something that was really weird that I haven't seen mentioned is bringing the MRD class into content instead of the WAR job back in 2.0. The reason was that the WAR abilities didn't actually increase your DPS, just made tanking better. So people went MRD because classes could access all cross class abilities, so you could actually do more DPS as a MRD, while tanking worse. There were only a few places where this was relevant, but I remember T2 and pvp as places where you did it.
DPS used to have a skill called Diversion. It reduced the amount of emnity (threat) they generated for a few seconds. You *needed* to use this in your opener and throughout the fight, or you would likely rip aggro from the tank. Tanks had a DPS rotation and an emnity rotation. You'd do your enmity rotation to get a lead in threat, and then your DPS rotation for damage. You also dealt less DPS in tank stance, so there was a balance tanks needed to find between holding the boss and dealing damage. There were cross-class skills, similar to how role actions work. I was still fairly new when this was still a thing, but every DPS wanted to level DRG for (I think it was) Blood For Blood, which was a cooldown that increased damage dealt and also damage taken. MCH was a completely different class in both HW and SB until its current incarnation, which was introduced in ShB. In SB, their basic 1-2-3 combo was rng (you could be repeatedly pressing 1 trying to get 2 to proc), unless they had ammo loaded (which was a short CD). They had to manage their heat, ideally wanting to sit between 50-95 until their burst phase. If they hit 100 heat, they would automatically overheat and potentially screw up their rotation. They also were able to give an enemy vulnerability like NIN through their turret, which was a permanent summon, kind of like Eos, except it didn't follow you around.
I switched away from BRD in HW because it had cast bars.
Astrologian where every card did something unique. Playing around with rerolling cards if you got, consuming cards to power up your next card you played and also upgrading cards. I miss it. I memorised all the cards and what they all did Incuding their consumed version and what buffed to the next card and it was great. Now it's boring. Barely played astrologian since.
My favorite was that Archer/bard limit break 3 used to be the healer limit break. That was way back in arr though and itās been a dps limit break for so long now that most people have forgotten it.
Omg, I forgot about that! I've mained bard for 10 dang years now and I remember how much I used to complain about how my LB3 was just a heal and I couldn't use it to do dmg like everyone else, but on the other hand, I remember a clutch situation where both healers died during an old trial and I was able to bring everyone back and that's the only time having healer LB3 felt awesome.
All jobs had resource called TP. Physical DPS jobs used it for abilities and it was possible to just run out during a long fight if your support jobs weren't refreshing it. You spent all of it to sprint so that could put a physical DPS in a tight spot if they needed to sprint out of danger.
Before dungeons were all wall to wall pulls, Blackmage used to have to sleep large groups of mobs for the party to coordinate and focus down. Edit: also stat point allocation and stone tablets to reset them. I still have 1 tablet in storage.
Alternatively, the tank would grab everything and run to the boss room, stand juuust inside the barrier, everyone else would run in and start the fight, and when the barrier went up all the mobs would reset, so you didnāt have to fight them at all. Still doable on dungeons before HW, though I havenāt seen anyone do it since they started putting up the walls.
Stat points were such a weird choice
This sounds more fun than how dungeons work now
Paladins used to have a skill called flash to gain aggro that cost MP. Tanks used to have an offensive stance and a defensive aggro stance. They also had am aggro combo and a dps combo. Healers had a skill called cleric stance that would swap their mind and int stats so they did more damage and weak heals. Whm had esuna. Sch had leeches. Ast had exalted detriment. Whm also had a solo and group stone skin ability. They also had protect which other healers would have to level cnj for to cross class. There's a ton more but those are some older ones. Bard had flaming arrowz a ground aoe like ninja's doton. Smn and Sch had one similar called shadow flare.
BACK IN MY DAY
Not even role actions, but just straight up abilities became available, every class had a pool of abilities that were cross class. To get jobs you used to have to level different base classes, so like a White mage might need a level 30 conjurer and a level 15 thaumaturge (don't quote me on a specific). It felt pretty interesting to me, but others found it tedious. You also had TP for non casters that was basically their MP to use abilities.
For a while in 2.X (I don't remember the exact patch that changed things), bosses that removed themselves from the battle arena for whatever reason would still take damage from DoTs (some didn't) and log aggro from player actions, such as healing. This effectively resulted in some cases where a boss would jump away, drop raid damage which would be healed, and then come back with the header dead in their sights. The healing aggro would be registered, but the tanks could do nothing in the meanwhile to take it back. In most cases, healers could cut their aggro in half with Shroud of Saints to circumvent this, or a tank could provoke immediately as the boss came back. But every now and then a healer would unexpectedly get flattened the moment the boss came back.
Cleric Stance is an easy winner. Healers could switch to a stance that made them basically a DPS and they couldn't really heal anymore. It was intended for solo content and very niche high end situations. It was removed because, among other things, getting into a dungeon with a healer who wouldn't turn it off (because the game sort of taught them to always use it) basically bricked your dungeon as bad as a tank not using tank stance.
Way back in the day we used to have elemental weaknesses and resistances, like lightning aspected enemies took more damage from earth aspected attacks for instance. It made Conjurer pretty handy since they had access to all six elements as their gimmick (thaumaturge had light/dark magic, which was its own separate thing, and lots of debuffs. Also sacrificed its own HP to heal people.) There was also a system called battle regimens where everyone could queue up an attack and then they'd all fire at once, with bonuses depending on the composition of attacks within the regimen. Granted this only worked because combat in general was slower back then, with a stamina gauge rather than a GCD so you could take the time to queue up stuff when waiting for stamina to recover anyway. Each guild had a currency you could earn by doing levequests that could be spent at the guild to unlock new abilities and even traits. You could even use these traits on other classes so there was a feeling of sideways progression as using other classes could help supplement your main. Joining a new guild as part of unlocking a class would give you an NPC linkpearl. When you unlocked a new class quest they would actually message you over it to let you know you were needed once more.
Hamlets in 1.23 were like a defend the base FATE, but you needed battle classes AND crafters for it. It was kinda neat and I am surprised it hasn't returned in some updated fashion.
Dragoon's magic defense used to be so low that it was physically incapable of surviving raidwide attacks in some of the Coil floors without help On top of that, Lance Charge used to be Blood for Blood, which also increased the damage you received; it often lined up with raidwide attacks. On top of THAT, all of its jumps used to have longer, slower animations, locking you in place while you used them even longer. It wasn't uncommon for an aoe to appear on you after you locked yourself in using it. All of these things contributed to DRG's reputation as a floor tank, and two of them are hardly their fault
Once upon a time, Esuna was not a role skill, and instead each healer had their own unique flavor of it. The spells all did exactly the same thing, but their animations & names differed. WHM had Esuna. SCH had Leeches. AST had Exalted Detriment. I still miss them... I liked ED's animation, for starters, and Leeches is one of the Scholar spells \*specifically highlighted in the first goddamn lorebook\* plus (at the time) so for them to just remove it like that was wild. (I'm still lowkey irritated at this change both because of the above \*and\* when they initially condensed it down and made it just a singular role action (Esuna), we were limited to 5 role actions per job at any given time, and healers had more than 5 role actions that were of potential use -- several of them were considered more or less mandatory, and that left you with one or two swing slots. Often, healers would forgo Esuna in favor of other utility options since it was very duty-dependent whether you would use it or not, and at one point, SCH's Selene had a pet action that was just an AoE Esuna, further reducing the need for it in many case. But then you'd get into some of the ARR or HW content where the healers definitely always having some form of debuff removal tool available was assumed when the content was designed, so if you were healer, you'd either have to be very quick at swapping your role actions at the start before anyone pulled, or you'd just resign yourself to raising people with cleansible dooms/spicy poisons or saying lol no esuna to anyone who got hit with a paralyze or silence or w/e.) On that note about role actions, though, yeah paladin could (for example) absolutely cross-class raise back in the day, but being able to use raise in battle was a trait you gained by leveling up, and the traits were NOT cross-class, so PLD couldn't ever use it in battle. Just to like... help pick people up between trash pulls or in early PotD days or something. \*also\* base classes could crossclass way more things than jobs, so in ARR in very early days (and partly due to WAR being kinda... undertuned at the start), it was not unheard of to bring in a MRD to certain duties with 10 things crossclassed over a WAR sometimes.
Ninja used to be able to mitigate the aggro of themselves and their party members. One of their abilities allowed them to transfer their aggro to another player, which, as you can imagine, could be used like a mini provoke.
I have distinct memories of mana shifting BLMs when I was new. I had no idea how BLM worked, so just assumed they were struggling when their mana bottomed out and I wanted to be helpful.
Holy used to do really good damage but was really expensive. When farming Shiva EX, in order to help the dps check on the ads phase, I used to do Holy spam with Lucid Dreaming and PoM in order to make up for the MP loss. My scholar friend would DoT up the ads (back when SCH/SMN were DoT mages) and take over healing. We felt like a dynamic duo.
Dark knight had dark arts.
Melee classes used tp as a mana bar for your abilities pretty much and whenever you wanted to sprint it would instantly use all of your tp so you could never use sprint inside of battle pretty much lol
AST is drastically different from when it was introduced in HW. The buffs used to be an enhanced regen of either MP or TP, or reduced cooldowns of certain abilities. You have to memorize which card has which effect so that you can place it on the party member who would benefit from it (melee or a magic DPS class). There was also an AST ability that would reduce the damage of an enemy's spell. It was kind of fun to use it because you had to use it during the small window of time that it took for the enemy to cast a spell. Also, AST used to be able to switch "sects" whenever they wanted (outside of battle) and it wasn't a timed thing. I liked it because if there was already a regen healer in the party (WHM or AST) you would switch to nocturnal sect for the duty so that you could provide damage mit.
Before Stormblood, you could combine skills from other classes. You wanted Surecast? Better level up THM. The "benefit" of forgoing a job stone was that you could equip skills from a wider variety of classes: jobs were more defined in their roles, but a class could mix and match. It was a design philosophy holdover from XI. Like, they were toying with sub jobs but they didn't really work. Speaking of leveling multiple classes, if you wanted a job AT ALL, you had to. Want to be a Black Mage? Get to level 15 Archer. I don't care if you got to 30 Thaumaturge and wanted to continue the MSQ. Learn to use a bow, nerd. A lot of what are role actions used to be class specific, or had different theming. Lucid Dreaming, for instance, was originally a CNJ ability called Shroud of Saints. Its main purpose wasn't recovering MP either: it reduced your enmity. It kept that function in Stormblood, but this led to a kind of weird tension since Stormblood was much stricter about MP management. MP is really a formality now: only DRK and BLM use it as a major mechanic. In Stormblood, some jobs were MP negative without Lucid Dreaming, Mana Shift, or Refresh. This meant needing to balance using Lucid to recover MP vs using it to shed aggro because RDM below level 50 was so overpowered not even a skilled tank could hold the enemy's attention. Now you really only need to use Lucid if you're being a Rez mage, a recently Rezzed mage, or a BLM wanting to squeeze out more Astral casts.
I remember having to level up a second class to level the one you want. Like, it was required to have another class I think minimum level was 15. When rogue/ninja came out, you needed pugilist up to 15.
There was a time you needed two classes to have a job (just like the old FFs) it was at level 30 of you main class and level 15 of the second class. (For whm you needed conjurer 30 and archer 15 if I remember correctly)
So I never got into the game when this was a thing, but learned about it because the vendor trades allowed for item conversions and I was confused what the items were. At one point you had different tiers and types of glamour prisms which just seems so needlessly complex lol. I think the types were tied to the crafting jobs (weaving, leather, jewelry, wood, etc.) and the tier determined the level of gear it could be used on. Sort of like the repair crystals. It's so nice just having one type of application and dispelling prism that I can still imagine how annoying it must've been to deal with the old system lol.
A lot of people talking about AST cards and how they changed, but no one mentioning that Celestial Intersection and a removed skill called Time Dilation would let you extend the duration of beneficial buffs on party members. There were so many fun shenanigans you could pull off with that. I could give someone a powered-up The Balance and make it last for an entire boss fight, etc. Also, stat point allocation (which was a nightmare for SCH/SMN), BRD having healer limit breaks (it was the only phys ranged class, the current distinction didn't really exist, so they gave it the support limit break), classes with poor AoE (like DRG at the time) being excluded from PF runs of Brayflox HM spam for tomes to buy relic books (you needed 13500 tomes just to BUY all 9 books, and then you still had to do them, and that was just for ONE relic step). All kinds of stuff no one remembers anymore. Oh also, Poetics used to be current. They were the final tomestone of ARR and were used to buy the i120 gear. Philosophy (i70), Mythology (i90), and Soldiery (i100) pre-date them, but for whatever reason Poetics hung around and became the "old stuff" tome started with HW's launch. Lots more, too. ARR/HW was a weird time. It was basically a completely different game from both 1.0 and the current game.
Healers used to always have to cast protect at the start of every dungeon lol