Morning in Vana'diel: Melee-brained.

Morning in Vana'diel is your daily dose of FFXI and all things Vana'diel. Give us your thoughts on the interesting topics of the day! Today, it's time to look playing other peoples jobs.

Some jobs fit into rather obvious roles. DD, Tank, Support, Healing. Most of my jobs since I have started playing this game have been melee DD's, and that is how I learned to play. I did level NIN and do some tanking with it, but that has been phased out as PLD has been buffed more and more. Our PLDs get the job done better than I could anyway. The problem with starting out playing as a melee and leveling so many melee jobs is that I have developed what I call "melee-brain". Melee-brain is what I call the set of habits and muscle memory that most melee players develop over time. For example, quick targeting and attack button mashing, running right after the tank or puller to be ready to engage on the mob as fast as possible, constant TP monitoring, and general WS macro button mashing. These work well for melee because they want to be on target as fast as possible and they want to be doing as much damage as possible whenever possible. Even my macros are melee-brained; Provoke, shadows, TP, buffs and WS macros are all in the same place on all of my melee jobs so that I can play all of them generally the same.

Being melee-brained is a good thing when you are playing a melee job, but when you start playing other kinds of jobs, like mages, RNG or support it can become a small to very large problem. Button mashing isn't necessarily a bad thing when playing WHM for cures, but it can be bad if you are using {stnpc} and actually need to take the time to select the right target. Most of the time I don't go melee-brained if I am well focused, but there are times for everyone when they aren't paying full attention or they are getting tired, when that muscle memory kicks in and you find that you are following the tank to fight that next mob in Limbus and you realize that you are surrounded by the melee and you BRD is yelling at you and telling you that you are not going to get Ballad because you are retarded (yes, this happened to me last night). The worst is when you run in to buff your party without considering the mob that you are fighting or the AoE damage or debuff that you are about to take.

Have you ever gone totally melee-brained? Or have you had the opposite problem and been far too cautious because you are used to playing a mage jobs? What are your bad in-game habits? How do you deal with them? Does your BRD yell at you for being retarded? Leave a comment and tell us what you think!