Comprehensive breakdown over Endwalker job balance

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Originally Posted by RyuDragnier

The 2 minute window was to be expected, considering how the playerbase for many years was actively aligning the burst windows to begin with. The devs just made it that much easier for the alignment. And the coordination was never a choice to begin with in Savage IMO, it was a necessity. When you balance around raids, you take into account how players think in raids, leading to things being adjusted for raids. Just like how the upcoming PLD rework will be to help deal with the fact that PLD is struggling with its rotation...in raids.

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It's just like the decision to make all AST cards 'The Balance', is it not? Players were already doing this, so the devs streamline it, which according to some players removes all the fun right out of the job, and strips it of its identity.

My question is how much fun are players having if they feel they need to put the kind of time and effort it takes to articulate the subject explored in the 'comprehensive breakdown'? My other question is who is it for? The devs don't need a breakdown of their own design. Do players really think that they are not aware of things like the burst window, and an RNG factor? Players who are frustrated will just be inclined to agree with it. And for casual players like myself, it douses and flame of curiosity to venture into this content because nothing about it seems fun at all if it is taken this seriously, and impact the RLs of the participants. IOW, is it just candy service to provide copium to the participants who are frustrated?

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Originally Posted by RyuDragnier

The 2 minute window was to be expected, considering how the playerbase for many years was actively aligning the burst windows to begin with. The devs just made it that much easier for the alignment. And the coordination was never a choice to begin with in Savage IMO, it was a necessity. When you balance around raids, you take into account how players think in raids, leading to things being adjusted for raids. Just like how the upcoming PLD rework will be to help deal with the fact that PLD is struggling with its rotation...in raids.

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That is not true, coordination in savage for previous expansions all had room for error. If you mistimed something in, say, Titan Savage, it wouldn't be the end of the world. It kind of ties into this next point I'll make:

For every expansion's raid tier (aside from Goridas lol) and even ultimate fights, having a meta comp just meant more room for error. People liked meta because it gave you more room to breathe if you fumble something. A meme comp in Dragonsong's Reprise is still completely fine in terms of ability to clear the fight. But for P8S (before 6.21, on week 1) you HAD to have a meta comp or almost full meta carrying deadweight (e.g. MCH) just to barely make the check, hence the overreliance on meta then that means people are upset over job balance and subsequently stuff like this docs highlighting their philosophy on 2 minutes having a bunch of problems.

Oh and I don't buy the reasoning they gave for nerfing P8S at all. I am almost positive they just ninja tuned it for week 2 tomes but didn't want to actually say that was why.

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Originally Posted by localareanetwork

Oh and I don't buy the reasoning they gave for nerfing P8S at all. I am almost positive they just ninja tuned it for week 2 tomes but didn't want to actually say that was why.

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You have to consider that the devs can instantly change their loadouts because they have access to everything. Were they all in pentamelded crafted gear doing it (lolno)? Were they at max ilvl (630) for this patch? Were they around i615? There's a lot of different choices they could have made for testing it. Were they using the meta setup? Were they using a mix of meta and average setups without PLD or MCH in the party? There's so many ways they could have done these fights, and so many ways they could have easily missed it. Had they done minimum ilvl with pentamelded crafter gear for the tests, and used PLD or MCH, it's likely it never would have been as high in HP as it was. They likely would have also noticed the job imbalance. I'm personally hoping this leads to them actively testing what the players consider the weakest jobs in these fights from now on.

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Originally Posted by RyuDragnier

You have to consider that the devs can instantly change their loadouts because they have access to everything. Were they all in pentamelded crafted gear doing it (lolno)? Were they at max ilvl (630) for this patch? Were they around i615? There's a lot of different choices they could have made for testing it. Were they using the meta setup? Were they using a mix of meta and average setups without PLD or MCH in the party? There's so many ways they could have done these fights, and so many ways they could have easily missed it. Had they done minimum ilvl with pentamelded crafter gear for the tests, and used PLD or MCH, it's likely it never would have been as high in HP as it was. They likely would have also noticed the job imbalance. I'm personally hoping this leads to them actively testing what the players consider the weakest jobs in these fights from now on.

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They specifically said in the Famitsu interview that it was all balanced for i610.

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Originally Posted by localareanetwork

They specifically said in the Famitsu interview that it was all balanced for i610.

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Then they did not test all the jobs for it, which is definitely a fault on their end.

Honestly, looking at their overview note over PLD’s potency tweaks made me think that they want PLDs to just facepull raid bosses with Requiescat.

EDIT: inb4 they buff Requiescat reach to 25y to facilitate this cursed opener.

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Originally Posted by Sweetness

Why don’t they just get rid of all the 120s skills and factor in as potency buffs for all the classes? i don’t see why this wouldn’t work but then again I’m not a spreadsheeter
How can we make the combat less rigid? I can only think of that option…

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The old system of having raid buffs with different cooldowns of 60,90,120,180 seconds worked perfectly fine. I honestly just think they're too stubborn to admit that funneling all damage into 2 minute windows was a mistake.

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Originally Posted by RyuDragnier

The 2 minute window was to be expected, considering how the playerbase for many years was actively aligning the burst windows to begin with. The devs just made it that much easier for the alignment. And the coordination was never a choice to begin with in Savage IMO, it was a necessity. When you balance around raids, you take into account how players think in raids, leading to things being adjusted for raids. Just like how the upcoming PLD rework will be to help deal with the fact that PLD is struggling with its rotation...in raids.

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Absolutely this.

The players decided on the burst window first, you align with it or you do less damage. If you happened to be on a job that didn't naturally align with the burst window then you had to jump through hoops and perform other such acrobatics to your rotation in order to fit in there anywayn often in ways that were completely detached from the intended design of the job.
Used to be things like predrawing cards before a pull and making everyone wait 30s before the fight could start. 20s pre pull openers for Monk and Dancer, etc.

This 'homogenisation' is merely QoL adjustments to those outlying jobs.

I agree with a lot of what Zheph highlighted in his tweets and document. I genuinely dislike the Endwalker era combat design philosophy centered around 2 minute raid buffs/bursts. It makes so many classes feel very same-y, and pretty homogenized. It feels super punishing that that a disproportionate amount of our damage potential is tied to the burst phase, especially in prog situations. While the big direct crit numbers under the raid buff window tickle a part of my monkey brain that dispenses the dopamine, I find it overall less fun than some of the past expansions combat design philosophies, and hope that in 7.0 the Developers reconsider this 2 minute window homogenization and make things more interesting by reverting some of these things.

I expected to see something a little more "comprehensive" than reducing combat to a square wave analysis for made up burst numbers, though the goal of this analysis seems to be more about explaining the new timing windows in fights and how that's changed.

Would be a bit more comprehensive to see an analysis with actual potency numbers and calculations.

Could someone explain this a bit more?

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DPS checks now have to be tuned low enough to account for mistakes rather than being tuned for average play with room to do even better.

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What distinguishes average play from making mistakes in rotations? I would think average play is equivalent to making mistakes.