The Problem with the "Buff Everyone Up to Reaper" Approach

I don't think it's a controversy to say that Reaper was more than a little overtuned at the launch of Endwalker, and really. Putting aside the details of the numbers, FF Logs, parsers, blah blah blah... that's not important.

What's important is what Square decided to do, and continued to try to do, to fix this problem.

Patch after patch after patch after patch, we've seen jobs have their potencies increased, some of which have been astronomically powerful buffs to standard rotations, skill floors, etc. It's happened now at least four times, and while i'm sure nobody was complaining to see their jobs fare better in the overall "Meta" (putting aside conversations about how every job is able to complete content, which is true), it had a consequence that I think is more than a little damaging to the game.

... Has anybody else noticed how short encounters are now?

And it makes sense. Numbers go up, overall job potencies are increased across the board to the tune of hundreds if not thousands combined if we're looking at alliance raids, and the end result seems to be that every encounter i've run, be it current or old, has had its run-time slashed by a fairly considerable margin.

Look... constructive feedback here... I understand why they did it this way. They wanted to try to silence the folks who might cry foul that they bought the expansion for the shiny new job only to have it nerfed, but the end result means encounters that don't feel as good to play. They should have made the hard call to dial back on Reaper's numbers, and then done minor adjustments to other jobs to make them feel better.

Because right now, unless they go in and do an across the board uplift of mob HP, the impact feels very, very noticeable, and quite frankly feels more difficult to fix than if they had just done the slight needed nerfs to begin with.

Not a good direction, guys, sad to say. Nor does it feel as good to play. :(

Thordan Normal being a pushover that lasts for less than 1.5 minutes WHILE SYNCED says it all really.

Kupo, do you really want old raids to take forever? kupo <3 :cool:

Time Borrowed did not need to be nerfed, and I will die on this hill forever. It went from group support to just a meh personal.

Ranting about our utility aside- The new Alliance Raid has melted so fast I was surprised there were mechanics I didn't even get to see on day 1. We're all way too powerful for new content, and that's not even just people in BiS. It just feels sloppier somehow.

Kupo, if I was to take a guess at the elemental root of it all I would say the powers realize that as time moves on we are so used to quick dopamine hits (phone, fast games etc..) that anything that is drawn out may become boring (books, work, long repetitive fights) or 'not worth doing' etc..

Wrong or right? Kupo who knows but I do believe its just a side product of society. Dopaminergic builds you could say kupo <3

People overreacting to nerfs in games has always kinda bothered me. It's obviously easier to nerf the 1 problem then buff the 10+ things that aren't a problem to match that 1 problem, seems obvious to take that approach. Just don't overnerf it, keep it viable.

With how many dps checks there are in the new Ultimate and how tight they are and how a single death/damage down=a wipe is, it's good our damage is where it's at.

For the newest alliance raid, you need to look at the ilevel required to run it, 565. We're still at the point in the cycle where people that are BiS or are close to BiS are still running it to gear alt jobs/finish getting BiS. Also a lot of people going in there even if they aren't BiS, are probably rolling up with a weapon from the new EX, which is 595. Also even casual players will likely have the crafted set which is 580. I don't think the bosses melting has much to do with our job potencies, and it has everything to do with people having an ilevel far above the minimum. It's going to take muuuuuuch longer when geared people aren't doing it anymore. I remember in Shb you could tear through the Nier raids pretty quickly until they stopped being relevant. I was in quite a few super long Copied Factory runs at the end of Shb.

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Originally Posted by Skiros

Thordan Normal being a pushover that lasts for less than 1.5 minutes WHILE SYNCED says it all really.

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Thordan Normal has been a pushover since Heavensward when it was current, so that really says absolutely nothing.

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Originally Posted by LisSquid

Time Borrowed did not need to be nerfed, and I will die on this hill forever. It went from group support to just a meh personal.

Ranting about our utility aside- The new Alliance Raid has melted so fast I was surprised there were mechanics I didn't even get to see on day 1. We're all way too powerful for new content, and that's not even just people in BiS. It just feels sloppier somehow.

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Thats because most were 580-590 in a raid tuned for 565 lol

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Originally Posted by ZJyn

I don't think it's a controversy to say that Reaper was more than a little overtuned at the launch of Endwalker, and really. Putting aside the details of the numbers, FF Logs, parsers, blah blah blah... that's not important.

What's important is what Square decided to do, and continued to try to do, to fix this problem.

Patch after patch after patch after patch, we've seen jobs have their potencies increased, some of which have been astronomically powerful buffs to standard rotations, skill floors, etc. It's happened now at least four times, and while i'm sure nobody was complaining to see their jobs fare better in the overall "Meta" (putting aside conversations about how every job is able to complete content, which is true), it had a consequence that I think is more than a little damaging to the game.

... Has anybody else noticed how short encounters are now?

And it makes sense. Numbers go up, overall job potencies are increased across the board to the tune of hundreds if not thousands combined if we're looking at alliance raids, and the end result seems to be that every encounter i've run, be it current or old, has had its run-time slashed by a fairly considerable margin.

Look... constructive feedback here... I understand why they did it this way. They wanted to try to silence the folks who might cry foul that they bought the expansion for the shiny new job only to have it nerfed, but the end result means encounters that don't feel as good to play. They should have made the hard call to dial back on Reaper's numbers, and then done minor adjustments to other jobs to make them feel better.

Because right now, unless they go in and do an across the board uplift of mob HP, the impact feels very, very noticeable, and quite frankly feels more difficult to fix than if they had just done the slight needed nerfs to begin with.

Not a good direction, guys, sad to say. Nor does it feel as good to play. :(

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Most of the short encounters we have today are old content that was designed with fewer available jobs, different mindsets of players and devs, different iterations of jobs, potential limitations of hardware by then, etc.
However, these are going to get revisited again. ARR MSQ dungeons are an example of content that got reworked by devs to stand out to current standards, and I'm really impressed with the reworks, and looking forward to what they might do in the future. Thordan normal difficulty is the first encounter that comes to my mind which needs a rework to reflect the importance, stakes, and the power of the final boss of an expansion similar to how Gaius three encounters (From the elevator to defeating the Ultima weapon) got a rework to the point he's way more difficult and survives a decent amount of time in comparison to Thordan who would die in less than one minute if not for the mechanics that protects him.

As long as they get purple > it doesn't matter if the game suffers for it

What I find weird is that they lower the numbers in general in EW and then when a job is clearly overperforming increase the numbers across the board again instead of lowering that one job.
So next expansion we're prob hitting the same numbers again as in ShB :p

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Originally Posted by Kuroka

Thats because most were 580-590 in a raid tuned for 565 lol

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My perfect patch attendance (have a house to keep!) reminds me other Alliance raids had teeth the first week. This round was faster than the others.

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Originally Posted by Doc_Seraph

Kupo, do you really want old raids to take forever? kupo <3 :cool:

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Yes.

No, seriously: I actually do want this, personally.

Not "to take forever", per se, but... if Labyrinth of the Ancients or Syrcus Tower was not a mindless faceroll -- if we saw things like the platforms in Glasya Labolas, for instance, and actually needed to do the mechanics -- I would actually find getting them in alliance roulette somewhat more interesting and a lot less "welp, guess we're doing this again".

But I mean, my FC has a group (the "Retro Raiders") who run old savage content and such synced, which I really love doing stuff with when we manage to schedule it. So I may not be the correct sample metric here.

theoretically the ideal thing to do is plot all the comparable classes in a chart and buff/nerf the outliers to fit in with the middle

it does seem generally that is what they're aiming for, I think aglaia is just really low hp pools on the bosses since it was designed for like... just hit 90 but everyone has built up gear already.
The new ultimate almost feels like no one has enough dps unless they go super extra meta

it didn't matter at the start of EW and it doesn't really matter now. Reaper being "so strong" was overblown, and any class now is completely fine when it comes to their damage contribution in fights.

So you prefer the nerf approach? rather than buffing underperforming classes, bring down the overperforming ones? can you imagine the amount of complaints? been there done that. Its how blizzard did it and some of the classes were unplayable because they can undertune sometimes too much.

Both nerfing and buffing have their places. Unfortunately this game has an endemic problem with undertuning content relative to the strength of actual job kits and gear and adjusting potencies to indirectly nerf swaths of older content each expansion by buffing potencies the moment they are acquired instead of at (old level cap+1)

Case in point: when dragoon was fresh in ARR you got jump at 200 potency and dragonfire dive at 250 every 3 minutes. One out of two Jumps could get a boost to 300 every minute. Nowadays dragonfire happens every 2 minutes and its potency is upped to 300. jump starts at 300 before getting buffed to 400 at level 74 when high jump arrives

If those damage buffs happened at level 51, then dragoon would be closer to its ARR strength for ARR duties and we'd actually see mechanics

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Originally Posted by Doc_Seraph

Kupo, do you really want old raids to take forever? kupo <3 :cool:

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It would not take forever. All you do is punish new players. You don't build up a big bad only to stand in every single AoE without consequence and the fight is over before the 2nd phase of the music has even started. The fact you want them to be over faster tells volumes of how boring they actually are.

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Originally Posted by LisSquid

Time Borrowed did not need to be nerfed, and I will die on this hill forever. It went from group support to just a meh personal.

Ranting about our utility aside- The new Alliance Raid has melted so fast I was surprised there were mechanics I didn't even get to see on day 1. We're all way too powerful for new content, and that's not even just people in BiS. It just feels sloppier somehow.

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That's less that we're too powerful and more that the bosses have too few HP.

Take for example, the Ivalice Raids, the bosses were Gigantic HP Sponges.

Apparently SE has a big problem with designing middle grounds.

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Originally Posted by Wolwosh

What I find weird is that they lower the numbers in general in EW and then when a job is clearly overperforming increase the numbers across the board again instead of lowering that one job.
So next expansion we're prob hitting the same numbers again as in ShB :p

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They had to be extremely specific about the numbers being lowered in general though. They sat there and "eased" everyone into it by explaining time and time again "Everything is going down." Both players AND NPCs, and they're generally going down "the same."

Nerfing a new job at the launch of an expansion is dangerous. People don't have anything to compare that job to, so if you nerf it it's just going to feel worse for the people who are playing it. There's no upside to it at all.

Bringing everything up to the level makes everyone feel better though because they're getting buffs. Everyone is happy to see "You're going to be doing more damage!" even if it's not more relative to all the other jobs. Given the fact that NPCs aren't changing, your character is getting stronger. Period.

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Originally Posted by Packetdancer

Yes.

No, seriously: I actually do want this, personally.

Not "to take forever", per se, but... if Labyrinth of the Ancients or Syrcus Tower was not a mindless faceroll -- if we saw things like the platforms in Glasya Labolas, for instance, and actually needed to do the mechanics -- I would actually find getting them in alliance roulette somewhat more interesting and a lot less "welp, guess we're doing this again".

But I mean, my FC has a group (the "Retro Raiders") who run old savage content and such synced, which I really love doing stuff with when we manage to schedule it. So I may not be the correct sample metric here.

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Aye kupo, along with the quick fights for dopamine another way to quickly kill dopamine is doing the same thing over and over mindlessly (aka its zzz) I agree it needs to be swift and/or something should be done to keep one alert.

What if they started randomizing the mechanics more so instead of just knowing mindlessly where to stand etc.. It keeps you on your pixelated toes hehe kupo <3

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Originally Posted by Doc_Seraph

What if they started randomizing the mechanics more so instead of just knowing mindlessly where to stand etc.. It keeps you on your pixelated toes hehe kupo <3

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I mean, it's unlikely they'll entirely randomize things, but... I actually do enjoy the sort of "buffet table" approach to mechanics some fights take, where you'll have two or three things you need to combine.

E12, for instance, where Eden's Promise will tether to two of the memory crystals, and then use a mechanics pattern from that specific previous fight, and you need to see which the two patterns will be to know where the safe space is when they're overlaid on each other. The extreme version of the level 89 trial, where you get one of In, Out, or Intercardinals, combined with Spread, Party Stack, or Light Parties, and need to execute the one and then quickly shift to the other. P4S's Pinax patterns, where it could be Knockback or Be-At-The-Edge, followed by Spread or Light Party stacks, with a giant cleave or (potentially second) knockback from one specific side between the two in half the cases. Etc.

It can even be somewhat predictable; if your first Pinax pattern is Lightning (Out) and Poison (Spread), you know the next one will be Water (Knockback from center) plus Fire (light parties), though you don't know which wall the Shift will be from between the second pair until the actual cast is going. In the extreme of the level 89 trial, if you get In/Light Parties, you know the next will be Out/Spread. So you have to pay attention, but you also still benefit if you learn the patterns.

But that's less relevant to "how do you balance jobs", and more "how do you keep Pax engaged in the fight". (Pax being how many a friend abbreviates "Packetdancer".)

However, I do think the stats creep we have -- and the wonky way ilevel sync "functions" in this game -- do new players no favors, when you build up these big climactic fights in the story only to have them be mindless facerolls.

(And it does veteran players no favors either. Folks like to complain that a sproud doesn't know mechanics from previous fights. But it's not like "Pyretic" is a mechanic they'll encounter early on any longer; the five-headed dragon in World of Darkness is where that was introduced, I believe, and that poor thing never lives long enough to cast it anymore. And they're not necessarily going to know that "Acceleration Bomb" and "Extreme Caution" and "Pyretic" are all functionally the same thing, even if they've encountered the others.)

Not gonna lie. I would love fights that are reaction-based instead of memorization-based. That truly would be a test of your reflexes.