Ultimates: Why the dumbing down exists

Those who understand why Ultimates come down to very precise dps checks understand the fact that you can only really do that if the jobs are easy to calculate in a 15-30 minute fight.

For DPS:
1. That doesn't allow for conditional skills (skills you use depending on conditions and situations).

2. You want skills which pull enemies toward you, skills which add dots or bounce from enemy to enemy? You want a job gauge which has more than 1 use? Nah, that's too much balance for ultimates

Tanks/Healers:
1. Tanks all have to be designed the same way; they all have the same 123 into fell cleave, one way or another because any deviation or uniqueness to tank's dps skills results in balancing hell; you'll end up with 1-3 tanks that are you vastly inferior in Ultimates and flat out not used.

The trend land is clear:
1. Realm Reborn, Heavensward, and Stormblood: Most jobs were unique; these 3 expansions had the most complaint about job balance from savage raiders.
2. Shadowbringers and Endwalker: Least complaints from Ultimate and savage raiders.

So. When you cater to high end raiders you usually get happy raiders because all the jobs are designed around that content. But when you cater to casuals who want unique jobs and could care less about balance you get unique jobs.

PS. One word statement: All the crying about Bard and Dragoon being required for 3 expansions for high end content.

Until we confront this battle between whom the game is made for; for high end raiders or for casuals the game will remained dumbed down and the fun only exists in Ultimates raiding. That's why Yoship told us to play Ultimates if we want healers to be engaging.

And yet you see the exact opposite in practice. Self-professed turbocasuals are practically gagging on their tongues praising current homogenized simplistic job design, and people who actually do difficult content think they're designed like crap. Weird.

Someone forgot that the expansion most of us old boomers collectively agree was the best balance and design wise for the jobs (SB) also gave birth to the ultimates

Well except for T7S the 6th ulimtate but eh

Ultimate players are not the ones complaining that they can't get a 99 by facerolling their keyboards.

SB had Ultimates, there wasn't an issue back then.

And really? There aren't any complaints right now? That's just wrong, RDM is in a terrible state and that has been the complaint since 6.0.

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Originally Posted by Amnmaat

Until we confront this battle between whom the game is made for; for high end raiders or for casuals the game will remained dumbed down and the fun only exists in Ultimates raiding. That's why Yoship told us to play Ultimates if we want healers to be engaging.

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It doesn't matter who the game is made for in this thread because you're going to have 3-year-olds who can't clear any Savage tier coming in and lecturing us all about Ultimates soon. Let's just wait.

I might have missed the mark on player complaints, I concede.
But let's talk about how the devs themselves can't seem to create high end content without constantly dumbing down the jobs. That's the real crux of the problem. While 1 Ultimate did indeed exist in Stormblood, that's an anomaly, and it was just 1, as we saw. Square enix gets very sensitive when people says "job balance is so bad, I can't clear this on mch because Bard's unique skills are needed."

Yoship himself told us to play Ultimates if we want challenging content as healers. That's the biggest clue why the jobs are so dumbed down; they're designed around High end duties, most notably Ultimates. Why account for 20 something jobs when we can design 4 tanks to all be the same way? etc

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Originally Posted by Supersnow845

Someone forgot that the expansion most of us old boomers collectively agree was the best balance and design wise for the jobs (SB) also gave birth to the ultimates

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True, but that's also when people started really harping on and demanding balance above all else. So probably a connection there.

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Originally Posted by Amnmaat

Until we confront this battle between whom the game is made for; for high end raiders or for casuals the game will remained dumbed down and the fun only exists in Ultimates raiding. That's why Yoship told us to play Ultimates if we want healers to be engaging.

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Yeah, you're right in your post overall, and this part in particular.

The hardcore like to blame everything on casuals, but the reality is, casuals tend not to care about these things much as long as they aren't being kicked out of groups, which isn't true for most of the content they do. Midcores are more worried about that. But the hardcore are the ones demanding everything be homogenized then complaining when things are homogenized. They're the ones who demanded Living Dead be changed, and they're the ones insisting RDM and SMN need their Raise taken away and that ResMage, Vercure, Clemency, and so on are bad abilities that should be removed - because they're bad if you're only concerned about balance.

On the other hand, casuals love stuff like that, and find far more use of it, either soloing or running the insanity that is 24 mans or casual 8 mans.

Casuals prefer unique and interesting Jobs.

Hardcores SAY they prefer unique and interesting Jobs, but then demand they be homogenized for the sake of balance whenever imbalances occur, and are among the first to demand that unique class flavor abilities like heals or raises be removed.

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Originally Posted by Semirhage

And yet you see the exact opposite in practice. Self-professed turbocasuals are practically gagging on their tongues praising current homogenized simplistic job design, and people who actually do difficult content think they're designed like crap. Weird.

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Actually not at all. Casuals like simple Jobs but not HOMOGENIZED ones or BALANCED ones.

Casuals love RDM while hardcores hate it right now. The hardcore hates that it does (slightly) less damage than SMN, is harder to optimize, and think that the Res Tax is too harsh and advocate all the time for SMN to lose its Raise and for even RDM to lose its if that is what is required for RDM to do damage closer to BLM/Melee levels to justify a raid spot.

Casuals, meanwhile, just love the Dualcast life and chain raising people in a botched 24 man or 8 man normal pull.

So it seems not to be "the exact opposite in practice" at all.

Yes, casuals like simple Jobs. But they aren't praising every Job you call simple. They aren't praising SCH and AST, despite you insisting they're simple. They don't praise BRD or the Melee (aside from maybe RPR) as simple. And they seem to prize uniqueness in Jobs over balanced, which is the exact opposite of the hardcore which will complain about homogenization all the time, but then make the very demands that lead to homogenization.

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Originally Posted by Amnmaat

I might have missed the mark on player complaints, I concede.
But let's talk about how the devs themselves can't seem to create high end content without constantly dumbing down the jobs. That's the real crux of the problem. While 1 Ultimate did indeed exist in Stormblood, that's an anomaly, and it was just 1, as we saw. Square enix gets very sensitive when people says "job balance is so bad, I can't clear this on mch because Bard's unique skills are needed."

Yoship himself told us to play Ultimates if we want challenging content as healers. That's the biggest clue why the jobs are so dumbed down; they're designed around High end duties, most notably Ultimates. Why account for 20 something jobs when we can design 4 tanks to all be the same way? etc

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Yoshi p has explicitly said they design around savage and that ultimate exists just because it does

Healers are not a mess because of ultimates

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Originally Posted by Amnmaat

So. When you cater to high end raiders you usually get happy raiders because all the jobs are designed around that content. But when you cater to casuals who want unique jobs and could care less about balance you get unique jobs.

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Usualy at the highest end content, players optimize every downside out of the game. So any job that lacks is getting significantly less playtime. But this is compensated by having certain job with better synergy, and the requirement to have a variety of jobs for better buffs.

Jobs being very similar here on its own doesnt say anything, if at the lower end that is also the case. Then balance wise this is good. But yes, it comes at a cost of variety. But only tanks and healers suffer here. The DPS classes provide enough variety in them that they feel very diffirent from each other, even if at the bottom line the values are effectively the same.

But even when being very similar, variety exists. And for healers this is mostly noticed between WHM,SCH and SGE which all 3 play quite diffirent. Its only AST and WHM that feel very similar in such way you can consider them as 1. Even though the card system is supposed to make it feel diffirent to WHM, the gameplay outside of that is very identical. And while SGE and SCH have a similar overlap in abilities, SGE covered that up by having a very diffirent button system.

The actual problem of all healers feeling the same is because the DPS button is used most by about 90% of the fight, and all jobs are equal at that. For tanks, while combos and some chains differ, the effective way to shield/block attacks doesnt realy change a lot. Its a similar situation to the healers. But at least the tanks have a big variety in the dps combo.

But do i care: not at all. I still think they provide enough variety within the jobs. Most of the issues we see are not job related, they are dungeon/trial/raid design instead. Things like: extra damage and adds do a lot for healers and tanks. But too often is just ignored as an option.

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Originally Posted by Supersnow845

Yoshi p has explicitly said they design around savage and that ultimate exists just because it does

Healers are not a mess because of ultimates

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Potatoe, Potatoh.
You're proving my point, friend. I can change the title to "High End Duty" so we don't argue about semantics.

Ultimates and savage share a lot of the game design; ultimates just take longer and have more encounters in one, for the most part. We're just arguing about which brand of soda has more has more sugar in it.

Premise is flawed from the start. They're not catering to raiders by making jobs into homogenous easy to play sludge.

While I haven't polled "Raiders" as a whole I can anecdotally say that no raider I know of is very satisfied at all with content or job design. Job design since 6.0 and content design post-DSR. Though my former tanks didn't like DSR that much, and TOP is considered fun by a few of them too.

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Originally Posted by Amnmaat

Let's talk about how the devs themselves can't seem to create high end content without constantly dumbing down the jobs. That's the real crux of the problem.

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Yes, agreed.

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Originally Posted by Amnmaat

when people says "job balance is so bad, I can't clear this on mch because Bard's unique skills are needed."

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But no high-end raider says this. It's the BAD PLAYERS who cosplay at high-end raiders who say this.

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Originally Posted by Amnmaat

Potatoe, Potatoh.
You're proving my point, friend. I can change the title to "High End Duty" so we don't argue about semantics.

Ultimates and savage share a lot of the game design; ultimates just take longer and have more encounters in one, for the most part. We're just arguing about which brand of soda has more has more sugar in it.

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That comment shows you have literally zero idea how ultimate actually works because ultimate isn’t designed like savage

And let’s for a minute say this was an argument about savage (you know what they actually balance against) then high end raiders only care about slight DPS discrepancies because square ripped out party utility, people were totally fine with DPS variance when the alternative was bringing useful utility, you can’t rip out any measurement other than RDPS then complain people are angry that the RDPS difference is 5% when the classes all play the same anyway

Again can I point you to stromblood

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Originally Posted by Amnmaat

While 1 Ultimate did indeed exist in Stormblood, that's an anomaly, and it was just 1, as we saw.

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I know UWU's been potency-crept to the point where it's debatably easier than some final floor Savage fights, but let's not do it dirty like this

Additionally, SB was not the expansion where people were wiping to 2% enrages because of how incredibly swingy the crit variance/raidbuff stacking makes things. I've been linked a comparison of two logs, one of a friend's WHM player, and one of 'the best (at the time) run of P1 of TOP. Both had the exact same number of casts of Glare, Dia, Misery, Assize. To the GCD, they were identical in their gameplay. The 'best run' WHM had much higher crit and directhit rates, and so their damage was TWENTY PERCENT higher than my friend's WHM. Said WHM had gone looking at other logs to see what could be improved, and the answer they got was literally 'go again, and crit more this time'. I didn't do ultimates back then, but I don't remember running into any kind of situations like that back in SB. I remember multiple people saying DRK was bad, only to watch as it took both ultimate worldfirsts. I remember people saying WHM was 'trolling tier', only for it to take, again, both ultimate worldfirsts.

I would put real money on it, if SE released a Stormblood Classic server, an unexpectedly large number of SHB/EW-joiners would go 'hang on a minute, this gameplay is more fun'. Emnity management, tank stance risk-reward, healers have another DOT (or 3 in SCH's case), AST has cards that do something more interesting than the same flat 6% regardless of card, NIN has tricksy things like aggro management skills and a silence, SMN has some actual depth to it's rotation. Of course, not everyone's a winner, WHM and MCH come to mind. But I think it'd have enough of an effect on the playerbase for SE to have to think 'well actually, maybe removing all these aspects of gameplay was not such a good idea', and think about designing jobs with SB as the blueprint, instead of this 2min mush

It's ok though, because at least now our classes are balanced to be very close in potency output. Wait, what's that, the ranged classes (except BLM because it gets special rights) are doing 10% less damage than the melee, because of 'ranged tax', despite melee now having 100% uptime basically guaranteed in every fight? How could this happen /s

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Originally Posted by ForsakenRoe

I know UWU's been potency-crept to the point where it's debatably easier than some final floor Savage fights, but let's not do it dirty like this

Additionally, SB was not the expansion where people were wiping to 2% enrages because of how incredibly swingy the crit variance/raidbuff stacking makes things. I've been linked a comparison of two logs, one of a friend's WHM player, and one of 'the best (at the time) run of P1 of TOP. Both had the exact same number of casts of Glare, Dia, Misery, Assize. To the GCD, they were identical in their gameplay. The 'best run' WHM had much higher crit and directhit rates, and so their damage was TWENTY PERCENT higher than my friend's WHM. Said WHM had gone looking at other logs to see what could be improved, and the answer they got was literally 'go again, and crit more this time'. I didn't do ultimates back then, but I don't remember running into any kind of situations like that back in SB. I remember multiple people saying DRK was bad, only to watch as it took both ultimate worldfirsts. I remember people saying WHM was 'trolling tier', only for it to take, again, both ultimate worldfirsts.

I would put real money on it, if SE released a Stormblood Classic server, an unexpectedly large number of SHB/EW-joiners would go 'hang on a minute, this gameplay is more fun'. Emnity management, tank stance risk-reward, healers have another DOT (or 3 in SCH's case), AST has cards that do something more interesting than the same flat 6% regardless of card, NIN has tricksy things like aggro management skills and a silence, SMN has some actual depth to it's rotation. Of course, not everyone's a winner, WHM and MCH come to mind. But I think it'd have enough of an effect on the playerbase for SE to have to think 'well actually, maybe removing all these aspects of gameplay was not such a good idea', and think about designing jobs with SB as the blueprint, instead of this 2min mush

It's ok though, because at least now our classes are balanced to be very close in potency output. Wait, what's that, the ranged classes (except BLM because it gets special rights) are doing 10% less damage than the melee, because of 'ranged tax', despite melee now having 100% uptime basically guaranteed in every fight? How could this happen /s

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I’m trying to figure out if this guy doesn’t even know UWU exists (or somehow doesn’t know UCOB exists) or simply forgot that one of them exists

Regardless I don’t think he is terribly qualified to talk on ultimates

Oh my god I totally missed him saying only 1 Ultimate was in StB. That's HILARIOUS. *Shadowbringers* was the anomaous 1-ultimate expansion and people were mad because Stormblood set the original precedent for 2 Ultimates per expansion.

Also @Koros: that makes perfect sense to me tbh.

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Originally Posted by ForsakenRoe

I know UWU's been potency-crept to the point where it's debatably easier than some final floor Savage fights, but let's not do it dirty like this

Additionally, SB was not the expansion where people were wiping to 2% enrages because of how incredibly swingy the crit variance/raidbuff stacking makes things. I've been linked a comparison of two logs, one of a friend's WHM player, and one of 'the best (at the time) run of P1 of TOP. Both had the exact same number of casts of Glare, Dia, Misery, Assize. To the GCD, they were identical in their gameplay. The 'best run' WHM had much higher crit and directhit rates, and so their damage was TWENTY PERCENT higher than my friend's WHM. Said WHM had gone looking at other logs to see what could be improved, and the answer they got was literally 'go again, and crit more this time'. I didn't do ultimates back then, but I don't remember running into any kind of situations like that back in SB. I remember multiple people saying DRK was bad, only to watch as it took both ultimate worldfirsts. I remember people saying WHM was 'trolling tier', only for it to take, again, both ultimate worldfirsts.

I would put real money on it, if SE released a Stormblood Classic server, an unexpectedly large number of SHB/EW-joiners would go 'hang on a minute, this gameplay is more fun'. Emnity management, tank stance risk-reward, healers have another DOT (or 3 in SCH's case), AST has cards that do something more interesting than the same flat 6% regardless of card, NIN has tricksy things like aggro management skills and a silence, SMN has some actual depth to it's rotation. Of course, not everyone's a winner, WHM and MCH come to mind. But I think it'd have enough of an effect on the playerbase for SE to have to think 'well actually, maybe removing all these aspects of gameplay was not such a good idea', and think about designing jobs with SB as the blueprint, instead of this 2min mush

It's ok though, because at least now our classes are balanced to be very close in potency output. Wait, what's that, the ranged classes (except BLM because it gets special rights) are doing 10% less damage than the melee, because of 'ranged tax', despite melee now having 100% uptime basically guaranteed in every fight? How could this happen /s

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Agreed with everything.

Just a nitpick though, but it's not just about the no. of GCDs. It's fairly obvious that on WHM you have to put Misery into buffs, but in some statics, the real killer of their damage is their atrociously desynced raid buffs where it spreads out over like 26s.

As far as I'm aware, unless you're playing outright meme comps like double phys ranged, enrage checks are almost always a skill issue first in Ultimates and week 1 Savage. However, the insane crit variance in EW is downright horrendous, on some jobs like GNB it's the literal difference between a blue and pink parse. In SB as long as you play skillfully (and back then very few people actually hit the skill cap) you will get a 99 even with unfavorable kill times. In EW that's basically up to chance outside of having very favorable kill times. We've gone from rewarding skill to rewarding luck. That means that in SB you need to play skillfully to beat enrage checks (the hardest was probably O8S p1 in that xpac, so Ultimates are actually more lenient in terms of enrage checks); in EW skill still beats enrage checks but now you can also just be lucky. A lot of statics having issues with enrages boiling down to RNG fall into that category which is why it might feel frustrating.

Also WHM took far more skill back then. It was arguably the HARDEST healer from a casting standpoint. AST is 100% easier after 4.3, when its cast time got reduced to 1.5s. In 4.0-4.2, AST had 0.8s of movement windows during each oGCD cast because optimal play on AST involved clipping (e.g. Malefic -> clipped Earthly Star -> Malefic -> Malefic etc.) and these happened far more frequently (since AST just had more oGCDs) than on WHM. So in 4.0-4.2 one could say AST was still easier than WHM for movement. SCH had Miasma II (not Ruin II, which most casual players think was the case) for movement, and this brought a different set of challenges, being that you could only weave/move comfortably every 12s optimally, and the movement has to begin from slightly more than max melee (iirc it was 6 yalms). Ruin II was only used for forced disengagement from melee range. But in either case, SCH was arguably the easiest healer for casting. WHM literally only had Aero II for movement and everything else must be slidecasted, since Regen should only be used when absolutely necessary; ironically that means that WHM had more movement in later floors than in earlier floors. None of this matters for casual players at all though, you can just use Aero II and Ruin II to move anyways.

Healers back then were one of the easiest roles on a skill floor level, since GCD heals are so powerful, but probably had the highest skill ceiling in the entire game, and 100% so during HW with old Cleric Stance. In SB, they were all BLM turrets with far fewer movement options while needing to heal the party when played at an optimal level. It's sad that the role has been so gutted.

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Also just to be on topic as I've said before: the gutting of multiple jobs is not something hardcore players asked for, nor is it something casuals wanted. It literally doesn't even help casuals because they will just press 1-1-1-1-1 and break combos anyways, it literally doesn't matter to them. It's something the developers did of their own volition with barely any consultation from the players. I 100% suspect a lot of the gutting is because the job design team played an alt job in their spare time, did some Savage PF and failed miserably so they gutted the job to soothe their own ego. This is a game dev issue, not a playerbase issue. Now we apparently need a DRG rework, even though I LITERALLY HAVE NEVER SEEN A SINGLE DRAGOON COMPLAINING ABOUT THEIR JOB. Which just means that they're not making job changes based on feedback, it's based on their own ego.

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Originally Posted by Koros

We've gone from rewarding skill to rewarding luck. That means that in SB you need to play skillfully to beat enrage checks (the hardest was probably O8S p1 in that xpac, so Ultimates are actually more lenient in terms of enrage checks)

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Seeing you talk about O8S phase 1 reminds me of one of the aspects I deeply miss from back in SB. I pugged O8S early weeks and got a team that couldn't quite beat the enrage, so I baited LB on all the Light of Judgements and got 2 LB3s and an LB2. I miss how you could come up with other solutions back then to make up for teams that were a bit weaker on the damage output. In EW, if your team lacks damage output, you're basically done, might as well disband.

I remember the first time I cleared T10 we were right at the soft enrage with one mechanic left, we had however placed a previous mechanic wrong and didn’t have enough space to resolve the final mechanic due to shrinking arena, so the person with the mechanic stood inside the shrinking wall and got power healed by the WHM to try to keep them alive while the rest of the party just stood there and DPS’ed down the boss

I think that person still ended up dying but it was the sort of “not really the way you should resolve the mechanic but it kinda works in a pinch if your group isn’t flawless” I miss so much from pre ShB

I think this thread raises a good point about job design even if it's not specifically 'correct' ( they design/balance around savage as someone mentioned).

It's not as though this is a new thing; in ARR fights like t5 and 9 very clearly wanted both SCH and WHM at release, for example, to survive things like Death Sentence's infirmity with % heals from Lustrate or putting on Stoneskin ahead of Nael's Megaflare.

And especially throughout HW there were jobs that just like a pain in the ass to play in the overworld or versus FATEs between needing a constant target to maintain its high DPS rotation and long cooldowns that did not reset between fights locking you out when you travelled, which happens much more often in the overworld or a dungeon than versus a boss. One job didn't even have AoE at all until StB.

QoL changes for what needs to be maintained out of combat have helped a lot, but there are still quite a few jobs that have had so much of this streamlined that they have comparatively little out of these environments, such as healers and particularly AST.

Something that doesn't help this trend are actions which can only be used on players in your party, which I think should be limited to ones that increase Enmity or force a player to reposition. It's silly that a DNC can't buff someone grinding FATEs while they're in queue for a duty, or that Eos can no longer heal the main tank of your 24 man raid because they're in a different alliance.

I get the reason they balance this way is for the same reason a pvp centric game balances around more seasoned players, but somehow this game manages to do that without having the pvp jobs feel as samey. Maybe their push to redo PvP was a concerted, short term effort that drew in more designers and now that it's done that team has disbanded, whereas the PVE design was and still is in the same more and more undermanned 4 total devepers the forums seem to think handle all of it.

That is, I don't really think strictly balancing around hard content is causing the 'dumbing down', but rather the lack of it being recognized as a problem or engagement on the level that pvp was before its EW rework. It's just kept in a sort of holding pattern propped up as much by the fact that players have to do SOME PvE to do ANYTHING AT ALL in game, the fact that it's possible on every job, and the fact that there's only a small team to manage this task worth at least 50% of all battles in the game.

Players dislike how busy AST is or how simple SMN is? Sure, we'll address that in the expansion, because it's balanced and some folks enjoy it the way it is now. PLD and MCH can't fit into the current 2 min design paradigm? That we WILL fix because it's actually a problem that affects 'completing content' .