In favor of Ultimates, Dungeons have suffered

I've been reviewing some discussions about how many jobs were simplified in order to make room for higher-end raid mechanics... I.E. if we don't have to worry about this or that job's complicated rotation, we can predict about how much damage they'll be doing and how much they can afford to move, and therefore we can push the limits with extremely difficult mechanics and how much precision we ask of the player. Xenosys himself even remarked "if you put P8S in Heavensward, nobody would be able to clear it."

And during all this, I came to a sudden realization.

While simplifying the classes to make more room for interesting and difficult ultimate-tier fight mechanics, they've inadvertently made dungeons the most brain-off content.

I've considered myself a casual player, I mained Scholar in Stormblood and I personally think the last legs of Stormblood (4.55) was the peak of the game for me... Scholar felt fun to play, I felt like I mastered juggling my DoTs with healing, the fairy controlled smoothly and was fun to command in the middle of a different spell cast, it was amazing.

I even did some Savage back then (though I didn't get super far). But dungeons were where it was at for me, I felt like I could really tryhard on every pull and see if I can make a difference in the speed of progression, I was constantly active, it was great.

But nowadays, while the Ultimate and Savage tier content is spot on- difficult mechanics without needing to concern myself too much with my rotation- the dungeons suck. "Tryharding" is just holding off on a GCD heal during the trash pull so you can push your one and only damage button an extra time or two. Commanding the fairy is just another off-global now.

I've switched to Sage and while I'm definitely having more fun there than I was on Scholar, it just isn't the same and I still want that Stormblood era skillset back. But that's me getting that off my chest.

I don’t think it’s ultimate as a content design’s fault it’s square Enix’s balancing philosophy in which all complexity should be dumped on the fight so the jobs can be easy as hell to play so they are more simple to balance so they can follow the “every job comp can clear all content” philosophy

The community just needs to accept a slightly worse balance on the jobs in order to get job diversity back so they can begin to tilt content back towards “difficulty comes from playing your job correctly, not just solving debuff vomit mechanics in savage/ultimate”

I can agree that the community needs to accept screwy job balance, and I don't think it's the fault of ultimate design as such... but I think it's a consequence of the devs being shortsighted when it comes to "raising difficulty." Players ask for harder content, devs make harder content, it's shown to be too hard in some cases so the devs dumb down the class kits and now the content itself is too easy... and the cycle repeats. I could be totally off base in some way, but the point is, dungeons being braindead content isn't "ultimate's fault", it's simply a trickle-down consequence of high-end encounter design being the priority, I think.

Dungeons are braindead because on average the community is braindead and square refuses to leave behind the people who a ti Ely cannot play their job

You should not be able to clear dead ends spamming cure 1 but you 100% can

There is a case to be made that you can have skill floors that are in the basement with sky high skill ceilings (basically how HW design worked) but the community hated that because they can’t accept balance problems which again isn’t really ultimates fault

I don't recall dungeons ever being a challenge. Even back in ARR my friends and I would speed run dungeons with 3 DPS and a healer just to see how fast we could clear them. Ultimate raids didn't even exist back then.

Jobs are tuned for savage, not ultimates. There's no reason for SE to fine tune jobs for ultimates since that tuning would go out of date with the next expansion and unlike savage current ultimates have way less of a crowd partaking and aren't worth adjusting for.

I'd actually be livid if they were making specific adjustments for ultimates, especially past ultimates as the content is rather niche despite the hype it generates.

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Originally Posted by Supersnow845

I don’t think it’s ultimate as a content design’s fault it’s square Enix’s balancing philosophy in which all complexity should be dumped on the fight so the jobs can be easy as hell to play so they are more simple to balance so they can follow the “every job comp can clear all content” philosophy

The community just needs to accept a slightly worse balance on the jobs in order to get job diversity back so they can begin to tilt content back towards “difficulty comes from playing your job correctly, not just solving debuff vomit mechanics in savage/ultimate”

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I actually agree with this,
The whole point of doing a class system in the first place is to have unique classes each with strengths and weaknesses that aren't as good at some things than others. When you get away from this, the whole point of a class system, the class system becomes pointless.

This used to be really good in this game and it's slowly going into the tank. Example... Back in HW, BLM was really good at single target while SMN was really good at AoE, so whenever you had any situation where there was a lot of AoE needed SMN came out on top.... but then if you had a lot of Single Target DPS needed BLM came out on top. It depended on how you designed the Raid as to which one was best at it. In Alex for example SMN came out on top of AoE 8-mans, while the BLM did in the DPS check single target stuff. Same when a given 8 man required a lot of Movement vs one that didn't need as much. It all depended on the situation as to which one would be better.

Another thing I think they really screwed up on which is in line with this... was when they removed subjobs in Stormblood.

One thing you could guarantee back then was that everyone would definitely have at least 2 different classes leveled. So if one of your jobs wasn't up to the task you just reverse your sub/main and the other class could cover it. So you were never at a complete impass if your normal main was bad at the specific content you needed to beat.

It was this type of thing they really wrecked with some of their short sighted decision making... which in turn really sucked a lot of the flavor out of what used to be a very rich and diverse environment/world.

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Originally Posted by Silverquick

Another thing I think they really screwed up on which is in line with this... was when they removed subjobs in Stormblood.

One thing you could guarantee back then was that everyone would definitely have at least 2 different classes leveled. So if one of your jobs wasn't up to the task you just reverse your sub/main and the other class could cover it. So you were never at a complete impass if your normal main was bad at the specific content you needed to beat.

It was this type of thing they really wrecked with some of their short sighted decision making... which in turn really sucked a lot of the flavor out of what used to be a very rich and diverse environment/world.

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Subjobs? You must be confusing this game with another one (maybe FF11) because you never needed a second job fully levelled. You did need to level certain classes 15 to unlock each job, and certain cross-class skills had a level requirement, but I think the highest you ever had to go was 34 with Lancer to get Blood for Blood.

It didn't leave much in way of decision making since there were only a few cross-class skills you actually needed, although it result in a lot of new Warriors lacking Provoke or healers with no Swiftcast because they couldn't be bothered or didn't know to level up other classes to unlock those skills.

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Originally Posted by Silverquick

The whole point of doing a class system in the first place is to have unique classes each with strengths and weaknesses that aren't as good at some things than others. When you get away from this, the whole point of a class system, the class system becomes pointless.

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Never mind balance, this baffling mindsets extends to playstyles as well. SE has basically come out explaining their reasoning why they are able to have so much class identity in PVP, but not PVE: They simply do not want PVE jobs to do anything too interesting, because anything out of the ordinary might scare away the average player from a specific job. Every jobs must be enjoyable, in the lowest common denominator way, for every single player. Nothing should stand out, because for some people what stands out positively will subjectively stand out negatively.

What is the point of having a class based system then? Someone should seriously ask the game designers that.

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Originally Posted by Supersnow845

Dungeons are braindead because on average the community is braindead and square refuses to leave behind the people who a ti Ely cannot play their job

You should not be able to clear dead ends spamming cure 1 but you 100% can

There is a case to be made that you can have skill floors that are in the basement with sky high skill ceilings (basically how HW design worked) but the community hated that because they can’t accept balance problems which again isn’t really ultimates fault

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Unfortunately this trend will continue because money talks. Se is a business. They are not giving a job interview to their players. In order to keep their subs, lowering the floor is their logical choice.

I think there's also a bit of a scaling issue in Dungeons now that didn't exist before.
As a healer I've noticed things just don't hit as hard anymore. When you've played whitemage for as long as I have you sort of know when the "big hit" is coming... but now it doesn't exist really.
I think there are only a couple of dungeons where doing a wall to wall be unadvisable, but like doing an old dungeon now the only way you'll have difficulty in it is if people are undergeared for it.

I started playing other jobs for the first time in 8 years. I leveled Paladin to 90 and soon monk. Monk does so much damage to mobs at low levels they basically evaporate.

To elaborate on the scaling issue, some things irrevocably changed the way old dungeons have played over the years. Yes, they've become easier as a result.

1. All jobs have infinite AoE options once they've unlocked it. WHM and AST are the last to get theirs at 45. TP no longer exists to limit physical jobs, and MP is no longer a concern. All tanks have infinite aoe too, coming from where PLD didn't have anything until StB and only DRK could go forever until ShB.

2. All jobs deal more damage because their action potencies are much higher than they were for especially older dungeons. This includes healing potencies and mitigation durations and cooldowns, as e.g. Shadow Wall used to only last 10 seconds for 3 minutes, and Reprisal was only single target.

3. All jobs have more VIT due to VIT being baked onto all accessories now and not just Fending ones (which tanks could choose to forgo).

4. Tanks are able to do their full damage at all times because nobody has to manage aggro. Hell, tanks and healers can't even draw aggro with regens if they WANTED to now.

5. Cleric Stance's fundamental change in 4.0 means that healers are even more free to contribute DPS while healing, especially if they struggled with juggling it before.

6. Role actions are not limited by level range like Cross Class actions were. A level 18-sync'd AST would have to choose between Cleric Stance and, let's say Protect (if they were an idiot). But with Role actions, if a tank is sync'd down, in addition to having the best gear possible, they'll have Arm's Length, Rampart, AoE Reprisal, an oGCD 5 second (greater duration than normal) stun, and not have to pick between any.

What's unique to EW for this situation is that the tank level 82 short-cooldown mitigations are all incredibly powerful, basically allowing a tank to slap on a 5 seconds of not needing any other mitigation between any of their actual long cooldowns. WAR basically goes invincible and fully heals for 8 seconds out of every 25.

I don't think it's unreasonable to conclude that they basically just haven't even thought about how dungeon content functions and is balanced since... probably HW, honestly. The only framework they consider it in now is "will our AI companions be able to execute all the mechanics" and "will a group be able to finish it in an Expert roulette in ~13 minutes." Those are the rubrics they grade their dungeon battle design on. They just lean on Soken and the environment artists to make it a worthwhile experience.

I know they have it in them to make it work with current job design, though, because the Criterion dungeons were all damn fun even if they still didn't play like the old dungeons. They were certainly more engaging than most of Savage Pandemonium.