Thoughts from Shiva Unreal

[Recon1o6]

This fight made me notice more than ever the drop in quality in the playerbase between low difficulty and no incentive to use kit, the designing style of the jobs and boss fights and vast netcode improvements.

On players: had a couple of groups refusing to do mechanics and kept dying in one party, another party had a dancer that never used technical step nor flourish, the one that i cleared had a whm that only used 6 buttons- glare, dia, medica, benison, cure 2 and raise. Fortunately the rest of the players in that clear party were excellent, even the sch who forgot to equip gloves
A frustrating number of players just don't want to use their full kits and worse is that fights don't require them either.
That said, this fight even if its the easiest extreme, did seem to require more frequent healing than other exs, but that's more of a damnation of modern exs than a point to shiva. note i said freqyent not harder- the damage itself is still poor on unavoidable damage

You'd be booted if you tried any of this back then

On jobs: Just wow... when I healed this way back, me and whichever scholar answered the shout (no pf in them days folks!) had a question each to answer- sch do i use eos or selene? while i had to ask do I set my hotbar for stance dance or stick to healing (if its new tank or sch co healer)
We could customise our hotbars. Healers were expected to and enjoyed dpsing and had a few options to do so, pure healers weren't a thing, shiva simply did not do enough damage. I would frequently start the fight with regen on tank, cleric stance, aero, thunder followed by stone.
Everyone had strengths and weaknesses, and you got better by doing other jobs. Each job also had a distinct playstyle and actions, skill floors and ceilings. Each job also looked like a bunch of rummage sale rejects

These days, healers are designed to be cure/physick/benefic bots even if all veteran healers and most new healers play like combat medics. Tanks and dps have so many more mitigation and self sustain tools. enmity is a joke as well, because shiva had frequent tank swaps. Positioning was and is absolutely critical in this fight with lots of very small safe zones and the boss frequently staying still instead of moving. You had to position correctly for the knockback in bow form- no immunity here folks, you learned to do things properly.

Overall, this makes for a poorer fight than the original. Because there are more healing tools available and more mitigation and self sustain tools for the tanks/dps, healers have proportionally less healing to do.
But unlike the original, healers nowdays have no dps kit beyond a dot and a nuke. So the increased downtime is incredibly dull and noticable

Boss design: The two key differences that stand out in this fight compared ot more modern fights is the mechanics timing and how most mechanics were simple and had tiny safe zones or fixed methods of being solved/avoided. More mechanics were also deadly (see glacier bash on none dragoons or tanks, 2 circle hits, shared damage+circle etc)
Shiva here does not have a fixed enrage timer, its based both on party dps and on her rotation. This is why one party i was in got enraged as soon as she triggered buff 11, but the clear party i had got several mechanics to finish her off in after she triggered buff 11.

Shiva does vulnerability stacks on most of her mechanics if they are failed and those that aren't, well she has a fixed damage share attack and does enough damage that squishy dps can get killed from max for having a single vuln stack. Contrast with most fights these days where 3 or 4 vuln stacks is suvivable.

netcode: Oh boy have things come a long way. for starters, your character syncs up much better with the server- within the small safe zones have less clipping by edge of the aoe. Autoattacks are also better timed. No more one of them accidently lagging and taking a double hit by mistake.
The countdown timer as well is an improvement. On occasion, partiuclarly with ps3, a tank could pull and it took a few seconds for everyone else to spot it.

tldr
Jobs trivialise some of it now. Its an extremely different and dull experience for healers given there is proportionally less healing required and better mitigation, but downtime kits have been gutted instead of compensating for it.