healers need a serious overhaul

[ItMe]

So to answer your question no they haven't messed up Unreal, they function perfectly fine, they just don't get how much they have changed jobs affects these old fights.

(Emphasis mine)
Why do you say that?
Considering how the team is a small group of people that haven't really been rotating in or out all that much, you'd think they'd have a pretty accurate idea of how much things have changed as they've changed the job itself.
What makes you say they don't?

We don't really have many examples in 14 of them updating old content, or updates to our kits making old content problematic, so I'm not sure where you're coming from on this. Am I missing something?

[HyoMinPark]

We don't really have many examples in 14 of them updating old content, or updates to our kits making old content problematic, so I'm not sure where you're coming from on this. Am I missing something?

While not related to the Unreal fights, you can see how jobs like GNB affect the Ultimates. GNB is extremely powerful at level 70, and there was a noticeable difference in my UCoB group when our PLD went GNB. Job adjustments have also affected the Ultimates as NIN is by far the strongest melee at level 70 now (versus where it should be a job like SAM, but 70 SAM is actually the weakest in a fight like UCoB).

I healed UCoB on AST—and our level 70 healing kit now compared to back then is so much stronger. Between COpp giving free regens every 60 seconds and CU being 60 seconds, I had an oGCD answer for nearly every raidwide. Plus we got 3 uses of CU during Golden’s Ahk Morns versus the previous 2 you could get before due to the cooldown reduction.

The developers did mention that they had to “make adjustments” to the 70 Ultimates prior to ShB’s release. I can’t recall if they ever stated what the specific adjustments were—but the job changes going from SB to ShB and the new jobs have affected the fights. Item level scaling aside, a lot of the DPS checks in UCoB and UwU simply don’t exist at the same level they did even post their relative patch when we had the dungeon gear BiS for them (post 4.1 for UCoB and post 4.3 for UwU). Before, an average group could have Nael at 20~30% pre-Divebombs. My group—also skilled enough but definitely not min-maxed—was consistently getting her to 4% pre-Divebombs.

I wouldn’t call this a “problematic” situation. But it’s definitely a situation where new jobs and job adjustments have affected old content.

[ItMe]

snip

Oooh, you have a clever eye~
I didn't think to take clues from the Ultimate either.

Hmm... this really changes my perspective. They'd said they care a lot about preserving the challenge of the Ultimate fights to keep them, well, ultimate, but man the ShB upgrades as well as being able to max out synched down substats really seem to be messing with things.
You mentioned they said they "made adjustments" to the Ultimates prior to ShB, and I doubt I'll find any specific statements, but I'll see if I can't find what they changed.

Though... perhaps this is just evidence that we actually need a stat squish to help rebalance everything???
At the very least (if it's done well) these performance disparities should become less pronounced.

[HyoMinPark]

Oooh, you have a clever eye~
I didn't think to take clues from the Ultimate either.

Hmm... this really changes my perspective. They'd said they care a lot about preserving the challenge of the Ultimate fights to keep them, well, ultimate, but man the ShB upgrades as well as being able to max out synched down substats really seem to be messing with things.
You mentioned they said they "made adjustments" to the Ultimates prior to ShB, and I doubt I'll find any specific statements, but I'll see if I can't find what they changed.

Though... perhaps this is just evidence that we actually need a stat squish to help rebalance everything???
At the very least (if it's done well) these performance disparities should become less pronounced.

The Ultimates are still hard—like there are still a lot of mechanics that, when failed, can still spiral out of control beyond saving (e.g., messing up Heavensfall Trio; people dying during ice phase in Nael is basically Russian Roulette on if you can power through not getting double-iced; screwing up Tenstrike Trio, missing towers during Blackfire, Titan gaols in UwU, etc.). Mechanically, you still have to know what you’re doing to pass the mechanic checks. Those are still well in tact—though toolkits do make them much easier in terms of mitigation—for example, as I mentioned before about having that extra CU for Golden Bahamut’s Ahk Morns. It still requires a decent knowledge and execution—but the DPS checks and healing checks are far easier now. A lot of the DPS checks simply don’t exist in UCoB or UwU, and it’s so easy to push phases now compared to before. Potting on certain bosses near guarantees you’ll skip their big mechanics (e.g., Nael’s Divebombs, Titan’s Merry-Go-Round pre-enrage).

I did ask around, and a friend of mine said that he recalls them saying they had to adjust outgoing damage in the Ultimates twice. The first time they adjusted it due to the job changes, so they tried to scale the damage up—but it didn’t really work as the bosses were now doing too much damage for parties to survive. So then they “nerfed” that back down. The Ultimates can still hurt—but we have so many more tools available to us that it makes them almost less of a threat now compared to when they were relevant.

I honestly wish that the Ultimates had been like the Unreals and scaled to 80 to account for the adjustments that some jobs now have at 70. SAM’s biggest weakness is that all its big hitters are post-70—so 70 SAM is just laughable by comparison. DNC also suffers a lot because the majority of its burst is post-70 as well, so 70 DNC just feels so bad to play without having things like Flourish and Saber Dance to really give it that burst (though that would probably further trivialize the damage checks in the 70 Ultimates). And the adjustments they did to NIN just made it, quite frankly, broken at level 70.