6.0 Stat Squish will be good for tanks

[Sqwall]

I have felt the game has begun to be to no longer be a challenge outside of extreme/savage/ultimate. A lot of the difficulty can be fixed with better dungeon/mob design mechanics and making bosses much more volatile. I rarely die in dungeons as a tank, but I would really love it if the dev's would make dungeons MUCH harder other then "sprout incompetence". Fine tune the mechanics.

Having said that.
Given the information about the "stat squish" and Yoshi-P's example during the endwalkers press event. Tanks will probably see a huge benefit to the reduced damage, HP, and all stats.

Yoshi-P's example: "I'm a level 80 Blackmage with 530 ilevel and I cast Fire IV, that is non crit and non DH. It will do around 50k damage. After the stat adjustment it will do around 10k damage, roughly 80% less then current values."

Skills I worry about are ones that scale with Max HP, Life Steal on attack, and attack power based skills.

Will Nascent Flash no longer be the go to for my meat blender WAR if i'm only getting 10k HP per hit?

Will The Blackest Night no longer be the best skill in the game for damage mitigation if I only have 30-40k max HP?

Now this could also mean that enemy HP will also adjusted downwards. Basically making it a wash when defeating enemies and mitigating damage.

But if SE was clever and actually made mobs/bosses hit HARDER? This could potentially "fix" this whole DPS is everything mentality.

Tanks need to mitigate better, Healers need to heal more, and DPS need to well...just DPS, but the emphasis will fall squarely on the DPS killing the mob's as the tank and heals will eventually run out of resources and are naturally gimp in the DPS department. Everyone will fill out there roll, but can't survive without the other.

We could get to the point where Tank can't live without heals and DPS. Heals can't live without tanks and DPS. And DPS can't live without tank and heals. Might even be able to keep those enrage timers, tank busters, and healer targeted mechanics, but the ramp up the difficulty.

[LeonKeyh]

The idea behind the stat squish is that everything, relative to everything else at that level, is going to remain the same. Unless they have decided to do stat tuning on top of the squish (which, as far as I know, hasn't been announced at all), then you won't see any difference in gameplay EXCEPT whenever doing unsynced content at a level higher than the expansion the content is from.

The stat squish, in and of itself, does nothing that you're hoping for. It will only affect unsynced content that you have out leveled. That doesn't mean that they won't, in addition, perform tuning that gives you everything that you're hoping for, but that hasn't been discussed at all.

Also, stat squishes actually make it so that they have less "fine tuning" precision available, not more. The bigger the number (with integers) the more fine tuning you have available.

[shao32]

Idk, we are talking about a understaffed combat dev team so unless Yoship says they have double the amount of members on the combat team and now have a dedicated tester team to work with so the Devs don't have to do all by themselfs i doubt we would see any real improvement of the situation, yeah im being negative but i can't help it, SHB have mined a lot any expectaction for any improvement for tanks and combat content and i totally wish with all my heart to be wrong.

[Seathts]

I understand and agree that tanks need to deal with more incoming damage, but the stat squish won't solve that. The most likely result is that the game will play exactly the same as it does now except the numbers will be smaller; nothing else will change unless they make a design change unrelated to the squish.

[Deceptus]

Idk, we are talking about a understaffed combat dev team so unless Yoship says they have double the amount of members on the combat team and now have a dedicated tester team to work with so the Devs don't have to do all by themselfs i doubt we would see any real improvement of the situation, yeah im being negative but i can't help it, SHB have mined a lot any expectaction for any improvement for tanks and combat content and i totally wish with all my heart to be wrong.

WoW has attempted multiple stat squishes and they have gotten it wrong every single time they've done it. This is a company who has done it before and should know how to do it right and they STILL manage to mess it up each time.

Guess what is the biggest problem with it? Re-balancing old content. It doesn't work to just say Kefka / Omega now does 80% less damage just like you do.

So, seeing as how another company has failed at it multiple times and how SE has a proven track record of really screwing up new systems they try, I have zero faith in them that they'll get it right.

I'd love to be pleasantly surprised, but I doubt I will be.

[Kabooa]

The stat squish is nothing more than numbers pairing down. If it is not combined with shifts in design, then all it really accomplishes is cutting off a zero and lowering a leading digit.

I doubt we're going to see an issue with doing content unsynced. Shadowbringers content will be paired down accordingly with the stat squish, and Stormblood and before, whatever decrease occurs, is still going to be contending with whatever scaling Level 90 brings.

[Brandedblade]

WoW has attempted multiple stat squishes and they have gotten it wrong every single time they've done it. This is a company who has done it before and should know how to do it right and they STILL manage to mess it up each time.

Guess what is the biggest problem with it? Re-balancing old content. It doesn't work to just say Kefka / Omega now does 80% less damage just like you do.

So, seeing as how another company has failed at it multiple times and how SE has a proven track record of really screwing up new systems they try, I have zero faith in them that they'll get it right.

I'd love to be pleasantly surprised, but I doubt I will be.

Between the sheer negativity of this comment and your signature. I sense you are an incredibly fun person to play with.

That unnessecary comment aside, My understanding of the stat squish is just as Kabooa says, still the same algorithms, just a couple digits shaved off to reduce the likelihood of overflow glitches occuring. Who knows? I certainly have no reason to feel negative about this, seems reasonable with how the stats scale with the ilevel powercreep that's inevitable in a game like this.

[Sqwall]

Between the sheer negativity of this comment and your signature. I sense you are an incredibly fun person to play with.

That unnessecary comment aside, My understanding of the stat squish is just as Kabooa says, still the same algorithms, just a couple digits shaved off to reduce the likelihood of overflow glitches occuring. Who knows? I certainly have no reason to feel negative about this, seems reasonable with how the stats scale with the ilevel powercreep that's inevitable in a game like this.

I agree to both your points.

To the later I think SE could tweak the mob stats slightly above the appropriate value, for a more engaging experience. Now if they don't want to do that...

Then maybe it's time they return to Hard mode dungeons. We didn't get ANY hard mode dungeons this expansion, and I for one was hoping (half expecting) some hard modes from stormblood. Chalk it up to lack of time or not enough dev's for all the projects going on.

I just want a challenge outside of the once a week savage/extreme run. Party finder is fine for PUG's....but PUG's SUUUUUUUUUUUUUCCCCCCCCCCCCKKKKKKKKKKKKK! Give me some high tuned dailies to keep coming back to and I'll be a happy camper.

Bring in "Heroic" modes that really test the skill of small parties, while offering up some really cool rewards (tomestones, mounts, minions, cosmetics,). Hell even add something like dungeon time trials to see who can get the fastest time posted on ranking boards, or really difficult to pull off achievements that offer titles.

Something like skulls in Halo 3 that REALLY added something unique to the game to allow the community to attempt crazy things. Like an all tank ultimate/extreme run that I have seen pop

[Liam_Harper]

Between the sheer negativity of this comment and your signature. I sense you are an incredibly fun person to play with.

There's nothing wrong with being skeptical due to a poor track record. If you sit back and give no feedback or concerns, it'll be too late once the expansion is released.

Stat squishes aren't as simple as dividing everything by 5 and calling it a day. Firstly they're only scaling values for lv51-80. Current content isn't too difficult since you're scaling it to the new stats, but old content will be affected far more. For example ARR EX's are aimed for lv50, which isn't a target of scaling but we'll still be fully scaled and 5 times weaker. Lv60 content will have some scaling, but there will still be growth from current lv50-new lv60, so they'll be harder than lv50 but we're still the full 5 times weaker. At 80 it starts to look more relative to how it feels now.

This happened in WoW. Old content became significantly harder unsynch and the developers learned that a sizable portion of their playerbase loved doing old content. The same is true in FF14, we love running old stuff unsynch for glams, mounts, story we missed, carrying BLU's, achievements, ect. In WoW it was a mess and they had to introduce a series of insane buffs for high levels in old content, but never quite got it right and had the issue with old content becoming much harder several times again later. It really wasn't ever a simple matter of "shaving a few 0's off".

The biggest concern with FF14 is that Yoshi admitted old content may become harder and that "they might look into it and see what they can do". They have no set plan for something that a much larger MMO company has tried, failed and struggled badly with. This is a complicated task, they can't underestimate it, they need to know exactly what they're doing.

[Ftail]

There's nothing wrong with being skeptical due to a poor track record. If you sit back and give no feedback or concerns, it'll be too late once the expansion is released.

Square Enix doesn’t listen to customer feedback or concerns, that should really be obvious by now.


Back on topic, the best thing to do to make content harder would be to lower the ilvl sync for dungeons and trials. Our ilvl is just way too high in comparison to the average ilvl when stuff first came out.