Final Fantasy XIV Hot Takes

[Silver-Strider]

No, I'm saying the devs will MAKE people have downtime with mechanics. Basically large bosses but mechanics constantly force 2 DPS away from the boss's hitbox. Forcing you to have 2 ranged because 3-4 melee is NEVER going to have full uptime. Basically imagine P8S phase 1, except double the size of the earthquake stomps and poison puddles so 4 people always have to be directly in the corner.

The wait til next patch defense has kind of run its course for this game. What happens when your hypothetical doesn't come to pass? Just wait til 7.0? 7.3? 8.0? When does it end?

If your argument hinges on imagination, then it's not an argument, it's a delusion.

[RyuDragnier]

We might not speak about the same thing. My point is about the devs claiming that you can play with every set of jobs as you wish, more or less forcing you into a set of tank, healer and dps without restricting dps but still, due to uptime in harder fights, basically forcing you to try to use the most melee you can get away with. This is in contrast to their free play. Easier content on the other hand makes melees far superior to ranged as there is no real danger in which you aren't in melee range

That I can't argue with. It's why I'm expecting a course correction on their part for the final tier. The playerbase hasn't been overall happy with the constant uptime on the bosses due to the lack of skill involved in doing it this time. Removing that constant uptime would help keep the fights feeling like melee works for that uptime (a feeling I personally like).

The wait til next patch defense has kind of run its course for this game. What happens when your hypothetical doesn't come to pass? Just wait til 7.0? 7.3? 8.0? When does it end?

If your argument hinges on imagination, then it's not an argument, it's a delusion.

It's based on history. Remember how the devs had to basically save the raiding scene in HW with Alex Midas after they almost completely killed it with Gordias Savage? Remember when the devs didn't like how people did things in Eureka Anemos in SB, and basically altered things so hard for Eureka Pagos to the point where it almost completely killed the content and they had to backpedal in Pyros and Hydatos? Remember how the devs had to backpedal on the SCH MP nerfs in SB because it caused enough problems to where SCH was pushed out of parties for AST? Remember how in ShB they had partially reworked MNK in 5.4 because the job was almost completely out of the meta? Remember how a few months ago they had to nerf P8S because they had the HP too high?

We have precedent on them having to course correct constantly, both with jobs and with content. And it often happens due to a shift of perspective on their part due to the community response. And the community hasn't really liked the permanent uptime, so it's very likely they're going to stop doing that. And if they haven't changed that by the next raids, I too will not be happy.

[Silver-Strider]

We have precedent on them having to course correct constantly, both with jobs and with content. And it often happens due to a shift of perspective on their part due to the community response. And the community hasn't really liked the permanent uptime, so it's very likely they're going to stop doing that. And if they haven't changed that by the next raids, I too will not be happy.

We also have a precedence of feedback being ignored as well and while some of it was warranted, there's been a disturbingly increasing amount of legitimate feedback that has been ignored, such as the dead horse that is Healer Feedback. The 2 minute meta has been universally panned at this point and while that might just be a larger change geared towards the next expansion, I just don't see it being killed off either given the lengths that SE has gone to adjust every class to fit that mentality.

If they had a plan for course correction after the feedback for the current raid's design was given, would that not have started in the subsequent patches? The 24 man raid hitboxes aren't exactly small and neither was Rubicante so was this just them not having time to adjust them after the feedback or was it just ignored? I want to believe the former but my copium has kind of run dry at this point. I don't see any hope for correction in EW at this point and can only hope 7.0 is amazing or I guess it'll be time to move on

[Shurrikhan]

We also have a precedence of feedback being ignored as well and while some of it was warranted, there's been a disturbingly increasing amount of legitimate feedback that has been ignored, such as the dead horse that is Healer Feedback.

Aye. And no matter the different opinions on how best that should be solved, at least there is very, very broad consensus on the largest problems themselves (with those problems, being solely of/in perceived gameplay, leaving little room for misunderstanding), so there's really no excuse for that feedback's being ignored/gaslit.



That said...

The 2 minute meta has been universally panned at this point

Things like this, on the other hand, probably hurt feedback's apparent value despite its breadth of consensus, as that consensus so often seems founded on, frankly, a lack of actually thinking about the underlying issues.

The broader (and frankly, meme-ish) that concensus has grown, the less it has shown critical thought, let alone any memory of how the game worked before it (i.e., exactly the same insofar as stacking CDs wherever possible, but with far more cases of "You shouldn't play Job A except in Compositions B or C").

That's not to say that people are "wrong" to dislike the result, of course -- only that there is a pretty clear path between past complaints and where we ended up and that the underlying optimizations now being taken issue with have been around since ARR, so the pointed finger isn't nearly so accurate or helpful as most seem to believe.

[Silver-Strider]

The broader (and frankly, meme-ish) that concensus has grown, the less it has shown critical thought, let alone any memory of how the game worked before it (i.e., exactly the same insofar as stacking CDs wherever possible, but with far more cases of "You shouldn't play Job A except in Compositions B or C").

That's not to say that people are "wrong" to dislike the result, of course -- only that there is a pretty clear path between past complaints and where we ended up and that the underlying optimizations now being taken issue with have been around since ARR, so the pointed finger isn't nearly so accurate or helpful as most seem to believe.

It's not so much that I've forgotten what life was like before the 2 minute meta but rather that I had hoped that it would be addressed differently. Take SB MNK as an example. At the start of the expansion, the job wasn't really all that great and the HW Meta pretty much persisted for the most part. However, by 4.5, the Tornado Kick rotation actually allowed MNK to have some relevance for the 1st time since NIN was introduced. There was obvious room for improvement of course but it was still an overall positive change for once. Instead of pursuing that break in the meta, however, SE decided to double down on the meta and just convert every other job to conform to it instead of developing the other jobs to succeed in their own ways. Sure, there were some positives to the changes, such as PoM finally being changed to a 120s buff instead of 150s but on the whole, I felt like it wasn't worth losing everything else that made jobs unique.

[Shurrikhan]

It's not so much that I've forgotten what life was like before the 2 minute meta but rather that I had hoped that it would be addressed differently.

That's fair. And mostly same here. Sorry if I sounded like I was applying that earlier complaint to everyone. It's not nearly so universal. It's just a whole lot more common that I would like / would have hoped.

Take SB MNK as an example. At the start of the expansion, the job wasn't really all that great and the HW Meta pretty much persisted for the most part.

Even in O1-4S, Monk was alt-meta; it just required a heavily physical-comp for Brotherhood. Quite a while into the next tier, most of the fastest O1-4S clears were by Monk-comps. And Monk could push out high rDPS even back in HW; it just had very few players performing at that level because it was considered too skill- and resource-intensive (needed so much Goad/Paeon/ProRook to not run dry when playing at its more optimal SkS tiers).

I don't bring this up just to nit-pick, to be clear, but rather because a lot of the undue simplifications or meta-minded "streamlining" that we've faced seems to correlate tightly with oversimplified perceptions of states of balance or said meta.

However, by 4.5, the Tornado Kick rotation actually allowed MNK to have some relevance for the 1st time since NIN was introduced.

4.2 brought forward the TK rotation (4.5 only increased Monk's baseline damage buff via FoF from 5% to 6% and reduced the penalty for missed positionals by 20), and it, again, wasn't the first time Monk saw relevance.

There was obvious room for improvement of course but it was still an overall positive change for once. Instead of pursuing that break in the meta, however, SE decided to double down on the meta and just convert every other job to conform to it instead of developing the other jobs to succeed in their own ways.

But what do you mean then by "break in the meta"? Consider that concept just generally at first. Does "a break" there mean that a new top dog arrived? That the difference between the top dog and the second place, third, etc., shrank greatly? That compositional optimizations came to have a lesser impact compared to the sum of individual player performances? What makes it a "break" and why would that be a good thing?

:: In late Stormblood, the meta comp only very, very, very mildly started underperforming hard Monk, RDM, or caster comps (each a composition with 5-7 slots fixed in terms of job choice, less flexible even than the double-Ranged-DRG-SMN/NIN or DRG-BRD-SMN-BLM meta comps). Granted, even before that, virtually every comp could clear every fight just fine. The most costly imbalances were between like-role jobs like MCH and BRD whenever one wasn't using a double-Ranged comp, etc. But that didn't stop perception from often barring jobs.

Across oh so many MMOs, it's been hard for me to find a playerbase more willing to bar choices over so small of performance differences in median/expected performance. Granted, there are pretty good reasons for that, worm-can though it be.

Sure, there were some positives to the changes, such as PoM finally being changed to a 120s buff instead of 150s but on the whole, I felt like it wasn't worth losing everything else that made jobs unique.

What distinguishes those, though? PoM being on the 120s CD meant its optimal use was that much more constrained to a 120s comp (though that was, by then, basically ever comp, so that running a DRG didn't mean you'd want to avoid running WHM, etc.). If that homogeneity of timing is a bad thing, then wouldn't PoM's being put on a 120s CD, instead of being buffed in terms of duration or %Haste, be a bad thing? What's the delineating factor?

Moreover, was swapping from a more comp-minded system where one wanted to trim anything outside the group's main timing (as, say a "90s", "120s", or largely "150s Comp") to a more "play whatever you like" system really what cost jobs that uniqueness? I'd say that's true for a very specific few, perhaps, like Stormblood-era Dragoon, who actually held certain CDs for those alternate-rhythm raid buffs, but more broadly? Would modern NIN really play so different, beyond its choice of opener, if Trick Attack was a 45s CD and the raid buffs went off per 90s (greater frequency of one's "full burst")? If some of those buffs went off per 90 and some per 120s, but you didn't sacrifice the optimal timing of one for a best result among both (via some complex stratagem of CD-holding based on expected fight length, likely only doable in serious pre-mades)?

Those differences on paper add flavor, but I suspect it's the differences less obvious from tooltip and more obvious in actual play instead that make the larger difference, and merely asking for diversified CDs --even ignoring the problem that you either (A) end up with reduced accessibility via set comps and/or reduced maximum raid buff power as to keep set comps' variance in check or (B) end up much more distinguished insiders and outsiders in ways that simple tuning tweaks can't handle-- tends to kick dirt over any attempts to figure out what all those subtler in-practice differences actually are/were. There were after all, a ton of changes that coincided with those CD adjustments, and we don't play CDs -- we play kits, on which the effect of mixed CDs depends on the individual considerations required to optimize them. I suspect, therefore, that that's where the bigger differences are, and we shouldn't conflate those gameplay simplifications, especially where they gutted even jobs' solo complexity, with that overarching choice of set-comps vs. shared raidbuff timings.

[Silver-Strider]

Alt-Meta.

As you stated, it was a decent choice, even back in the day. I know I loved the job most back in HW but sustain was a real pain and trying to get TP support when WAR was equally in need of Gaol, rook, etc just made it hard for most teams to justify bringing a MNK. Same in SB but to a lesser extent.

4.2

Must have misremembered then. I could've sworn that Perfect Balance was changed in 4.5 to be 30s and that helped facilitate the Tornado Kick rotation.

Break in the Meta

What I meant was that, there was more comps that could deal comparable (if not more) damage to the meta. PF started being more open to other jobs whereas before, they were much more restrictive in which jobs would get in; I know I had a bit of a hard time getting into groups at the start of SB as a MNK vs later on in the expansion.

Presence of Mind

The main reason being that WHM was always behind SCH amd AST in SB but not by a huge margin. If PoM had gone to 120s back then, the gap between WHM and the other healers would've been much small, if it even remained at all. WHM just needed that small buff is all.

[Payadopa]

Melee deserve to do less damage since uptime has become a joke with constantly-inflating hitboxes and positionals are increasingly marginalized, so watching where you stand means less and less anyway.

I'm glad we agree that the hit boxes should be shrunk again.

[RyuDragnier]

I'm glad we agree that the hit boxes should be shrunk again.

I think everybody agrees on this. It's fine-ish being that big when it's the final boss of the tier, but not for EVERY boss.

[Turnintino]

I think everybody agrees on this. It's fine-ish being that big when it's the final boss of the tier, but not for EVERY boss.

Yeah, like, personally, I think it's excusable when the boss is massive and/or sitting at/off the edge of the arena like Endsinger, but is just absolutely mind-boggling on a boss like Rubicante lol.