Ultimates: Why the dumbing down exists

[Koros]

I know UWU's been potency-crept to the point where it's debatably easier than some final floor Savage fights, but let's not do it dirty like this

Additionally, SB was not the expansion where people were wiping to 2% enrages because of how incredibly swingy the crit variance/raidbuff stacking makes things. I've been linked a comparison of two logs, one of a friend's WHM player, and one of 'the best (at the time) run of P1 of TOP. Both had the exact same number of casts of Glare, Dia, Misery, Assize. To the GCD, they were identical in their gameplay. The 'best run' WHM had much higher crit and directhit rates, and so their damage was TWENTY PERCENT higher than my friend's WHM. Said WHM had gone looking at other logs to see what could be improved, and the answer they got was literally 'go again, and crit more this time'. I didn't do ultimates back then, but I don't remember running into any kind of situations like that back in SB. I remember multiple people saying DRK was bad, only to watch as it took both ultimate worldfirsts. I remember people saying WHM was 'trolling tier', only for it to take, again, both ultimate worldfirsts.

I would put real money on it, if SE released a Stormblood Classic server, an unexpectedly large number of SHB/EW-joiners would go 'hang on a minute, this gameplay is more fun'. Emnity management, tank stance risk-reward, healers have another DOT (or 3 in SCH's case), AST has cards that do something more interesting than the same flat 6% regardless of card, NIN has tricksy things like aggro management skills and a silence, SMN has some actual depth to it's rotation. Of course, not everyone's a winner, WHM and MCH come to mind. But I think it'd have enough of an effect on the playerbase for SE to have to think 'well actually, maybe removing all these aspects of gameplay was not such a good idea', and think about designing jobs with SB as the blueprint, instead of this 2min mush

It's ok though, because at least now our classes are balanced to be very close in potency output. Wait, what's that, the ranged classes (except BLM because it gets special rights) are doing 10% less damage than the melee, because of 'ranged tax', despite melee now having 100% uptime basically guaranteed in every fight? How could this happen /s

Agreed with everything.

Just a nitpick though, but it's not just about the no. of GCDs. It's fairly obvious that on WHM you have to put Misery into buffs, but in some statics, the real killer of their damage is their atrociously desynced raid buffs where it spreads out over like 26s.

As far as I'm aware, unless you're playing outright meme comps like double phys ranged, enrage checks are almost always a skill issue first in Ultimates and week 1 Savage. However, the insane crit variance in EW is downright horrendous, on some jobs like GNB it's the literal difference between a blue and pink parse. In SB as long as you play skillfully (and back then very few people actually hit the skill cap) you will get a 99 even with unfavorable kill times. In EW that's basically up to chance outside of having very favorable kill times. We've gone from rewarding skill to rewarding luck. That means that in SB you need to play skillfully to beat enrage checks (the hardest was probably O8S p1 in that xpac, so Ultimates are actually more lenient in terms of enrage checks); in EW skill still beats enrage checks but now you can also just be lucky. A lot of statics having issues with enrages boiling down to RNG fall into that category which is why it might feel frustrating.

Also WHM took far more skill back then. It was arguably the HARDEST healer from a casting standpoint. AST is 100% easier after 4.3, when its cast time got reduced to 1.5s. In 4.0-4.2, AST had 0.8s of movement windows during each oGCD cast because optimal play on AST involved clipping (e.g. Malefic -> clipped Earthly Star -> Malefic -> Malefic etc.) and these happened far more frequently (since AST just had more oGCDs) than on WHM. So in 4.0-4.2 one could say AST was still easier than WHM for movement. SCH had Miasma II (not Ruin II, which most casual players think was the case) for movement, and this brought a different set of challenges, being that you could only weave/move comfortably every 12s optimally, and the movement has to begin from slightly more than max melee (iirc it was 6 yalms). Ruin II was only used for forced disengagement from melee range. But in either case, SCH was arguably the easiest healer for casting. WHM literally only had Aero II for movement and everything else must be slidecasted, since Regen should only be used when absolutely necessary; ironically that means that WHM had more movement in later floors than in earlier floors. None of this matters for casual players at all though, you can just use Aero II and Ruin II to move anyways.

Healers back then were one of the easiest roles on a skill floor level, since GCD heals are so powerful, but probably had the highest skill ceiling in the entire game, and 100% so during HW with old Cleric Stance. In SB, they were all BLM turrets with far fewer movement options while needing to heal the party when played at an optimal level. It's sad that the role has been so gutted.

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Also just to be on topic as I've said before: the gutting of multiple jobs is not something hardcore players asked for, nor is it something casuals wanted. It literally doesn't even help casuals because they will just press 1-1-1-1-1 and break combos anyways, it literally doesn't matter to them. It's something the developers did of their own volition with barely any consultation from the players. I 100% suspect a lot of the gutting is because the job design team played an alt job in their spare time, did some Savage PF and failed miserably so they gutted the job to soothe their own ego. This is a game dev issue, not a playerbase issue. Now we apparently need a DRG rework, even though I LITERALLY HAVE NEVER SEEN A SINGLE DRAGOON COMPLAINING ABOUT THEIR JOB. Which just means that they're not making job changes based on feedback, it's based on their own ego.