Ultimates: Why the dumbing down exists

[Koros]

Let's talk about how the devs themselves can't seem to create high end content without constantly dumbing down the jobs. That's the real crux of the problem.

Yes, agreed.

when people says "job balance is so bad, I can't clear this on mch because Bard's unique skills are needed."

But no high-end raider says this. It's the BAD PLAYERS who cosplay at high-end raiders who say this.

[Supersnow845]

Potatoe, Potatoh.
You're proving my point, friend. I can change the title to "High End Duty" so we don't argue about semantics.

Ultimates and savage share a lot of the game design; ultimates just take longer and have more encounters in one, for the most part. We're just arguing about which brand of soda has more has more sugar in it.

That comment shows you have literally zero idea how ultimate actually works because ultimate isn’t designed like savage

And let’s for a minute say this was an argument about savage (you know what they actually balance against) then high end raiders only care about slight DPS discrepancies because square ripped out party utility, people were totally fine with DPS variance when the alternative was bringing useful utility, you can’t rip out any measurement other than RDPS then complain people are angry that the RDPS difference is 5% when the classes all play the same anyway

Again can I point you to stromblood

[ForsakenRoe]

While 1 Ultimate did indeed exist in Stormblood, that's an anomaly, and it was just 1, as we saw.

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

[Supersnow845]

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

I’m trying to figure out if this guy doesn’t even know UWU exists (or somehow doesn’t know UCOB exists) or simply forgot that one of them exists

Regardless I don’t think he is terribly qualified to talk on ultimates

[SaberMaxwell]

Oh my god I totally missed him saying only 1 Ultimate was in StB. That's HILARIOUS. *Shadowbringers* was the anomaous 1-ultimate expansion and people were mad because Stormblood set the original precedent for 2 Ultimates per expansion.

Also @Koros: that makes perfect sense to me tbh.

[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.

[Aravell]

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)

Seeing you talk about O8S phase 1 reminds me of one of the aspects I deeply miss from back in SB. I pugged O8S early weeks and got a team that couldn't quite beat the enrage, so I baited LB on all the Light of Judgements and got 2 LB3s and an LB2. I miss how you could come up with other solutions back then to make up for teams that were a bit weaker on the damage output. In EW, if your team lacks damage output, you're basically done, might as well disband.

[Supersnow845]

I remember the first time I cleared T10 we were right at the soft enrage with one mechanic left, we had however placed a previous mechanic wrong and didn’t have enough space to resolve the final mechanic due to shrinking arena, so the person with the mechanic stood inside the shrinking wall and got power healed by the WHM to try to keep them alive while the rest of the party just stood there and DPS’ed down the boss

I think that person still ended up dying but it was the sort of “not really the way you should resolve the mechanic but it kinda works in a pinch if your group isn’t flawless” I miss so much from pre ShB

[Post]

I think this thread raises a good point about job design even if it's not specifically 'correct' ( they design/balance around savage as someone mentioned).

It's not as though this is a new thing; in ARR fights like t5 and 9 very clearly wanted both SCH and WHM at release, for example, to survive things like Death Sentence's infirmity with % heals from Lustrate or putting on Stoneskin ahead of Nael's Megaflare.

And especially throughout HW there were jobs that just like a pain in the ass to play in the overworld or versus FATEs between needing a constant target to maintain its high DPS rotation and long cooldowns that did not reset between fights locking you out when you travelled, which happens much more often in the overworld or a dungeon than versus a boss. One job didn't even have AoE at all until StB.

QoL changes for what needs to be maintained out of combat have helped a lot, but there are still quite a few jobs that have had so much of this streamlined that they have comparatively little out of these environments, such as healers and particularly AST.

Something that doesn't help this trend are actions which can only be used on players in your party, which I think should be limited to ones that increase Enmity or force a player to reposition. It's silly that a DNC can't buff someone grinding FATEs while they're in queue for a duty, or that Eos can no longer heal the main tank of your 24 man raid because they're in a different alliance.

I get the reason they balance this way is for the same reason a pvp centric game balances around more seasoned players, but somehow this game manages to do that without having the pvp jobs feel as samey. Maybe their push to redo PvP was a concerted, short term effort that drew in more designers and now that it's done that team has disbanded, whereas the PVE design was and still is in the same more and more undermanned 4 total devepers the forums seem to think handle all of it.

That is, I don't really think strictly balancing around hard content is causing the 'dumbing down', but rather the lack of it being recognized as a problem or engagement on the level that pvp was before its EW rework. It's just kept in a sort of holding pattern propped up as much by the fact that players have to do SOME PvE to do ANYTHING AT ALL in game, the fact that it's possible on every job, and the fact that there's only a small team to manage this task worth at least 50% of all battles in the game.

Players dislike how busy AST is or how simple SMN is? Sure, we'll address that in the expansion, because it's balanced and some folks enjoy it the way it is now. PLD and MCH can't fit into the current 2 min design paradigm? That we WILL fix because it's actually a problem that affects 'completing content' .