"The Discourse is Dumb and Endwalker is FINE" - Wesk Alber

[Turtledeluxe]

Do you folks realize parroting the same sentiment incessantly will not change the opinion of a human that can rub 2 brain cells together? I enjoyed Endwalker. I still enjoy Endwalker. I have been playing this game since launch. I will continue to sub and continue to play Endwalker. Is Endwalker pefect? Nope. It doesn't need to be perfect. FFXIV is still the best MMO on the market by FAR. I hope I didn't shatter to many bubbles. The video that this thread is supposed to be about actually went into great detail why so many systems were terrible in Heavensward. The man had MANY great points and I agree with him.

The video misses the mark in so many ways that it's crazy. Classes have always been viable regardless of the nonsense he is peddling. Was Heavensward perfect? No it wasn't but people still enjoyed elements of it. Not all of us care about total balance. Some people want jobs to feel unique even if that means not everyone will play the class or bring the class to every single raid. Some classes are and always be sub optimal for any given fight and it's pointless to homogenize the combat into a two minute meta dps fest.

And yes, I said it. Classes have always been viable for high end content with very few exceptions. What has happened to XIV is that classes have been gutted in the appeasing people who have argued otherwise to the point of overcompensation.

[Atelier-Bagur]

The video misses the mark in so many ways that it's crazy. Classes have always been viable regardless of the nonsense he is peddling. Was Heavensward perfect? No it wasn't but people still enjoyed elements of it. Not all of us care about total balance. Some people want jobs to feel unique even if that means not everyone will play the class or bring the class to every single raid. Some classes are and always be sub optimal for any given fight and it's pointless to homogenize the combat into a two minute meta dps fest.

And yes, I said it. Classes have always been viable for high end content with very few exceptions. What has happened to XIV is that classes have been gutted in the appeasing people who have argued otherwise to the point of overcompensation.

I want to believe you but Ive heard this account of terrible job balance by many other veterans who played Heavensward back in the day to believe that was to the case.

Unless you're going to tell me all of those other players where lying?

[Sebazy]

I want to believe you but Ive heard this account of terrible job balance by many other veterans who played Heavensward back in the day to believe that was to the case.

Unless you're going to tell me all of those other players where lying?

Terrible is probably a bit strong? It certainly wasn't perfect, nor were the jobs as closely balanced as they are now by any stretch. But terrible isn't really the right word?

That's not to say there weren't extremes of course, 3.0 AST was absolutely terrible. Every hardcore group I knew that ran one for Gordias either switched or failed by A3S.

Not quite as extreme but 3.4 WHM's rough MP economy was highlight and exposed by A12S prog asking a bunch of AoE healing whilst simultaneously offering opportunities for AoE DPS. SCH and AST both had the means to maintain the throughput, meanwhile WHM had to stand around doing nothing.

On the Tanks, DRK blew various degrees of hot and cold out of the gate but not to the extremes of AST. For the DPS, was this the period of piercing or get out? I honestly can't remember.

[Atelier-Bagur]

Terrible is probably a bit strong? It certainly wasn't perfect, nor were the jobs as closely balanced as they are now by any stretch. But terrible isn't really the right word?

That's not to say there weren't extremes of course, 3.0 AST was absolutely terrible. Every hardcore group I knew that ran one for Gordias either switched or failed by A3S.

Not quite as extreme but 3.4 WHM's rough MP economy was highlight and exposed by A12S prog asking a bunch of AoE healing whilst simultaneously offering opportunities for AoE DPS. SCH and AST both had the means to maintain the throughput, meanwhile WHM had to stand around doing nothing.

On the Tanks, DRK blew various degrees of hot and cold out of the gate but not to the extremes of AST. For the DPS, was this the period of piercing or get out? I honestly can't remember.

Sounds a lot worse than how it is today, despite some of the memes early on.

[Sebazy]

Sounds a lot worse than how it is today, despite some of the memes early on.

That depends IMO.

If you were dead set on playing a particular job and said job was a dumpster fire then that's a fair view to hold.

If you were flexible on what you played then IMO it actually wasn't a bad thing at all. I did Gordias as SCH then WHM, Midas as both WHM and AST, then Creator on AST. The shifting meta and balance gave me a firm push into mixing up what I played, that alone does wonders for preventing things getting too stale and I'd credit that as a healthy portion of why I have some 80 or so A12S clears logged alone, at least half of which were PF.

Meanwhile with the current status of balance above all, I generally just sit on WHM and leave it at that as there's little to nothing to be gained from playing a different healer. Thus things got stale fast I guess.

Sometimes you've got to save the playerbase from themselves, having jobs/classes that are inherently somewhat unbalanced but with a meta that is always evolving over time helps do just that whilst FFXIV's job system means that the 'penalty' for switching to a more flavour of the month job is relatively minuscule compared to what you used to see in WoW.

[Atelier-Bagur]

That depends IMO.

If you were dead set on playing a particular job and said job was a dumpster fire then that's a fair view to hold.

If you were flexible on what you played then IMO it actually wasn't a bad thing at all. I did Gordias as SCH then WHM, Midas as both WHM and AST, then Creator on AST. The shifting meta and balance gave me a firm push into mixing up what I played, that alone does wonders for preventing things getting too stale and I'd credit that as a healthy portion of why I have some 80 or so A12S clears logged alone, at least half of which were PF.

Meanwhile with the current status of balance above all, I generally just sit on WHM and leave it at that as there's little to nothing to be gained from playing a different healer. Thus things got stale fast I guess.

Sometimes you've got to save the playerbase from themselves, having jobs/classes that are inherently somewhat unbalanced but with a meta that is always evolving over time helps do just that whilst FFXIV's job system means that the 'penalty' for switching to a more flavour of the month job is relatively minuscule compared to what you used to see in WoW.

True but I dont think its a good mentality to be like "Oh this one job I like to play is actually super bad, guess I'm forced to play something else". Game shouldnt be the one to make that decision, the player does and if the balance was that awful, its not something that can be easily ignored. People like their jobs and if every job is viable then that should be the standard.

[Sebazy]

True but I dont think its a good mentality to be like "Oh this one job I like to play is actually super bad, guess I'm forced to play something else". Game shouldnt be the one to make that decision, the player does and if the balance was that awful, its not something that can be easily ignored. People like their jobs and if every job is viable then that should be the standard.

It really does depend on the mentality of the player.

In my main static from Midas to this day pretty much all of us were only really inflexible as so far as we wanted to stick within our preferred role. Outside of that, we'd just play whatever job within the role was needed for that Savage turn/tier. Heck, 3 of us would literally play just about anything as long as you gave enough notice or threw a set of crafted their way in time for prog.

In my eyes at least, players tend to be less likely to be as flexible as you move further from the hardcore extremes? Or at least it's a trend I've noticed when pugging or helping more midcore/casual teams over the years. In this case, a job being out of the meta isn't such a big deal no? Case in point, WHM was absolutely sub par for A12S and people made a big deal of that even occasionally going as far as excluding it from Zurvan PFs, yet ironically it was perfectly fine there and in the case of low level play could actually be easier to hit a decent standard with.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to suggest that 3.0 AST was a good thing by any stretch, rather I'm of the opinion that the WHM vs AST balance in Midas was something that SE would do well to explore. Both had advantages over each other depending on which turn you were tackling at the time and for that tier I actually ended up flip flopping between the two over the course of the night.

Tanks have had similar situations over the years too.

[Fawkes]

I want to believe you but Ive heard this account of terrible job balance by many other veterans who played Heavensward back in the day to believe that was to the case.

Unless you're going to tell me all of those other players where lying?

I don't know of a time when a particular job was incapable of doing any particular content, I'm pretty sure "terrible job balance" in the eyes of FFXIV players has always been like "MNK has to push a lot of buttons and care about lots of positionals, but does about the same amount of damage as another job that pushes fewer buttons with fewer positionals".

[Turtledeluxe]

I want to believe you but Ive heard this account of terrible job balance by many other veterans who played Heavensward back in the day to believe that was to the case.

Unless you're going to tell me all of those other players where lying?

That isn't what my post says. I clearly said Heavensward is not ideal however the game has been rendered mediocre by listening to players who claimed their jobs weren't viable at all when in reality they were just suboptimal either because that player sucked and lacked self awareness or bc their class wasn't demanding every single type of encounter.

Also regarding believing him-- do you seriously believe no one was taking warriors to raids
? People take RDM to raids today. They take all classes aa they always have because again all classes are viable for all encounters the vast majority of the time, and we should not adjust jobs based on a minority of cases (ie waH it's harder to clear this dps check bc of my job).