Quote Originally Posted by Doopliss View Post
I love how people keep trying to use this exact predictable argument on me. I've played so many MMOs that calling HW's balance "disastrous" is honestly just funny. Yeah, those raid sets were locked for people who only cared about playing the numbers game. The "massive disadvantage" people were really whining about was getting a DPS loss for their FFLogs upload. You could still easily clear these fights on any job, it just required you to know what you were doing...which was also true when using the meta people desperately relied on.

I still fondly remember just bringing in random friends constantly into A12S after clearing it, still during the peak of its relevancy, on whatever roles they felt like. We did it with 2 BLMs sometimes, 2 MNKs another time. Would have a BRD without a DRG. Sometimes did it with the supposedly crippled and dying PLD, or without any Physical Ranged support at all. Did Healer combos with SCH+WHM, AST+WHM, etc, with no problems.

Also DRK and AST were "panned" even though, before their busted buffs like 20% Balance, they were still seen as requirements for Alexander raids? Which was it? I know their outputs were lowballed on release, but that was definitely still fixed "enough" before 3.3. Job designs that are still inherently fun but have bad numbers can be fixed a lot more easily than job designs that are dreadfully boring with good numbers.

Anyway, sorry for being petty, but, skill issue.
HW job gameplay was really held back by HW structuring and the lack of QoL that has since been implemented. There were missteps in job balacing ofc but I still think all the frustrations with the jobs were made much much worse by other barebones systems like no PF, No cross server, the unbalanced party buffs forcing certain comps [which has nothing to do with how the jobs themselves functioned - it was just an extra numbers bonus] even waiting between pulls for cooldowns was a pressure point. I'd love to see how gen pop would react to HW job design today if it wasn't also paired with godawful infrastructure and a stagnant pool of raiders making the mood awful. I mean that last one is inescapable but yeah -_-