Combat system is beyond saving.

[Menriq]

This is probably the best way to articulate exactly why coils is STILL the best raid series the team has ever made and how it is truly sad that most of the people playing this game will never get to see what they missed. Even with all of the QoL changes we have gotten since then, raiding has never been as fun as it was at that time.

Fun is always going to be subjective. Also, people seem to forget that there are indeed different strategies for different fights, but generally PF will push one to the top. Some mechanics will indeed be 1 solution based, but many others will have different ways of handling them. This includes P12S. Does this mean that every fight is perfect? Not at all. I was not a fan of all the body checks in this last tier. My hope is that they follow through with their stated goal of changing up encounters in 7.0, which will allow them to have more diversity with jobs come 8.0 to try and find a balance with encounter difficulty and giving jobs room to be much more individualized.

[Menriq]

You're definitely right, they could do that. With the caveat that encounter design vs job design has always been relatively balanced, where now the latter is almost weightless.

I'm happy that you're enjoying it, but unfortunately, your personal opinion goes directly against mine here, so where does this leave us?

This gets to the heart of the issue for many developers (not just here). You have different schools of thoughts and both are very valid. The old saying of "If you try to please everyone, you'll please no one" certainly rings here. Having said that, I do think there is some room to try and offer a range. Encounters already kind of do this with the first turn always being the easiest, and then ramping up to the final turn. At the same time, there could be a range of complexity with the jobs. For example, you could have BLM that is complex with SMN as very simple, and then have other jobs fall in the middle. However, going with this route and trying to keep things balanced, the complaint would then become BLM has to "work harder" to get the same output as the SMN who just spams 1-2-3 (for arguments sake). I don't know what the right answer is, but I can certainly see the challenges that can be presented when looking at the whole picture.

[xivYuiM]

Fun is always going to be subjective. Also, people seem to forget that there are indeed different strategies for different fights, but generally PF will push one to the top. Some mechanics will indeed be 1 solution based, but many others will have different ways of handling them. This includes P12S. Does this mean that every fight is perfect? Not at all. I was not a fan of all the body checks in this last tier. My hope is that they follow through with their stated goal of changing up encounters in 7.0, which will allow them to have more diversity with jobs come 8.0 to try and find a balance with encounter difficulty and giving jobs room to be much more individualized.

It goes deeper than just having a mechanic be solvable by doing "we can dodge this move by doing X formation or Y formation!! Both are viable!!" It was more that doing some mechanics a certain way would often have a cascading effect on multiple things that followed in the fight and came with costs and benefits to each section. Also most of the raids were more than just "stand in circle arena and beat up boss". Not to mention like someone else said earlier, since ShB every encounter has been loaded with mechanics where one mistake from anyone = wipe. Before 4.0 it was (most of the time) possible to pick up the slack of your incompetent team members. If DPS got injured or even died at a crucial time it was possible for others to adjust and pick up the slack. Nowadays every mechanic just ends with a strict "is everyone alive and standing in their spot? no? wipe." and it forces PF to become extremely frustrating when you could literally have 7 people be robots that play flawlessly and all it takes is that one person to make a mistake and everyone fails. Or on the other end of the spectrum you could do 99 flawless runs and never clear because someone wants to drool on their keyboard and ERP while raiding and the ONE time you pass a roadblock then make a single mistake it instantly wipes everyone. Of course old raids had SOME mechanics that were like this but it was often the mechanic of the fight. (T9 divebombs for example)

[Supersnow845]

That was what I was trying to explain (though apparently I didn’t do a particularly good job of it)

For those that don’t know in T8 (second coil turn 3 against the avatar) his main mechanic was 4 towers that sat around the edge of the arena, each of these towers would periodically activate and do a mechanic and you could chose to turn different towers on to speed up a mechanic to place it at a different part of the fight

Allagen field was a debuff one tower put on a player at random. This debuff was like proto macrocosmos. It would store damage taken by the player with the debuff then release it at 10* the potency at the effect expiration. So during the time you absolutely could not let the allagen field player take damage so you had to organise the other towers around not overlapping with allagen field. HOWEVER, you could chose instead to power shield the allagen field player and dump all the towers in the allagen field window if you could mitigate properly which would deactivate all towers at the same time for a period which would give you some downtime

So there was legit choice that affected downstream parts of the fight. T7 which would actually desync itself is another (very bad) example if you organised the renalds incorrectly

So it’s not just superchain arrangement A or arrangement B, it’s the fact you could manipulate the entire fight around your own parties strengths and weaknesses if you knew what you were doing

[Valence]

This gets to the heart of the issue for many developers (not just here). You have different schools of thoughts and both are very valid. The old saying of "If you try to please everyone, you'll please no one" certainly rings here. Having said that, I do think there is some room to try and offer a range. Encounters already kind of do this with the first turn always being the easiest, and then ramping up to the final turn. At the same time, there could be a range of complexity with the jobs. For example, you could have BLM that is complex with SMN as very simple, and then have other jobs fall in the middle. However, going with this route and trying to keep things balanced, the complaint would then become BLM has to "work harder" to get the same output as the SMN who just spams 1-2-3 (for arguments sake). I don't know what the right answer is, but I can certainly see the challenges that can be presented when looking at the whole picture.

My main problem is that they have made it pretty clear with their direction and playing deaf to all of our feedback that they do not want to care at all about what kept us veterans engaged. The blanket was already decently balanced between both "schools of thought" back then (else I could tell you what I truly want and it would be a fully randomized game where difficulty is based almost exclusively on rpg mechanics, tactics, player agency, resource management and adjusting to chaos and random variables with zero DDR and script based mechanics, and that would be the opposite end of the spectrum). Those days they keep unilaterally pulling the blanket to the other opposite because they clearly have a made a choice and do not want to aim for compromises at all.

The saddest part is that except perhaps for a few lunatics, most disgruntled veterans aren't even asking for a return to "Heavensward or Stormblood classic", because those expansions are over, and have had a good run already. We're just asking for new things that also try to give us a bone to gnaw at, really. Something new within the spirit of the current expansions.

However i'll fight tooth and nail against any attempt to make various degrees of job difficulties, because that's exactly what gave us SMN and as far as I'm concerned this one directly belongs into the trashpile of utter failures that are actually harmful to the game. We need every job being accessible (which is the case today with the exception of BLM for very green players mostly due to badly explained mechanics and obscure tooltips), but all of them also with a decent ceiling for some skill expression and actual rewards beyond "just press your buttons and that's all the job is gonna give you, don't expect for more". Differing job difficulties also generate a problem of damage output balance that is unsolvable in the current model.

[Supersnow845]

^SGE can also go in the pile of “jobs that actively play themselves and you physically cannot optimise anything on the job even if you want to”

[Rekh]

^SGE can also go in the pile of “jobs that actively play themselves and you physically cannot optimise anything on the job even if you want to”

Yeah haha, ast's my healer main so going from that to sage really jarring. Square enix thinks that OGCDs can always make up for poor job design. It's not about throwing OGCDs at every job, it should be more about what OGCD's purpose. Ast's cards have good value because no other healer does something like that. Sage's OGCDs are nothing special besides the flashy aoe beam thing.

[Supersnow845]

Yeah haha, ast's my healer main so going from that to sage really jarring. Square enix thinks that OGCDs can always make up for poor job design. It's not about throwing OGCDs at every job, it should be more about what OGCD's purpose. Ast's cards have good value because no other healer does something like that. Sage's OGCDs are nothing special besides the flashy aoe beam thing.

It’s also just that SGE’s oGCD’s are actively hostile to the healer meta given it has the highest throughput of any healer by a wide wide margin and it’s a shield healer

You can’t optimise it if you try and the only way to surpass it in raw healing is to be a SCH who pretends energy drain doesn’t exist; also a shield healer

What are the regen healers even doing

[ty_taurus]

It’s also just that SGE’s oGCD’s are actively hostile to the healer meta given it has the highest throughput of any healer by a wide wide margin and it’s a shield healer

You can’t optimise it if you try and the only way to surpass it in raw healing is to be a SCH who pretends energy drain doesn’t exist; also a shield healer

What are the regen healers even doing

It's also really bizarre when you realize Sage has a barely any spells and most of their hotbar is comprised of OGCDs. Making more GCDs necessary wouldn't help Sage because it doesn't have GCD healing.

Of your 10 GCD actions:
- Egeiro is a raise.
- Esuna is barely relevant.
- Dyskrasia II has no function in single target/Dosis has no function in AOE
- Toxikon has basically no function at all.
- Pneuma has a 2 minute cooldown.

Your casting options are literally designed to be stunted.

[Aravell]

It's also really bizarre when you realize Sage has a barely any spells and most of their hotbar is comprised of OGCDs. Making more GCDs necessary wouldn't help Sage because it doesn't have GCD healing.

Of your 10 GCD actions:
- Egeiro is a raise.
- Esuna is barely relevant.
- Dyskrasia II has no function in single target/Dosis has no function in AOE
- Toxikon has basically no function at all.
- Pneuma has a 2 minute cooldown.

Your casting options are literally designed to be stunted.

That's what happens when they aim to design a job that's "free of clunk".

See: SMN