Are Ultimates a major contributor to Job Design issues?

[Kohashi]

I wouldn't expect them to catch nor trap everything, but I certainly would not expect to see some of the bugs that have been present in this games history with a team of 100+ people on QA. Especially when many of those bugs would be visible by just merely playing the game, and would not necessarily be a fairly situational bug, and no I am not talking about your "But it's only untranslated text" 'bug'.

Edit: and I absolutely would expect quite a lot of the bugs to be patched, especially for a game that deems bug exploitation to be against the ToS.

You would be surprised. Also, let me give you a hint. Those numbers are ONLY when they work on an expansion or they have to release a major patch. It makes 0 financial sense to have a QA team of 100 people testing tiny patches. A more realistic number is probably around 12-15 max, where people are split between tickets received (bug reports) and testing the new upcoming build + some edge cases.

If you really want to be angry and blame someone blame the devs and the stakeholders that push for profit above all. (mostly stakeholders since they are the ones who impose the unrealistic release dates).

As for bug exploitation against the ToS, every single game out there under the sun has the same policy..


@Valence

I'm sorry but this is all but a QA team, this is a ragtag team of various employees of whom QA isn't the core job and skillset they have, who do this on the side of their actual jobs, and there is even less of them testing the hardest difficulties

Typically game companies have 1-2 teams that exclusively focus on testing High End content. They will also be tasked with providing feedback on the fight (mechanics, HP, Damage, timing, difficulty.. etc) as well as any abnormalities observed.

[VerdeLuck]

Talking about QA is getting around the point which was that changes like making esuna instant cast, changing nastrond, giving astro extra light speed, giving black mage extra leylines, making jobs fit into the 2 minute window like PLD, all seem to be related to high end raiding exclusively.
Rotations and balance are changed specifically for 1-2 duties at the high end. It completely disrupts everyone below that point just because they really need to have things function a specific way for their one new special high end duty they're pushing this patch.

It's annoying and shows a lack of care about how balance and changes affect people other than hardcore raiders. It's not that things shouldn't be balanced and fun for high end players but they can't keep tossing away any care about fun and balance for anything below savage over and over again and expect casual players to like it.
This is not an enjoyable or sustainable way of balancing or thinking about your game. Constantly catering to one type of player exclusively and the other players just have to deal with the fallout of it over and over. I don't want my rotation changed and have to relearn a job because it did slightly poorer in a savage fight and had to be compeltely redone to fit into the 2 minute meta of raiding. I don't want my favorite job of White Mage to perpetually get lackluster new abilities and updates because "You know cure 3 is broken in ultimate, WHM is sooo good in this new ultimate fight".

I want the jobs I play to be fun in the content I play and that shouldn't be such a hard ask to SE, provided they actually play their game at all levels.

[Azurarok]

Between this and other raid finder content I do wonder if trying to move away from hard enrages and starting to do soft enrages might make any difference?

[BigCheez]

Talking about QA is getting around the point which was that changes like making esuna instant cast, changing nastrond, giving astro extra light speed, giving black mage extra leylines, making jobs fit into the 2 minute window like PLD, all seem to be related to high end raiding exclusively.
Rotations and balance are changed specifically for 1-2 duties at the high end. It completely disrupts everyone below that point just because they really need to have things function a specific way for their one new special high end duty they're pushing this patch.

It's annoying and shows a lack of care about how balance and changes affect people other than hardcore raiders. It's not that things shouldn't be balanced and fun for high end players but they can't keep tossing away any care about fun and balance for anything below savage over and over again and expect casual players to like it.
This is not an enjoyable or sustainable way of balancing or thinking about your game. Constantly catering to one type of player exclusively and the other players just have to deal with the fallout of it over and over. I don't want my rotation changed and have to relearn a job because it did slightly poorer in a savage fight and had to be compeltely redone to fit into the 2 minute meta of raiding. I don't want my favorite job of White Mage to perpetually get lackluster new abilities and updates because "You know cure 3 is broken in ultimate, WHM is sooo good in this new ultimate fight".

I want the jobs I play to be fun in the content I play and that shouldn't be such a hard ask to SE, provided they actually play their game at all levels.

When have jobs been changed specifically for specific pieces of high-end content? Esuna becoming an instant cast is the only time I can remember this happening in recent years and I'm not sure how that could reduce someone's enjoyment of the game in any way. Generally, when a job is changed, it's because it doesn't function well within the wider scope of the game. It doesn't have anything to do with specific pieces of high-end content.

[Voryn]

When have jobs been changed specifically for specific pieces of high-end content?
…
Generally, when a job is changed, it's because it doesn't function well within the wider scope of the game. It doesn't have anything to do with specific pieces of high-end content.

I think there’s a lot of changes for which it’s reasonable to assume that they’re for high end content, even though the devs will just say “we wanted to reduce inputs” or “we heard some feedback about this.”

Double Down costing either one or two carts will only matter when trying to do the burst window perfectly. Accidentally wasting a cart or drifting the burst down’t matter outside high end content. Same with how RDM or MCH could accidentally waste a bit of meter if they pressed Manafication or Barrel Stabilizer while already having over 50 meter: you’re probably not worried about wasting a bit of meter in a Normal raid.

I think the recent change that gave DRK Dark Missionary before level 70 was specifically to make it job feel better in UWU and UCOB since otherwise it doesn’t feel like a big deal that it gets that ability ten levels earlier now. But like the above examples it’s just an assumption on my part since there wasn’t much detail given (that I know of) about why this change was made.

I haven’t read through this whole thread enough to know if it was mentioned already but I personally would prefer more transparency from the devs about why adjustments are made. Because there’s raiders on the internet who complain “I can’t believe SE ruined my job because of casuals” when it seems to me that some changes are so raiders have less to complain about. And I personally would prefer to hear more reasoning than “some people complain about this thing,” I want to know why they think each change is actually good even if I might disagree.

[Oizen]

Clearly not seeing as the game still isn't balanced at all for high end content.

[Absurdity]

It's the chicken and egg question really.
Were the jobs all crammed into the 2-minute burst window mold with pointless filler because of their high-end fight design or did they want jobs to play like that from the start and designed fights around it?

Ultimately it doesn't matter which one it is, the outcome that the gameplay nowadays is incredibly stale remains the same.

[Mikey_R]

The whole shift into the 2 minute meta really started in ShB, where, allegedly, there were people who struggled to line up raid buffs, or didn't like that some jobs were 90 seconds with most 120 seconds. Whichever way, they didn't like that things didn't line up.

With this, come EW, the devs took that feedback and remade every job to fit a 120 second buff window. With more raid buffs coming off at the same time, jobs were required to be more and more burst orientated, so much so that jobs were changed. Paladin is a classic example due to it being more of a sustain job then changed to a burst style mid expansion, though I suspect the SMN rework also had the 2 minute meta mindset when being developed. What the devs also said was with the unification of the 2 minute meta, they could more easily design fights around the fact they knew when every job was going to burst. DT just followed on by adding more potency in the burst window, making these windows even more important.

It is worth noting that back in ARR when Ninja was released, the trick attack window was something everyone wanted to play around. It did cause a noticeable increase in DPS just by lining things up with it and this was in a time where jobs didn't have massive potency in their burst windows. Just to also compare what we had then compared to what we have now, Ninja was the only job with a 'raid buff', which was (IIRC) 10% for 10 seconds every 60 seconds. Compared to now, randomly choosing Monk, Ninja, Dancer and Summoner, you get an increase of just over 27% increase, for 20 seconds, every 120 seconds, this obviously hasn't counted buffs from healers and the Dancer buff is only Technical Step.

So really, the 2 minute meta came first with fight design being built around that.

This is then were the fun discussion comes in. The 2 minute meta is (almost) universally hated and they want jobs to diversify more, with jobs going back to sustain, DoTs etc. The problem then lies in fight design. By making fights with a certain design or fight flow, it could lead to some jobs being either overpowered or underpowered just by the nature of the fight. The clear example here is Pictomancer. Pictomancer was praised as being more unique and fun to play. however, when FRU was released, and PIC was topping the charts...easily, people wanted it to be nerfed or adjusted so that it would fall more inline with the other jobs.

Ultimately, there are a few things that players need to agree to for any sort of change to happen. The first is the raid buffs either need to be removed or heavily nerfed. I will caveat that 100% uptime buffs are fine (Bard's songs/Dancer's Standard Step) as it provides an increase to everything equally. The second is, if you want jobs to have a different damage profile, you might need to accept the fact your job might be underpowered compared to another jobs, just because of fight design.

[Buttobi]

When have jobs been changed specifically for specific pieces of high-end content? Esuna becoming an instant cast is the only time I can remember this happening in recent years and I'm not sure how that could reduce someone's enjoyment of the game in any way. Generally, when a job is changed, it's because it doesn't function well within the wider scope of the game. It doesn't have anything to do with specific pieces of high-end content.

Paladin in the middle of Endwalker got a full rework because it didn't fit into the current 2 minute rotation design. The 2 minute rotation is only really relevant in higher level raiding. Old paladin functioned completely fine outside of that content.

[Absurdity]

y, there are a few things that players need to agree to for any sort of change to happen. The first is the raid buffs either need to be removed or heavily nerfed. I will caveat that 100% uptime buffs are fine (Bard's songs/Dancer's Standard Step) as it provides an increase to everything equally. The second is, if you want jobs to have a different damage profile, you might need to accept the fact your job might be underpowered compared to another jobs, just because of fight design.

I'm not sure even that is really necessary.
Sustain jobs like Paladin were fine when raid buffs were still 60, 90, 120 and 180 seconds because the different timings of FoF and Req allowed Paladin to take advantage of the multiple different buff windows, it wasn't the 2nd highest dps tank in most of ShB for no reason.

It's really only the consolidation of all buffs into the same window that killed sustain dps jobs

Paladin in the middle of Endwalker got a full rework because it didn't fit into the current 2 minute rotation design. The 2 minute rotation is only really relevant in higher level raiding. Old paladin functioned completely fine outside of that content.

You could even see it in the fact that old Paladin was doing fine when it came to rDPS, problem is that it completely fell off a cliff when it came to aDPS and for tanks it is relevant how much damage you can put inside other people's buff windows.