Couldn't sleep - made a feast thread.

[KataTime]

I was originally gonna post this as a thread, but as it turned out, i typed out 9000+ characters, originally wanted to include suggestions but decided to break it up into several topics that I will finish later. Mostly my view on current state of things inside the 4v4 mode. I deliberately avoided suggestions in this blog as it's something I believe would be best addressed in a separate write up. Would love to know if anyone high up (plat+) is experiencing similar thoughts. Really late plz forgive grammar k?

http://na.finalfantasyxiv.com/lodest.../blog/2838789/

EDIT:
So by now the feast has been out long enough so that we can begin to form somewhat educated opinions on it. I would like to note that this thread focuses solely on the 4v4 mode of The Feast. I played primarily as a MCH/WAR/NIN/DRK and dabbled with DRG/MNK.

I went into The Feast with expectations of egregious buffs that distract from the natural flow of combat, latency problems, and uncontrollable burst, and clunky mechanics (ex: varying damage potency for ranged classes). Luckily, my experience proved to be, for the most part, nothing what I expected.

My first general impression is that it is much more balanced than one would expect from such a pve invested game. That being said, it is also lacking a lot of polish and fine tuning (shocker). The pacing of combat felt great. Getting kills was not a drawn out game of trading cooldowns and it certainly feels that a good switch or an interrupt on the healer can secure a kill on just about any target. Neither did I feel that certain cooldowns or situations had no response/counter to them. Indeed, FFXIV in most cases does a stellar job of telegraphing when the pain train is pulling into the station. Latency for the most part was tolerable, I fully expected to have troubles with laggers doing the slide when they would suddenly change direction and got the nostalgic flashback to WoW 3 years ago (SE, this is me giving you a dirty look for having outdated servers). The buffs felt like a light sauce that didn't draw the attention from the main dish, neither did they accent the flavor of the meat however.

With a general look out of the way I would like to focus on the heart of the matter. In this thread I aim to take a glance at class balance, and cover matchmaking, rewards, and quality of life issues in another thread (this has gotten way too long). Let's get started.

Class Balance

I'm not gonna mince words and say that overall, you can pick any job and expect to have fun. There are no fringe outliers that are so far below other jobs that you can be labeled a masochist (well, not enough to warrant a psych eval at least) for choosing to play that job. As long as you have a solid understanding of your job and the general abilities of others you can expect to have a reasonable rate of success. Indeed, in my experience I found that the single most important factor in my victories was the player behind the keyboard (I'm that awesome, yes.) Knowledge of the game, and the ability to effectively communicate with your team are 90% of the winning cookie.

That being said, there are certainly “the right” jobs. It’s not even that they are overpowered in any way, it’s just that they are equipped with better tools to deal with the situations that you are likely to encounter in the majority of your matches. I will do my best to discuss these classes with respect to the classes that compete for the same spot on the team.

Melee DPS - MNK/DRG/NIN
Melee DPS as a rule of thumb are the most mobile jobs, they are in most cases will be the person who will deal the finishing blow on that poor soul who is praying for heals at 10% behind that pillar. Melee also tend to dictate the flow of the combat, such as when to retreat (you won’t push in on the enemy team when your melee has been struggling to get out of execute range), and when to swap targets (Yeah, surprisingly you wanna hold the ham back till that poor bastard waddles over to the next target). MNK/DRG fulfill those roles exceptionally well. They are both very mobile with excellent gap clothing methods and escapes that are naturally complemented with their very respectable survivability. Fetter Ward is an amazing cooldown that in combination with cds such as Weapon Throw will ensure that any competent player will deliver their burst when the time calls (both jobs also have cd’s that offer increased crit rates - to ensure interrupt threshold is reached reliably). Both classes also have PvP skills that provide overwhelming control/pressure (Skewer/Axe Kick/Somersault) and have the capacity to completely turn the tables in virtually any situation.
Comparatively speaking NIN fails to deliver the burst that you can reliably expect from a MNK/DRG. The mobility of NIN also falls behind primarily because of the arduously long animation of the teleport and it’s very unimpressive range. Both DRG and MNK will reach their target faster and more reliably (movement latency). In terms of utility NIN is most bland and underwhelming, providing slashing and more importantly the healing debuff (also provided by WAR), a 1s silence/2s stun on a shared timer and a bind/heavy on a 20s cooldown at the expense of a large chunk of damage. In the survivability department NIN once again falls short, with a roughly 2k shield that “protects” against physical damage NINs are my fav target to train on WAR ANYTHING. I feel I should mention the Mug “heal” on that 90 sec recast, but I’d rather get a flu shot (that has tangible value). The PvP skills on NIN are most disheartening. Detect and Malmsight are completely worthless and aren’t even worth a keybind (Yeah, I’d say that even at their birthday party). This leaves us with ghetto shoulder tackle and Ill Wind which is arguably useful if only because there are much less silences available as opposed to stuns and has a higher probability of not being DR’ed (Note: Somersault is a much more potent and valuable ability on a shorter recast). I skipped the many more deficiencies of the NIN because I felt it would be redundant to write them out for the average forum reader. In summary, if you take pvp seriously, you are better off with a gold DRG/MNK over a diamond NIN (in any situation), simply because of the overwhelming number of tools they have at their disposal. It is in my opinion that NINs need a serious redesign to compete on par with the other melee.

Tanks PLD/WAR/DRK
A tank’s primary purpose is to soak the coins and keep them safe for their team. The secondary purpose depends largely on the job in question. I won’t go on a tirade comparing PLD and WAR simply because their roles are so different I feel it is impossible to objectively compare them. WAR and DRK, however, fill a similar enough niche to warrant a look.
WAR as a tank provides good sustained damage and with cooldowns, incredible burst (at least for a tank). They somewhat lack in mobility but tanks being so low on the priority list for the enemy team that I am inclined to not weigh this category as heavily. Utility wise, WAR has a healing debuff, a stun, Holmgang (immobolize), storm’s path, Mythril Tempest, and Thrill of War (skipping Full Swing because both DRK/WAR have it). Short and sweet, WAR has amazing team peels in the form of an AOE knock back+ stun as well as the 25% aoe Last Stand (yeah sorry for that reference) style heal that is perfectly complemented by the incredible burst potential (holmgang that poor BLM behind wall lately chum?) of the job.
DRK provides good sustained damage, medium burst, with superior mobility, and arguably superior survivability. DRK utility consists of a stun that has a chance to reset (30% on parry), 5% INT debuff, blind, Carnal Chill, and Tar Pit (Reprisal not reliable enough to mention). It’s no secret that in the defense department DRK has a few more tricks in his bag when compared to WAR, however, I would like to note that grit is on a GCD and has a mana cost which makes DRK much more vulnerable to swaps when compared to WAR. Prior to the casting interruption change I felt the superior mobility of DRK had more value as it was significantly easier to stick on a healer. It is important to consider that with a VIT accessory(ies) on a healer DRK cannot reliably use damage to interrupt a cast (most non tanks without VIT accessories have 10k or so life which means a hit of 1500 is required to interrupt a cast). This further highlights a DRK design weakness as a WAR has a 10% increased crit chance built in on at 5 stacks of Abandon which in full crit gear makes WAR a serious threat. Carnal Chill is an incredible counter opener that can easily force a purify or else will significantly increase the survivability odds of your team mate. Regretfully, Tar Pit is only worth it for its heavy debuff. It’s damage is extremely lack luster and as such so is it’s heal.
All in all, DRK is to WAR as a NIN is to DRG/MNK, a job that fills a similar role and just does it worse. A lot worse, with less utility, and that has much less class synergy.

Ranged Caster DPS
Both BLM and SMN are simply amazing in the right hands, I feel that the discussion of Sleep in PvP warrants a separate thread (stay tuned - or change the channel faster).

Ranged Physical DPS
MCH>BRD. There’s nothing to debate. MCH bursts better, is more mobile and buffs physical dps, and has better CC. BRD has slightly more survivability due to MNK x-class heals, but it’s nothing to write home about, inherent flaw is that BRD is meant to buff casters while it takes up that very slot.

Healers
I won’t go deep into details here as I just don’t have a healer at 60. I will mention that both WHM and AST have their merits, SCH is too weak against buff cleansing abilities (no aetherflow) and it’s pvp utility skill is outclassed by AST/WHM.

I’ll be honest what started as a I can’t sleep might as well do something useful, has turned into a way too long thread. I am so very tired.

[Koltik]

Good post; read most of it. You should edit your original post here and just paste it in. That bypasses the character limit.

[Cynric]

The only thing I'd like to note is one small tidbit of misinformation being that Monk has no cooldown to disregard positional skills, only dragoon has this.


Ninja also while not as great as MNK/DRG, does makeup for it slightly in terms of utility, Doton and Hyoton are both great CC abilities to help out your healer from being chased. You are right in that the PVP skills fall extremely flat for Ninja and is probably part of their huge weakness in their kit.

Scholar also is not falling flat purely because of dispel. The amount of CC Scholar has is very small in comparison to WHM/AST and gives them much less potential to survive in anything but capable hands. The PVP skills don't do as much as they could to help this problem either. If Scholar had more CC it would be much harder to dispel Aetherflow. Recasting Protect and casting Adlo and not sitting on Aetherflow for too long help deal with dispel, however the options to give free time for that sort of thing just isn't really there.

Scholars most powerful heal is on a finite resource. If their fairy is CC'd or destroyed they take to long to set back up to put anything else back into the fight unless they die or can somehow manage to get away. Which is very hard to do when dealing with the DPS classes currently.

I do agree the PVP skills scholar has could do with some work. More CC would help bring scholar up to AST/WHM.

Mostly the write up was good though. Good job.

[KataTime]

Thanks for the edit tip. (You should advertise your stream more Koltik, I stumbled on it today by accident and it was a good watch).

Apologies on the MNK misinfo, and thank you for catching that. Was late and I totally misrepresented perfect balance. What I meant by the SCH was that aetherflow can be taken off by one Ilm punch. I believe that core class mechanics like this should not be dispelable, same goes for SMN.

[Cynric]

Thanks for the edit tip. (You should advertise your stream more Koltik, I stumbled on it today by accident and it was a good watch).

Apologies on the MNK misinfo, and thank you for catching that. Was late and I totally misrepresented perfect balance. What I meant by the SCH was that aetherflow can be taken off by one Ilm punch. I believe that core class mechanics like this should not be dispelable, same goes for SMN.

Ah it's no problem. You can't be expected to know the inside and out of every single skill lol.

And I see what you mean about scholar. While I agree with you in the fact that a buff that is so needed for their kit shouldn't be removable, I'm more along the line of thought that it is a weakness in Scholars kit if they rely so heavily on a single buff to function. I see Scholar having a multitude of issues regardless of aetherflow being able to be dispelled or not.
Their powerful heals require a resource, and once spent is no different than if it had been dispelled.

Even if you couldn't dispel aetherflow Scholar would still at best get 6 saves for healing, and be very out of luck after those are spent outside of their fairy, which can be CC'd and killed very easily.

WHM/AST still function very well without Benediction and Essential Dignity being off cooldown. Even better after the casting interruption buff. They also have plenty of CC(and utility) to save themselves and their teammates. Scholar just doesn't really have that and, without the fairy scholar will fall behind, and the only way to get the fairy back is to waste a swiftcast, and it might just get CC'd after that work anyway.

And neither of them have the weakness of a portion of their healing kit being tied to something external.

Scholar will, even while being able to keep aetherflow the entire match still fall behind late game.

[Kyani]

Scholar's potency per GCD is also a lot lower than the other healers'. While Adlo+Lustrate is strong, Scholar actually gets run over quite easily because they have no source of passive healing outside of an easily-manipulated fairy. Not having a source of passive sustain is killer.