Unchained. Seriously, why are we not abusing this skill?

[FallenWings]

Not sure. Everyone just always tells me it's "JP Strats" - and friends I have who have come to my server from the JP data center say the same thing. They're sometimes a bit confused as to why we make the DRK/PLD just pull straight up instead of having the WAR do unchained to pull.

I really just don't understand how the entirety of the NA/EU playerbase could not come up with this level of play and make it the standard. One look at this skill, and the gears in one's head should be turning.

I don't really like generalizing too much but it's almost clear that as Spooky said initially, the general populace of the NA/EU WARs are post 3.0 Deliverance Hype Train that only have focus on their own personal DPS. A selfish mindset that is usually akin to a western player as some would claim. I don't believe in something so fallacious as that being a western player myself but it's hard to deny it if something as simple as "help out PLD/DRK at very little personal cost" is so alien to the western servers.

[HoodRat]

I don't think you can really put all the blame on the warriors. Whenever I get random tanks, or even some in my fc who queue with me, they'll put on shield oath or grit regardless of whether I have defiance or deliverance on. Besides, a lot of the tanks I see stack parry to high heaven and refuse to leave tank stance claiming, "I'm a tank, it's not my job to do damage." And then the others just try to dps with little regard to the other 7 people in the party.

Df...amirite

[Sarcatica]

A5-7 savage can be done without using tank stance thanks to unchained and that's some of the hardest content in the game. Tanks regularly output 1000-1300 DPS even while handling mechanics. I can see how some people may be against the idea if they aren't overgeared for the fight but let me give you an example of why you may want to push for dps even in a mechanic-oriented group. A6s Blaster: Immediately after the first set of mirages, if Blaster isn't under 50% he will do two back to back tank busters which hurt even if you use a cooldown. Let's say your group plays it really safe during the dashes, ensuring nobody gets hit. Well this safe play results in blaster still being at 55% or so and you keep getting those tank busters consistently. Having both your tanks in DPS stance, using unchained, will allow you to push that extra 5% skipping those 2 tank busters and taking overall less damage. I think this is a practical example, since groups in i240 gear won't have that issue but groups doing progression will. There's no danger of the tanks losing aggro because Unchained just has make up the difference in dps between tanks and damage dealers, not eclipse the entire team's aggro generation. Tanks are still generating aggro while in dps stance, it doesn't just drop off into nothing.

99% of the progression groups advocate safe DPS-ing and all that, which to me adds to the fluff of the saying: "Play safe guys". Sometimes I just don't understand where that mentality came about. So you are advocating doing 400dps as a PLD in blaster that isn't going to go up sooner or later, even worse that your 4 DPS are not doing the standard level of their own DPS, which normally leads to having to deal with additional mechanics that usually just wipe the team over and over again.

It still is very dependent on the team you are in though, some teams just forbid pushing DPS because they just want to clear. A very different approach than what I actually like, which is to clear with optimization where I can afford to. /thumbsup to you.

[JackFross]

It still is very dependent on the team you are in though, some teams just forbid pushing DPS because they just want to clear. A very different approach than what I actually like, which is to clear with optimization where I can afford to. /thumbsup to you.

Actually something I deal with every raid night this tier. I joined a new group at the end of Gordias progression, and this new tier has just been... fun? I enjoy the fights, and I enjoy raiding with these guys, but all of my realistic ideas that inject no new or difficult additions to survival while affording us a gain to our raid DPS have just been completely discounted at the jump because the name of the game is focus on mechanics and don't worry about DPS.

I myself am the type of player who will go into an encounter and throw the kitchen sink at the boss out the gate, hitting everything on cooldown the first few pulls to see what sticks and what doesn't. It's really frustrating to then be in a group that says "the DPS checks are light this tier so focus on mechanics, not DPS" even after we literally killed A7S during enrage. Not during the cast - during the actual iteration of the wipe mechanic. Five people got killed by the final Sizzlespark before the boss died at 12:44. I did ~1570 in that kill, a solid 200 over the MCH in second place. If I DIDN'T focus mainly on DPS and optimizing it throughout the encounter, that would have been a wipe, straight up.

Frustrating, that mentality is. Progression isn't done by "playing it safe" - it's done by throwing your heads against the wall over and over in effort to optimize every situation to your advantage within as few failures as possible. You don't progress by actively telling the DPS to not do their job. You don't progress nearly as quickly by having tanks not even bother to try and do damage.


We're on A8S and making progress now, so it doesn't really bother me, like, at all. It's just an interesting real-world example of the difference in philosophy. I've dialed myself back and started focusing on mechanics more (hitting ~1600 on our recent kill and finally getting my gobdip) because I just want to progress at this point.

[SpookyGhost]

It depends on what your definition of "playing it safe" is - you should 100% start by playing as turtley as possible, and then from there look for holes where you don't need to turtle. It is always better to account for death to be around every corner when your party doesn't know the fight yet. You aren't the only one responsible for you, your healers have to watch your back and the party's back as well - being as sturdy as possible at the right times is key to allowing them to get comfortable with how damage flows in the fight. As the fight goes on, you both make adjustments for eachother to find the happy medium - back in Gordias this was to such a degree that both tanks and healers could go practically full time DPS because SE forgot that bosses needed to do damage. In Midas however, while there are plenty of times for tanks and healers to push DPS, it's not nearly as lenient as it was before.

Anyway, for the sake of your entire group making progress, it's better for you to play ultra safe and work in recklessness than to play ultra reckless and work in safety.

That said, there is an extent to playing safe. After you know that you don't need, say, tank stance for a section of the fight where you're only taking auto attacks, you shouldn't stick to staying in tank stance 5 pulls later. You should always be learning, always be adapting, always trying to work in new ways to keep your survivability high as well as your DPS output.

RE: We killed A7S right at enrage - this sounds like a case of a group that's inexperienced with raiding. Usually when you hear "let's focus on mechanics" and you're still having trouble with mechanics 10 pulls in then you're dealing with people who haven't raided before. The static I was in before it disbanded due to conflicting goals was realistically 5/8 people who were excellent players but had very little experience raiding. They pulled high tier DPS, but their inexperience with handling coordinated mechanics made it look really sloppy. As we kept pulling, though, they got better and better - had we not disbanded, I feel like my team could've been really good for the next tier, but you live and you learn.

I think that does play into optimization as well, though. Generally any group who's raided before will actually look into maximizing everyone's performance - while I didn't organize my raid team myself, I was the one calling out mechanics for them, and I would generally try to solve problems for other people when they weren't really aware of how to fix them. I would call out Mantra timing, LB timing, where certain mechanics would be happening, when we needed more DPS/healing, etc. Having that awareness was good for me to guide that team, but then you have to consider what it's like to have that knowledge on multiple members of your team - those members then working in tandem rather than just having one guy calling all the shots.

So. Yeah. Experience is key. More experienced groups will be more optimized. JP linkshell groups are a good source of this as they don't raid to compete in the world first footrace, but rather build off existing strategies and fine tune them as they don't feel rushed. If you look back at Lucrezia's style, they played like bulls - they forced their selves through mechanics in whatever way seemed possible, correct or not (you can look at their T11 prog for this). This is the style of a team focused on competing, more "what will get us through this" rather than "what would be the best way to handle this". The latter is what you'll get out of the slower JP groups, and that's why they usually come up with the best strategy (easy example is NA's Garuda EX strat vs JP's Garuda EX strat).

[Sarcatica]

So. Yeah. Experience is key. More experienced groups will be more optimized. JP linkshell groups are a good source of this as they don't raid to compete in the world first footrace, but rather build off existing strategies and fine tune them as they don't feel rushed. If you look back at Lucrezia's style, they played like bulls - they forced their selves through mechanics in whatever way seemed possible, correct or not (you can look at their T11 prog for this). This is the style of a team focused on competing, more "what will get us through this" rather than "what would be the best way to handle this". The latter is what you'll get out of the slower JP groups, and that's why they usually come up with the best strategy (easy example is NA's Garuda EX strat vs JP's Garuda EX strat).

You are comparing apples to oranges at this point. The JPs don't have to worry about DPS because they know themselves that they aren't pulling small numbers. Compare that to most NA/EU servers that have a much lower pool of players capable of doing same/better DPS.

Like I have been saying to a lot of people, people who have good DPS will have less problems to worry. Again, compare to groups that are not good at mechanics and also not on the clearing track for DPS wise. They are so snowbally and either the community or perhaps SE needs to step up to improve the players as a whole. We aren't going to be like the Chocobo server level at this rate, whether soon or later.

[SpookyGhost]

You are comparing apples to oranges at this point.

Gonna be honest, not 100% sure what you said has to do w/ what I said, but:

DPS comes from learning mechanics. The absolute maximum you can do going into an encounter for the first time is your opener (even this can be sketch, Hummelfaust alone has you save your offensive CDs for when he actually drops rather than unnecessarily burning them on the 2 Fausts) and then your standard rotation. There are many, many, many changes that have to be made to your rotation throughout the encounter based on what mechanic is happening. An easy example is that if a boss jumps at a certain time as DRG, you want to make sure you can keep up BotD by planning out your GCD usage before and after the jump. This applies to basically everyone, to one degree or another.

So I'm not really sure what you mean. Being not good at mechanics defacto means that your DPS isn't going to be very good. Improving on said mechanics will improve said DPS. JP groups get better DPS because they take their time and consider how to best handle every mechanic, rather than rush headlong into it. Lucrezia was largely successful DPS-wise because a lot of their strategies involved just healing through things and ignoring certain mechanics entirely, thus allowing them more up time than groups that played safer. Generally speaking, though, if you see someone doing good DPS it's highly likely they're also handling their mechanics well. If you see someone doing bad DPS, they're highly likely to be messing up mechanics or not handling them properly.

I do, however, agree that SE is largely to blame for the current state of the players' skill level. Let's be honest, every encounter in this game is really simple and easy to execute as long as you can memorize the script that the boss follows. This hasn't changed since the start of the game, every boss is like this, the only difference is realistically the length of the script. Sometimes you have to have quicker reactions but if you know that the thing is coming, you aren't really even "reacting". But despite this, people fail at end game raiding. Surely it's just that every player is bad and they just need to git gud, yeah? Nah. Game design problem. You can't make the whole game not punish you at all for being a complete troglodyte and then suddenly you either execute correctly or you either instantly die or you instantly kill everyone in your party.

What we really need, and I know it's been said 50,000 times, is more mid-core content. More stuff like the EX Primals to teach players that their actions have consequences and they need to learn the boss' script instead of just hoping and praying. This isn't a hard game by any stretch of the imagination, but because there's this one big wall that suddenly appears for the one piece of relevant content at end game when you've been skipping through the meadows this whole time... it's just... I dunno, it baffles me.

Anyway. I might've completely misinterpreted your point and made this lengthy post that kinda turned into a tangent for nothing. So if that's the case I apologize, but I stand by experience equating to better players - even if raiding is an unnecessarily steep wall, its one that can be climbed and with perseverance you'll inevitably get there.

[Sarcatica]

Gonna be honest, not 100% sure what you said has to do w/ what I said, but:

DPS comes from learning mechanics. The absolute maximum you can do going into an encounter for the first time is your opener (even this can be sketch, Hummelfaust alone has you save your offensive CDs for when he actually drops rather than unnecessarily burning them on the 2 Fausts) and then your standard rotation. There are many, many, many changes that have to be made to your rotation throughout the encounter based on what mechanic is happening. An easy example is that if a boss jumps at a certain time as DRG, you want to make sure you can keep up BotD by planning out your GCD usage before and after the jump. This applies to basically everyone, to one degree or another.

So I'm not really sure what you mean. Being not good at mechanics defacto means that your DPS isn't going to be very good. Improving on said mechanics will improve said DPS. JP groups get better DPS because they take their time and consider how to best handle every mechanic, rather than rush headlong into it. Lucrezia was largely successful DPS-wise because a lot of their strategies involved just healing through things and ignoring certain mechanics entirely, thus allowing them more up time than groups that played safer. Generally speaking, though, if you see someone doing good DPS it's highly likely they're also handling their mechanics well. If you see someone doing bad DPS, they're highly likely to be messing up mechanics or not handling them properly.

I do, however, agree that SE is largely to blame for the current state of the players' skill level. Let's be honest, every encounter in this game is really simple and easy to execute as long as you can memorize the script that the boss follows. This hasn't changed since the start of the game, every boss is like this, the only difference is realistically the length of the script. Sometimes you have to have quicker reactions but if you know that the thing is coming, you aren't really even "reacting". But despite this, people fail at end game raiding. Surely it's just that every player is bad and they just need to git gud, yeah? Nah. Game design problem. You can't make the whole game not punish you at all for being a complete troglodyte and then suddenly you either execute correctly or you either instantly die or you instantly kill everyone in your party.

What we really need, and I know it's been said 50,000 times, is more mid-core content. More stuff like the EX Primals to teach players that their actions have consequences and they need to learn the boss' script instead of just hoping and praying. This isn't a hard game by any stretch of the imagination, but because there's this one big wall that suddenly appears for the one piece of relevant content at end game when you've been skipping through the meadows this whole time... it's just... I dunno, it baffles me.

Anyway. I might've completely misinterpreted your point and made this lengthy post that kinda turned into a tangent for nothing. So if that's the case I apologize, but I stand by experience equating to better players - even if raiding is an unnecessarily steep wall, its one that can be climbed and with perseverance you'll inevitably get there.

More or less, I am comparing the <700dps vs 1.1k++dps. The sentiment and normally is right is that JP players (majority) can pull their own weights even if their DPS isn't stellar. So, in that sense, they just have to focus less on smaller DPS adjustments and focus more on the whole mechanics. Currently, this is what's lacking between the NA/EU vs JP players. The average player in NA/EU is definitely more likely to be less skilled by a considerable margin, compared to the JP players. This is also something that is bugging me to farm stuff in PF/DF, something on the line of 3 DPS doing 800dps each in Sephirot EX farm parties. Quite horrible if I must say.

EDIT: maybe it's clearer to ask the question if a DPS is doing 1k and below in Hummelfaust alone, what would you think? This is exactly what is happening, no one is there to take these people inside hard raids because of the DPS requirement to just pass the "mini-boss" and the fight is as simple as a dummy fight even. Changes need to be made if SE wants to design better dungeons/raids/trials. At this point, the content is getting stale with all the facerolly stuff and the sudden jump in difficulty (Sephirot EX is still very hard for an average joe).

[Lyth]

I'm not really sure how having the WAR pull constitutes aggressive play.

I prefer to minimize the number of required tank swaps. If there's a swap that's due to happen, I'd rather that the tank tagging in just keep the boss, unless there's a strict defensive requirement that forces the taunt back. We can then adjust who pulls in order to pair up the correct tank with the correct mechanic. For example, in A6S, WAR cannot rocket jump. Axes are big, clumsy things. So WAR pulls, freeing up DRK to DM rocket jump the mines. But it just comes down to whatever everyone is comfortable with.

I do, however, think that it's a lot easier to convince your OT to pull as the group's "MT" than it is to ask your MT if you can pull as the group's "OT". Having raided on WAR for most of ARR, and having being relegated to OT myself on many occasions, if I get the sense that my co-tank really really wants to tank a particular boss, I let them. It's good to have some variety.

[JackFross]

It depends on what your definition of "playing it safe" is - you should 100% start by playing as turtley as possible, and then from there look for holes where you don't need to turtle.

From a tank perspective, I agree with this whole post and the other. I was speaking as a DPS myself. The best way to learn how to DPS a fight is to throw everything you have at a boss, popping everything the second its available and seeing where that gets you pull-to-pull. After a few runs of it, you'll see what you have to tweak (shifting Jump 1 gcd sooner so you don't Jump into an AoE for instance - holding B4B+IR to pop together when the boss is targetable again - etc). If you play it safe off the bat and don't press your offensive buttons, you're playing your Job wrong. Fullstop.

Same for tanks, except on the defensive side. If you die at any point during progression with defensive buffs sitting unused, that's on YOU just as much as it is on the healers. Play every point where you THINK you might be in danger overly safe until you are sure you can play it less safe. I absolutely agree with this mentality - it's just the exact opposite mantra that a DPS should be maintaining/thinking about.

As a DPS in progression, you want to absolutely consider mechanics first and otherwise you want to be shitting out maximum DPS at all times. You should be hitting cooldowns when they're ready - don't hold ANYTHING on the first few pulls. Only start holding things if you hit a scenario where it would be optimal to actually hold the thing. For instance, if you need to dodge a mechanic at a certain time and BotD drops off, you know NEXT time to hold that last gsk you used and maintain blood instead. Micro-optimizations like that can only be seen and corrected for if you're actively throwing the kitchen sink at the boss mob.


That said, this all relates back to the topic in the fact that, pulling with Unchained and swapping into the other tank is optimal both for mitigation and dps because the WAR who's tanking through Berserk is gonna have Raw Intuition and/or Vengeance rolling the whole duration of Berserk, which equates to the same mitigation as the other tank would have by pulling in ShO or Grit while affording both tanks to start the fight with nearly optimal rotations. There's no loss for this - all positives.