• SAM changes: Shoha's pretty fun, but the Meditation interaction feels pretty awkward, given how often we end up hitting downtime already at 2 out of the 3 stacks possible.
  • NIN changes: Perfect iteration on TCJ. Ninjutsu, however, now feels sluggish as heck.
  • Other changes: Better than before, at least. (The Crown change on AST seem to have some unintended consequences for high levels of play by removing another source of banking and--essentially--RNG protection, and the SMN changes are both hit and miss, however.)
  • New raid: This is what passes for story-integration? Meanwhile, the raid itself is pretty fun, but did they really need to add so many death elements that would be out of our individual control (i.e. inadvertent PK opportunities). Would be nice to die more often from standing in the wrong place, rather than a tank running tether-bots through me, dropping precision guided missiles on the group, or giving the first boss an orb-shower.
  • New dungeon: Pretty meh. The mini-bosses in trash are a nice touch, but most everything else felt like a rehash, minus a couple of the final boss's mechanics. Though, said boss was especially weird in that sometimes the furniture can be shared for blue-cleanse if timed correctly and other times it can't, and when not shareable then someone may inevitably die just because one fewer furniture may spawn than there are blue flame debuffs.