Thread: Patch 6.0 Notes (Preliminary)

Originally Posted by Moonlite

HP and damage, values used in battle calculations have been downscaled


Please note, however, that these changes will have little to no effect on game balance.


Epic Echo status effect increases player attributes in order to maintain a level of difficulty similar to that experienced before the introduction of downscaling. The strength of this effect varies by duty level.




Does the second line not mean that they didn't balance content? That they are just throwing echo around instead of actually balancing content? And while the game isn't broken(hopefully), it is lazy design. Let's not do it right we will just throw an echo on anything that is broken.

No, you're missing a few keywords in the patch notes here. The 1st line refers to all content when its synced. Pre & Post stat scaling, all content should feel the same as it was balanced before.

Epic Echo is referring exclusively to unsyncing content. Due to the fact our current scaling is exponential rather than closer to linear, each expansion's level cap is about 2-3x stronger than the previous one was. Meaning you're roughly ~15x stronger than you were at the end of ARR. This is why ARR & HW stuff is so trivially undersized, because you're so crazy strong comparatively.

With the new scaling, gains will be closer to a more linear scale, meaning instead of being 15x stronger at 80 than you were at 50, you might be like, 3-4x stronger. this will have the unintended effect of making everything harder to undersize since you can't bulldoze through everything as you could before with insane stat lines. Epic Echo has been implemented to reverse this undesired effect when undersizing by emulating the strength you have currently pre-stat squish. Allowing them to keep their downscaling, while not butchering player's ability to undersize ARR/HW/SB content.

Originally Posted by Moonlite

HP and damage, values used in battle calculations have been downscaled


Please note, however, that these changes will have little to no effect on game balance.


Epic Echo status effect increases player attributes in order to maintain a level of difficulty similar to that experienced before the introduction of downscaling. The strength of this effect varies by duty level.



Does that not mean that they didn't balance content? That they are just throwing echo around instead of actually balancing content? And while the game isn't broken(hopefully), it is lazy design. Let's not do it right we will just throw an echo on anything that is broken.

It means they put in twice the work to maintain the current level of balance in two situations, synced or unsynced.

Everything is rebalanced for the stat-squish while level synced. There's no echo for your duty roulettes and current-level content. Enemy HP and damage will be lowered to match the lower Player damage and HP that we will have after the squish.

But that would create a problem for unsynced content. For instance, we can currently one-shot ARR Extreme primals with Blue Mage. This is only possible because we have ~15 times more damage with Level 70 gear, than we would with synced level 50 stats. After the stat squish, that difference will be much lower, because that's the whole point of the stat squish: to keep high level stats/damage/HP from growing to insane numbers.

But that means it would become harder at level 70-90 for people trying to solo old content unsynced. So SQEX is giving us an extra Echo when doing unsynced content at much higher levels, so that is equally difficult as it is right now.

Basically, they redid the stats to be naturally balanced when SYNCED, and had to do an additional balance pass, adding the Epic Echo for UNSYNCED. There's no way to keep the current balance in both situations without an Echo buff.

So no, it's not broken, and certainly not lazy, considering they put in extra effort to keep everything as close to the current difficulty as possible in all situations.

Originally Posted by Asuka-Hykiri

I agree, this seems like a really stupid idea and very counter intuitive.

If it was a toggle switch within search... sure, I can see people wanting that.

But having to switch through 20 jobs to see what you can queue for seems extremely asinine and will slow down PFs filling

I'm not sure, but I hope this only applies to the Filter Search mode, where you can pick what class(es) you want to join as. So if you're not filtering, or you have all the classes selected (default), then it won't change anything.

I always appreciate the theme'd UI windows, the ones I've seen so far are pretty cool. It's not that I really dislike the 'traditional' FF simple colors box rounded corner UI that is pretty much ubiquitous to the series, it's just that I prefer and like those theme'd windows more. Also really excited for a few UI changes that I, and others probably, had asked for in the UI forum, which to me seems like further evidence they do indeed listen :3 (like four different unrelated items at least). Thank you for that!

A lot of other neat changes too, noting many polite to player's time ones (focusing on fun over grind rather than 'grind makes them take more time', which to me is one of many major reasons why FFXIV is *chef's kiss*), or like epic echo was another example of a requested (and received) change, but just thought to comment on the above- so far (it's a big list, and I just started scanning).

Also want to say I appreciate the time put into making the notes readable and visual too (nice pictures, even front / back slider).

Long boi ♥