What's with SE and balancing

[Hawuhawuu]

Objectively, any job is easy if you spent a huge amount of hours on it. Black Mage is extremely mobile now and strats are created to minimize caster movements and melee downtime.

BLM becomes a lot more enjoyable and easy if you go for the spell speed BiS. Fire IV turns into a 2.47s cast from a 2.8s which is pretty huge. You can use your sharcast procs to move, your ice paradox and xenoglossy to move around so you can keep Triple Cast for DPS purposes mainly.

The moment you've figured out the dance and your movement, you can just save all the mobility on demand to purely use it for DPS. You can save your triple casts, Xenoglossies during the 2 minute burst window. It feels really good.

I will say that MNK is the "hardest" because it requires cursed knowledge which is inaccessible for none PC players if you don't have the ping to double weaves on MNK. BLM? It's about just knowing when to move and when you can use your stuff for damage. Both have fairly low actions per minutes compared to Gunbreaker or Machinist.

I run sps blm goes from average to extremely hard when you use paradox to switch between fire and ice for the 3% increase.

[CKNovel]

Personally, I just dont understand the following logic:

Melee dps must have a higher base potency because they will have less uptime. And so to bring it back to normal level it is needed.

Okay but then SQEX must design content where you can't have +95% uptime.
My maximum number of ranged attack on a clear (as a tank) was 11. I wanted to respect as much mechanics as possible.

To be then reduced to 6, then 4 ranged attacks.
Maintaining melee uptime is in now way hard, especially when SQEX delivers encounters with half the map as a hitbox or full hitbox without positionals.

I do agree with the statement, but not in this current context and raid design..

[MagiusNecros]

I posted this on a new topic and I would like to apology. I no longer think MNK is the hardest job. It's pretty brain dead since you can delete True Strike and Snap Punch and get a pink log.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R7oqi_4stdg

I still can't believe how Monk got to this point. Even if you take a look at his chart with/without raid buffs you do slightly less DPS with Dragon Kick spam but it's 100% easier to do and requires very little effort.

This expansion is full of surprises. Really hope the Live Letter is forthcoming with adjustments for DPS, Tanks and Healers.

And with Monk you can begin your journey of Dragon Kick bullshit at lvl50 and carry it all the way to 90.

[Aikaal]

Okay but then SQEX must design content where you can't have +95% uptime.
My maximum number of ranged attack on a clear (as a tank) was 11. I wanted to respect as much mechanics as possible.

To be then reduced to 6, then 4 ranged attacks.
Maintaining melee uptime is in now way hard, especially when SQEX delivers encounters with half the map as a hitbox or full hitbox without positionals.

I do agree with the statement, but not in this current context and raid design..

95%? More like 99.4% according to the loggers.



Only actual downtime is invuln phases which impacts everyone. SE said they would catter to melees for fights so the design of taxing mobility makes no sense.

[CKNovel]

95%? More like 99.4% according to the loggers.

I mean on a prog level.
I know you can extend the uptime to 99.5%.

The argument is that uptime is not difficult at a low player level. 99.5% is someone who already optimize their uptime.

[Aikaal]

I mean on a prog level.
I know you can extend the uptime to 99.5%.

The argument is that uptime is not difficult at a low player level. 99.5% is someone who already optimize their uptime.

Agreed! Anyways. Can I introduce you to the bane of min-maxers. Theorycrafter fears this man.



BEHOLD THE DRAGON KICK MONK MAIN

[MagiusNecros]

Time to drop Reaper folks. Tifa Lockhart is here.

Devs: You can now Fell Cleave every GCD.

[Flatopia]

Back in Stormblood, there was a lot of synergy, where using a combination of jobs made them good. During this time, PhysRange jobs were actually able to top the charts, and believe it or not, 2 PhysRange was actually a valid comp for doing high end content.

Look, I'm going to be real, this is revisionist history. People hated how annoyingly strong the best comps in SB was. Trick was still outrageous and basically a requirement. So many PFs and statics would not step foot into a raid if you didn't bring a ninja. Phys ranged was really strong, but that wasn't because phys ranged itself was just on steroids, it was because of foes and dragoons OUTRAGEOUS piercing debuff that straight up added 10% extra damage to the phys ranged. This was awful. Since you still needed a phys ranged for the party buff, and foes at the time was really strong, you either brought a dragoon or gimped yourself fullstop. It SUCKED, people fucking hated it. You can google "stormblood piercing debuff" and find post after post asking for it to be removed. It didn't help that dragoon's buffs besides the pierce damage up was also ridiculous.
Well wait a minute, if dragoon and ninja feel necessary to bring to 90% of the playerbase, that means you have both melee filled! Well hang on, what about samurai? Yeah there's a reason people said samurai sucked in SB and was godlike in ShB. The only fight to my memory people brought a samurai on was Omega M/F.

But wait, if both melees are filled, what about the other jobs? Well, Machinist was technically functional on paper, if you had any lag or messed up at all, your damage tanked and really didn't feel worth it to most. Not to mention it was just unfun trash at the time. So realistically, it was bard 90% of the time. That leaves the single option you are allowed to flex with, which was caster. Even then, some people only saw RDM as 'prog-mage' even back then. Still, that was the biggest point of variety on SB team compositions and it wasn't enough.
Tanks were lucky enough to all be viable, even if DRK felt worse than it's HW version. Granted, Warrior was always present because they were a bit cracked, but the other two were flexible. healers though? Jesus christ that was the era of criminally underpowered WHM. Bringing a WHM felt like trolling at times much more than it's current still-underpowered form. SCH and AST were so much better in terms of damage output and healing tools that WHM was just not even considered.

To recap, the commonly accepted and enforced composition at the time was

WAR
DRK/PLD
SCH
AST
BRD
DRG
NIN
Caster of choice

No matter how annoyed at balance we get these days, me and my static still to this day say "at least it isn't raiding in stormblood" because of how obnoxious the meta was. I refuse to be told it was the glory days of experimentation and flexibility, because no it just wasn't.

[AziraSyuren]

I get the feeling that people think that things like piercing and slashing debuffs were just "neat little bonuses" when, in reality, not having them made the game outrageously more difficult. It wasn't a cool little job synergy thing, you were literally telling every tank except WAR to go fuck themselves if you didn't have slashing debuff, every phys ranged to go fuck themselves if you didn't have a DRG, and every caster to go fuck themselves if you didn't have Mage's Ballad. Stormblood was the low point of this game's job design in every imaginable way, outside of some rotations being a little more fun and involved. But outside of the stuff that activates the monkey brain neurons of the average casual, it was horribly unbalanced and a large portion of job mechanics that gave the illusion of variability just stopped existing the moment you got good.

It wasn't a skill floor or skill ceiling thing either. It was a skill "take one step up and suddenly you do 15% more DPS without actually having to work for it" ladder.

[MagiusNecros]

Heavensward was the peak of combat design given the debuffs meaning anything, Tank stances and enmity being required, Accuracy requirements needing to be met. Stormblood was when they started to dumb everything down to what it is today.

So instead of jobs with identity and pierce meta comp we now have jobs that mostly feel the same and half of them are broken.

HW required Tank Swaps even in some normal raids, and there was definitely heal checks that needed to be met. As it is right now they have made the game way too easy.