Quote Originally Posted by ZJyn View Post
I don't think it's a controversy to say that Reaper was more than a little overtuned at the launch of Endwalker, and really. Putting aside the details of the numbers, FF Logs, parsers, blah blah blah... that's not important.

What's important is what Square decided to do, and continued to try to do, to fix this problem.

Patch after patch after patch after patch, we've seen jobs have their potencies increased, some of which have been astronomically powerful buffs to standard rotations, skill floors, etc. It's happened now at least four times, and while i'm sure nobody was complaining to see their jobs fare better in the overall "Meta" (putting aside conversations about how every job is able to complete content, which is true), it had a consequence that I think is more than a little damaging to the game.

... Has anybody else noticed how short encounters are now?

And it makes sense. Numbers go up, overall job potencies are increased across the board to the tune of hundreds if not thousands combined if we're looking at alliance raids, and the end result seems to be that every encounter i've run, be it current or old, has had its run-time slashed by a fairly considerable margin.

Look... constructive feedback here... I understand why they did it this way. They wanted to try to silence the folks who might cry foul that they bought the expansion for the shiny new job only to have it nerfed, but the end result means encounters that don't feel as good to play. They should have made the hard call to dial back on Reaper's numbers, and then done minor adjustments to other jobs to make them feel better.

Because right now, unless they go in and do an across the board uplift of mob HP, the impact feels very, very noticeable, and quite frankly feels more difficult to fix than if they had just done the slight needed nerfs to begin with.

Not a good direction, guys, sad to say. Nor does it feel as good to play.
Most of the short encounters we have today are old content that was designed with fewer available jobs, different mindsets of players and devs, different iterations of jobs, potential limitations of hardware by then, etc.
However, these are going to get revisited again. ARR MSQ dungeons are an example of content that got reworked by devs to stand out to current standards, and I'm really impressed with the reworks, and looking forward to what they might do in the future. Thordan normal difficulty is the first encounter that comes to my mind which needs a rework to reflect the importance, stakes, and the power of the final boss of an expansion similar to how Gaius three encounters (From the elevator to defeating the Ultima weapon) got a rework to the point he's way more difficult and survives a decent amount of time in comparison to Thordan who would die in less than one minute if not for the mechanics that protects him.