The Problem with the "Buff Everyone Up to Reaper" Approach

[Jin-]

As long as they get purple > it doesn't matter if the game suffers for it

[Wolwosh]

What I find weird is that they lower the numbers in general in EW and then when a job is clearly overperforming increase the numbers across the board again instead of lowering that one job.
So next expansion we're prob hitting the same numbers again as in ShB

[LisSquid]

Thats because most were 580-590 in a raid tuned for 565 lol

My perfect patch attendance (have a house to keep!) reminds me other Alliance raids had teeth the first week. This round was faster than the others.

[Packetdancer]

Kupo, do you really want old raids to take forever? kupo <3

Yes.

No, seriously: I actually do want this, personally.

Not "to take forever", per se, but... if Labyrinth of the Ancients or Syrcus Tower was not a mindless faceroll -- if we saw things like the platforms in Glasya Labolas, for instance, and actually needed to do the mechanics -- I would actually find getting them in alliance roulette somewhat more interesting and a lot less "welp, guess we're doing this again".

But I mean, my FC has a group (the "Retro Raiders") who run old savage content and such synced, which I really love doing stuff with when we manage to schedule it. So I may not be the correct sample metric here.

[Nihility]

theoretically the ideal thing to do is plot all the comparable classes in a chart and buff/nerf the outliers to fit in with the middle

it does seem generally that is what they're aiming for, I think aglaia is just really low hp pools on the bosses since it was designed for like... just hit 90 but everyone has built up gear already.
The new ultimate almost feels like no one has enough dps unless they go super extra meta

[Alaray]

it didn't matter at the start of EW and it doesn't really matter now. Reaper being "so strong" was overblown, and any class now is completely fine when it comes to their damage contribution in fights.

[Lieri]

So you prefer the nerf approach? rather than buffing underperforming classes, bring down the overperforming ones? can you imagine the amount of complaints? been there done that. Its how blizzard did it and some of the classes were unplayable because they can undertune sometimes too much.

[Recon1o6]

Both nerfing and buffing have their places. Unfortunately this game has an endemic problem with undertuning content relative to the strength of actual job kits and gear and adjusting potencies to indirectly nerf swaths of older content each expansion by buffing potencies the moment they are acquired instead of at (old level cap+1)

Case in point: when dragoon was fresh in ARR you got jump at 200 potency and dragonfire dive at 250 every 3 minutes. One out of two Jumps could get a boost to 300 every minute. Nowadays dragonfire happens every 2 minutes and its potency is upped to 300. jump starts at 300 before getting buffed to 400 at level 74 when high jump arrives

If those damage buffs happened at level 51, then dragoon would be closer to its ARR strength for ARR duties and we'd actually see mechanics

[Payadopa]

Kupo, do you really want old raids to take forever? kupo <3

It would not take forever. All you do is punish new players. You don't build up a big bad only to stand in every single AoE without consequence and the fight is over before the 2nd phase of the music has even started. The fact you want them to be over faster tells volumes of how boring they actually are.

[Deceptus]

Time Borrowed did not need to be nerfed, and I will die on this hill forever. It went from group support to just a meh personal.

Ranting about our utility aside- The new Alliance Raid has melted so fast I was surprised there were mechanics I didn't even get to see on day 1. We're all way too powerful for new content, and that's not even just people in BiS. It just feels sloppier somehow.

That's less that we're too powerful and more that the bosses have too few HP.

Take for example, the Ivalice Raids, the bosses were Gigantic HP Sponges.

Apparently SE has a big problem with designing middle grounds.