Quote Originally Posted by Ransu View Post
Every job has been viable for years...They are currently changing their design approach whether good or bad is going through hiccups. No balance is ever perfect, but that mantra existed because its been factual for years.

As far as dev playtesting goes. There is never going to be any kind of transparency on how they do things internally. That is simply just not going to happen.
There have been peeks into it, or at least, they provide snippets and from there we drew assumptions. For example, there was an interview shortly before 5.2 where they were talking about the difference between Titan and Shiva tuning, where they claimed to have slashed the dps requirement on Titan by 15% from what they were testing, but only did 10% on Shiva.

I don't remember the entire discussion, but from there, the assumption was made that the devs playtest in Tome Gear, and they slash based on expected values on pentamelded Min Ilvl so that the encounter is achievable. 15% sounds like a lot, but the extra is due to differences in intended strategies vs prog strategies, so, again, the assumption is that the slash is overestimated because if an up-time strategy exists, it is not likely to be the first one that catches on.

So while the P8s explanation is raising skepticism, rightfully I'll add, it's not exactly out of line of what they've told us so far. This time they made a mistake, and it isn't even the first time they've made the mistake, because E4s and Titan presented a similar situation.