Abyssos DPS tuning and week 2 progression.

[Edgedy]

After having spent some time watching the fights and doing them myself, I feel that I'd comment on the decision by the raid team in terms of the difficulty, as well as the decision to give us an extra week.

First of all, the general balance of the first 3 fights was top notch. I also appreciate giving us extra time to enjoy the story and prepare for the raid as it was one of the more 'restful' raiding progressions I've had so I was able to enjoy it without being overly stressed out.

That said however, Yoshida specifically mentioned the fight tuning was not inclusive of the extra week, the extreme weapon or crafted gear and I feel this was a little disingenuous.

The door boss for P8S 100% factored in the use of a tome weapon upgrade being allocated to one of the DPS in the party which wouldn't have been possible without 500 tomes in order to beat the check consistently. This is coming from my Free Company which has cleared this tier week 1 in all the other previous savages.

Group composition is BLM/NIN/RDM/DNC/PLD/GNB/SGE/WHM if people were curious.

Content like this should be enjoyable and the fact that said group was incapable of bypassing the door boss, let alone progressing through the second phase is truly a shame and it truly demoralizes the raiders that because of composition of the team and gearing that they weren't able to defeat it.

While I appreciate the desire to challenge raiders, something like this shouldn't force other players to either switch their jobs or at the very least, need to procure a tomestone weapon on the first week of raid without forewarning that it is required. (Many of us spent tomes on the pants, rather than the weapon expecting it would be a sufficient upgrade.)

I do enjoy the world race, and the challenge but I would ask that in the future that information be more clear to allow more players to enjoy the content and the challenge especially stating that the difference of a weapon would have allowed us to likely beat the check instead of repeatedly wiped on 50.2% even without any errors on the player's parts.

Regardless, this is a very fun design both from the mechanics, and gameplay and I look forward to future raiding content. Just be a little kinder to those of us who aren't focused so heavily on meta jobs and the necessity to play specific ones to meet certain difficulty checks.

[Enjuden]

After having spent some time watching the fights and doing them myself, I feel that I'd comment on the decision by the raid team in terms of the difficulty, as well as the decision to give us an extra week.

First of all, the general balance of the first 3 fights was top notch. I also appreciate giving us extra time to enjoy the story and prepare for the raid as it was one of the more 'restful' raiding progressions I've had so I was able to enjoy it without being overly stressed out.

That said however, Yoshida specifically mentioned the fight tuning was not inclusive of the extra week, the extreme weapon or crafted gear and I feel this was a little disingenuous.

The door boss for P8S 100% factored in the use of a tome weapon upgrade being allocated to one of the DPS in the party which wouldn't have been possible without 500 tomes in order to beat the check consistently. This is coming from my Free Company which has cleared this tier week 1 in all the other previous savages.

Group composition is BLM/NIN/RDM/DNC/PLD/GNB/SGE/WHM if people were curious.

Content like this should be enjoyable and the fact that said group was incapable of bypassing the door boss, let alone progressing through the second phase is truly a shame and it truly demoralizes the raiders that because of composition of the team and gearing that they weren't able to defeat it.

While I appreciate the desire to challenge raiders, something like this shouldn't force other players to either switch their jobs or at the very least, need to procure a tomestone weapon on the first week of raid without forewarning that it is required. (Many of us spent tomes on the pants, rather than the weapon expecting it would be a sufficient upgrade.)

I do enjoy the world race, and the challenge but I would ask that in the future that information be more clear to allow more players to enjoy the content and the challenge especially stating that the difference of a weapon would have allowed us to likely beat the check instead of repeatedly wiped on 50.2% even without any errors on the player's parts.

Regardless, this is a very fun design both from the mechanics, and gameplay and I look forward to future raiding content. Just be a little kinder to those of us who aren't focused so heavily on meta jobs and the necessity to play specific ones to meet certain difficulty checks.

I mean, if your group didn't get weapons and plan for such that is 100% on them regardless of the raid being planned to be tuned for full crafted.

50.2% means your group is making a mistake, and it isn't weapons. It's rotation or potion windows being done in error. If your group played without error they'd be past door boss already.

[Saraide]

I mean, if your group didn't get weapons and plan for such that is 100% on them regardless of the raid being planned to be tuned for full crafted.

50.2% means your group is making a mistake, and it isn't weapons. It's rotation or potion windows being done in error. If your group played without error they'd be past door boss already.

OR the much easier approach would be for the PLD to swap to DRK. Tank balance is not good enough for how tight the dps check on the door boss is.

[Enjuden]

OR the much easier approach would be for the PLD to swap to DRK. Tank balance is not good enough for how tight the dps check on the door boss is.

There's a reason I didn't address anything else in the post aside from 0.2%.

Job balance has never been great this expansion and the balance team has been floundering because they don't have players that are good enough to do what they need to do. If the Ultimate group isn't doing it (spoilers, they are not), then they have no clue. It really is that simple. The math shown at the very beginning of the expac was more than enough proof to show that their balance was frankly irreparable without delaying patches (again), so this is the result. And every single change this expansion tripled down on how they just don't know what to do anymore without reworks. So I'm not expecting anything but for the job balance to be worse until they get people that know what they're doing, or start using data and do more than just throw people to do testing for more than 3 weeks or whatever it is they do. There's a clear lack of communication between teams and it needs to be fixed yesterday.

[LittleImp]

I'm sure this thread will be full of well thought-out opinions presented by informed people /s.

Talking about job balance or tuning in regards to this tier is a lost cause. Every twitter thread about it has devolved into a clown parade filled with people who don't meaningfully interact with the content posting uninformed takes and bizarrely white-knighting the current state of the game.

[XiRon]

I just think its wild how many war mains are dropping it for a while because its damage is so considerably less than gnb or drk.
One of the best war mains in the game played gnb for p8s, did considerably worse, but still outdamaged warrior.
And Warrior gets 3 guaranteed d-crits and has shake it off, which is an immensely powerful party wide shield.
No other Role is apparently having such a huge problem with dps checks except tanks.

[Reimmi]

I find it disheartening that pld is the lowest dps by so much when it has the most complex optimization of the tanks

[Edgedy]

Every job is viable should be the sentence, and well orchestrated gameplay using every resource and not taking damage down or losing dps up time should be enough to beat it. You can conjecture that switching jobs was the solution, or that poor performance and gameplay was but the root of it is that as a result of it this tier the group was so demoralized it chose to wait till next week to change your gearing plan to continue progression and that saddens me greatly.

[Edgedy]

That'd be an interesting concept, that the design team this time ran out of raid time and didn't do their normal DPS check. But I'm still sticking with the fact that this difficulty was intended they even went so far as to raise the gear for tanks in such a way that crit/det was the primary focus and the usual skill speed/tenacity pieces were barely there. The only real issue is exactly the fact that PLD/WAR/MCH/RDM are incapable of reaching the same peaks. I don't mind if they want to do a number of job balance, what I have an issue with is that many of us were mislead that tome weapons wouldn't be required to defeat a door boss based on what we were told by the development team when it is in fact geared towards that exact thing.

[Iyrnthota]

That'd be an interesting concept, that the design team this time ran out of raid time and didn't do their normal DPS check. But I'm still sticking with the fact that this difficulty was intended they even went so far as to raise the gear for tanks in such a way that crit/det was the primary focus and the usual skill speed/tenacity pieces were barely there. The only real issue is exactly the fact that PLD/WAR/MCH/RDM are incapable of reaching the same peaks. I don't mind if they want to do a number of job balance, what I have an issue with is that many of us were mislead that tome weapons wouldn't be required to defeat a door boss based on what we were told by the development team when it is in fact geared towards that exact thing.

Part of me morbidly wants to see what this tier would have been like with the same check and no delay