This needs to be said

[zabu]

People only blame everything on job balance, did you ever think what is the current skill level on average player base now? It is really low.... That is why people are getting traps on party finder
From SE perspective, they cant say player sucks, so they only can say is all their fault.
With one week delay, there is no DPS check already until p8s. It is literally mechanics check.
Did you even know a lot of player especially DPS do not even pot or eat this tier's food and still clear the raid?
Did you know people cheese the fight and skip mechanics with healer lb 3 and tank lb 3 when the savage (non-causal content) release in day 2? Then what is the point of design the mechanics?

[ReynTime]

Ah yes the balance team. The team that tests and defines the job balance. The team that thought healers are fine and that having a dedicated healer that was "too good" was a bad idea. The team that has no dedicated tank player.

That balance team?

[Raoabolic]

*remembers the healer that was too good for their testing team*
Uh-oh, I assume 8 people are about to be fired. lmao

Ah yes the balance team. The team that tests and defines the job balance. The team that thought healers are fine and that having a dedicated healer that was "too good" was a bad idea. The team that has no dedicated tank player.

That balance team?

That was a heck of a hivemind moment, lol.

[Brightamethyst]

It's a straight up lie and considering this explanation is aimed at the high end raiders, who pretty much all use fflogs, meters and analyze numbers very thoroughly, I don't understand how they expected us to believe it.

And I don't understand why people are so willing to believe the devs are lying instead.

Sure, they could be lying, but to what end? Historically they're not afraid to admit they've made balancing errors, so why would they suddenly start lying about it now? Who benefits by lying instead of just saying "sorry, we over tuned the fight"?

[Deceptus]

I have no doubt in my mind that their balancing team is more skilled than the average player in the game. Heck, I'm willing to bet that they are pretty good at the game. However, to think that their dev team is so good at the game that the entire community, even at the top tier of play, notices a problem with how out-of-whack job balance is within a day or two is copium at best.

To be clear, I'm not talking about balancing for the average player. The average player is entirely unaffected by any of this, fight was totally fine un-nerfed from week 2 onward. I'm only talking about the playerbase that is attempting week-1, which I do concede is a vast minority.

I think one of the bigger problems is the battle design team doesn't seem to be communicating with the job balance team.

Tuning a fight to be difficult is fine.

Tuning a fight that literally can't be accomplished by a certain group comp isn't.

From SE perspective, they cant say player sucks, so they only can say is all their fault.

Can't point to hard at the players when they are showing definitive proof of 98% uptime / perfect CD management and still missing enrages.

Savage Content shouldn't require players to play perfectly, that's what ultimate is for.

All they had to say was "we screwed up job balance, our fault, we'll fix it, sorry". That's it.

Seriously. Why has this been so hard for them the last few expansions? People are extremely forgiving when people admit mistake and fix them.

[zabu]

I think one of the bigger problems is the battle design team doesn't seem to be communicating with the job balance team.
Can't point to hard at the players when they are showing definitive proof of 98% uptime / perfect CD management and still missing enrages.

Savage Content shouldn't require players to play perfectly, that's what ultimate is for.

I did not say need to be perfect, the fault tolerance is way too big, you can have 4+ people die and still clear the raid. Mechanics got cheesed to clear the raid. Crappy food and no pot. Some folks do not even know their rotation or mitigation. This is like doing extreme mode. Is that really fun?

[AmiableApkallu]

There is no world where your balance team tested and tuned this fight to be clearable with every comp at full 610 iLvl.

5 choices for melee * 3 choices for physical ranged * 3 choices for magical ranged * 6 tank pairs * 6 healer pairs = 1620 possible seven-person party compositions with one player per job. Multiply that by… 4, I think, to get the number of eight-person party compositions? Anyway, I doubt SE is devoting the resources to exhaustively test that many combinations.

They're taking shortcuts, and it's not difficult to imagine how it might work to set the DPS check:

1. They start with the internal testing team's DPS with their chosen party compositions. They have some expectation for how players of some certain skill level playing those same compositions compare to the testing team, so they take the testing team's DPS and shift it up or down to get something appropriate for the players.

2. They then take into account that some party compositions will naturally perform worse than the ones they used in testing, so they shift the DPS down to accommodate those less-performant compositions.

3. They then take into account natural damage variance and shift the DPS down to cover some not-small range of that variance.

So, it doesn't matter how well SE understands job balance (2) and damage variance (3) if they start from a bad baseline (1) because they misjudged where the players would land relative to themselves, which can happen when their testing team's performance improves unexpectedly.

[NekoMataMata]

And I don't understand why people are so willing to believe the devs are lying instead.

Sure, they could be lying, but to what end? Historically they're not afraid to admit they've made balancing errors, so why would they suddenly start lying about it now? Who benefits by lying instead of just saying "sorry, we over tuned the fight"?

They also have no reason to lie either technically. There's a lot of ways they can easily twist things around to suit whatever purpose they might need without having to outright lie and put themselves in a position where they can be caught.

[WellGramarye]

It seems the community has forgotten how Twintania was when it first released. P8S isn't the first time this was an issue.

[Kazhar]

It seems the community has forgotten how Twintania was when it first released. P8S isn't the first time this was an issue.

But this is the first time it has been an issue since A6S, and raiding changed quite a lot since then.