Quote Originally Posted by Gserpent View Post
Yeah, basically. I stopped going to The Balance at all once I both realized how far up their own ass those chronically online types are. I used to believe a lot of what they said until I *effortlessly* parsed orange in e10s, without ever having spent a moment practicing on striking dummies or anything like that. One or two steps beyond mashing buttons and I'm parsing a number that the system should say belongs to the best of the very best? Kind of a watershed moment. Made me realize that the entire parsing thing was a crock of shit.

I'll reiterate that Square-Enix are cowards. The number of players who *genuinely care* about parses, about the tiny differences in numbers, are so minuscule that they could kill all of their accounts tonight and probably not notice much of a blip in revenues. Yet these players are seemingly the ones they're building the entire combat system around. It's madness.
World First for our very first Ultimate... featured a DRK at a time when DRK was at its very worst. His reasoning: "Idk. I just like playing DRK." The changes made would make no sense if they were being made just for the top tier, the theorycrafters, etc. And most of the ones actually going for an orange parse aren't the ones arguing over this or that job having 0.5% higher theoretical rDPS despite being the sole group for whom such differences would actually matter.

Nothing about Balance theorycrafters working out the best way to leverage Overheat turned it into the shallow shtick MCH has been since Shadowbringers. Nothing about their figuring out the best ways to open as Monk removed Greased Lightning. By their count, after all, it was already balanced; whatever "clunk" was there didn't matter to them, because they'd already accepted and worked around it.

I don't particularly give a damn about that community, either, but it's laughable that you could lay the devs' changes made over time towards accessibility-(even-if-at-cost-to-identity-and-skill-ceiling) at their feet.