Why is everyone anxious about a PLD Rework?

[Shurrikhan]

One day, FFlogs should just hide the percentile and median stats on everyone's page as an april fools joke. Leave it that way for a week or two, so it doesn't just get dismissed right away as 'eh its just april fools' and people start thinking it'll stick.

I'd actually really like to see that. Given the high chance people just go back to business as normal thereafter, though, I guess I'd just like to see context made a bit more visible? For instance, it would be interesting if we could see how many attempts have gone into a given fight that haven't yet cleared (noting also that most people don't log non-clears), or how the number of clears compare to previous tiers or luckybancho estimates on the number of active level-capped players. It'd be cool to see what the enrage time is for the given fight, and to be able to quickly check how a party fell far above or below making that mark, or even to do "what if" substitutions.

If they wanted to really throw a wrench into it, we'd just have an assortment of different prime number recasts to deliberately mess with the alignment. But then you might as well stick with personal buffs and make this feel more like a single-player game. That will be next, the way the complaints are going.

I hope it doesn't come to that, but that does sadly seem the fairest bet, given the history of adjustments thus far.

[Gserpent]

I think "solo buffs" is pretty much exactly how it should go. I can't speak for modern WoW, but in older editions of WoW that's pretty much how it worked - you maybe had Bloodlust as a once per fight raidwide buff but otherwise everyone was on their own. When you triggered your class's big damage buttons was in large part reliant on when it was safe and effective for *you* to do so.

I also liked how planning on how to integrate your personal rotation into the raid's buffs and rotation worked in Shadowbringers, although we were already well on our way to the 2 minute meta there. I think there's a lot more space to improve skill ceilings in an "everyone is on their own" setup than a rigid 2 minute hierarchy. Add this to making boss hitboxes a bit smaller so that melee and tanks have room for greeding mechanics (damage down is a good solution to lmao healers adjust, it should remain as is), and I think you're in a much better place going into Expansion Number Next.

[Shurrikhan]

I think "solo buffs" is pretty much exactly how it should go. I can't speak for modern WoW, but in older editions of WoW that's pretty much how it worked - you maybe had Bloodlust as a once per fight raidwide buff but otherwise everyone was on their own. When you triggered your class's big damage buttons was in large part reliant on when it was safe and effective for *you* to do so.

...Original WoW had, just off the top of my head... Battle Shout, Commanding Shout, Power Word: Fortitude, Blessing of Kings, Blessing of Might, Blessing of Sanctuary, Devotion Aura, Crusader Aura, Trueshot Aura, Earthskin Totem, Strength of Earth Totem, Flametongue Totem, Windfury Totem, Arcane Intellect, Mark of the Wild, Divine Spirit, Fel Intelligence, so there wasn't a lack of raid buffs per se. (And I was actually happier when that buff bloat was less prominent, or consolidated into auras instead of filler flavor buttons, prior to Shadowlands' returning them to full mass.)

But yeah, you didn't really try to align anything to raid buffs' damage windows. That said, you still basically don't. It's pretty much still just Power Surge (single target Haste buff) and Bloodlust/Heroism.

[Gserpent]

Yeah, but outside of vanilla, those are all fire and forget buffs. The lowest of them had durations of like 3 minutes and no cooldown so you just tapped it once at the start and again periodically to keep it rolling. Most had durations of 60 minutes or more. It made sense in a game like WoW, where you had a lot of classes/specs and a much larger raid size, but in XIV it would be pointless to have buffs like that... hence the 5% stat boost benefit, I imagine. DPS classes would usually have a personal buff with a length 2-5 minute cooldown like Death Wish for Fury and Recklessness (variously like a fucking *hour* cooldown, to I think 5 minutes in Wrath) and while you'd *usually* want to use them during Bloodlust, you didn't always.

I dunno. I think raiding was just better, overall, in Shadowbringers. Especially since I don't give a single tin shit about parsing or parsing culture, and I don't think Square-Enix ought to either. I can understand there being problems with "everyone's different" for speedrunning etc, but I'm perfectly telling an incredibly tiny group of players who frankly are irrelevant in the grand scheme to find something else to focus their efforts on, if it means the gameplay for the majority of players is better.

[Shurrikhan]

I think raiding was just better, overall, in Shadowbringers.

I preferred the state of certain jobs back then, too, but... the fixation on raid buffs was exactly as prevalent then as now. It's just that certain jobs screwed over others' rDPS more.

[Lyth]

It's not that the dev team particularly care about speedrunning. It's the impact that it has on the community's perceptions. The questions that everyone asks when starting a new MMO is: Which job should I pick? What's good? Players scrutinize what is happening at the top. Oh, my job is 50 dps behind the others at the 99th percentile and isn't being commonly used in the speedruns that I've looked at. It must be broken. And then they proceed to lose thousands of potency on lost uptime or basic rotational mistakes. It's not the job holding you back. It's you.

I think there's eventually going to be a point where you have to evaluate whether you want this to be a team game or not. We took away boss movement and positioning from tanks because we can't trust them to not spin the boss. We took away add spawns because we can't trust the tanks to pick them up. We gave everyone self-heals, mitigation, and raises because we can't trust the healers. We made hitboxes span the arena and removed positionals because we can't trust melee to press TN. We made all the casters into ranged dps because we can't trust them to know how to slidecast. And we never trusted the ranged dps to begin with. It's really okay to fail because someone else messed up. You'll do it yourself. Just dust yourself off and go again.

[ForsakenRoe]

It's pretty weird to me that current WoW's WarcraftLogs doesn't use RDPS as a metric, like at all, despite there being multiple DPS-boosting buffs that would arguably mean it's more needed there than here. DNC gives a 100% uptime 5% damage buff to someone? On the other side of the digital pond, Monks and DemonHunters give a 5% boost to all physical/magical damage respectively, but that's not factored into their damage, it's just assigned to the person who dealt the damage, not the buff-applier. Power Infusion is, yes, single target haste buff, but I assume the reason that's not RDPS-d is because it'd be VERY difficult to calculate what skills got extra uses due to PI's effect, because haste works very differently there to skillspeed here (for one, people actually want it on their gear). There's also BattleShout (melee attackpower), Arcane Intellect (INT, affects spell damage), Mark of the Wild (3% Versatility, their version of Determination), Windfury Totem for 'you have a chance to autoattack extra times' (very nice for Arms Warrior), and then all the non-damage useful ones like Devotion aura for 3% damage resists, PW Fortitude for 10% Stamina, yadda yadda

Just funny to me that the supposedly 'sweaty toxic elitist' game gives less of a shit about 'making sure the correct person is accredited with their buff's contribution' than FF. I wonder if it's because of the time-bracket where all the classes became super self-focused and raidbuffs basically didnt exist? Now they're back (kind of) but WCL hasn't changed anything to reflect that. Maybe, just maybe, the players of WOW understand raidbuffs enough to say 'ah 9/14 of our dps are casters, we should pick up a DH for the 5% buff', but don't care enough to say 'ok I am a DH I want to parse, I'm going to stack the raid with casters to pad my 5% buff's contribution'? I've heard you can only do one parse run per week, once your lockout's spent on the killed boss, you can't retry so that's your try for the week, if the run sucks, you have to wipe it before you kill it. So, I wonder if it'd be possible to detect if the clear was a 2chest clear (ie, the first clear for the week for that character) and only accept a log if it had that criteria? The fact that people can just run the fight over and over, until they get 'the one run where the stars align' kinda detracts from the whole 'competitive aspect' imo.

If I did a 100m sprint over and over against Usain Bolt, I can't show the news stations the one run where he tripped over his shoes at the start and I won and say 'look guys I'm faster than Usain Bolt!' If there's gonna be a 'competitive' side to logs, there should be rules, livelog only, forced public, wipes included. Lastly, it's always made me laugh how these parse gamers want to have this supposed 'competitive' aspect to the game (ie competing for leaderboard spots, allstar points, whatever), but then they pitch a fit about add padding. 'Wah wah someone's group might hold back their own DPS so one specific person can do more damage to the adds and get a higher DPS value at the end, we have to remove the sunbirds from the parse in P3S', but then the dark fires at the very start WEREN'T removed, so you got ASTs throwing Star, Macrocosmos and Lord of Crowns at them, absolute insanity. Same with the P8S double damage buff, who gives a rat's backside, everyone's gonna have the buff (unless they die, in which case their parse is dead) so what does it matter? Something about holding buffs/resources until after the Ego Death res? But then people are gaming it by holding resources at the end of Phase 1, so they can go straight into Phase 2 and do it all in one go, without resetting. I just don't get it, and in some ways, I don't know if I even want to.

[Lyth]

I think the reason why the culture developed a bit differently over here is because of smaller raid sizes, ease with which you can swap jobs, and ease with which you can rerun the fights multiple times without having to clear trash packs. So you finish the tier, your WHM swaps to AST and takes turns padding everyone individually with Balance cards. I think it eventually reached a point where it was sufficiently prevalent that the numbers themselves lost their value and everyone started to find them a bit silly. The new parameters were necessary for them to stay relevant in this game.

Numbers are only useful if you know how to critically evaluate them, same as always.

[Azuri]

If I did a 100m sprint over and over against Usain Bolt, I can't show the news stations the one run where he tripped over his shoes at the start and I won and say 'look guys I'm faster than Usain Bolt!' If there's gonna be a 'competitive' side to logs, there should be rules, livelog only, forced public, wipes included. Lastly, it's always made me laugh how these parse gamers want to have this supposed 'competitive' aspect to the game (ie competing for leaderboard spots, allstar points, whatever), but then they pitch a fit about add padding. 'Wah wah someone's group might hold back their own DPS so one specific person can do more damage to the adds and get a higher DPS value at the end, we have to remove the sunbirds from the parse in P3S', but then the dark fires at the very start WEREN'T removed, so you got ASTs throwing Star, Macrocosmos and Lord of Crowns at them, absolute insanity. Same with the P8S double damage buff, who gives a rat's backside, everyone's gonna have the buff (unless they die, in which case their parse is dead) so what does it matter? Something about holding buffs/resources until after the Ego Death res? But then people are gaming it by holding resources at the end of Phase 1, so they can go straight into Phase 2 and do it all in one go, without resetting. I just don't get it, and in some ways, I don't know if I even want to.

Your analogy is asinine. Usain Bolt had plenty of starts that weren't his best. He hasn't won every race he participated in either. This still doesn't diminish his world record. On the other hand, the moment you run 100m in less than 9.58s you can indeed claim that you are faster. Regardless of how slow your other attempts might have been.

And for all the shit people give him, Kirha is quite conscious about how his decisions may affect general raiding experience in the game and generally tries to avoid situations where parsing ends up hindering actually clearing the fights. If you remove Dark Fires from logs, no one will want to hit them. If you add Phoenixes into the log, people will stack them together and demand from everyone else to stop pressing buttons. If you keep Phoenix buff, the optimal way to parse will be to make the fight last as long as possible. While not everyone will agree with those decisions it's fair to say that some thought goes into them.

[Shurrikhan]

@ForsakenRoe Largely because ,in WoW, raids are the only place where those raids come out ahead of non-rDPS utility or damage profile synergies. And there any real difficulty has 20 (Mythic) or 10-30 players (Heroic), so there are slots aplenty.

The question if more damage to beat a timer vs. more defensive or mobility utility to cheese a certain fight is still very much a thing in M+, though.