Ultimate Representation: Good, Bad, or Indifferent?

[ForsakenRoe]

While obviously true, I actually feel when someone puts effort into saying something, it's worth taking the time to reply to. That's the respectful thing to do.

...I'll also note you got 3 likes for that comment, clearly proving what I said: "Likes are probably the least reliable metric in all of the internet for judging positions or arguments."

Or maybe it means people agree with what I said in that post, that 'there's not much point in typing a massive reply, if whatever WE reply with is dismissed immediately as 'you didn't read again''.

Have they not done anything about the buff cap issue?

Talk about gimping jobs for no reason.

I think part of the issue AST suffers from is not being able to track their buffs/timers when it should be relied back via job gauge instead of the tiny buff bar. It's the same issue with BRD, why aren't their dots timers on their job gauge?

Everything in AST's kit is so disconnected from each other, it's easy to forget that it's back up while doing mechanics. There's no flow like there was in SB and ShB.

SE dumb as hell on this stuff, they already had the solution for the TOP-HW buffcap issue IN THE GAME. In Intermediate Relativity, you got Return IV, which placed a return position upon expiration, and gave Return I. That ALSO dropped a return position, and then gave a new debuff that would Return you to return I, then return IV. So back to TOP, why did they have to give Local Regression, Remote Regression, Local Code Smell, Remote Code Smell, Critical Overflow Smell whatever yadda yadda, when they could save debuff slots by having Local/Remote Regression II, that becomes Local/Remote I upon resolving?

As for AST, another casualty of the 2min meta. You throw out literally everything in a hectic window of 15-20s, then go back to mashing one button (mostly) for the next 100. With the old system, you'd be playing a card (or burning it) every 30s, and thinking ahead about things a lot more. Do you save that Spear with Spread in case you can't find a Balance, or reroll it to try and get the Balance, or a EwerSpire to burn up? Do you play a raidwide Arrow knowing it's 'kinda not great', or risk the reroll knowing that Bole Ewer and Spire would all be 'a hell of a lot crappier'?

They seem to want cards to be thought about as little as humanly possible, so Astrologians can focus on…hitting Malefic more? Lol

If the healer can't do their job's mechanics without thinking at all, then they might get analysis-paralysis, freeze up, and cause a wipe. And the thought that they might 'fail' at something is just too much for the precious, delicate healer playerbase, so of course SE has to protect us, from ourselves. I've said it before, but I'll repeat it again, we're plants that SE has put plastic bottle-tops over to protect us from the birds. But if a plant gets too big for it's bottle-top protection, outgrows it, that 'protection' actually strangles the plant. After a certain point, we end up like those novelty shaped watermelons.

I've also said before, I don't care if someone wipes in a raid. My motto is, if you do make a mistake, own up to it, understand HOW the mistake occured, try your damndest not to repeat it. Because, if you die in new, unique way every time, eventually you run out of ways to fail. And once that happens, you succeed by default. Every time I've screwed up in a raid and I can tell that it was me that caused the wipe, I have immediately said 'my bad'. So my question is, if we keep applying safety helmets to the role so it's not possible to make any mistakes, or if a mistake IS made, it's so inconsequential you cannot even get the feedback that tells you that a mistake WAS made, how is the player meant to improve?

It's bad enough that DPS players can potentially go months at max level not knowing their damage is awful, because the game doesn't tell you. Stone Sky Sea is an absolute joke, wildly varying between 'lmao you were 15 seconds off' and 'wow you beat it with over 20 seconds to spare' depending on the patch, job and fight combo. No matter how many times I tried, how much I practiced, I could never beat the P4S dummy as most of the DPS classes. But the healer ones fell over. 'Oh but healers aren't meant to focus on DPS so the requirement is lower', I could beat the AST one in my crafted gear, without using cards, how does that make sense? Then in the actual fight, as AST, we had multiple 50% enrages, because a RPR was meant to do approx 7.2k DPS, and was instead doing 6.2k. I don't know if SSS would have even helped them. At most it'd have told him 'you need to do your rotation different, this one doesn't work'. But it can't tell the poor sod WHY their rotation isn't good. Can SE update SSS to, idk, at least have some basic stats stuff? Like, DOT uptime, cooldown drift, resource overcap, etc?

[Renathras]

Or maybe it means people agree with what I said in that post, that 'there's not much point in typing a massive reply, if whatever WE reply with is dismissed immediately as 'you didn't read again''.

Yeah, but unlikely.

[Rein_eon_Osborne]

If the healer can't do their job's mechanics without thinking at all, then they might get analysis-paralysis, freeze up, and cause a wipe. And the thought that they might 'fail' at something is just too much for the precious, delicate healer playerbase, so of course SE has to protect us, from ourselves. I've said it before, but I'll repeat it again, we're plants that SE has put plastic bottle-tops over to protect us from the birds. But if a plant gets too big for it's bottle-top protection, outgrows it, that 'protection' actually strangles the plant. After a certain point, we end up like those novelty shaped watermelons.

I've also said before, I don't care if someone wipes in a raid. My motto is, if you do make a mistake, own up to it, understand HOW the mistake occured, try your damndest not to repeat it. Because, if you die in new, unique way every time, eventually you run out of ways to fail. And once that happens, you succeed by default. Every time I've screwed up in a raid and I can tell that it was me that caused the wipe, I have immediately said 'my bad'. So my question is, if we keep applying safety helmets to the role so it's not possible to make any mistakes, or if a mistake IS made, it's so inconsequential you cannot even get the feedback that tells you that a mistake WAS made, how is the player meant to improve?

A bit unrelated, but SE does seems hell bent on doubling down with changes that potentially eliminates sour interactions between players. Healers currently felt the largest impact but I’m seeing couple of signs on neighboring role as well: tanks.

Worries that people might flame the tank for not keeping aggro? Alright let’s remove aggro management and make everything they hit generates 2000% aggro!
Worries that people might flame the tank for not knowing certain niche boss positioning? Alright let’s prevent that by making bosses resets their on their own to the middle of arena!
Worries that people might flame the tank for not making the targeted boss comfortable for melees? Alright let’s take away some positionals & make bosses hitbox humongous!

[ForsakenRoe]

A bit unrelated, but SE does seems hell bent on doubling down with changes that potentially eliminates sour interactions between players. Healers currently felt the largest impact but I’m seeing couple of signs on neighboring role as well: tanks.

Worries that people might flame the tank for not keeping aggro? Alright let’s remove aggro management and make everything they hit generates 2000% aggro!
Worries that people might flame the tank for not knowing certain niche boss positioning? Alright let’s prevent that by making bosses resets their on their own to the middle of arena!
Worries that people might flame the tank for not making the targeted boss comfortable for melees? Alright let’s take away some positionals & make bosses hitbox humongous!

It's no surprise that my favorite boss in the current raid in WOW is Kurog, who is entirely about 'his position in the arena dictates which of the four movesets he will use' and my least favourites are Sennarth, Terros and Dathea, all three of whom the tank has zero agency over their positioning.

Oh yeh, also you forgot:

'Worries that people might flame the tank for keeping tankstance on for safety? Alright let’s remove the damage penalty of tankstance so they can just use it without thinking'
'Worries that people might flame the tank for dying after removing tankstance to push more damage? Alright let's make the 20% mitigation a flat bonus for picking the role, so they can press absolutely no mitigations and still survive everything outside of savage, because an actual difficulty curve where EX trials start to demand a little bit of player skill would be too much. Just go from 'everything tickles' to 'everything oneshots you' with no inbetween'

and for healers, 'Worries that people might flame the healer for running out of healing tools? Alright remove MP management, bloat healer toolkits with like 4 OGCDs too many so they always have something they can heal with. Unless they're WHM, in which case, lol, lmao, make sure to keep their healing design locked in a filing cabinet labelled 'garbo from the year 2015'
or even 'Worries that the tank might flame the healer, because they dropped low (but didn't die)? Alright let’s make it so that tanks can selfheal so hard, they dont even NEED a healer in EX roulette'

not tried it yet but I imagine that PLD is pretty up there on 'doesnt need a healer' EX runs now that you can Holy Spirit every 3 AOE GCDs

[Renathras]

A bit unrelated, but SE does seems hell bent on doubling down with changes that potentially eliminates sour interactions between players. Healers currently felt the largest impact but I’m seeing couple of signs on neighboring role as well: tanks.

Basically yeah.

I think it's easy for people to get lost in thinking this is a Healer problem, but this is honestly a game-wide problem. And it's detrimental to each role it's applied to. Healers almost don't heal anymore, leaving them as a simple support DPS much of the time, and Tanks likewise don't do most of the things players who WANT to Tank think of, like agro management or poss positioning - two of the three legs of tanking (the other being mitigation, the only one they still somewhat interact with, but even there, because of self-sustain and even some shielding like GNB's -2 of its main 1-2-3 combo, even part of this is automatic). Much to the distaste of people that prefer the Trinity in their traditional roles.

One could also say this for the DPS roles. Melee now have almost no positionals, and boss hitboxes are the size of planets - that's not just making Tank more fail-proof, it's also making Melee fail-proof. Somewhat ironically, Ranged (though they already had the easiest rotations) and Casters (with 1.5 out of three of them being pretty easy to play) have the more challenging aspects of their roles still. BLM and 50% of the time RDM having to worry about cast times (though less than they used to), and Ranged are expected to be the "flex" party member with things like the P5S swap on Intemperance.

[IceBlueNinja]

Decide to lvl up ast to 90 today out of being bored. Forgive me for saying this but its so god damn awful with the card playing, feels so much stressing and less awarding for such lil buffs that tbh am finding myself half the time forgetting to play them(then again being sage 100% so far this since ew may have caused some lazyness in me ). The nerf to redraw from 3 charges to only 1 was one of the dumbest thing ever, yes even with 3 charges you still could get unlucky rng for getting all the seals, but it still felt the changes was higher imo. This astrodyne foolishness please get rid of it.