Endwalker is pretty great

[EliaStormblade]

Midwalker lmao

xdddddddddddd

[SassyAssassin]

People that feel unheard, patronized, mocked, or marginalized tend to turn to turn to sarcasm and mockery as communication strategies themselves.

I listen to you angry looking man, always had because I like the edgy face :3

[Ransu]

I'd hate for SE to come away from these forums with the wrong impression, so I'm going to do something pretty rare and illustrate why this expansion has been a major success.

SE doesn't pay attention to the forums at all, which can be good and bad depending on your perspective. with that said, even if they did look at the forums, I don't really think they would care about the same 3 trolls complaining all the time.

[AwesomeJr44]

The two Endwalker ultimates stand as the greatest ones to date

You say that you don't want the devs to come away from the forums with the wrong impression and yet you try to paint one of the most universally hated pieces of content ever added to the game as one of the greatest? The only bar TOP raised was how buggy and terribly designed a raid could be. This has to be a joke right?

Please tell me this was a joke, please.

[DiaDeem]

The two Endwalker ultimates stand as the greatest ones to date

I'll take your word for it. I don't run Ultimate.

The portrait system is super fun

Yes, and it's also horribly implemented. I wanna love this feature, but as is today, more often than not my portrait goes out of sync. Usually because I just affixed Materia and forgot to update my set. This system shouldn't be the mess that it is.

Crystalline Conflict has been a massive improvement over The Feast

It's alright.

Orthos and Island Sanctuary I consider equivalent to the past expansions' equivalents in Bozja and the like

You don't know this. I've used the argument on people who cry to the heavens that "Resources were wasted on IS instead of an exploratory zone" and the truth is we don't know this. HoH came along with Eureka, so I'll go to where I always go with this argument: You don't know how resources are used, and one being up doesn't mean the other one needs to be gone.

Endwalker's Story: Endwalker's MSQ put a very neat bow on the story so far

Love the story, but not everything was resolved. Do you know what happened to Travanchet? Exactly.

Soo... I love Endwalker, but the notion that it couldn't be better, or that 7.0 can't improve on it. Then again, I've already made my Wishlist Thread.

[BRVV]

You say that you don't want the devs to come away from the forums with the wrong impression and yet you try to paint one of the most universally hated pieces of content ever added to the game as one of the greatest?.

Honest question: was it really that hated? Why? I don't do Ultimates. I heard a lot of praise actually. The negativity around them i heard was exclusive to the cheating world first drama and the fact that for TOP you apparently need 2 melees... or was it 3?

[Myon88]

As for the two minute meta conversation. Your assessment isn't entirely true as certain jobs or comps benefit significantly. Dark Knight, for example, has nearly as many clears as every other tank combined because it feeds so aggressively into both that aforementioned meta and has a one minute burst. Summoner is overwhelmingly superior compared to Black Mage and Red Mage. In fact, it completely outclasses both of them even in aDPS—matching Samurai in that department. The fight favors it to a comical degree. I'd mention Bard but its utter lack of presence is more a design issue with the job itself than anything TOP specific. All in all, the two minute meta has been a factor.

While it's true that DRK is a particularly dominant tank, I believe that has been the case all expansion, even before TOP came along. Its base design just gives it superior output in coordinated settings. I'm not sure how much thinner you could shave the margins without impinging on what little unique job identity there is left, but there's definitely a dynamic at play there.

Consensus on SMN and RDM appears to put them on fairly even ground to me. I'm not seeing this overwhelming superiority reflected in the data that's out there, not in ADPS, or any DPS metric really. While both produce similar output, the former mainly has an advantage in ease of play, and the latter in finer control over it's resources and burst windows. One of these could be an advantage for minimizing wipes to careless mistakes, the other for expediting progress through phases with tough enrage timers. To me, their strengths are qualitatively different and difficult to compare directly.

Also, it might interest you to know that with the data we have now, its become clear that Bard is actually the strongest ranged job in the last phase of TOP by a significant margin. Being able to open p6 with a fully powered radiant finale has a lot to do with it, dwarfing even the advantage of machinists carrying over a full gauge of resources. Bard does tend to be unpopular in cutting edge progression as its rotation and song cycles take more effort to integrate with a fight. Stereotypes trickle down from the hardcore community and it do be like that. For those learning a fight later on with strategies fully prepared however, it seems to have turned out to be a perfectly fine choice.

Beyond that, maybe I should expand on why I think TOP undercuts a lot of the issues with 2 minute cooldowns.

Simply put, the fight punishes you really hard if your strategy is to simply roll them on cooldown together. There was a lot of worry that these homogenizations would lead to unimaginative rotations in raid, but at least for now, that has thankfully not been the case in TOP.

Some of the phase timers are structured just so that you are given the option to use major cooldowns a final time before the end of the phase. Doing so is a trap however, as it results in you massively outrunning the enrage timer and coming up empty for the next phase.

Instead, you often end up holding cooldowns and sandbagging until the very last second. Were we still in the Heavensward era of mismatched 90, 120, and 180second cooldowns, it's likely they'd all be forced to realign in a fight like this. Depending on your composition, the 2nd through 4th phases have entirely different strategies for when cooldowns and limit breaks are to be used. Certain jobs like reaper are incentivized to eschew raid alignment completely and burst alone at their own timing.

There's a surprising amount of nuance built into the way rotations and phase timers interact in TOP. Personally, I've been enormously pessimistic about SMN going back to before Shadowbringers. I saw this 'rework' and simplification coming ages ago. Nevertheless the fight has succeeded in making even such a boring job fun to play for me (it has a lot of optimization space in p2, p4, p5, and p6). I'm not sure how much of this is happenstance or cunning design, but I have to give credit where it's due.

[Amenara]

I am glad you are enjoying the game. I disagree with a lot of your points but it doesn't mean I am not happy players are enjoying it still. I honestly just want SE to put the instant portraits back into the version we used for "beta" as the current version is just worse.

[EliaStormblade]

Instant portraits do feel strangely finicky for no reason. Hopefully they fix that.

[Knot_D]

Instant portraits do feel strangely finicky for no reason. Hopefully they fix that.

It's not really that bad IMO, sure it's worse than the beta but all you have to do is just update your gear set, edit to the portrait, then save it.