Combat system is beyond saving.

[Aravell]

The presence of tank mastery alone basically ruins coils even on mine specifically because the tanks just don’t take anywhere near as much damage as they used to and don’t need anywhere near as much upkeep which frees the healers up to do way more than they did when content was current

It is also just way easier to cheese mechanics with the buffed potency than it used to be. It’s so easy to cheese allagen field these days with shields because you have more free mana to spam shields and the shield potency is higher. I remember in ShB I did a coils run of T7 and we were killing her so fast she desynced then we pushed her phases so fast she somehow managed to resync and we cleared her as normal. That 100% would have been a wipe when current

Minimum ilvl can't be trusted for old fights, the scaling is all off nowadays.

When I did Midas savage with some friends, we actually did it below minimum ilvl for better scaling, I think we did it in i110 gear for the closest experience.

I do think it's unfortunate that new players can't get the experience as it was back then anymore though. If only they had a mode that places you wholesale back into that expansion with kits, scaling and all. If they had the technology to do that, they could also preserve the challenge of old ultimates, my poor boy Golden Bahamut doesn't deserve to be treated like this.

[Zadood]

An online rpg will come around and steal their thunder eventually though, just a matter of time.

That's is not going to happen, I afraid, especially If you know how much yearly revenue BDO has make compared to FFXIV, it's like comparing a boulder to a pebble.

If you are a corporate that want to develop a MMORPG to make money, would you invest a tons of money to develop a MMORPGs just overthrow FFXIV for it's dogwater yearly revenue?
Or invest a ton of money to develop a MMORPG that is good enough to compete with BDO in hope getting at least half of BDO yearly revenue?

One of the reason why SQEX is reluctant to increase CBU3's budget by a ton to develop a better FFXIV that could possibly overthrow WoW, because the amount of increased yearly revenue for dethrone WoW's spot for being No.1 MMORPG is never good enough to justify the cost and tremendous increased budget of FFXIV.

[TheRealQuah]

Is this the same HW where certain jobs were completely useless in content?
Then some jobs were buffed to the point where you were griefing if you played anything else?
You couldn't clear content without extra gear and a certain comp.
NIN - DRG - BRD - MCH being the only comp anyone in PF allowed?

Lots of rose tinted glasses for HW, when in reality the job system was in the worst state it ever was.

3.x patch series was the worst period in this games history.

[Jeeqbit]

NIN - DRG - BRD - MCH being the only comp anyone in PF allowed?

Hmm, let me think. I remember seeing some SMN. I don't really remember MNK (legit never seen many MNK in any expansion). I saw BLM in statics. The rest of the DPS jobs literally didn't exist then, so saying it was restricted to NIN, DRG, BRD and MCH is like duh. We just didn't have many jobs then so SE was able to have them synergize.

I also didn't have trouble using PF as a PLD - people didn't really care about the tanks because they saw it as the DPS' job to do damage, and felt like any old tank can usually tank the boss, since they had no appreciation or respect for all the things tanks did back then.

[ty_taurus]

Is this the same HW where certain jobs were completely useless in content?
Then some jobs were buffed to the point where you were griefing if you played anything else?
You couldn't clear content without extra gear and a certain comp.
NIN - DRG - BRD - MCH being the only comp anyone in PF allowed?

Lots of rose tinted glasses for HW, when in reality the job system was in the worst state it ever was.

3.x patch series was the worst period in this games history.

I love how jobs that were not meta, but were absolutely viable and that were still used in harder content always gets described as being "completely useless" by accounts with join dates years after 2015-2017.

World First Brute Justice Clear btw: Love the NIN-DRG-BRD-MCH comp they're running...

[Sunhwapark]

NIN - DRG - BRD - MCH being the only comp anyone in PF allowed?

Definitely didn't experience that at all. Or do you mean Stormblood's expansion where they had the blunt/piercing/striking debuffs tacked onto different classes that pretty much locked those spots (for meta chasers, at least) ?

Cross world pf didn't exist at the time, smaller population and it was harder to get people in groups on PF for them to be so picky. You'd be more likely to run into more people that would block/kick the 'imposter' player for faking fight knowledge and constantly failing all of the mechanics, and most people got gated by mechanics anyway in pf - at least on Cerberus server, A11s was a giant wall by the end of the tier.

Anyway - OP is right, combat will not regain the things it has lost which makes everything very reliant on the success of encounters - if encounters end up being boring, well...

[Jeeqbit]

Cross world pf didn't exist at the time, smaller population and it was harder to get people in groups on PF for them to be so picky.

That's a good point as well. We did get cross-world PF at the tail-end of the expansion, but for even the initial 4 months of creator it was just your own world's PF.

You'd be more likely to run into more people that would block/kick the 'imposter' player for faking fight knowledge and constantly failing all of the mechanics

This is why the jobs are being made easier haha. We ran into SMN that didn't know their rotation in a way that meant they wouldn't be doing much damage. Healers that just couldn't heal raid-wides even in A11S.

Mechanically, I got beyond steamroller pretty quick in A10S and made post-steamroller parties... but nobody that joined was actually post-steamroller (the same issue you get today in savage basically).

The smaller population in PF meant that after the initial few weeks of savage release, you were effectively a static - a lot like people say ultimates are now. The amount of people became so thin that you were genuinely just progging with the same people in PF always, so cross-world PF was a welcome variety.

A11s was a giant wall by the end of the tier.

My experience is that it was a wall when progging (variously due to poor healing, not being able to do limit cut, OTs not being able to handle add, etc). But reclear parties were actually pretty smooth for me.

Anyway - OP is right, combat will not regain the things it has lost which makes everything very reliant on the success of encounters - if encounters end up being boring, well...

Agreed and I don't necessarily think everything should be how it was (obviously I gave the SMN and healer examples which were frustrating to deal with), but we really do need the basic trinity to function ie. warrior not just being able to heal without healers. I say that as a tank main! It's not easy as a tank main to say "take stuff away", but when you just literally don't even need the rest of your party in a dungeon it's ridiculous. Auto attacks used to be far more threatening on bosses without the constant boss casting and self heals as well.

whatever HW hatred some people have now wasn’t prominent enough at the time to justify sharing their own feedback about it back then.

Ok, so I agree the job balance thing wasn't an issue in PF, but people definitely shared their feedback at the time about numerous issues like Accuracy, RNG parry mitigation, cross-class actions needing to be role actions, useless actions, physical mit, which SE listened to completely since it all changed in SB.

[Aravell]

I love how jobs that were not meta, but were absolutely viable and that were still used in harder content always gets described as being "completely useless" by accounts with join dates years after 2015-2017.

I don't really think forum join dates mean very much since it's tied to when you register for the forums, not when you started the game.

That said, the "rose-tinted glasses this, rose-tinted glasses that" argument is annoying. Have you people who use that argument ever considered that you have on the opposite of rose-tinted glasses? You hated HW so much that you amplified the flaws in your mind with your biases, so "NIN/DRG/BRD/MCH were great because of their synergy" filtered through your negative biases becomes "NIN/DRG/BRD/MCH was absolute meta and every other job was worthless and nobody wanted them".

[ty_taurus]

I don't really think forum join dates mean very much since it's tied to when you register for the forums, not when you started the game.

That said, the "rose-tinted glasses this, rose-tinted glasses that" argument is annoying. Have you people who use that argument ever considered that you have on the opposite of rose-tinted glasses? You hated HW so much that you amplified the flaws in your mind with your biases, so "NIN/DRG/BRD/MCH were great because of their synergy" filtered through your negative biases becomes "NIN/DRG/BRD/MCH was absolute meta and every other job was worthless and nobody wanted them".

That’s true, it’s just an odd trend I’ve noticed where the ones who talk about how “terrible” the balance of HW or SB were seem to only be people with later join dates. Clearly, whatever HW hatred some people have now wasn’t prominent enough at the time to justify sharing their own feedback about it back then.

[Valence]

That’s true, it’s just an odd trend I’ve noticed where the ones who talk about how “terrible” the balance of HW or SB were seem to only be people with later join dates. Clearly, whatever HW hatred some people have now wasn’t prominent enough at the time to justify sharing their own feedback about it back then.

I first decided to register on those forum in 2018 to ask SE to do something about MCH latency problems during late SB, but I've been playing since 2015.

It's because players who were bad back then could not utilise the jobs to their fullest potential, playing a meta NIN at 30% output was a massive detriment compared to playing an off-meta MNK at 70% output.

What the dev team is doing now isn't going to kill off any meta, it's going to end up solidifying the meta even harder. Because it's so easy to pick up and get good at any job in the current game, people can easily just lock in meta comps and always get players. It's going to become even harder to join parties as an off-meta job as they continue making jobs easier to hit peak performance on.

In my opinion it's more a problem of a damage meta slowly shifting toward an effort based meta, since most damage discrepancies are being softened (which isn't a bad thing mind you) while they bring more and more braindead jobs like SMN and DNC that account for more than half of the raiding playerbase of their respective subroles.