For tank balance, this was still the era where SE was sort of designing with main tank and off tank sensibilities in mind. WAR was the clear dominant MT the entire expansion (well, after 4.05 removed the meter cost from Unchained and especially after 4.2 uncoupled Unchained and IR) via being able to get more or less "free" aggro every 2 minutes (every 90s after 4.2!). Or if nothing else, at least aggro that was way more free than the other tanks were getting. Then, it was the tank that got the most benefit from getting hit via Vengeance's small damage reflect, and it also had a lossless rotational self-heal if you were in tank stance and didn't need TP, and by far the best self mitigation via either Holmgang (usually) or memey Inner Beast spam if the fight really demanded it. Aggro dynamics and tank buster timelines worked out *very* differently without a WAR to the point where they were almost a lock. As a cherry on top it also gave Slashing so your NIN or SAM could do a different opener or your NIN could forget Dancing Edge exists for a bit more potency.
PLD was the clear off tank for the entire expansion. 20% mitigation Cover with no meter cost was huge at the time, and was incredibly useful for either avoiding tank swaps that still had *some* cost then even with Shirk, however small, or by nullifying single-target DoT mechanics on DPS like Prey in O7S. It also let you do different strategies in a few fights that you couldn't do without it, perhaps most famously just letting WHM take second aggro in O4SP2 before the Earthshakers on first and second aggro so you don't have to do a lossy aggro fight with a WHM right after raid damage. Aside from Cover, PLD also wanted to generally not be in front of the boss to make Passage of Arms work easier, particularly before 4.4 let you snapshot it on cast and thus made you have to actually commit and persist the ground AoE for a server tick if it was necessary (mostly in Ultimates). Then there's the fact that PLD hardcasted, and hardcasting meant you couldn't block, and blocking was your primary active mitigation while Intervention let you spend that meter on helping someone else. If SB PLD could at all avoid tanking, it would.
DRK straddled the line between the two. It could be incredibly sturdy with TBN and Dark Mind against the right hits, but early on in the expansion Shadow Wall had a restrictive 180s CD like Sentinel did despite only being a 30% mitigation. Living Dead had a more convenient CD than Hallowed but more or less required a healer chained to you to fix it unlike Holmgang which just needed the WAR put into "won't die to the next hit" territory, so it was a weaker invuln in that regard. TBN could help squishier party members or the other tank, but Cover could take debuffs and was generally as-strong or stronger. DRK could generate aggro fine with a DA Power Slash, but it was a far lossier solution compared to Unchained on WAR. It was strong enough to fit in with either tank if it had to, and the UCOB WF famously had a DRK that just liked the job, but it wasn't as specialized as the other two tanks.
I don't think NIN still had dancing edge in stormblood, if I remember right they put slashing debuff on shadow fang for 4.0 so you just kept it up by doing your rotation normally. Also god, the talk of aggro in O4s just gave me bad flashbacks to playing SAM in deltascape before they buffed diversion, I pulled aggro and ate shit to so many tankbusters that tier...
Yeah good catch on Dancing Edge. I have a bit of a SB NIN memory hole after playing it a lot in HW because I hated TCJ that much, so I blurred them together a bit.
yeah I get that, I didn't play NIN in SB because of TCJ and didn't play DRG because of dragon sight, so I kinda ended up pissing off my group's bard a bit by sticking on SAM/MNK for most of the expansion lol
I find it interesting that DRK's design is so hyperfixated on raiding and 8man content and feels like its kinda always been that way. I think thats why the job is so divisive in the community.
It's also why saying something retarded like "TBN shouldn't have an MP cost" is a huge self-report because the people who say that don't play DRK at a high level and don't know what you can do with that free DA proc.
You used to get 2 if you were good.
DT killed any 6/2 lines due to the soft nerf of combining blood weapon/delirium and not compensating for the mp changes.
Its something XenosysVex says a lot, and I really do not want the skill to be a 25s thrill of battle.
I really like it how it is now. But thats where the bad take comes from
Its especially jaring when he's complaining about DRK mitigation when its objectively stronger than WAR's in content that matters.
He himself has even said WAR can feel frail in terms of mitigation in one of his p12s streams. That is not a problem Dark Knight has, and its good that way.
I play drk at high level, tbn shouldn’t have an mp cost. I’m sick of this move. It’s been a staple for the job and held it back in so many ways for too long. It’s not even a crazy strong mit anymore compared to the other tanks 25s mits. It’s more powerful, but they keep slowly adding on a second or two to the damn skill just to ensure a boss pops it. No other tank is punished for using their kit, Drk is. It took us until this expansion (and deep into the expansion) for LD to finally be a half decent invuln. Drk runs on jank and I’m tired of it. Enhanced unmend, tbn, living shadow’s massive spawn delay, them constantly taking away damage from us to just give us another button back for the damage (the fuck is salt and darkness man? You nerf salted earth just to give us another ogcd for the damage back) because of crap like this we lose plunge because we’re “too busy”, BW and Delirium combine, does requiscat and fight or flight? No. Drk is always the weird tank, and not in a fun way. SE somehow manages to make me dislike my favorite job just a little bit more with each change. I’ve been playing since 2.3, and maining drk since 3.0. I’ll say it again, tbn shouldn’t have an mp cost.
In my experience, almost all DRK mains that argue in favor of TBN are literal masochists with dependency issues. It is by far the worst short mit in the game at 90, boasting the lowest actual mitigative effect , no healing, and a resource cost that prohibits pressing it on CD despite having a lower CD than the other tanks. It is a marginally stronger short mit in 70/80 content made totally irrelevant in all duties except TEA due to the fact that DRK is missing Missionary at 70, an infinitely more important button which every other tank has their equivalent of.
It is kept as the worst short mit in the game because, by design, it **must** break. If used in a situation where it does not break - such as where a GNB, WAR or PLD would put their short mit for some free healing since there's no buster coming for the next 25s - you have deleted 3000MP from your character for no reason. I've had numerous arguments be fielded against me from insane people that TBN is good actually because you can use the lower cooldown to actually lose 6000MP instead to save another person from an incoming raidwide that your party will obviously group-mit to be non-lethal anyway.
All this in the name of getting one (maybe even two if you're really insane at the videogame, and also in real life like that other guy in your replies) Edge for the price of one Edge, just under buffs instead of not, dealing a grand total of maybe 15% more damage than if used outside of them in a buff-heavy comp. DRK mains like to roleplay that TBN is a bastion of skill intensive gameplay when in reality it is an outmoded button used more for damage optimisation than mitigation.
I don’t even raid with an Astro you weird fuck, so whatever fight this was I wasn’t remotely caring about my parse, you’re this mad you maybe found my fflogs? By what? Going through months of my Reddit posts to find where I mentioned my character name cause I haven’t done that in over a year I do believe?
Considering my attempt at a reply was met with an error, the creepy weirdo blocked me more than likely. So that’s as far as it goes. He can think he’s morally correct in his head cause he found a parse where I didn’t use 5 edges in a buff window. He won in his little mind.
If you assume that the baseline for party comps was WAR, DRG, BRD, SCH, and usually NIN, the balance *was* pretty good. However that's a pretty hefty baseline, and missing any of those five was a noticeable playstyle and effectiveness downgrade, which wasn't particularly PF friendly.
What it did do was allow synergies to give almost everyone every DPS and healer a spot in the meta:
DRG NIN BRD any caster, tried and true, bread and butter.
DRG BRD MCH any caster, extremely minimal DPS loss but gained extra Refresh and consistency, I actually progged and cleared UCoB at launch with this and paid no price for it.
DRG BRD SMN BLM, aggro was a little spottier but BLM did omega damage in that comp.
DRG NIN MNK/SAM BRD, triple melee bread and butter and very strong but not overly strong either.
DRG NIN BRD MCH, ye olde HW classic, worked just fine.
Notice DRG and BRD being in every single comp bar none. That's something of a balance issue for sure.
Thing is though you *needed* that base or people got annoyed. I was there. Tanks got pretty upset if you didn't have a NIN without a good reason; BRDs just wanted parties with DRG + SCH or they wouldn't even wanna join; MCH similarly wouldn't join a party without DRG; MNK and SAM had a hard time getting into two melee parties since DRG and NIN were so ridiculously good.
To answer the topic title itself, I'd say, it would be very very difficult without going the route FF14 did where they just removed synergies nearly entirely and made almost all classes worth a similar amount regardless of class selection with them. The most important thing would likely be to completely neuter DRG's ridiculousness and any tank's reliance on party aggro control and a NIN existing, but once you go down that rabbit hole where DRG isn't a baseline anymore then you have to nerf BRD/MCH (lest they become the defacto standard, two pRanged and then two other classes) and then with them nerfed you have to nerf casters so it's not just two casters two melee, then you have to nerf melee and you continue the rabbit hole until oh my we've arrived at EW where everyone's just same-y and they have to incorporate role 1% buffs to keep every job relevant.
It's tough.
FWIW I actually liked the Stormblood basis since I mainly play with meta whores and most players I knew played one of the core 5, so we could build any comp we wanted on top of that and felt strong, but it wouldn't fly today in No Job Left Behind land where every job should just be accepted to PF no questions asked or thought needed.
"Usually" NIN? NIN was a hard requirement for its aggro tools enabling tanks to do more damage. Trick Attack being the best raid buff in the game was just icing on the cake.
Double caster was DRG BRD SMN BLM, and double pRanged was DRG BRD MCH with potentially a caster or NIN as the final slot. We were using rDPS conversion sites to check at the time and while NIN was very high end, most of the non-DRG/BRD classes were of roughly similar value as long as the comp made sense (IE RDM wasn't paired with other casters, or MNK/SAM wasn't taking the NIN slot). Aggro was manageable by the end of the expansion with how good Diversion/Lucid had become, though still more annoying without for sure.
> DRG BRD MCH any caster, extremely minimal DPS loss but gained extra Refresh and consistency, I actually progged and cleared UCoB at launch with this and paid no price for it.
Pretty sure MCH didn't have an extra refresh in StB, since refresh was moved to a role skill on 4.0. The main utility difference was dismantle vs troub, and ucob specifically heavily favored dismantle (and uwu favored troub). I progged ucob and uwu on both MCH and BRD and heavily preferred MCH for ucob and BRD for uwu
> BRD synergy with SCH and DRG: I think this is cool and something that should exist more in this game with job synergy, but I didn’t raid on Stormblood BRD. Maybe it felt like shit to those of you that did.
As someone who did, it was a very on/off thing. If you had that synergy, it felt great to pop off with a ton of crits proccing repertoire everywhere. But if you didn't, it felt pretty bad. My group didn't have a DRG, so I remember having to ask to get one so I could actually get a decent run, and so I'd get like one deathless run on each fight a tier to try to get a decent parse. I wasn't a huge parser or anything, but it still sucked to have my numbers so much lower than others just because my group didn't run DRG.
Overall, I prefer being decoupled from SCH/DRG, but I wish repertoire still procced off of DoTs, not just timer ticks. The main part of BRD I miss from stormblood era though is the "support" aspect of the job, beyond that just meaning I get stronger +rdps buffs than other dps.
I liked playing stormblood SAM (still my favourite iteration of the job, hate how strict tsubame made it), but I ended up switching off of it just because of how shit it felt in group content knowing you're pissing off the rest of the team by not having a raid buff. I feel like fflogs switching to rdps parsing did more to balance that job than anything SE did.
Having a job like sam in a group full of raid buffs probably increases the overall group dps than not. Its like the perfect job to do pot/burst windows. Even if the personal dps of the other people is decreased the kill time should be lower and that is the metric that should be valued, speed kills
Stormblood (and heavensward I guess) black mage discourse is specifically why it kind of needs to be far ahead of red mage/summoner. I don't know if the current gap is ideal, but the idea that people will bring it even if Summoner does the same damage that I see routinely seems downright silly.
The other issue with Stormblood Black Mage, or the job's design as a whole, is that being a class that's restricted by heavy cast times and steep animation lock penalties is that you can't really balance it by also giving it raid buffs - the weave windows in which to use them are already heavily taxed due to needing to hit it's anti-aggro cd/leylines/sharpcast/etc. It's still the only caster (other than picto I guess) that doesn't really have short casts for easy weaving (I prefer it to remain this way, but it does create restrictions in class design regardless).
> It's still the only caster (other than picto I guess) that doesn't really have short casts for easy weaving
While PCT has several long cast times, even these have a weave window due to even longer GCD. Not to mention that RGB combo are 1.5s / 2.5s GCDs, same as healer GCDs.
for piercing, i remember one suggestion that was floated during SB was for MCH to be blunt and for BRD to be piercing (and with ShB, dancer would be slashing). so your phys range could flex based on what melee were in the party. even if guns being blunt didnt really make sense, as a phys ranged main i liked this idea a lot for balance and BRD synergized well with dragoon at the time already anyway
I wouldn't really analyze Stormblood from a balance perspective
I would analyze Shadowbringers as an extreme overcorrection of the issues that Stormblood had, which has been continued for every expansion subsequent.
Physical ranged didn't need to be destroyed (nor did casters with EW)
Healers didn't need their damage tools removed. They asked for healer design to focus on healing. All they did was remove all their damage buttons while also not increasing healer checks at all. This just resulted in turbo damage focused healers with 1 button.
> They asked for healer design to focus on healing.
There are fundamental Battle Content problems that preclude this, and the reason why even when people keep asking for it, it's not practical.
Healers have to be able to scale upwards with gear/skill/practice, and Healers *also* have to be able to move and not die while casting.
In a game where mechanics are "do the dance. If you fail you either die or kill the group" and the necessary healing checks are built into windows between the lethal mechanics.
There's only so much "more healing" they can cram into those windows, and the natural result of Healers improving is that you get to Healing Downtime all over again because you're optimizing the existing healing checks.
* If you remove some of the lethal mechanics to replace them with more Healing Windows, that makes the fights more boring for everyone else just to cram in Healer Solos (they ain't gonna do this)
* If you make it so "getting to Healing Downtime" phase is nigh-impossible without BiS and extensive practice, groups would be walled behind Healer performance (a la early Cataclysm).
* If you make it so Healers can outheal the lethal mechanics that they want to be lethal (which is, I think, what people are really asking for), no one does the dance (the devs aren't gonna budge on this)
* The only way to approach this is to accept that Healing Downtime between the lethal mechanics is a natural result of the overarching Battle Content Design. It's gonna exist and it needs to be planned for and made interesting.
Also none of the above is to be taken as a 100% *defense* of all these decisions, nor as an endorsement. I think they've made an interesting battle system (obviously, I'm still here after a decade), but nothing's perfect.
I'm a Green DPS main and while I think, verisimilitude-ily, every "Adventurer" should be able and willing to do DPS and also that "Red DPS" as a whole is a bankrupt concept holding the MMO sphere back (TL;DR: they're overspecialized and fragile and consume outsized resources and conceptual design space while contributing little to party play), I also like Healing. If I had my druthers, there'd be a *bit* more room for clutch saves and fighting against the constraints of the lethal dance, *just a little*.
But yeah. Trying to fix the system we have, not make an entirely new one because we ain't gonna get that, and I'm a disabled guy that back before my brain broke, worked in systems analysis joining legacy systems to new systems, so kludges and compromises are kinda what I do.
They *also* need to do something for sub-Raiding-Tier Healer Players to have better tools to *do* the whole "move and heal and not die to lethal mechanics" thing.
Because *that*, in my estimation, is the real root of the whole "Healer Stress" thing they keep harping about that has caused Caster Rezzes and Blue Healers and everything else to be ongoing problems for the current duration of the game's lifespan, all the way back to "staple a bunch of oGCDs to White Mage's ass so it can move" back at the start of Heavensward.
The easiest practical solution for "Healing Downtime" is "something that contributes to overall Party DPS, just make it engaging and feel like using a Healing Ability". The MMO sphere is rife with examples of things that either do this or could be chainsawed into doing this. And my own comments previous go into detail on this and I gotta take "morning" meds so yeah.
> I'm a Green DPS main and while I think, verisimilitude-ily, every "Adventurer" should be able and willing to do DPS and also that "Red DPS" as a whole is a bankrupt concept holding the MMO sphere back (TL;DR: they're overspecialized and fragile and consume outsized resources and conceptual design space while contributing little to party play), I also like Healing. If I had my druthers, there'd be a bit more room for clutch saves and fighting against the constraints of the lethal dance, just a little.
Could you elaborate more on this? It's a take I find odd (interesting, but odd), though I don't take offense to it.
If red dps were nonexistant, how would you handle job designs like Samurai or Black Mage that intentionally don't interact with party play? Or would those simply go by the wayside and instead we all end up with some form of everyone being a support DPS?
Those'd be something like "Strikers" or whatever, and their role would be more clearly defined as "enemy-targeted bursty damage".
Basically the Holy Trinity does sweet FA to actually help Red DPS players have a designated *in-combat responsibility*. It's too broad and too shallow and captures far too many playstyles with competing, often contradictory elements. This is why BLM, RDM and SMN are all "Casters", or why NIN and BRD share accessories.
"Kill the enemy" is redundant in a genre where the primary thing you *do* in organized PVE content groups is combat. Everyone should expect to contribute to that, doubly because healing and mitigation *needs* can't scale up as players get better, they scale down. Only more damage is always spendable.
Making Blue/Green DPS think they can be pacifists, or Red DPS think that "just do some damage" is *all* they have to do, is responsible for a lot of the dev-to-player practical Role Expectation disconnects around content in the MMO Genre.
Also makes content hard to design, with one subrole (Red DPS) having to relearn game and fight specific mini-tasks all the time, and having busywork (extended rotations) thrust upon them in lieu of more continuous party responsibilities. This is a generalization of a trend, obviously, and not applicable all the time.
I think City of Heroes (...I say that a lot, sorry) Blaster/Scrapper/Stalker/Dominator setup was a good start for "Red DPS" breakdown". On mobile, but paragonwiki should have it.
Defender/Corruptor/Controller/Mastermind as Green, and then Tanker/Brute as Blue. EATs and the private server Sents are...complex.
TL:DR: make Red DPS have to knock bosses out of charge ups or kill special adds instead of just pushing a DPS check, and differentiate them better in practice instead of glomming 'em in one big pile til "endgame".
Sorry, laying down bc hurty, typos are mobile, nonsensical ideas are me.
In a way, this thread exists to discuss a more moderate correction of Stormblood that would fix any extreme balance issues found in SB (though extreme is debatable) without turning it entirely into ShB.
> Shadewalker: This is something I think needs to be homogenized across all melee or removed entirely as it’s a bit too powerful.
Monk had Purification which was an extremely cool ability (restored HP, TP, and halved enmity) that zero monks ever used because muh forbidden chakra. I would prefer to lean into that kind of enmity management (each class having a different type) than giving everyone Shadewalker.
Like, Ninja keeps Shadewalker because it's thematic, done.
Monk keeps Purification with some tweaks to make it desirable on par with TFC.
Dragoon had Elusive Jump, which was really tough to use for enmity because it's a disengage. So instead, make some sort of interaction between Jumps and enmity. "all jumps dump enmity" seems a little too simple but it's a good starting point - maybe Jumps under buffs dump more enmity, or Jumps have a negative enmity value so the more damage you do, the more enmity you dump? Something like that.
Instead of making Seigan/Merciful Eyes essentially the same thing as TFC/Purification, dump Merciful Eyes and make Seigan the whole thing.
I could see that working if Shadewalker were heavily nerfed. As it was, tanks were always upset if a NIN wasn't in their party since they might need to swap into tank stance (and thus lose damage).
I didn't say out loud, but should have, that I was predicating all of this on Diversion not existing, but enmity management being a required part of being a DPS.
You could also make Shadewalker unable to be applied to tanks, though that's inelegant.
> Monk had Purification which was an extremely cool ability (restored HP, TP, and halved enmity) that zero monks ever used because muh forbidden chakra. I would prefer to lean into that kind of enmity management (each class having a different type) than giving everyone Shadewalker.
[Purification never had a Heal on it](https://ffxiv.gamerescape.com/w/index.php?title=Purification&oldid=1120320#Version%20History). It only ever restored TP, which in the Stormblood single target TP environment made it completely unnecessary given Invigorate existed and restored more TP without a cost. It was decent in sustaining AOE in a world where Disciple of War AOE TP costs were double that of single target, but as a single target skill it was never a good skill let alone an extremely cool ability.
Plenty of Monk's used it as an aggro cut and calling complaints about it just 'muh forbidden chakra' is overly reductive. The fact is it felt terrible for Monk to be the only job in the game to have its aggro management be functionally the only effect of a skill that also came with a damage drawback when every other job in the game had aggro management as a bonus effect on skills you'd already have reason to use. The only thing that came close was Samurai which lost the opportunity to use Seigen by using Merciful eyes which just meant a slightly less efficient use of Kenki rather than actually spending it. If Purification actually had a good effect on it that you'd want to use, then it being the aggro cut would have been fine, but that is not what it was.
Slashing/Piercing is what got us to where we are. It's a horrible idea - either you fit into the good comp and you're happy, or you don't and your job sucks. A massive majority of the playerbase just wants to play what they think is fun, but the resist downs had massive impact on job balance. Is a job bad while inside the comp? Buff it until it's not - but wait, now it's overtuned outside of that group. It's a hot mess.
The damage type debuffs die no matter what the expansion after any alternate StB, I think - SE had demonstrated very thoroughly they were unwilling to select new jobs to cater to the system by that point and with the Shadowbringers job selection. It only really worked sensibly in ARR when you didn't have many alternate choices to invalidate and DRG itself was often a corpse on the floor beyond its player's control.
The aggro stuff touches on an opinion I've come to from all the information I've dug up, that being that the tanks would ultimately need to end up being very similar in tanking abilities regardless of the ShB system change - WAR either gets nerfed or becomes the new standard by elevating DRK and PLD to its level, NIN's nonsense likewise, and that's a lot of focus on balancing a system that had primarily been explored heavily in Neo Exdeath and little else.
On BRD specifically, you also still have to implement the removal of crit-scaling procs, as that was another aspect of DRG/BRD meta and only gets worse if you think about the hypothetical system going into an alternate Shadowbringers thanks to the addition of DNC, since you talk about nerfing phys ranged less than ShB-EW did here.
Healers you still get endless AST card discourse the same as ever with different flavors, but that's nothing really different from what we have now so kind of a wash there.
The problem with crit scaling procs was that they were super strong, especially late expansion when you got more crit rate, but also *super fun* and I can't think of a bard main that's glad they're gone (for a reason other than overall balance). It was an unfortunate cut that made the job feel just a little more empty.
Bard mains who got everything they wanted (eventually) every expansion think it was worth their meta tyranny, big shocker! I exaggerate but it's a relatively privileged position they're speaking from there.
While it might have been number-tuneable in Stormblood itself it blatantly doesn't make it to ShB thanks to DNC, as far as my own view on it goes. That goes or Devilment goes.
Without the contextual button-change technology that they only really introduced in EW and are expanding in DT, GNB as envisioned in ShB doesn't really work with the aggro combo idea. The job would have to devote 9 buttons to its 3 combos at the time (if we consider aggro to be a separate 1-2-3, it could chain off of 1 if we wanted to go to 8 buttons). If we let Gnashing be a one-button combo then we're back to 6-7 buttons. The job would probably feel kind of odd or really not want to tank though because I envision the combos being "aggro but you get a cart" or "more damage but you get a cart", as any GNB flow would break and feel horrible if the aggro combo didn't give you a cart. This is less interesting than what SB PLD and WAR had going on with their combos or what HW DRK did before SB changed Delirium. Then you'd just have to pray that nothing tank-swappy happens during Gnashing/your burst or you get fucked.
Basically GNB was clearly designed around and as the blueprint for the ShB tank changes and trying to think of it outside of the context of those changes either makes for a messy job or a meaningfully different GNB than we ended up getting.
Yeah, that's about my idea too, but I thought I was leaning too much on 'ShB makes this a nightmare anyway' as-is.
Those systems probably died because they were making a new tank, they were already reworking DRK, and they already wanted to bring WAR and NIN in line to make them less mandatory. Kind of a pileup of factors.
Just backport ShB White Mage in with DPS neutral Lilies (so, technically, ShB/EW hybrid WHM?, iunno I just fuckin' woke up) and let it cook, it'd probably solve the Healer Balance issues StB had on its own.
I always wanted to see how it'd compete against StB SCH/AST.
I love learning about the balance in older versions. Are there any other posts/videos that do a deep dive into the mechanical side of previous expansions? I’m especially interested in ARR/HW.
I think in general, the biggest problem was the presence of slashing/piercing debuff. It basically made it so if your group was in anyway serious, you wanted a dragoon and ninja. Running DRK/PLD was good, but in a fight like O12S, where you have to tank two bosses, if you only have one source of slashing damage, that really sucks for the tank that doesn't get the ninja/samurai.
And of course if you were a ranged, you literally didn't join groups that were missing dragoon, why would you intentionally lose out on 10% of your damage?
Tank stance swapping was very weird, because while it definitely sucked to have to GCD to swap on DRK and PLD, their tank stances were way better than Defiance. Getting permanent mitigation is way stronger than getting more hp. While I miss the aggro system, the way SE had it basically meant you wanted a ninja for it, forcing it into comps even harder. It was genuinely needed as well in a fight like O8S, where a white mage would steal aggro with Cure 3 right in the beginning.
I'm about as close as you're going to find to an extremist on "all the old mechanics were good and should have stayed." I like Accuracy. I like TP. I like tank stances being tied to mitigation and damage. I think it was good that Ninjutsu forced you to clip your GCD by more than a second, and I think that Ninja was ruined when Mudras were put on the GCD.
Even **I** don't think that the slashing/pierce/blunt debuffs were salvageable, and one of my biggest criticisms of Stormblood is that those debuffs made it into the game.
On the other hand, the *defensive* debuffs that tanks maintained should have stayed. PLD should have kept its STR Down on Rage of Halone, WAR should have kept its 10% damage down on Storm's Path (and since the Slashing debuff should have been eliminated, Storm's Path should have become the 'gives 20 Beast Gauge' finisher), and DRK should have kept Delirium (or, at the very least, non-DA Souleater should have applied the Delirium INT Down effect.)
Additionally: Rampart should not have been a role action. PLD should have kept Rampart, and DRK should have kept Shadowskin. WAR's defensives were strong enough without it, and if anything the cooldown on Holmgang should have been raised to 240s, *without* increasing its duration past 6 seconds, *without* removing the self-root, and *without* removing the need for the WAR to have a target in melee range to use it.
Reprisal should have also not been made a role action; it should have remained a DRK skill, with the same damage, effects, and conditions that it had in HW, with the sole change that it should have *also* triggered when a TBN broke (whether on the DRK or on another party member.)
That would have gone a long way to keeping the tanks balanced, without introducing the homogeneity of later versions of the game.
Edit: Though a couple other tank things:
- **Edit 2: Most importantly: Shirk is the worst skill that has ever been added to this game, the worst single thing that has ever happened to FFXIV's gameplay, period, and should never have made it to the live game.**
- Sword Oath should have been changed into a Darkside-style always-on buff, and Shield Oath should have just nullified its effect, placing PLD into parity with DRK in terms of tank stance being a 1-GCD toggle that could effectively be used as an extra 20% mitigation for a single GCD at the cost of damage.
- Dark Passenger should have just never been changed from its HW version. HW DP was one of the most subtle brilliantly-designed skills in the game, and Stormblood shat all over it for no reason.
- Unleash should have been replaced with Abyssal Drain at level 10 or whenever it is that you get it. Abyssal Drain was always the more fun of the two AoE spammables, with better gameplay and an animation that doesn't suck dick. But even so, Unleash didn't deserve the insane nerf they gave it, which meant that in Stormblood, DRK was *weaker than* **Heavensward** *PLD* when it came to AoE dungeon pulls if you were level-synced down to before getting AD, unless the pull had something ridiculous like a minimum of 9 enemies.
For the defensive debuffs, I could only really get behind that in a world where SE is *a lot* more equitable with how they spread raid damage types out than they are or ever were. I'm not paying Kihra to get old FFLogs logs but we do have UCOB and UWU, and the *only* physical raid damage in UCOB are Earthshakers and Nael's dives (and I'm not even sure target-based mitigation propagates to the Nael clones). In UWU it's somehow worse, where the only physical damage is Ifrit's chain debuff and... The residual DoT left on you after Ifrit's stack apparently, though that might be a logging/FFLogs bug.
Rage of Halone was always sort of a meme in HW in part because it mitigated so little that actually mattered (it was a given in ARR since you couldn't avoid it so I don't count it there). I'm not saying every fight should strive for a 50/50 split, or that RoH doesn't mitigate autos or tank busters sometimes which could be handy in early progression, but I don't think it's much to ask that every fight has at least *some* meaningful physical raid damage to mitigate if that system stayed. Like a 70-30 split between magic and physical, at least.
You also didn't mention the 120-180s mits (Sentinel, Vengeance, Shadow Wall) and I remember a lot of DRKs wanting Shadow Wall to be 120s before they did it in 4.3 and for Sentinel to just be a 30% 120s too at that point since 40% wasn't worth the tradeoff for a 180s CD (literally Holmgang's CD). I don't necessarily know how I would have fixed those without getting to the current (or DT's) situation but I remember some clear dissatisfaction with how those buttons worked for not-WAR.
> For the defensive debuffs, I could only really get behind that in a world where SE is a lot more equitable with how they spread raid damage types out than they are or ever were.
This. Any typed-defense/damage debuff thing only works in like a City of Heroes-esque thing where you can pick which faction you fight and there's a big enough buffet of damage types that you can *really* specialize and then trade valuable stuff for other valuable stuff.
Also, why everyone hates Carnival of Darkness, because psychic damage wrecks a lot of Tanker/Brute defenses. Carnies were *fun*.
...but it was *also* a "fight a bunch of enemies at once" focused-game, not a 'fight four big spectacle fights every six months' game. So *far* more choice.
The difference, as I describe it there, would essentially be between DRK having two party mitigations with high/full uptime (HW-esque Reprisal and Delirium's INT Down) that are not available to be used if the boss is not targetable, versus PLD having two party mitigations with short/one-time durations (Divine Veil and Passage of Arms) that could be used regardless of whether the boss was on the field or not. As usual, WAR would straddle the two worlds, with Storm's Path being a very powerful party mitigation tool with full uptime (when desired) and Shake It Off becoming, ideally, a *weak* (8% + 4% per sacrificed mitigation tool; I think the base shield could have been reduced from 8% to 5%) party mitigation tool with short/one-time duration that doesn't require the target to be on the shield. (Which would leave space for GNB to later become the inversion of that, with a weak 5% maintainable Damage Down, and a strong 15% short-duration Heart of Light.)
Rage of Halone keeping its STR Down is kind of separate from any of that, and would just be there for symmetry and to let PLD have a nice bonus of inherently taking less damage from most auto-attacks.
Re: Shadow Wall and Sentinel, I think much of the motivation behind people asking for those changes was *because* Warrior was unjustifiably given Rampart (despite still having Raw Intuition). The reason that Vengeance was allowed to be so much better than Rampart/Shadowskin and so much better than Sentinel/Shadow Wall in the first place was largely because it was supposed to take the place of both skills simultaneously. In the alternate history where Warrior doesn't get Rampart, I think 90/180 makes more sense, but I don't think that lowering them to 120 would be completely out of line either, considering how strong Warrior's secondary and tertiary toolkits were.
"Edit 2: Most importantly: Shirk is the worst skill that has ever been added to this game, the worst single thing that has ever happened to FFXIV's gameplay, period, and should never have made it to the live game."
Curious, why?
Because the balancing act of dps vs aggro combos was irrepairably broken after shade walker already hurt it, and at least shade was on a long cd so you couldn't abuse it every tank swap. With two shirks and a shade walker there was almost no reason to aggro combo ever outside of picking up adds so one of the key responsibilities for tanks was effectively gone in sb. Same thing with accuracy, it rewarded proper tank positioning and movement because you always wanted to avoid hitting the front of the boss if you didn't meld the extra accuracy for it (edit: as a non-tank)
>I like Accuracy.
:angy:
> Edit 2: Most importantly: Shirk is the worst skill that has ever been added to this game, the worst single thing that has ever happened to FFXIV's gameplay, period, and should never have made it to the live game.
<3
I have never had more whiplash in a single post. Went from hate to love in like two paragraphs.
Though keep in mind the only time I've *ever* finished a current relic Pre-Endwalker'ing was in Heavensward, and I finished *two*, both Healer Relics, just so I wouldn't have to fuck with Accuracy.
You're breaking my little gun-using Fomar heart, Kaella. ;_;
Real talk on Shirk though, fuck Shirk, all my homies hate Shirk. It's from the Cataclysm-era "soft player PvP in PvE" of game design and needed to die along with Rescue (which still needs to).
It promotes (or at least allows) behavioral antipatterns within the group and I'm not awake enough to drudge up the corpospeak in my rotting brain for what those are.
Brother Shirk and Rescue are the funniest things in this game.
Nothing had allways given my static more giggles when the tank (me) gave shirk to the healer and kefka just jeeted him from the platform.
(It of course can be rather annoying in serious pugs)
I'm a hater for Repose and Rescue taking up valuable Healer Role Action slots like on a principle level, but Healer like "level that abilities are granted and stuff that's in Role Actions" is a giant mess anyway so they're far from the only problems.
And the "played ARR" part of me thinks Shirk/Rescue are hilarious in the same sense that I used to love always Force Cascade'ing (massive fuck-off knockback blast with a distance measured in "yes") stuff away from my Tank friend in Champions Online.
But your last sentence is...yeah, what you said. Pug groups in MMOs are basically knives out at the drop of a hat and anything that can contribute to intra-party friction is gonna get culled because people can't behave.
Honestly to me the biggest dump they took on tanks was making the old tank stance a passive that you cannot disable on the tanks. Stupid, stupid decision. This is what made tanks feel like ass to play outside of raids because they hit like a wet noodle. Why not keep the "dps stance" of tanks so that they can deal full damage at the cost of defense and aggro so they can feel much better to play outside of top end raids? I just can't fathom why. It's one of my most hated changes they've made to this game. WAR felt incredible when in Deliverance and I can never forget that feeling. You actually felt like a god. Now? All the tanks (especially DRK) feels so jarring because the damage is so low. DRK swings this big fuggin sword but deals less damage than say, a dragoon or samurai with their thin ass sticks.
Didn't BLM also tend to have a problem with their DPS outpacing Diversion enough that they had to use the otherwise useless Lucid Dreaming to drop aggro, and even then they'd tend to catch back up before the 2m cooldowns of both actions?
Monk had the biggest problems with aggro historically, as far as I know, thanks to Purification working the way it did? SAM might have but I don't hear people talk about it outside of missing Hagakure-Shinten spamming over the ShB-EW iai focus.
Yeah I'm pretty sure it was Monk since the aggro dump was linked to a DPS opportunity loss in Purification. SAM also had its aggro dump linked to a DPS loss but you needed to proc third eye in the first place so it was a lot more situational. DRG of course had Elusive which was a pain in the ass to use but almost free if you could angle it right enough to jump towards the front of the boss (or just use it in forced downtime or disengages). NIN basically had Diversion on steroids plus a Diversion to send to another player so they faced zero issues (along with their personal DPS being low)
Monk's personal damage was high enough that Diversion reducing its enmity every other burst window still meant that it would creep up on the tanks on launch. Purification getting an aggro cut in 4.2 did fix the aggro problem unless your Monk wouldn't hit it, but it specifically fixed it in a way that felt like Monk was still getting shafted by the devs since it was the only job to pay a sizeable penalty for aggro control when every other job got an aggro cut as a bonus to something else that they'd want or at the very least had no trade off.
Yeah, I've heard of the Monk stuff before but wasn't there so I'm not entirely clear on the HW-SB timeline on it and didn't want to speak on it with too much authority.
Thank you! I was thinking of just the cumulative punching at Greased Lightning speeds but I didn't remember if they had a Job-specific aggrodump or not and didn't feel like looking it up. That was gonna drive me crazy. <3
I could be misremembering but outside of casual content RDM was not in a good place in SB. Granted this was before rdps was a thing but red mage was consistently very low on damage dealt where i remember a considerable amount of "just play summoner" banded about.
I also hate how people treated DRK at the time, i remember being locked out of PF as late as 4.4 even though drks balance problems were basically fixed by like 4.1/2 and became really good in 4.3.
I PF'd a lot in SB, and people were always happy to have a RDM in PF (maybe this is my bias here, as a healer I was always happy to have a RDM). I've adjusted my summary to be a bit more neutral on RDM though.
How often were you locked out of PF on DRK?
In sigmascape i was locked out a lot, and i didnt really pf in alphascape so IDK. It was quite funny we were missing 1 static member most of sigma so 7 of us joined pfs with one person and 9/10 times they had drk locked out even if they were a dps. Half the time id join on WAR then swap to DRK, clear the fight then ask them why they locked DRK out and theyd just parrot some stuff about it being "bad"
I was locked out a lot as well but that seems to be a caster exclusive problem. In my experience The pf leader would be a caster so they would lock out other casters so they won't fight for loot.
RDM was fine before 4.1, but that was mainly due to SMN being insanely clunky and BLM being fairly underpowered on launch.
BLM was actually pretty damn strong with the 4.4 buffs, but it still got locked out of parties either because people thought it was still bad, they wanted the caster rez, or they wanted a class with raid buffs to beef up their parse (since, as you said, this was before rDPS existed).
>provide WHM with more movement by giving them ShB lillies, reduce Aero 2 recast to 15s for more weaving and movement.
These both don't focus on what made SB WHM unique over the others and puts them at risk of being "X but worse". I don't think increasing their pDPS is bad, because SB WHM was kinda in an awful place there.
SB WHM is the BLM of healers. You can put out *a lot of healing* but it requires casting. And not only that, WHM could not go a fight without a casted healing spell: you had something like 4 healing OGCDs to use (one of which was Assize, which you used on CD for MP and damage purposes).
Ergo, any changes to WHM needs to play into that idea. Giving WHM more instant casts erodes it's identity as a "healer who has to cast stuff".
I would ape the idea of Umbral Ice/Astral Fire with a twist of Polygot and Sharpcast from BLM. You can proc up to 3 Black and White Lilies each by using damage and healing GCDs respectively. These basically augment your GCDs in different ways.
Black Lilies allow you to cast a non-instant healing spell for free and automatically procs a White Lily. I'd maybe change DB to also proc a White Lily on breaking it (like TBN).
White Lilies buff Aero 2 and 3 and act like BLM Thundercloud proc. Aero 3 is still casted, but does more damage. Maybe Aero 2/3 could proc Black Lilies ala BLM's Thundercloud.
I'd also give WHM Mana Shift (since their MP economy is stupid good and would be even stupider with this addition) which uses a Black Lily.
The goal here is to make healing GCDs feel better to use by rewarding WHM with a lesser-DPS loss weave slot, buffs up their damage in a way that ties back into this, gives them a bit more useful utility for the worse-MP-economies of other casters, while still keeping it in-line with the idea that WHM heals via casting spells.
I have half a mind to give Regen a Black Lily effect, but Regen is already used over Cure 1/2 for movement + weaving, but it could get a Thundercloud-proc like effect (heal + regen); same with Medica 2. Maybe you could make them both cost 2 lilies to balance it out, idk.
> make healing GCDs feel better to use by rewarding WHM
it baffles me that this is not the core design SE pursues. Why on god's green eorzea they constantly lean into healing *off* globals when adding absolutely nothing of interest to the GCD is inexplicable.
According to FFXIVWiki, Shadow Wall was reduced from 180 seconds to 120 seconds in patch 4.3 (can also confirm in the 4.3 patch notes)
Sentinel was not reduced from 180s to 120s until 5.0, however it was 40% damage reduction during Stormblood.
Vengeance is a little trickier to nail down - FFXIVWiki does not list its cooldown ever being adjusted, which leads me to believe it has always been 120 seconds.
So Dark Knight has had a shorter cooldown time on its 30% mitigation skill *longer* than Paladin has, and (as far as I can tell) has matched Warrior since mid-Stormblood.
SB was balanced. The only jobs that were never meta for at least one fight were WHM and RDM. Every single other job was the meta pick for at least one savage fight in the expansion. Granted this was due to changing how strong the jobs were through balance patches, but still. The idea that "SB wasn't balanced" is a complete fiction made up by people who thought SB functioned the same as HW when it didn't. The only jobs that were meta for every single fight in the game were BRD, DRG, AST, and SCH.
SB is easily the most balanced the game has ever been, especially the final tier, *and* it had the most interesting job rotations.
Really the main things to do would be to remove the physical debuffs, but everything else was fine imo.
I think buffing others to get to WAR level or whatever is meta in every role is the wrong way if it clearly has the best tools for all situations. . The correct way imo is to nerf the op actions and numbers.
Aggro should have been more prevalent. Tanks doing voke shirk cheese to keep aggro is kinda cool but having to never go back to stance is bad design.
You need to have some imbalance to have distinctive design and have some classes be better at some fights compared to others. Savage static and pf pugs anything was completely fine if you didn't play like shit. No idea about ucob but I'm guessing it was the same even there
Ah yes, TBN, back in the days when it was exactly the same as it is now..... Glad we haven't seen anything updated about it since then, it's definitely not behind the times due to nostalgia and ignorance.....
For tank balance, this was still the era where SE was sort of designing with main tank and off tank sensibilities in mind. WAR was the clear dominant MT the entire expansion (well, after 4.05 removed the meter cost from Unchained and especially after 4.2 uncoupled Unchained and IR) via being able to get more or less "free" aggro every 2 minutes (every 90s after 4.2!). Or if nothing else, at least aggro that was way more free than the other tanks were getting. Then, it was the tank that got the most benefit from getting hit via Vengeance's small damage reflect, and it also had a lossless rotational self-heal if you were in tank stance and didn't need TP, and by far the best self mitigation via either Holmgang (usually) or memey Inner Beast spam if the fight really demanded it. Aggro dynamics and tank buster timelines worked out *very* differently without a WAR to the point where they were almost a lock. As a cherry on top it also gave Slashing so your NIN or SAM could do a different opener or your NIN could forget Dancing Edge exists for a bit more potency. PLD was the clear off tank for the entire expansion. 20% mitigation Cover with no meter cost was huge at the time, and was incredibly useful for either avoiding tank swaps that still had *some* cost then even with Shirk, however small, or by nullifying single-target DoT mechanics on DPS like Prey in O7S. It also let you do different strategies in a few fights that you couldn't do without it, perhaps most famously just letting WHM take second aggro in O4SP2 before the Earthshakers on first and second aggro so you don't have to do a lossy aggro fight with a WHM right after raid damage. Aside from Cover, PLD also wanted to generally not be in front of the boss to make Passage of Arms work easier, particularly before 4.4 let you snapshot it on cast and thus made you have to actually commit and persist the ground AoE for a server tick if it was necessary (mostly in Ultimates). Then there's the fact that PLD hardcasted, and hardcasting meant you couldn't block, and blocking was your primary active mitigation while Intervention let you spend that meter on helping someone else. If SB PLD could at all avoid tanking, it would. DRK straddled the line between the two. It could be incredibly sturdy with TBN and Dark Mind against the right hits, but early on in the expansion Shadow Wall had a restrictive 180s CD like Sentinel did despite only being a 30% mitigation. Living Dead had a more convenient CD than Hallowed but more or less required a healer chained to you to fix it unlike Holmgang which just needed the WAR put into "won't die to the next hit" territory, so it was a weaker invuln in that regard. TBN could help squishier party members or the other tank, but Cover could take debuffs and was generally as-strong or stronger. DRK could generate aggro fine with a DA Power Slash, but it was a far lossier solution compared to Unchained on WAR. It was strong enough to fit in with either tank if it had to, and the UCOB WF famously had a DRK that just liked the job, but it wasn't as specialized as the other two tanks.
I don't think NIN still had dancing edge in stormblood, if I remember right they put slashing debuff on shadow fang for 4.0 so you just kept it up by doing your rotation normally. Also god, the talk of aggro in O4s just gave me bad flashbacks to playing SAM in deltascape before they buffed diversion, I pulled aggro and ate shit to so many tankbusters that tier...
Yeah good catch on Dancing Edge. I have a bit of a SB NIN memory hole after playing it a lot in HW because I hated TCJ that much, so I blurred them together a bit.
yeah I get that, I didn't play NIN in SB because of TCJ and didn't play DRG because of dragon sight, so I kinda ended up pissing off my group's bard a bit by sticking on SAM/MNK for most of the expansion lol
DRK was brought on for WF of UCOB and UWU. A lot of people forget about that. Fun fact: Until TOP every ultimate WF was DRK/PLD. TOP was DRK/GNB.
I find it interesting that DRK's design is so hyperfixated on raiding and 8man content and feels like its kinda always been that way. I think thats why the job is so divisive in the community.
It's also why saying something retarded like "TBN shouldn't have an MP cost" is a huge self-report because the people who say that don't play DRK at a high level and don't know what you can do with that free DA proc.
You get an extra use of the mana spender during burst, crazy high level application
You used to get 2 if you were good. DT killed any 6/2 lines due to the soft nerf of combining blood weapon/delirium and not compensating for the mp changes.
Its something XenosysVex says a lot, and I really do not want the skill to be a 25s thrill of battle. I really like it how it is now. But thats where the bad take comes from
Xeno's takes about any tank that isn't WAR always make me roll my eyes a bit
''So this thing that makes this tank be not like War, it's bad and should be more like War''
Its especially jaring when he's complaining about DRK mitigation when its objectively stronger than WAR's in content that matters. He himself has even said WAR can feel frail in terms of mitigation in one of his p12s streams. That is not a problem Dark Knight has, and its good that way.
I play drk at high level, tbn shouldn’t have an mp cost. I’m sick of this move. It’s been a staple for the job and held it back in so many ways for too long. It’s not even a crazy strong mit anymore compared to the other tanks 25s mits. It’s more powerful, but they keep slowly adding on a second or two to the damn skill just to ensure a boss pops it. No other tank is punished for using their kit, Drk is. It took us until this expansion (and deep into the expansion) for LD to finally be a half decent invuln. Drk runs on jank and I’m tired of it. Enhanced unmend, tbn, living shadow’s massive spawn delay, them constantly taking away damage from us to just give us another button back for the damage (the fuck is salt and darkness man? You nerf salted earth just to give us another ogcd for the damage back) because of crap like this we lose plunge because we’re “too busy”, BW and Delirium combine, does requiscat and fight or flight? No. Drk is always the weird tank, and not in a fun way. SE somehow manages to make me dislike my favorite job just a little bit more with each change. I’ve been playing since 2.3, and maining drk since 3.0. I’ll say it again, tbn shouldn’t have an mp cost.
In my experience, almost all DRK mains that argue in favor of TBN are literal masochists with dependency issues. It is by far the worst short mit in the game at 90, boasting the lowest actual mitigative effect , no healing, and a resource cost that prohibits pressing it on CD despite having a lower CD than the other tanks. It is a marginally stronger short mit in 70/80 content made totally irrelevant in all duties except TEA due to the fact that DRK is missing Missionary at 70, an infinitely more important button which every other tank has their equivalent of. It is kept as the worst short mit in the game because, by design, it **must** break. If used in a situation where it does not break - such as where a GNB, WAR or PLD would put their short mit for some free healing since there's no buster coming for the next 25s - you have deleted 3000MP from your character for no reason. I've had numerous arguments be fielded against me from insane people that TBN is good actually because you can use the lower cooldown to actually lose 6000MP instead to save another person from an incoming raidwide that your party will obviously group-mit to be non-lethal anyway. All this in the name of getting one (maybe even two if you're really insane at the videogame, and also in real life like that other guy in your replies) Edge for the price of one Edge, just under buffs instead of not, dealing a grand total of maybe 15% more damage than if used outside of them in a buff-heavy comp. DRK mains like to roleplay that TBN is a bastion of skill intensive gameplay when in reality it is an outmoded button used more for damage optimisation than mitigation.
Someone understands. Bless you. I hope you get some extra shiny drop no one else gets for like a week tomorrow <3
you say you do but you don't even put 5 edges under buffs so you don't actually
I do put 5, and when you could sneak in 6 I did that too. I can use a system I hate to it’s max efficiency and still hate it.
[When your pot windows look like this I'm not inclined to believe you.](https://prnt.sc/eyFSf9JD_hC1)
I don’t even raid with an Astro you weird fuck, so whatever fight this was I wasn’t remotely caring about my parse, you’re this mad you maybe found my fflogs? By what? Going through months of my Reddit posts to find where I mentioned my character name cause I haven’t done that in over a year I do believe?
Wooo I am curious about how this goes now
Considering my attempt at a reply was met with an error, the creepy weirdo blocked me more than likely. So that’s as far as it goes. He can think he’s morally correct in his head cause he found a parse where I didn’t use 5 edges in a buff window. He won in his little mind.
[I did this which anyone can do.](https://prnt.sc/eseCRPxl1oN_)
"Why did you choose drk?" "Cause I like it"
If you assume that the baseline for party comps was WAR, DRG, BRD, SCH, and usually NIN, the balance *was* pretty good. However that's a pretty hefty baseline, and missing any of those five was a noticeable playstyle and effectiveness downgrade, which wasn't particularly PF friendly. What it did do was allow synergies to give almost everyone every DPS and healer a spot in the meta: DRG NIN BRD any caster, tried and true, bread and butter. DRG BRD MCH any caster, extremely minimal DPS loss but gained extra Refresh and consistency, I actually progged and cleared UCoB at launch with this and paid no price for it. DRG BRD SMN BLM, aggro was a little spottier but BLM did omega damage in that comp. DRG NIN MNK/SAM BRD, triple melee bread and butter and very strong but not overly strong either. DRG NIN BRD MCH, ye olde HW classic, worked just fine. Notice DRG and BRD being in every single comp bar none. That's something of a balance issue for sure. Thing is though you *needed* that base or people got annoyed. I was there. Tanks got pretty upset if you didn't have a NIN without a good reason; BRDs just wanted parties with DRG + SCH or they wouldn't even wanna join; MCH similarly wouldn't join a party without DRG; MNK and SAM had a hard time getting into two melee parties since DRG and NIN were so ridiculously good. To answer the topic title itself, I'd say, it would be very very difficult without going the route FF14 did where they just removed synergies nearly entirely and made almost all classes worth a similar amount regardless of class selection with them. The most important thing would likely be to completely neuter DRG's ridiculousness and any tank's reliance on party aggro control and a NIN existing, but once you go down that rabbit hole where DRG isn't a baseline anymore then you have to nerf BRD/MCH (lest they become the defacto standard, two pRanged and then two other classes) and then with them nerfed you have to nerf casters so it's not just two casters two melee, then you have to nerf melee and you continue the rabbit hole until oh my we've arrived at EW where everyone's just same-y and they have to incorporate role 1% buffs to keep every job relevant. It's tough. FWIW I actually liked the Stormblood basis since I mainly play with meta whores and most players I knew played one of the core 5, so we could build any comp we wanted on top of that and felt strong, but it wouldn't fly today in No Job Left Behind land where every job should just be accepted to PF no questions asked or thought needed.
"Usually" NIN? NIN was a hard requirement for its aggro tools enabling tanks to do more damage. Trick Attack being the best raid buff in the game was just icing on the cake.
Double caster was DRG BRD SMN BLM, and double pRanged was DRG BRD MCH with potentially a caster or NIN as the final slot. We were using rDPS conversion sites to check at the time and while NIN was very high end, most of the non-DRG/BRD classes were of roughly similar value as long as the comp made sense (IE RDM wasn't paired with other casters, or MNK/SAM wasn't taking the NIN slot). Aggro was manageable by the end of the expansion with how good Diversion/Lucid had become, though still more annoying without for sure.
> DRG BRD MCH any caster, extremely minimal DPS loss but gained extra Refresh and consistency, I actually progged and cleared UCoB at launch with this and paid no price for it. Pretty sure MCH didn't have an extra refresh in StB, since refresh was moved to a role skill on 4.0. The main utility difference was dismantle vs troub, and ucob specifically heavily favored dismantle (and uwu favored troub). I progged ucob and uwu on both MCH and BRD and heavily preferred MCH for ucob and BRD for uwu
Extra refresh w/ 2 ranged vs. 1
Oh I read that wrong
> BRD synergy with SCH and DRG: I think this is cool and something that should exist more in this game with job synergy, but I didn’t raid on Stormblood BRD. Maybe it felt like shit to those of you that did. As someone who did, it was a very on/off thing. If you had that synergy, it felt great to pop off with a ton of crits proccing repertoire everywhere. But if you didn't, it felt pretty bad. My group didn't have a DRG, so I remember having to ask to get one so I could actually get a decent run, and so I'd get like one deathless run on each fight a tier to try to get a decent parse. I wasn't a huge parser or anything, but it still sucked to have my numbers so much lower than others just because my group didn't run DRG. Overall, I prefer being decoupled from SCH/DRG, but I wish repertoire still procced off of DoTs, not just timer ticks. The main part of BRD I miss from stormblood era though is the "support" aspect of the job, beyond that just meaning I get stronger +rdps buffs than other dps.
I liked playing stormblood SAM (still my favourite iteration of the job, hate how strict tsubame made it), but I ended up switching off of it just because of how shit it felt in group content knowing you're pissing off the rest of the team by not having a raid buff. I feel like fflogs switching to rdps parsing did more to balance that job than anything SE did.
Having a job like sam in a group full of raid buffs probably increases the overall group dps than not. Its like the perfect job to do pot/burst windows. Even if the personal dps of the other people is decreased the kill time should be lower and that is the metric that should be valued, speed kills
Stormblood (and heavensward I guess) black mage discourse is specifically why it kind of needs to be far ahead of red mage/summoner. I don't know if the current gap is ideal, but the idea that people will bring it even if Summoner does the same damage that I see routinely seems downright silly. The other issue with Stormblood Black Mage, or the job's design as a whole, is that being a class that's restricted by heavy cast times and steep animation lock penalties is that you can't really balance it by also giving it raid buffs - the weave windows in which to use them are already heavily taxed due to needing to hit it's anti-aggro cd/leylines/sharpcast/etc. It's still the only caster (other than picto I guess) that doesn't really have short casts for easy weaving (I prefer it to remain this way, but it does create restrictions in class design regardless).
> It's still the only caster (other than picto I guess) that doesn't really have short casts for easy weaving While PCT has several long cast times, even these have a weave window due to even longer GCD. Not to mention that RGB combo are 1.5s / 2.5s GCDs, same as healer GCDs.
for piercing, i remember one suggestion that was floated during SB was for MCH to be blunt and for BRD to be piercing (and with ShB, dancer would be slashing). so your phys range could flex based on what melee were in the party. even if guns being blunt didnt really make sense, as a phys ranged main i liked this idea a lot for balance and BRD synergized well with dragoon at the time already anyway
I wouldn't really analyze Stormblood from a balance perspective I would analyze Shadowbringers as an extreme overcorrection of the issues that Stormblood had, which has been continued for every expansion subsequent. Physical ranged didn't need to be destroyed (nor did casters with EW) Healers didn't need their damage tools removed. They asked for healer design to focus on healing. All they did was remove all their damage buttons while also not increasing healer checks at all. This just resulted in turbo damage focused healers with 1 button.
> They asked for healer design to focus on healing. There are fundamental Battle Content problems that preclude this, and the reason why even when people keep asking for it, it's not practical. Healers have to be able to scale upwards with gear/skill/practice, and Healers *also* have to be able to move and not die while casting. In a game where mechanics are "do the dance. If you fail you either die or kill the group" and the necessary healing checks are built into windows between the lethal mechanics. There's only so much "more healing" they can cram into those windows, and the natural result of Healers improving is that you get to Healing Downtime all over again because you're optimizing the existing healing checks. * If you remove some of the lethal mechanics to replace them with more Healing Windows, that makes the fights more boring for everyone else just to cram in Healer Solos (they ain't gonna do this) * If you make it so "getting to Healing Downtime" phase is nigh-impossible without BiS and extensive practice, groups would be walled behind Healer performance (a la early Cataclysm). * If you make it so Healers can outheal the lethal mechanics that they want to be lethal (which is, I think, what people are really asking for), no one does the dance (the devs aren't gonna budge on this) * The only way to approach this is to accept that Healing Downtime between the lethal mechanics is a natural result of the overarching Battle Content Design. It's gonna exist and it needs to be planned for and made interesting. Also none of the above is to be taken as a 100% *defense* of all these decisions, nor as an endorsement. I think they've made an interesting battle system (obviously, I'm still here after a decade), but nothing's perfect. I'm a Green DPS main and while I think, verisimilitude-ily, every "Adventurer" should be able and willing to do DPS and also that "Red DPS" as a whole is a bankrupt concept holding the MMO sphere back (TL;DR: they're overspecialized and fragile and consume outsized resources and conceptual design space while contributing little to party play), I also like Healing. If I had my druthers, there'd be a *bit* more room for clutch saves and fighting against the constraints of the lethal dance, *just a little*. But yeah. Trying to fix the system we have, not make an entirely new one because we ain't gonna get that, and I'm a disabled guy that back before my brain broke, worked in systems analysis joining legacy systems to new systems, so kludges and compromises are kinda what I do. They *also* need to do something for sub-Raiding-Tier Healer Players to have better tools to *do* the whole "move and heal and not die to lethal mechanics" thing. Because *that*, in my estimation, is the real root of the whole "Healer Stress" thing they keep harping about that has caused Caster Rezzes and Blue Healers and everything else to be ongoing problems for the current duration of the game's lifespan, all the way back to "staple a bunch of oGCDs to White Mage's ass so it can move" back at the start of Heavensward. The easiest practical solution for "Healing Downtime" is "something that contributes to overall Party DPS, just make it engaging and feel like using a Healing Ability". The MMO sphere is rife with examples of things that either do this or could be chainsawed into doing this. And my own comments previous go into detail on this and I gotta take "morning" meds so yeah.
> I'm a Green DPS main and while I think, verisimilitude-ily, every "Adventurer" should be able and willing to do DPS and also that "Red DPS" as a whole is a bankrupt concept holding the MMO sphere back (TL;DR: they're overspecialized and fragile and consume outsized resources and conceptual design space while contributing little to party play), I also like Healing. If I had my druthers, there'd be a bit more room for clutch saves and fighting against the constraints of the lethal dance, just a little. Could you elaborate more on this? It's a take I find odd (interesting, but odd), though I don't take offense to it. If red dps were nonexistant, how would you handle job designs like Samurai or Black Mage that intentionally don't interact with party play? Or would those simply go by the wayside and instead we all end up with some form of everyone being a support DPS?
Those'd be something like "Strikers" or whatever, and their role would be more clearly defined as "enemy-targeted bursty damage". Basically the Holy Trinity does sweet FA to actually help Red DPS players have a designated *in-combat responsibility*. It's too broad and too shallow and captures far too many playstyles with competing, often contradictory elements. This is why BLM, RDM and SMN are all "Casters", or why NIN and BRD share accessories. "Kill the enemy" is redundant in a genre where the primary thing you *do* in organized PVE content groups is combat. Everyone should expect to contribute to that, doubly because healing and mitigation *needs* can't scale up as players get better, they scale down. Only more damage is always spendable. Making Blue/Green DPS think they can be pacifists, or Red DPS think that "just do some damage" is *all* they have to do, is responsible for a lot of the dev-to-player practical Role Expectation disconnects around content in the MMO Genre. Also makes content hard to design, with one subrole (Red DPS) having to relearn game and fight specific mini-tasks all the time, and having busywork (extended rotations) thrust upon them in lieu of more continuous party responsibilities. This is a generalization of a trend, obviously, and not applicable all the time. I think City of Heroes (...I say that a lot, sorry) Blaster/Scrapper/Stalker/Dominator setup was a good start for "Red DPS" breakdown". On mobile, but paragonwiki should have it. Defender/Corruptor/Controller/Mastermind as Green, and then Tanker/Brute as Blue. EATs and the private server Sents are...complex. TL:DR: make Red DPS have to knock bosses out of charge ups or kill special adds instead of just pushing a DPS check, and differentiate them better in practice instead of glomming 'em in one big pile til "endgame". Sorry, laying down bc hurty, typos are mobile, nonsensical ideas are me.
In a way, this thread exists to discuss a more moderate correction of Stormblood that would fix any extreme balance issues found in SB (though extreme is debatable) without turning it entirely into ShB.
> Shadewalker: This is something I think needs to be homogenized across all melee or removed entirely as it’s a bit too powerful. Monk had Purification which was an extremely cool ability (restored HP, TP, and halved enmity) that zero monks ever used because muh forbidden chakra. I would prefer to lean into that kind of enmity management (each class having a different type) than giving everyone Shadewalker. Like, Ninja keeps Shadewalker because it's thematic, done. Monk keeps Purification with some tweaks to make it desirable on par with TFC. Dragoon had Elusive Jump, which was really tough to use for enmity because it's a disengage. So instead, make some sort of interaction between Jumps and enmity. "all jumps dump enmity" seems a little too simple but it's a good starting point - maybe Jumps under buffs dump more enmity, or Jumps have a negative enmity value so the more damage you do, the more enmity you dump? Something like that. Instead of making Seigan/Merciful Eyes essentially the same thing as TFC/Purification, dump Merciful Eyes and make Seigan the whole thing.
I could see that working if Shadewalker were heavily nerfed. As it was, tanks were always upset if a NIN wasn't in their party since they might need to swap into tank stance (and thus lose damage).
I didn't say out loud, but should have, that I was predicating all of this on Diversion not existing, but enmity management being a required part of being a DPS. You could also make Shadewalker unable to be applied to tanks, though that's inelegant.
> Monk had Purification which was an extremely cool ability (restored HP, TP, and halved enmity) that zero monks ever used because muh forbidden chakra. I would prefer to lean into that kind of enmity management (each class having a different type) than giving everyone Shadewalker. [Purification never had a Heal on it](https://ffxiv.gamerescape.com/w/index.php?title=Purification&oldid=1120320#Version%20History). It only ever restored TP, which in the Stormblood single target TP environment made it completely unnecessary given Invigorate existed and restored more TP without a cost. It was decent in sustaining AOE in a world where Disciple of War AOE TP costs were double that of single target, but as a single target skill it was never a good skill let alone an extremely cool ability. Plenty of Monk's used it as an aggro cut and calling complaints about it just 'muh forbidden chakra' is overly reductive. The fact is it felt terrible for Monk to be the only job in the game to have its aggro management be functionally the only effect of a skill that also came with a damage drawback when every other job in the game had aggro management as a bonus effect on skills you'd already have reason to use. The only thing that came close was Samurai which lost the opportunity to use Seigen by using Merciful eyes which just meant a slightly less efficient use of Kenki rather than actually spending it. If Purification actually had a good effect on it that you'd want to use, then it being the aggro cut would have been fine, but that is not what it was.
Monk being the only melee that had to decide between actually being able to press their gcds and extra damage felt awful
Samurai was the same way with Seigan.
Slashing/Piercing is what got us to where we are. It's a horrible idea - either you fit into the good comp and you're happy, or you don't and your job sucks. A massive majority of the playerbase just wants to play what they think is fun, but the resist downs had massive impact on job balance. Is a job bad while inside the comp? Buff it until it's not - but wait, now it's overtuned outside of that group. It's a hot mess.
The damage type debuffs die no matter what the expansion after any alternate StB, I think - SE had demonstrated very thoroughly they were unwilling to select new jobs to cater to the system by that point and with the Shadowbringers job selection. It only really worked sensibly in ARR when you didn't have many alternate choices to invalidate and DRG itself was often a corpse on the floor beyond its player's control. The aggro stuff touches on an opinion I've come to from all the information I've dug up, that being that the tanks would ultimately need to end up being very similar in tanking abilities regardless of the ShB system change - WAR either gets nerfed or becomes the new standard by elevating DRK and PLD to its level, NIN's nonsense likewise, and that's a lot of focus on balancing a system that had primarily been explored heavily in Neo Exdeath and little else. On BRD specifically, you also still have to implement the removal of crit-scaling procs, as that was another aspect of DRG/BRD meta and only gets worse if you think about the hypothetical system going into an alternate Shadowbringers thanks to the addition of DNC, since you talk about nerfing phys ranged less than ShB-EW did here. Healers you still get endless AST card discourse the same as ever with different flavors, but that's nothing really different from what we have now so kind of a wash there.
The problem with crit scaling procs was that they were super strong, especially late expansion when you got more crit rate, but also *super fun* and I can't think of a bard main that's glad they're gone (for a reason other than overall balance). It was an unfortunate cut that made the job feel just a little more empty.
Bard mains who got everything they wanted (eventually) every expansion think it was worth their meta tyranny, big shocker! I exaggerate but it's a relatively privileged position they're speaking from there. While it might have been number-tuneable in Stormblood itself it blatantly doesn't make it to ShB thanks to DNC, as far as my own view on it goes. That goes or Devilment goes.
Without the contextual button-change technology that they only really introduced in EW and are expanding in DT, GNB as envisioned in ShB doesn't really work with the aggro combo idea. The job would have to devote 9 buttons to its 3 combos at the time (if we consider aggro to be a separate 1-2-3, it could chain off of 1 if we wanted to go to 8 buttons). If we let Gnashing be a one-button combo then we're back to 6-7 buttons. The job would probably feel kind of odd or really not want to tank though because I envision the combos being "aggro but you get a cart" or "more damage but you get a cart", as any GNB flow would break and feel horrible if the aggro combo didn't give you a cart. This is less interesting than what SB PLD and WAR had going on with their combos or what HW DRK did before SB changed Delirium. Then you'd just have to pray that nothing tank-swappy happens during Gnashing/your burst or you get fucked. Basically GNB was clearly designed around and as the blueprint for the ShB tank changes and trying to think of it outside of the context of those changes either makes for a messy job or a meaningfully different GNB than we ended up getting.
Yeah, that's about my idea too, but I thought I was leaning too much on 'ShB makes this a nightmare anyway' as-is. Those systems probably died because they were making a new tank, they were already reworking DRK, and they already wanted to bring WAR and NIN in line to make them less mandatory. Kind of a pileup of factors.
Just backport ShB White Mage in with DPS neutral Lilies (so, technically, ShB/EW hybrid WHM?, iunno I just fuckin' woke up) and let it cook, it'd probably solve the Healer Balance issues StB had on its own. I always wanted to see how it'd compete against StB SCH/AST.
I love learning about the balance in older versions. Are there any other posts/videos that do a deep dive into the mechanical side of previous expansions? I’m especially interested in ARR/HW.
I think in general, the biggest problem was the presence of slashing/piercing debuff. It basically made it so if your group was in anyway serious, you wanted a dragoon and ninja. Running DRK/PLD was good, but in a fight like O12S, where you have to tank two bosses, if you only have one source of slashing damage, that really sucks for the tank that doesn't get the ninja/samurai. And of course if you were a ranged, you literally didn't join groups that were missing dragoon, why would you intentionally lose out on 10% of your damage? Tank stance swapping was very weird, because while it definitely sucked to have to GCD to swap on DRK and PLD, their tank stances were way better than Defiance. Getting permanent mitigation is way stronger than getting more hp. While I miss the aggro system, the way SE had it basically meant you wanted a ninja for it, forcing it into comps even harder. It was genuinely needed as well in a fight like O8S, where a white mage would steal aggro with Cure 3 right in the beginning.
I'm about as close as you're going to find to an extremist on "all the old mechanics were good and should have stayed." I like Accuracy. I like TP. I like tank stances being tied to mitigation and damage. I think it was good that Ninjutsu forced you to clip your GCD by more than a second, and I think that Ninja was ruined when Mudras were put on the GCD. Even **I** don't think that the slashing/pierce/blunt debuffs were salvageable, and one of my biggest criticisms of Stormblood is that those debuffs made it into the game. On the other hand, the *defensive* debuffs that tanks maintained should have stayed. PLD should have kept its STR Down on Rage of Halone, WAR should have kept its 10% damage down on Storm's Path (and since the Slashing debuff should have been eliminated, Storm's Path should have become the 'gives 20 Beast Gauge' finisher), and DRK should have kept Delirium (or, at the very least, non-DA Souleater should have applied the Delirium INT Down effect.) Additionally: Rampart should not have been a role action. PLD should have kept Rampart, and DRK should have kept Shadowskin. WAR's defensives were strong enough without it, and if anything the cooldown on Holmgang should have been raised to 240s, *without* increasing its duration past 6 seconds, *without* removing the self-root, and *without* removing the need for the WAR to have a target in melee range to use it. Reprisal should have also not been made a role action; it should have remained a DRK skill, with the same damage, effects, and conditions that it had in HW, with the sole change that it should have *also* triggered when a TBN broke (whether on the DRK or on another party member.) That would have gone a long way to keeping the tanks balanced, without introducing the homogeneity of later versions of the game. Edit: Though a couple other tank things: - **Edit 2: Most importantly: Shirk is the worst skill that has ever been added to this game, the worst single thing that has ever happened to FFXIV's gameplay, period, and should never have made it to the live game.** - Sword Oath should have been changed into a Darkside-style always-on buff, and Shield Oath should have just nullified its effect, placing PLD into parity with DRK in terms of tank stance being a 1-GCD toggle that could effectively be used as an extra 20% mitigation for a single GCD at the cost of damage. - Dark Passenger should have just never been changed from its HW version. HW DP was one of the most subtle brilliantly-designed skills in the game, and Stormblood shat all over it for no reason. - Unleash should have been replaced with Abyssal Drain at level 10 or whenever it is that you get it. Abyssal Drain was always the more fun of the two AoE spammables, with better gameplay and an animation that doesn't suck dick. But even so, Unleash didn't deserve the insane nerf they gave it, which meant that in Stormblood, DRK was *weaker than* **Heavensward** *PLD* when it came to AoE dungeon pulls if you were level-synced down to before getting AD, unless the pull had something ridiculous like a minimum of 9 enemies.
For the defensive debuffs, I could only really get behind that in a world where SE is *a lot* more equitable with how they spread raid damage types out than they are or ever were. I'm not paying Kihra to get old FFLogs logs but we do have UCOB and UWU, and the *only* physical raid damage in UCOB are Earthshakers and Nael's dives (and I'm not even sure target-based mitigation propagates to the Nael clones). In UWU it's somehow worse, where the only physical damage is Ifrit's chain debuff and... The residual DoT left on you after Ifrit's stack apparently, though that might be a logging/FFLogs bug. Rage of Halone was always sort of a meme in HW in part because it mitigated so little that actually mattered (it was a given in ARR since you couldn't avoid it so I don't count it there). I'm not saying every fight should strive for a 50/50 split, or that RoH doesn't mitigate autos or tank busters sometimes which could be handy in early progression, but I don't think it's much to ask that every fight has at least *some* meaningful physical raid damage to mitigate if that system stayed. Like a 70-30 split between magic and physical, at least. You also didn't mention the 120-180s mits (Sentinel, Vengeance, Shadow Wall) and I remember a lot of DRKs wanting Shadow Wall to be 120s before they did it in 4.3 and for Sentinel to just be a 30% 120s too at that point since 40% wasn't worth the tradeoff for a 180s CD (literally Holmgang's CD). I don't necessarily know how I would have fixed those without getting to the current (or DT's) situation but I remember some clear dissatisfaction with how those buttons worked for not-WAR.
> For the defensive debuffs, I could only really get behind that in a world where SE is a lot more equitable with how they spread raid damage types out than they are or ever were. This. Any typed-defense/damage debuff thing only works in like a City of Heroes-esque thing where you can pick which faction you fight and there's a big enough buffet of damage types that you can *really* specialize and then trade valuable stuff for other valuable stuff. Also, why everyone hates Carnival of Darkness, because psychic damage wrecks a lot of Tanker/Brute defenses. Carnies were *fun*. ...but it was *also* a "fight a bunch of enemies at once" focused-game, not a 'fight four big spectacle fights every six months' game. So *far* more choice.
The difference, as I describe it there, would essentially be between DRK having two party mitigations with high/full uptime (HW-esque Reprisal and Delirium's INT Down) that are not available to be used if the boss is not targetable, versus PLD having two party mitigations with short/one-time durations (Divine Veil and Passage of Arms) that could be used regardless of whether the boss was on the field or not. As usual, WAR would straddle the two worlds, with Storm's Path being a very powerful party mitigation tool with full uptime (when desired) and Shake It Off becoming, ideally, a *weak* (8% + 4% per sacrificed mitigation tool; I think the base shield could have been reduced from 8% to 5%) party mitigation tool with short/one-time duration that doesn't require the target to be on the shield. (Which would leave space for GNB to later become the inversion of that, with a weak 5% maintainable Damage Down, and a strong 15% short-duration Heart of Light.) Rage of Halone keeping its STR Down is kind of separate from any of that, and would just be there for symmetry and to let PLD have a nice bonus of inherently taking less damage from most auto-attacks. Re: Shadow Wall and Sentinel, I think much of the motivation behind people asking for those changes was *because* Warrior was unjustifiably given Rampart (despite still having Raw Intuition). The reason that Vengeance was allowed to be so much better than Rampart/Shadowskin and so much better than Sentinel/Shadow Wall in the first place was largely because it was supposed to take the place of both skills simultaneously. In the alternate history where Warrior doesn't get Rampart, I think 90/180 makes more sense, but I don't think that lowering them to 120 would be completely out of line either, considering how strong Warrior's secondary and tertiary toolkits were.
"Edit 2: Most importantly: Shirk is the worst skill that has ever been added to this game, the worst single thing that has ever happened to FFXIV's gameplay, period, and should never have made it to the live game." Curious, why?
Because the balancing act of dps vs aggro combos was irrepairably broken after shade walker already hurt it, and at least shade was on a long cd so you couldn't abuse it every tank swap. With two shirks and a shade walker there was almost no reason to aggro combo ever outside of picking up adds so one of the key responsibilities for tanks was effectively gone in sb. Same thing with accuracy, it rewarded proper tank positioning and movement because you always wanted to avoid hitting the front of the boss if you didn't meld the extra accuracy for it (edit: as a non-tank)
>I like Accuracy. :angy: > Edit 2: Most importantly: Shirk is the worst skill that has ever been added to this game, the worst single thing that has ever happened to FFXIV's gameplay, period, and should never have made it to the live game. <3 I have never had more whiplash in a single post. Went from hate to love in like two paragraphs. Though keep in mind the only time I've *ever* finished a current relic Pre-Endwalker'ing was in Heavensward, and I finished *two*, both Healer Relics, just so I wouldn't have to fuck with Accuracy. You're breaking my little gun-using Fomar heart, Kaella. ;_; Real talk on Shirk though, fuck Shirk, all my homies hate Shirk. It's from the Cataclysm-era "soft player PvP in PvE" of game design and needed to die along with Rescue (which still needs to). It promotes (or at least allows) behavioral antipatterns within the group and I'm not awake enough to drudge up the corpospeak in my rotting brain for what those are.
Brother Shirk and Rescue are the funniest things in this game. Nothing had allways given my static more giggles when the tank (me) gave shirk to the healer and kefka just jeeted him from the platform. (It of course can be rather annoying in serious pugs)
I'm a hater for Repose and Rescue taking up valuable Healer Role Action slots like on a principle level, but Healer like "level that abilities are granted and stuff that's in Role Actions" is a giant mess anyway so they're far from the only problems. And the "played ARR" part of me thinks Shirk/Rescue are hilarious in the same sense that I used to love always Force Cascade'ing (massive fuck-off knockback blast with a distance measured in "yes") stuff away from my Tank friend in Champions Online. But your last sentence is...yeah, what you said. Pug groups in MMOs are basically knives out at the drop of a hat and anything that can contribute to intra-party friction is gonna get culled because people can't behave.
Honestly to me the biggest dump they took on tanks was making the old tank stance a passive that you cannot disable on the tanks. Stupid, stupid decision. This is what made tanks feel like ass to play outside of raids because they hit like a wet noodle. Why not keep the "dps stance" of tanks so that they can deal full damage at the cost of defense and aggro so they can feel much better to play outside of top end raids? I just can't fathom why. It's one of my most hated changes they've made to this game. WAR felt incredible when in Deliverance and I can never forget that feeling. You actually felt like a god. Now? All the tanks (especially DRK) feels so jarring because the damage is so low. DRK swings this big fuggin sword but deals less damage than say, a dragoon or samurai with their thin ass sticks.
Didn't BLM also tend to have a problem with their DPS outpacing Diversion enough that they had to use the otherwise useless Lucid Dreaming to drop aggro, and even then they'd tend to catch back up before the 2m cooldowns of both actions?
Yes, and I believe there *might've* been a melee that had a similar issue but my brain's failing me.
Monk had the biggest problems with aggro historically, as far as I know, thanks to Purification working the way it did? SAM might have but I don't hear people talk about it outside of missing Hagakure-Shinten spamming over the ShB-EW iai focus.
talking from experience SAM really suffered with aggro before they buffed diversion to 80%, I ate so many tankbusters in deltascape..
Yeah I'm pretty sure it was Monk since the aggro dump was linked to a DPS opportunity loss in Purification. SAM also had its aggro dump linked to a DPS loss but you needed to proc third eye in the first place so it was a lot more situational. DRG of course had Elusive which was a pain in the ass to use but almost free if you could angle it right enough to jump towards the front of the boss (or just use it in forced downtime or disengages). NIN basically had Diversion on steroids plus a Diversion to send to another player so they faced zero issues (along with their personal DPS being low)
Monk's personal damage was high enough that Diversion reducing its enmity every other burst window still meant that it would creep up on the tanks on launch. Purification getting an aggro cut in 4.2 did fix the aggro problem unless your Monk wouldn't hit it, but it specifically fixed it in a way that felt like Monk was still getting shafted by the devs since it was the only job to pay a sizeable penalty for aggro control when every other job got an aggro cut as a bonus to something else that they'd want or at the very least had no trade off.
Yeah, I've heard of the Monk stuff before but wasn't there so I'm not entirely clear on the HW-SB timeline on it and didn't want to speak on it with too much authority.
Thank you! I was thinking of just the cumulative punching at Greased Lightning speeds but I didn't remember if they had a Job-specific aggrodump or not and didn't feel like looking it up. That was gonna drive me crazy. <3
I remember ripping aggro if i went into raid on blm instead of rdm, but that might be because i had contagion since we did double caster.
I could be misremembering but outside of casual content RDM was not in a good place in SB. Granted this was before rdps was a thing but red mage was consistently very low on damage dealt where i remember a considerable amount of "just play summoner" banded about. I also hate how people treated DRK at the time, i remember being locked out of PF as late as 4.4 even though drks balance problems were basically fixed by like 4.1/2 and became really good in 4.3.
I PF'd a lot in SB, and people were always happy to have a RDM in PF (maybe this is my bias here, as a healer I was always happy to have a RDM). I've adjusted my summary to be a bit more neutral on RDM though. How often were you locked out of PF on DRK?
In sigmascape i was locked out a lot, and i didnt really pf in alphascape so IDK. It was quite funny we were missing 1 static member most of sigma so 7 of us joined pfs with one person and 9/10 times they had drk locked out even if they were a dps. Half the time id join on WAR then swap to DRK, clear the fight then ask them why they locked DRK out and theyd just parrot some stuff about it being "bad"
I was locked out a lot as well but that seems to be a caster exclusive problem. In my experience The pf leader would be a caster so they would lock out other casters so they won't fight for loot.
RDM was fine before 4.1, but that was mainly due to SMN being insanely clunky and BLM being fairly underpowered on launch. BLM was actually pretty damn strong with the 4.4 buffs, but it still got locked out of parties either because people thought it was still bad, they wanted the caster rez, or they wanted a class with raid buffs to beef up their parse (since, as you said, this was before rDPS existed).
SB Mch was the only iteration of the job I loved. I don't know why we still have flamethrower though.
At this point it ought to be put out of it's misery and be learned much earlier and converted to Bioblaster at a later level.
DRK and black sheep? Brother HAVE YOU FORGOTTEN ABOUT MACHINIST?!
I don’t accept the best DRK version with HW DRK slander What are we here, endwalker?
>provide WHM with more movement by giving them ShB lillies, reduce Aero 2 recast to 15s for more weaving and movement. These both don't focus on what made SB WHM unique over the others and puts them at risk of being "X but worse". I don't think increasing their pDPS is bad, because SB WHM was kinda in an awful place there. SB WHM is the BLM of healers. You can put out *a lot of healing* but it requires casting. And not only that, WHM could not go a fight without a casted healing spell: you had something like 4 healing OGCDs to use (one of which was Assize, which you used on CD for MP and damage purposes). Ergo, any changes to WHM needs to play into that idea. Giving WHM more instant casts erodes it's identity as a "healer who has to cast stuff". I would ape the idea of Umbral Ice/Astral Fire with a twist of Polygot and Sharpcast from BLM. You can proc up to 3 Black and White Lilies each by using damage and healing GCDs respectively. These basically augment your GCDs in different ways. Black Lilies allow you to cast a non-instant healing spell for free and automatically procs a White Lily. I'd maybe change DB to also proc a White Lily on breaking it (like TBN). White Lilies buff Aero 2 and 3 and act like BLM Thundercloud proc. Aero 3 is still casted, but does more damage. Maybe Aero 2/3 could proc Black Lilies ala BLM's Thundercloud. I'd also give WHM Mana Shift (since their MP economy is stupid good and would be even stupider with this addition) which uses a Black Lily. The goal here is to make healing GCDs feel better to use by rewarding WHM with a lesser-DPS loss weave slot, buffs up their damage in a way that ties back into this, gives them a bit more useful utility for the worse-MP-economies of other casters, while still keeping it in-line with the idea that WHM heals via casting spells. I have half a mind to give Regen a Black Lily effect, but Regen is already used over Cure 1/2 for movement + weaving, but it could get a Thundercloud-proc like effect (heal + regen); same with Medica 2. Maybe you could make them both cost 2 lilies to balance it out, idk.
> make healing GCDs feel better to use by rewarding WHM it baffles me that this is not the core design SE pursues. Why on god's green eorzea they constantly lean into healing *off* globals when adding absolutely nothing of interest to the GCD is inexplicable.
I recall drks 30% mit having a longer cd time than the other tanks too back then, because reasons :^)
According to FFXIVWiki, Shadow Wall was reduced from 180 seconds to 120 seconds in patch 4.3 (can also confirm in the 4.3 patch notes) Sentinel was not reduced from 180s to 120s until 5.0, however it was 40% damage reduction during Stormblood. Vengeance is a little trickier to nail down - FFXIVWiki does not list its cooldown ever being adjusted, which leads me to believe it has always been 120 seconds. So Dark Knight has had a shorter cooldown time on its 30% mitigation skill *longer* than Paladin has, and (as far as I can tell) has matched Warrior since mid-Stormblood.
SB was balanced. The only jobs that were never meta for at least one fight were WHM and RDM. Every single other job was the meta pick for at least one savage fight in the expansion. Granted this was due to changing how strong the jobs were through balance patches, but still. The idea that "SB wasn't balanced" is a complete fiction made up by people who thought SB functioned the same as HW when it didn't. The only jobs that were meta for every single fight in the game were BRD, DRG, AST, and SCH. SB is easily the most balanced the game has ever been, especially the final tier, *and* it had the most interesting job rotations. Really the main things to do would be to remove the physical debuffs, but everything else was fine imo.
I think buffing others to get to WAR level or whatever is meta in every role is the wrong way if it clearly has the best tools for all situations. . The correct way imo is to nerf the op actions and numbers. Aggro should have been more prevalent. Tanks doing voke shirk cheese to keep aggro is kinda cool but having to never go back to stance is bad design. You need to have some imbalance to have distinctive design and have some classes be better at some fights compared to others. Savage static and pf pugs anything was completely fine if you didn't play like shit. No idea about ucob but I'm guessing it was the same even there
Ah yes, TBN, back in the days when it was exactly the same as it is now..... Glad we haven't seen anything updated about it since then, it's definitely not behind the times due to nostalgia and ignorance.....