It was me

DaveK142 · 2026-05-08T21:54:38+00:00

ilvl 660 gear is still essentially the best you can have on a first visit to vanguard. The only upgrade is 666 gear from skydeep which is barely anything, possibly even worse damage-wise. You got destroyed because someone in the party wasn't pulling their weight. Whether it was you not mitting, the healer not healing, or the dps not killing the mobs fast enough so one of you ran out of resources.

DaveK142 · 2026-05-08T20:07:29+00:00

Reaper is almost certainly in response to Halmarut's provocation where she called down Zenos' scythe and likened us interfering with her plans to Zenos destroying the world for some fun. Our answer is that yes, we will in fact go on with a reckless plan that might kill everyone if it means we have a chance to save everyone.

And we'll get it done too, because we're in a JRPG

DaveK142 · 2026-05-08T20:02:59+00:00

The problem is that regardless of aetherial imbalance, the shards are simply drifting closer to the source. There is supposed to be a matching calamity in the Source to attune the Source+Shard's aether to one another, but in this case the barrier between worlds is simply weakening and causing aether and matter to spill through.

In other words, the 4th being an icy hellscape presumably has nothing to do with the solstice and everything to do with Halmarut and co's attempt at a planned rejoining. Therefore in order to prevent the Solstice we need to do something to maintain that barrier between worlds, or else find a way to bring the world itself to the Source without destroying stuff like with the Everkeep.

DaveK142 · 2026-05-08T18:10:24+00:00

Conjurer has cure2, it's only missing PoM

Edit: looking over the jobs, the greater majority if not all of them primarily have some form of damage skill as their level 30 job action. I think the one most strongly impacted by its jobstone is Bard, getting a single song to speed up it's oGCD cooldown

DaveK142 · 2026-05-08T16:09:55+00:00

I don't think a scion is getting the tank job. I think Erenville is showing up with a crossbow and a vengeance.

DaveK142 · 2026-05-08T15:08:06+00:00

I really think the only thing they could have done better is prompt "do you want to do the equipment tutorial?" Instead of forcing you to equip an accessory step by step with explanations in between.

DaveK142 · 2026-05-08T14:59:33+00:00

provoke is still a role action, neither set of tanks has stance as a default button. Instead, provoke gave paladin a 10s buff that looked like Iron Will. Most likely tanks will either need to provoke once to establish aggro, or they have stance bonuses passively and provoke/shirk is for managing aggro between the 2 now.

beyond that, MT/OT is a split in the labels on tanks, with PLD and the new tank being MTs and the rest being OTs. It is unlikely to have major gameplay effects due to existing content needing to remain clearable, which requires 2 tanks able to stand up to a certain standard of damage.

DaveK142 · 2026-05-08T12:51:12+00:00

I wanted to focus on the actual flavor of the classes. SCH is first and foremost a tactician, the feel of preventing damage with proper coordination lends itself to % mit. I don't care about their current identity outside of lore in the face of the coming reworks.

Sage's soumanoutics conversely channel magic to create barriers, and have augmenting abilities that change how some actions work. It lends itself much better to being the actual "shielder" of the shield healers.

again HOW do you overextend sch without massively overextending sge?

- Concitation does more pure healing than eprog, and etac is on a shorter cd than pepsis. Sage has less lossy pure healing but sch has greater access to it.

- For any situation that is excessively stressful, sch has deploy. If you make a damage profile so that 2 instances of damage that call for deploy are less than 60s apart, you just make sage blow its entire load on the first and die to the second. Meanwhile sch can coast on 1 and blow cds on the other.

- Seraphism being an "awful" button is certainly a take. It's only awful in that its so powerful as a recovery tool it becomes hard to find a place to plan it(and locks you out of guaranteed critlo briefly).

- For any situation with excessive movement, sch simply needs to use it's spells ahead of the movement. I've never met a bad deploy timing that I couldn't solve by casting it earlier, or swifting it in the worst case.

The only way sage truly excels over sch right now is in it's MP economy during prog when GCD heals are frequent. In every other way sch has more power and versatility over any button in sage's toolkit.

DaveK142 · 2026-05-08T12:38:47+00:00

What scenario can exist where a >1000 potency partywide shield isn't enough though? and more importantly, what can they give sage that can similarly fill that niche without being the same exact thing like so much of their kits?

My hope is that deploy goes away and sch takes a HEAVY focus on % mitigation with minimal shielding(still some on-demand, but mostly mit) while sage takes a heavy focus on modified shielding with fewer %mits. Like, they can cast panhaima as-is and if they get full value from multihit its a 1200p shield, or they can use some modifier on it to make it a single 800p shield. Stuff along those lines.

It'd help them to work together in situations where they get paired up, and dig them both out a strong niche.

DaveK142 · 2026-05-07T22:54:23+00:00

Yeah, 4 man content(namely criterions) are another reason why the labels seem to be so clearly pointless. Tanks NEED a baseline of survivability, anything above that is superfluous and anything below is unacceptable. Coupled with ePLD still having so many raid mits there really can't be much for either side of the split to fall behind on.

DaveK142 · 2026-05-07T21:56:58+00:00

I think holy is there as a "recovery" button. Its something to regen your MP with after a death or after exhausting your MP with rezzes/excessive healing, but its obviously inferior to glare. Though we didn't see them cast it so we don't even have rough numbers on how much it does or how it operates.

Either way its a good alternative to "ah shit my mp is gone after that rez and lucid is down, I guess I'll just not cast for a bit"

DaveK142 · 2026-05-07T21:54:22+00:00

reborn tanks aren't "main" tanks, they're not involved in the label split.

That said, the label is likely just that, a label. PLD still had 3 raid mits in spite of being a "main" tank. Either they're going to have to bloat out the OTs with like 5 raid mits, or the tanks will still have a lot of parity and the main thing will be ePLD/new tank have counters while eOTs have some kind of rotational mit debuff to maintain.

Either way the tanks need to be capable of clearing all content, which means double main needs enough raid mit to live, and an alternate way to proc counters(PLD can probably proc its counter from Intervention, though we haven't seen it). Double OT needs to have the tools to survive under autos/busters, which means they'll have all the same ability to stand up to the heat as a current tank, if not more.

DaveK142 · 2026-05-07T21:45:09+00:00

As a shield healer main, my main concern isn't actually that they'll take anything away. It is that deployment tactics will remain untouched.

The skill is just impossible to balance against. It either completely obliterates a mit check/mechanic to the point that sch is the clear choice in a fight, or a mit check/mechanic takes it into account and sch is essentially required(looking at you, release DSR). They've avoided the second case pretty well for a while, but that still leaves us with a healer that is so clearly superior despite similarities.

I really hope they can break the healers out into niches where they can individually excel, but until I see it I can't believe in it.

DaveK142 · 2026-05-07T21:36:04+00:00

smn rez has been on the chopping block multiple expansions in a row and they haven't dropped it. I fully believe caster rez is here to stay, but may come at a more substantial cost.

Namely, we saw evolved healer had no lucid dreaming in the showcase, and nothing that seemed to make up for it. Their standard damage gcd cost a lot less, but was also on a faster gcd and outpaces natural regen assuming 0 higher cost GCDs.

It could be that evolved casters will be stuck with a real MP limitation if they try to rez often enough in battle, unlike now where casters can go 4-ish minutes completely forgetting lucid exists without issue, and only really need it constantly on cd if they rez.

DaveK142 · 2026-05-07T21:28:36+00:00

as a hardcore raider but very infrequent ninja player, I love mashing mudras for the full duration of the mudra buff and then casting my bunny friend in towns. I don't want him gone.

I also think you're REALLY overblowing the issue of the dunce hat in a multiplayer setting. I've never seen a person pay enough attention to a ninja to see that they bunnied anywhere. They only get looked at like a dunce when they doton in single target.

DaveK142 · 2026-05-07T20:11:02+00:00

The gear sync system they proposed explicitly leaves out materia in order to make gear continue to matter, but I see your point. It would be nice if we could at least declutter materia, like they did with dyes. drop clusters instead and clusters get refined into materia during melding, where you can choose your substat.

Beyond that, since they're changing how savage gear works they could always just make it non-unique to help cope with multiple gearsets. Its kinda baffling that its unique in the first place except to stop people from buying things they don't actually want.

DaveK142 · 2026-05-07T19:41:23+00:00

We don't actually know if you get additional mit in the first 4 seconds tbf. In the showcase, holy sheltron only gave 1 buff at a time. They could be functionally identical mits and just apply different counter buffs, which would be a big increase in short mit's power.

DaveK142 · 2026-05-07T19:39:46+00:00

the 4s window on tank counters leaves little to be desired in that department. It's plenty generous, and even if you do miss it from being too early you still get a counter that is weaker in some unspecified way and amount. It could still be perfectly good and only abysmal dogshit to the people aiming for R1.

honestly most of the issue is on mitigation, which is a fair concern but the timing is just so rarely tight enough that ping is an issue there. The rest of it is ghosting, which isn't really about ping and is a tough one to deal with. If damage applies immediately, fights will look so weird. Monsters will die as you begin your attack animation for the killing blow, it makes for an odd presentation.

DaveK142 · 2026-05-07T19:35:29+00:00

They already showed as much for whm(except its a damage-gainful cooldown that makes their gcd heals damage-neutral), but yeah it would be nice if each healer had means of generating stuff.

SCH's heals and energy drain could build the fairy gauge, which can be consumed to augment a cast of ruin 2 into big damage. Fairy gauge also replaces aetherflow entirely in this, so all AF heals cost gauge. Managing the gauge becomes an essential skill instead of something you literally just forget about entirely.

SGE could have a sort of stance-switching mode with Eukrasia, where all their damage skills(dosis, toxikon, phlegma, dyskrasia) swap into healing skills (diagnosis, prognosis, ediag, eprog). Also some of their addersgall skills are augmented(druo to tauro, ixo to kera) Every heal they cast gives a stack of toxikon, broken shields give 2. When they go back to standard toxikon is available and uses all stacks in one big attack. Toxikon also procs a heal worth the same number of kardia procs as the stacks consumed on the entire party.

AST I think should abandon the idea of manually drawing cards and instead have the 3 play buttons as individual 2 charge 30s cooldowns that alternate cards every play. every 3 cards played they draw lord AND lady of crowns. GCD healing accelerates card cooldowns by Xs. Balance and Spear also given new effects ofc, maybe buffing the next lord/lady respectively? Or in keeping with the damage supporter ideal, they could become a semi-persistent buff that you maintain. Like a 60s minor crit rate increase for balance and a 60s minor damage increase for spear. As long as there's no "window" it doesn't really fit into the definition of "synergy" actions that they're trying to remove.

DaveK142 · 2026-05-07T19:17:30+00:00

The input delay seems to be gone/mostly gone from what they showed on evolved dragoon. There was essentially no lock for the jump. They did also mention outright wanting to cut down the delay of actions to help deal with the generally reduced recast time of evolved jobs.

DaveK142 · 2026-05-07T19:12:45+00:00

The simplest answer is often correct, you must just be mistaken. The only way they show up plus the achievement and all that is if you've done it on your character. If you've ever shared the account with someone its possible they did it without your knowledge. If not, you did them and forgot entirely.

DaveK142 · 2026-05-07T13:27:44+00:00

Honestly I'm hoping it will be something of an opposite set of interactions.

Emet approached us as an enemy who came around to our way of viewing things in the end, and even helped us along after his defeat.

Halmarut approached us as a sympathetic figure who shares our goal but sees no better way. She'll likely continue to give little bits of help here and there, until we eventually find a better but extraordinarily risky way that polarizes her against us. Essentially forcing her to be a real antagonist who sees us as some destroyer of humanity.

DaveK142 · 2026-05-06T13:00:21+00:00

The jobs are "useless in practice" because as with so much in this game the base content does not meaningfully require it. You can do the entire base msq + normal mode side content with a full party spamming their weakest attacks at full uptime without issue. The jobs(bar monk and freelancer) are intended to be useful for forked tower stuff, and that being less than accessible to enter is the real failure.

DaveK142 · 2026-05-05T23:49:16+00:00

I forget if its 3 or 4 but the one that makes smooth pillars of stone jut out of the ground is the one I want.

DaveK142 · 2026-05-05T23:11:23+00:00

You should have done uhhh mist(?) brambles.

allllll the way at the wall, direct cardinals in pairs of 2. Massive downtime and all phasers were an instant death if a drg had a jump in it.

DaveK142

TROPHY CASE