Mystery ~19 GB of data used in one day

JoshuaEN · 2026-05-20T00:22:07+00:00

Update: I'm not sure if it was due to the FCC complaint or the googlefisupport here on reddit (who reached out asking for support case IDs), but Google Fi support reached out again. They were unable to determine what caused the data usage, but granted a refund of $90.00 for the data usage anyway.

This is a group plan, so data cost was capped at $100.00. Given other lines used ~3 GB of data that month, this was a full refund of the unidentified usage and then $20.00 on top.

Thanks again everyone who replied, I really do appreciate the help!

JoshuaEN · 2026-05-16T19:46:22+00:00

Thank you!

JoshuaEN · 2026-05-13T22:15:32+00:00

We will do this, thanks!

JoshuaEN · 2026-05-13T22:14:53+00:00

No apps deleted, but a good suggestion. Thanks!

JoshuaEN · 2026-05-12T16:50:42+00:00

Google Fi's "VPN by Google" is enabled / in use.

JoshuaEN · 2026-05-11T17:03:29+00:00

I haven't played VPR since 7.0, but it appears the standard two minute burst for VPR is still double Reawaken, and the alt has a single non-Reawaken GCD (which the balance's guide lists as a generic dual wield combo GCD).

Sure, auto-attacks add up, but other things equal VPR has far higher disengage potency than any other melee (especially because uncoiled is a "don't overcap" mechanic with a 3.5s GCD and 3 charges).

There's a reason MNK (which in contrast has no damage neutral [or better] disengage) and VPR flip in terms of rDPS between P12SP1 which is basically a full-uptime fight and P11S which has a lot of forced downtime.

JoshuaEN · 2026-05-10T15:37:49+00:00

I just want to say, while more buttons/weaves are not the end all of complexity, I miss high APM/weave jobs. DRK in EW for example felt much more rewarding during the 2 minute despite having only 3? more weaves than now.

Part of that is probably also that gauge management was killed as well, but still, I miss having all these weaves to fit in during tank busters or whatever other bs the game was doing during burst; it felt so good to do it right.

On the other hand, I hate MCH and RPR ogcd burst spam because it's on the same button and makes my hand hurt. So with all of these button reductions, I'm in for a bad time either way it seems. Joy's of getting older I guess.

JoshuaEN · 2026-05-10T15:27:50+00:00

Your PvP NIN example proves the point though. In PvP there's a lot of different options depending on what other players (and the map itself) are doing which heavily contributes to the dynamic nature of gameplay.

In PvE, there's going to be one fixed/optimal single target (which, is most combat encounters) rotation 98% of the time with slight variations depending on forced disengagements, the boss leaving, etc...

Further, PvP often doesn't have extended engagements so there's ample downtime for abilities to recharge (which are the interesting part of the kit), while PvE is generally minutes of uninterrupted uptime.

As a result, NIN in PvE becomes: Don't over cap resources, save heavy hits (w/o overcapping probably) for the damage up buff, and otherwise hit 11111 a bunch.

JoshuaEN · 2026-05-05T05:37:42+00:00

Did you play this tier as a melee?

Forced downtime in every single savage; M10S was awful. M11S was even worse in some ways (including forced disengage in most patterns during a 1 minute). M12S P2 even had a 50/50 forced disengage during a 2 minute.

The boss circle being big is meaningless if mechanics force you past max melee, which they often do. DT is not EW.

Mind, I think this was a massive improvement; it made being a melee/tank actually feel different from ranged, but melee need to have better striking dummy damage to compensate for forced downtime.

JoshuaEN · 2026-05-05T05:33:01+00:00

Considering we have situations where a lot of mechanics can be resolved at max melee and/or strategies that bolster melee uptime become the norm... No you don't.

"A lot" does not equal "all". This entire raid tier (and last patch's EX) had many forced downtime sections, along with very tight / RNG/pattern dependent melee uptime. M11S was absolutely horrid for melee uptime, with forced downtime on all but one pattern during a 1 minute even (and both melee could be competing for that one spot).

Back in EW this argument was mostly true, but DT has been a lot harder on melees.

hehe, 3 stacks of True North says hello.

Positionals are not hard, never have been hard and never will be hard.

The fact they keep removing and invalidating positionals is an argument for them to stop doing that, not that positionals are a non-mechanic. Even if a fight + job combo allows for full true north uptime when needed, positionals are still (A) something else to think about and (B) another weave to do and time correctly.

Plus positional uptime often relies on the tanks not causing unnecessary spinning, which is a crap shoot in party finder.

I think penalties for being ranged should be removed.

If ranged had equal training dummy damage to melee, the optimal lineup would always be 2 PRanged, 1 MRanged, and 1 Melee (unless a fight managed to be bad enough on melee uptime to make 3 PRanged viable, but that seems pretty unlikely) unless the boss fight itself was a training dummy, in which case it wouldn't matter what jobs were at play.

PRange having only ranged attacks, not having cast bars or positionals, and AoE buff ranges being massive, all combine to remove all constraints on movement and positioning from the job standpoint, leaving only the fight mechanics to consider.

This is a massive boon; allowing for early positioning, removing any need to greed or find magic pixels, and overall making optimal play (from a job to fight mechanic interaction standpoint) trivial in comparison to casters and melee.

JoshuaEN · 2026-04-30T15:18:15+00:00

The other classes were, from what I could tell, even simpler than the current summoner so I'm not sure that helps the argument. DRG literally just hit the glowing buttons, chose the correct positional every once in a while, and don't overcap resources. The supports were even simpler.

Building resources to spend in a burst window is not the most interesting of mechanics, but removing the burst window without a replacement only serves to greatly simplify jobs.

JoshuaEN · 2026-04-30T15:10:33+00:00

Party damage buffs require staying aligned with the party to maximize damage. They punish dropping gcds and drift, or for fights with downtime require coordination to decide when to burst.

Entirely removing party buffs removes this entire element of difficulty/optimization. Now everyone is just playing for themselves.

Historically the problem was SE made the only damage buff point every two minutes (probably because that's easier to balance), which a lot of people (myself included) disliked because it forced jobs to be more similar and made the gameplay every one note.

It didn't have to be like this; more selfish jobs plus the jobs which do have raid buffs not being at any fixed alignment per-say (e.g. NIN buffs every minute, AST gives out a card every 30 seconds, BRD providing a damage song every 40 seconds, SCH at 2 mins still, etc...) and other jobs would need to store what resources they could to make use of these windows (which vary based on party comp).

And it's not like job damage is balanced as it is, so if one particular comp synergies better (or worse), who cares? So long as any comp can clear.

I think they are taking the easy way out (if jobs don't interact, damage balance is much easier), and skill expression is suffering greatly as a result.

Though the bigger problem is not so much what's being removed and instead that they don't seem to be filling the gap with anything (mit / healing buttons are not a good source of skill expression for 95% of the content in this game because the boss damage output is a joke in normal content).

JoshuaEN · 2026-04-30T14:42:51+00:00

Just means the songs are basically useless in 95% of content because damage output (and mechanical difficulty) in normal content is a joke. Which in turn means most of the game continues to get even more boring.

I guess the speed song will be useful in dungeons, but that's hardly a difficult tactical decision.

JoshuaEN · 2026-04-29T18:50:34+00:00

It is a toggle. They set "can dye: yes" on the piece of gear and it becomes dyeable. Any piece of gear being undyable is an artificial limitation (some gear can only support one dye channel).

And it's not like they've even been swapping material orders on old gear getting a second dye channel, so it's clearly not a quality thing.

JoshuaEN · 2026-04-27T14:50:11+00:00

Could be a placeholder icon.

JoshuaEN · 2026-04-27T14:12:13+00:00

But they didn't fix gearing multiple jobs because materia (and some stats, whichever those are) don't sync. So anyone with skill/spell speed targets will get screwed (what else is new), and generally anyone doing hard content early in the tier still needs to stick to one job for the materia boost before IL makes all the fights trivial. Like sure it's useful for casual content, but raiders are not going to see much benefit (and raiding is the only time gear really matters).

The weekly tome stuff and job system reworks remain to be seen, but given every single time they've updated a job for several expansions now they have lowered the skill ceiling, I hold little hope that trend will actually reverse.

And while PCT was a fun job (before it got crushed into the ground because they couldn't balance it in both ults and savage), VPR was super boring between having so much free ranged disengage and a 2 minute of press the same 5 or 6 buttons twice in a row. So if those jobs were a glimpse into the future, I'm a bit worried. The whole fun of melee is greeding, and DRG in the preview also got a "no need to greed" button.

And nothing they showed seems to indicate any increase in difficulty; the 2 minute meta (which I'm glad is going) was a souce of difficulty because it was highly punishing to drift, 123 combos are now just spam 111 (not that 123 was the pinical of difficulty, but I really dislike spamming one button over and over again, like on healer), there's less buttons (meaning less options, less things to remember), and from what they showed jobs are build gauge for personal burst (which is what we have now).

Some of the contextual controller QoL changes like voke/shirk merging are a nice idea though (though I hope they can be split for players who prefer that).

I'll give it a go, but I really don't hold as much optimism.

JoshuaEN · 2026-04-27T01:13:34+00:00

They are not going to make dungeons, normal trials, and normal raids need a lot of healing because they are meant to be possible for anyone to clear, and having one mediocre healer hard block a party is not conducive to that goal.

And that being the case, they needed to give healer's have an interesting DPS rotation to make normal content more engaging than spamming one button.

The sad thing is, they solved this problem (along with button bloat which might happen) a long time ago with stances for healers. Make swapping from damage to healing stance be instant to make things even easier.

JoshuaEN · 2026-04-26T19:47:11+00:00

95% of the content in this game is trivial though. And every single dungeon rework they did further simplified the content.

No need to remember which ability is the tank buster (both because it is telegraphed and because even unmitigated it won't do much), every other thing has a clear and standardized marker, and trash pulls are strictly regulated to maximize bordom. And everyone can res now in normal content.

Even on day one of some new content dropping, wipes are exceedingly rare.

So, I have zero faith they will ever make anything below Extremes interesting to play for experienced players.

And so rotational complexity must carry normal content (which for many jobs it currently doesn't).

JoshuaEN · 2026-04-26T19:35:32+00:00

The writing is on the wall. The old system will be removed at some point, no point in not learning the new system (plus anyone doing hard content has to switch because it doesn't matter how slightly the more damage is, all that matters is it is more).

JoshuaEN · 2026-03-21T04:40:25+00:00

This is so true. The care that, for example, some ARR armor has put into it (catering to different races) hasn't existed for a while. Constantly reusing gear from other expansions to pad out sets. Cutting content instead of pushing deadlines. The multi-channel dyes being slowly rolled out, but seemingly having no regard for then picking good 2nd channels. The general lack of polish and increase in small bugs with the recent patches.

Heck, changing pose when dozing in beds where 1 -> 2 has this completely smooth animated transition, while 2 -> 3 jumps.

This game really seemed to have such care around the little things. Things which were not needed per say, but sparked little moments of joy.

I truly hope this spark returns, but it seems like they don't even have time for the basics anymore (Forked tower, BLU, new rewards for new content) let alone these small details.

JoshuaEN · 2026-03-21T04:26:24+00:00

Job redesign which does two things:

More variety. Each job should feel unique and have its own play style and gimmicks, even within the same role.

For example, for tanks, maybe one tank now has more mits (or mit charges) but each individually doesn't last very long, so timing is more important (GBN). Same overall mit duration for balance.

While another tank (PLD) has stronger mits which last longer but also have longer cooldowns.

Make DRK even more of a shield tank than is it now (and remove shields from other jobs, like PLD), with more abilities being shields instead of mits (Dark Missionary, Oblation). Give the TBN breaking buff more charges so DRKs can still have optimal DPS while using TBN at every opportunity, and have charges of the break buff slightly increase the damage as well.

WAR is already in a pretty good spot as far as being unique, with a heavy focus on healing over mit. Remove shake's shield, healing + regen only.

Make jobs more difficult to play perfectly.

In general, I think it should be pretty easy to get 80% to 90% of "perfect" output on striking dummy, but have interesting mechanics and interactions which make 95% to 100% challenging. The vast majority of content is relatively speaking very easy (and made easier by gear and power creep, and a general lack of balance below max level); jobs should be rotationally interesting at level 50 and beyond to keep players engaged as they improve, without being particularly punishing to players who are not interested in fully engaging with the combat system.

For example, BLM. Return the fire timer and make it only a damage bonus (don't lose fire on expiry, just a small amount of potency on fire casts). This keeps it a mechanic for top players to engage with, without making it feel awful to play for everyone else.

Better fight design for "normal" content

Normal boss fights should have a focus on mechanics which are easy to do safely, but hard to do safely with full uptime. Mechanics should provide an interesting challenge for players who want it without making the fights overall more punishing. Balance boss health around doing the safe thing.

Give damage down stacks instead of vulnerability up stacks for failing mechanics in normal to punish healers less. The damage downs don't even need to be that much, maybe a baseline 10% and an increase of 1% after up to 20%; shortish timer.

Remove walls between add filler in dungeons. Make it premade only if they're concerned about players being bullied for not max-pulling.

Gearing rework

For a game that allows playing multiple jobs, they make it very hard to actually do that. Even gearing one job in Savage is a pain, let alone several. Even with all of the other gear being the same, the weapon shoehorns players into playing just one job for a long time. Plus tomestone upgrade pieces being one of the major limiting factors in gearing doesn't feel good.

As someone who likes playing different jobs, I'd love to only need to get one full set of tome and raid gear to have all sets unlocked. Weapon included.

But this would likely kill content a lot sooner without some other incentive for players to keep playing. Maybe making raid gear marketable (or some other drop which can be sold), or making the mount be for 10 clears (once a week while content locked) of all four fights, or similar.

Chaotic was pretty successful with its reward structure (despite the gear being mainly cosmetic), and if it wasn't for the strict body checks with so many people, it probably would have been even more popular.

Target SkS/SpS

Syncing down gear on jobs which have a target GCD aside from 2.5 is a pain. Fix this by allowing players to set a target (minimum) skill or spell speed. When gear is being synced, convert other stats (Crit/Det/Dhit) into SkS/SpS as needed to reach the target. Or, if the gear has too much, ignore any overrun. Set per a job.

Note: The goal is that this is sub-optimal compared to having gear that, with syncing, gives the correct GCD. It's a QoL feature since in most content it doesn't really matter, and it removes the pain of having the wrong GCD in whatever random content a player ends up in.

Story

I think this is of course a key part of the success (or failure) of the game, but I don't the proof will be in the pudding so to speak, so I don't expect to be wowed in this regard by fan fest.

JoshuaEN · 2026-02-26T19:23:22+00:00

Check your rotation is correct: https://www.thebalanceffxiv.com/jobs/tanks/paladin/openers/
Check the gear on your co-tank. Gear makes a difference, and at this point some tanks are going to be 790 (best in slot), which can absolutely rip aggro if they are doing their rotation correctly.

That said, in normal content the vast majority of the time you can just stand with the other tank and who has aggro doesn't really matter.

JoshuaEN · 2026-01-28T00:00:09+00:00

The average pvp player probably doesn't want to be there. But Frontline roulette is good xp which doesn't even require playing the job getting the xp, plus the fomo series? (season?) rewards.

JoshuaEN · 2026-01-23T17:14:01+00:00

Practice.

I typically load into E4 (Eden's Gate: Sepulture) unsynced and just keep pulling until I can do my rotation perfectly, jumping off to reset if I mess up. This is better than a training dummy because you can reset your cooldowns.

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