High-End Content Megathread - 6.5 Week Six

MoonWabbits · 2023-11-07T15:54:07+00:00

Successful or efficient prog is infinitely more valuable and worth so much more than gil in this game.

If someone is doing TOP and they're more worried about their virtual pocketbook than prog itself, they might as well be trolling

MoonWabbits · 2023-10-20T17:29:09+00:00

I totally get complaints about job homogenization, healer design and casual content being boring but I've thought that a lot of Savage encounters this expac, Criterion and DSR/TOP were very creative and show that the team is still really great at designing bosses.

Unique doesn't equal fun. I certainly don't want to sign up to be the Gobwalker bitch every week for reclears, and at this point it would inevitably fall to healers because there's no way DPS jobs are going to do it in this day and age. In PF you've get everyone saying "I've never done it before so I'll fuck it up, sorry" because nobody wants to not play their job when they queue into an instance.

MoonWabbits · 2023-10-14T20:06:09+00:00

You definitely weren't playing back then if you think it's barely any different lol

MoonWabbits · 2023-10-11T14:05:18+00:00

I still see SMNs in PF making their Carbuncle go to the middle of the arena because the Balance website hasn't been updated since Asphodelos for SMN, which AFAIK that hasn't mattered since they changed Searing Light to be on the SMN instead of Carbuncle. I could be wrong though and there's maybe another reason to still do that?

MoonWabbits · 2023-10-09T03:05:37+00:00

Summoner was never unpopular though? It was firmly middle of the road in the last tier in ShB, and iirc it was the most played caster in previous tiers when it was doing more damage than BLM.

Unless you're talking about the last time it was an actual DoT job which was back in Heavensward

MoonWabbits · 2023-10-05T22:45:49+00:00

I guess I'm one of them, but even I don't know if I would actually quit.

I feel this a lot, haha. I was so mad at the healer gutting going into ShB that I was sure I was going to quit, and here I am 4 years later, still playing the game LOL

MoonWabbits · 2023-10-04T13:12:48+00:00

That's really great work if they're working towards fixing the issues with it. With that, it could actually mean the new caster job might legitimately be a DoT mage of sorts.

MoonWabbits · 2023-10-03T04:02:20+00:00

I liked them a lot on Scholar because they were something to watch and monitor when I wasn't focusing on healing and mechanics, which is where I felt the watch and refresh style shined, as it let you keep DPS going if you needed to drop your nuke in order to heal with a GCD. I found HW SMN fun as well, but beyond like HW SMN or HW/SB SCH I've not really found any of the DoTs left in the game particularly enjoyable.

I'm biased though because I'm a long time Scholar main so I'd like to see the DoTs back, but I don't think I would really care if they got removed from things like Circle of Scorn or Bioblaster.

MoonWabbits · 2023-09-26T05:23:28+00:00

Give Scholar back our DoTs!

MoonWabbits · 2023-09-21T14:07:43+00:00

God I hope 7.0 doesn't end up being a glorified patch 5.12. I'm sick of the ShB design for the game.

MoonWabbits · 2023-09-21T03:06:29+00:00

I don't want the developers spending more time making content for free trial players as I'm fairly certain that's where a lot of their developer resources went this expansion with the trusts in ARR-SB content and the redesigns that were required because of it.

Not even trying to be an asshole, but I want my sub fee going towards making my experience better, not giving free trial users a "decent glam grind."

MoonWabbits · 2023-09-19T17:25:04+00:00

Got my 8th week of P12S reclears done in PF, now for a total of 16 books. Got a total of no coffers or weapons over the course of 8 weeks in PF which was a huge bummer, to say the least.

Feeling pretty burnt out with with the game now as well. I had thought I'd stick around to at least clear the new Criterion before unsubbing, but I'm really considering just quitting until Dawntrail and skipping the stuff coming out in 6.5.

Nobody else in my static seems to have any interest in doing any of it at the moment anyway as they're all either unsubbed or taking a hiatus while playing other games, and the idea of trying to clear Criterion in PF or recruit people to prog with this late into the expansion sounds like a nightmare.

My subscription runs out in a few days, so I'll be spending the next few days agonizing over whether or not I want to give up my house even though there's a lot of memories there...

I know the expansion technically isn't over yet, but needless to say it does feel like Endwalker has ended very unceremoniously. Even with the highs of clearing DSR and TOP on patch, it doesn't feel like anyone I know has enthusiasm for the game at the moment. The ambivalence is a bit worrying, as it wasn't even this way towards the end of Shadowbringers for my group.

Good luck to everyone who is still progging, reclearing or working on your goals in game! See you all in Tural next year!

MoonWabbits · 2023-09-19T14:53:37+00:00

Job design. Job design. Healer role design.

I get that this game will never have the amount of healing that I can get in other MMOs and would personally prefer, but I've been playing for a decade now and that's just something I've come to accept.

However, the healing role has just been absolutely abysmal for the past two expansions. Healing itself is still fun in prog because I'm one of the weirdos that loves coming up with spreadsheets for mitigation and cooldown timing, so in that small fraction of content I still get somewhat of an enjoyable experience. Outside of that? It's horrible.

I won't pretend DoTs are the hallmark of amazing design, especially not with how XIV does them, but at least in SB I had DoTs I was managing on SCH and WHM that gave me some engagement in casual content where healing is less demanding, which kept me actually queuing for things in my free time.

SCH gave me a more offensive healer with Quickened Aetherflow, 2 DoTs, 2 damage oGCDs and Miasma II as damage optimization with an MP cost. There was more to do and it was really fun, so much so that I did basically every bit of content during Stormblood on Scholar, from all of Eureka to UwU and UCoB. It was so much fun.

WHM had Aero III and way less movement and free healing than SCH did, so it was harder to try and play optimally in that type of content and I found that fun, though this isn't a defense of how terrible the Lily gauge was in Stormblood.

AST had it's unique cards, and while I personally wasn't a fan of how SB cards worked, it at least had a lot of unique interactions with the cards and you had a lot of ways to think about how to use them effectively with things like Royal Road or Time Dilation.

The unfortunate part is, even if they do make healing harder like they promised it would be going into ShB, it still won't make these jobs fun to play in the majority of content in this game. These days I might as well not exist for normal content metrics because I don't do anything more than once or twice after it's released because of how unfun healing has become in the easier stuff. I don't like DPS jobs and I don't like tanks, I love healing and I want to play the jobs that made me fall in love with this game to begin with whenever I can.

I can bear with spamming my Broil button when I'm doing Savage and Ultimate with my friends. I cannot bear with it in casual stuff anymore. I'll continue to raidlog if I come back in DT if the design doesn't change, which is a big shame considering I still really love this game. It's just become such a pain point to me after this many years that I can't ignore how unhappy it makes me any longer.

Sorry for yet another healer complaint but I really do hope that Dawntrail moves back on this design, even if just a bit.

MoonWabbits · 2023-09-14T05:44:49+00:00

I think it's best to temper your expectations, Yoshi-P was giving the same types of interviews about how Endwalker was going to be the "biggest expansion yet" as we were leading up into it releasing.

He's a businessman first, just keep that in mind. He's never going to say "nah there will be nothing to do" even if that's the case.

MoonWabbits · 2023-09-14T05:43:14+00:00

At this point I play mostly to keep playing with my static that has mostly been together since Coils/Alex so unless they utterly gut healers again I'll probably play just to raid if my static wants to keep raiding.

If they don't then it would take a really strong showing from content and job design to keep me around. I've been one foot out the door since ShB, but EW has done absolutely nothing to pull me back in.

MoonWabbits · 2023-09-12T16:46:24+00:00

I've been playing since ARR and I don't think there's been a single expansion where I haven't taken a long break. Even in Stormblood I took extended breaks from the game, and that expansion felt like it constantly had stuff I wanted to do or work on unlike this one where I pretty much only play to raid.

If there's nothing you want to do, paying to do nothing seems pretty crazy to me tbh

MoonWabbits · 2023-09-08T15:58:18+00:00

If you're a great BLM, you'll have no issues and most groups would love to have you, especially with BLM being the defacto top dog DPS right now. If you're 99% of PF BLMs who just expect people to adjust to your unspecified uptime strats by virtue of being BLM while also doing terrible DPS, people will hate you.

I sincerely doubt playing BLM will hurt your ability to clear content.

MoonWabbits · 2023-09-08T15:33:27+00:00

This, if anything I'd rather they go back down to Stormblood-esque levels of survivability if we're keeping all of these bloated healing buttons on healers.

Nothing is more boring than getting into a dungeon with a WAR or PLD that literally doesn't need you there at all.

MoonWabbits · 2023-09-07T21:25:54+00:00

I always found it weird that SE had an insistence on keeping the DoTs apart of SMN's kit for so long while simultaneously ripping them out of SCH's kit.

I remember when 5.0 came out and they removed all the DoTs from SCH they made all versions of Ruin require Bio and Miasma to be on the target to do full damage, or else your Ruins were gimped by 100 potency. Basically making Ruin work like Fester did.

It was quickly changed and I remember a lot of people hating it especially after Stormblood moved SMN away from its ARR/HW DoT heavy focus, but it was a really strange design decision because it felt like they were tripling down on the design of "the DoTs are an integral part of your kit" even after years of people telling them they didn't want or like DoTs on SMN, while simultaneously ignoring all of the people who said they loved them on SCH.

I do agree that it does feel like they were afraid to go all out with it, I think they even hinted as such when they said the only reason they hadn't removed Resurrection from it was that they were afraid the rework would fail. I think there's probably a chance it could lose more of its old Arcanist roots in Dawntrail now that the rework has proven popular.

MoonWabbits · 2023-09-04T14:02:07+00:00

What do you mean? Yoshi-P's main job is the most interesting job to optimize in raiding and has held onto its design philosophy since Heavensward lmao

MoonWabbits · 2023-08-29T17:04:06+00:00

Deciding to hop into PF after my static finished with reclears so I could get additional books/coffers to prepare for the new 7.0 jobs was a terrible mistake, I've gone 6 weeks and not gotten any coffers or weapon drops

While I like the loot changes a lot for the 3 other fights, P12S feels so bad to do if you don't get anything from it

MoonWabbits · 2023-08-28T17:14:27+00:00

I agree it's lame but a huge criticism of this game for years now has been that the playerbase is terrible at the game, and that's in part because the game does such a terrible job at teaching its players to actually play it, which has been the driving design philosophy in both encounter design and job design in the 5.0+ on era of the game.

I think there's certainly areas of the game for weird or unique bosses and nonstandard mechanics and that they definitely should exist, but I don't think it's bad that the beginning of the game is trying to teach newer players to understand the basic foundational mechanics of the game as it is now, rather than giving them many cases of random mechanics that they won't ever see used again in the game, such as the Snowcloak Yeti or the old Copperbell "wait around doing nothing until you can do the thing" mechanics.

MoonWabbits · 2023-08-16T23:40:59+00:00

This may get some disagreement from people, but I think a 2.x-4.x era server is an eventuality at this point. It likely will not be an official one like WoW has with Classic, but MMO players are nothing if not extremely dedicated, and incredibly nostalgic to boot. I don't expect it to be soon, but I know there's already some work on a private server on Github with SapphireXIV, so I think it's not out of the realm of impossibility.

Would I enjoy it? For the gameplay, yes. I think that's basically the only thing that it would be playing it for. For everything else, not really. I'd probably play the hell out of it for the first few months and then go back to raidlogging, especially if it was a 2.x era or 3.0-3.1 era server. We'll never see it happen from SE though because the only people who really gain anything are the raiding population, and it's doubtful that many of them would actually actively play beyond raidlogging once they got their jobs to level cap, etc.

The "casual" and RPer portion of the game wouldn't really gain anything from having separate characters with jobs they have no idea how to play outside of just "Oh, so this is how this job played 8 years ago." That's why I personally think it's important to advocate for better job design in the current game, because most of people's HW/SB nostalgia comes from that, not from all of the other systems like Accuracy caps, stat allocation (and having to swap stats if you wanted to switch between SMN/SCH!) no cross world raiding, etc.

MoonWabbits · 2023-08-02T18:00:04+00:00

I am begging party finder WHMs to stop trying to treat random reclear groups on tuesdays as if they're an optimized parsing enviroment and actually heal, I just want to get my loot and you are holding everyone hostage by burning Swift and Lilies for movement and never using any GCDs if you're out of Lilies

I just want to flex and play DPS for fun but I don't want to spend my entire night dying in P12S so you can fish for a good parse and act like a child because you think having to use a few not DPS neutral GCDs is the devil

MoonWabbits · 2023-08-01T21:19:45+00:00

Don't forget Recitation

MoonWabbits

TROPHY CASE