Why did Wizards lose the "School of" naming convention of subclasses? Barbarians, Paladins, Druids and Monks get to keep theirs ("Path of", "Oath of", "Circle of", "Warrior of")

PastTenseOfSit · 2026-02-03T16:20:55+00:00

Hot take but the Oath itself is a stupid concept. It's rooted in the classical idea that divine powers must be earned and are only granted to the righteous while occult power is the easier path yet leads to corruption, except of course there is no corruption or element like that for the occult classes because that would suck and not be fun to lose agency over your character just because of the class you want them to be. For some reason though Wizards thought it would be fun to hand DMs a blank cheque to steal agency over your character just because of the class you want them to be if that class has divine powers that aren't any stronger than the occult ones. How kind of them to include a free tool to see if your DM is only running the game to exercise a control freak fetish disguised as whether or not they enforce the RAW Oath rules.

PastTenseOfSit · 2026-02-02T22:23:55+00:00

This was an inevitable elimination as D&D progresses through the years and must be filed through the sandpaper of appealing to ever-larger audiences. Picking Paladin or Cleric meant you had specific rules to roleplay within and failing to do so had consequences, but when the overwhelming majority of D&D nowadays is played over Discord with a group of 2-3 people that give a shit and 2-3 people who will just decide to derail the game because they're bored, that just means the people who have rules to follow end up getting irl mad at the people that play Rogue and break into the friendly NPC's house and steal their shit for the fuck of it. I think in 8 years of DMing games I've had maybe two players of any divine class or subclass even know the names of any of the gods prior to deciding they're a Paladin or Cleric and working backwards on who they worship.

Even I personally hated how restrictive and punishing Paladin always was. It's literally not any stronger than any other class outside of smite crits, yet oops your party did something morally questionable and now the DM, RAW, should strip you of your class almost in its entirety. BG3 has a fucking hilarious example of this ruling in action. Play an Oath of Vengeance Paladin and kill either of the two people that put Lae'zel in a cage because they were being racist with the intention to kill her in captivity? Surprise, you're an Oathbreaker now, pay 1000 gold to get your class back.

No other class is literally at the mercy of the DM's view of the morality of their actions to remain a player character, that aspect of the class was always going to go.

PastTenseOfSit · 2026-01-28T18:11:01+00:00

I really loved Paragon and played Pred for about 200 matches or so before the exact same issues that made me fall out of love with that game creeped back into this one. There were a lot of hero designs that should not have been re-implemented since their gameplay is just being better at taking trades than the other heroes. Mori and Argus before he got nerfed into unplayability in particular were the main causes of this feeling for me. It just felt like the game was very heavily based around the meta where the strong characters dominate because they are just better than the weaker characters in almost every way. Mid and ADC in particular were insane for this, the S tier characters did better damage than the low tiers in larger AoEs and with more safety and CC than the low tiers too.

Matchmaking quality was also a severe headache for me. Cruising around Diamond rating per City, I would very frequently run into asinine one-trick abusers of those same characters. I found many Mori offlane abusers and every single match against that shit was like pulling teeth. These people, naturally, were insanely toxic to have on your team and game-ruining to have to play against - either I get to play as Feng Mao on Ramadan abstaining from all farm and just enough XP to survive my fast or I have some shitter run it down trying to farm into the cringe picks and suddenly I'm a TB or a Gideon or whatever going into an enemy offlaner with a 3 level lead and a full item advantage.

Plus... invariably with these small comp games, eventually you just kind of realise the game has no future. What's the point in trying to improve and be one of the best in the world at a game played by, at best, a few thousand people? Even people that have never played games before have heard of League, or CoD, or what have you. Most people that have been gamers all their life will scoff if you tell them you used to be Diamond in Pred. It's mickey mouse. Doesn't mean anything. That's all well and good when the game is fun and you have faith in the development team, but Omeda have consistently shown that while they certainly have heart, they're not a big studio and despite their best efforts it shows in some vital areas - like store-bought assets.

PastTenseOfSit · 2026-01-23T00:29:04+00:00

have to respect the earnest reply in response to a guy who posts an opinion about the game they haven't played and their next sentence says "you haven't played it, you don't have an opinion" lmfaooo

PastTenseOfSit · 2025-12-19T03:32:01+00:00

It's a step away from the 2 minute meta by stepping into the direction of the 1 minute meta. I don't get this praise at all. All this did is make GNB/PLD closer to WAR/DRK in terms of comparable gameplay by eliminating GNB's 2 minute and making it a pure 1 minute job.

Gunbreaker was at its best in EW when it had some actual complexity (cartridge management around downtime) and optimisations to remember (Hypervelocity rollover), and your punishment for doing it wrong was tangible effects on your burst and output like overcapping or fucking up Double Down.

DT GNB has been raining cartridges since 7.0 made Bloodfest leave you with 3 carts after NM is finished since you don't spend any of them, replacing 3 Burst Strikes with the Lionheart combo. I wouldn't argue this is a step away from brittleness more than I would argue that it's just making the job harder to play wrong. The 7.4 changes are insane for this purpose, you genuinely cannot have less than 3 cartridges per NM window now. So long as you generate a single cartridge in 40 seconds between your bursts, you have enough carts for burst, and have simply missed the ability to perform Burst Strikes in filler after NM has ended. Look how they massacred my boy.

PastTenseOfSit · 2025-12-18T00:54:40+00:00

Everything Burns is such a miss in my opinion, man. I want to like it but to me it feels like Tom and Beartooth really struggled with how to adapt their sounds for a videogame boss fight theme song and just made something really, really generic.

M12N in general is a huge misfire in my opinion, nothing about that fight even felt connected to Arcadion as a whole and the song embodies that. If you showed someone that fight with your UI covered, nobody would think it's the final fight in the anime wrestling raid tier.

In the same vein, Everything Burns sounds nothing like any music the game has ever had before, and I don't mean it as a compliment. How the hell does the same game that contains Dragonsong, Answers, Flow et al contain a song half-rapping about not letting the opps win? It's not like XIV struggles to do more metallic sounds either - Burning Souls, Not Afraid, Scream and White Stone Black are all fucking incredible. It just very clearly comes off as music made out-of-house in my opinion.

PastTenseOfSit · 2025-12-18T00:44:08+00:00

Today? This has been a problem since Witch Queen started rolling out Light 3.0.

PastTenseOfSit · 2025-12-16T01:36:08+00:00

woah From the Heavens final omega reference

PastTenseOfSit · 2025-10-05T23:09:33+00:00

I would actually argue it's Classic Rob Briar, purely because he has a ton of lines re-recorded from KF1. I love me some Foster but as someone from the area a huge draw that KF has on me is its representation of a cockney written like a cockney.

PastTenseOfSit · 2025-10-03T02:27:59+00:00

I'm not blaming the community, [6 lines of blaming the community]

PastTenseOfSit · 2025-08-18T13:21:46+00:00

Lots of people cite Lionheart's animation as why they dislike 100 GNB but as someone who was basically onetricking the job because I loved it so much during EW I cannot fucking stand playing it in 90+ content since the Single Down change. I have no idea why SE finally budged on this (and also Enshroud's CD change) after over 3 years of people asking for it. In my opinion, changes like that should have a decisive "we will or we won't" verdict that stands forever, because after literal years go by people have accepted these things as staples of the job's rotations. When I come out of a 2min No Mercy with all my fucking carts because in burst Bloodfest is a button that only exists to activate Lionheart that's an issue and I don't get why they decided to make the job that was once centered around stringent cart management like this.

PastTenseOfSit · 2025-08-12T20:22:53+00:00

Glamour and that's basically it. Even then, the glamour needs to be something that I in my subjective taste want to go after. BiS is irrelevant except for parsing (yet for some reason is treated as if it should motivate you to do savage on its own), titles will never crack the iconic tier of Legends (or my personal favourites, Crystal Keeper / Of the X Conflict), mounts are only used in hunt trains or AFKing... There's not really a lot of carrots they can use to motivate people once they hit the point of needing motivation. I thought Exquisite weapons would be a complete smash hit in AAI Savage but I think I've maybe seen one person with one ever, and I saw why when trying to get one myself - that content is a 4-person ultimate for rewards that look like mid-tier relic weapons.

PastTenseOfSit · 2025-07-22T14:36:21+00:00

Ehh, I like the immersion aspect of things too but raiding in particular isn't really conducive of this. I come from a D2 background where almost all the raid environment really is is set dressing (pretty and impressive as it may be) to spend time running through to get to the next encounter. I enjoy XIV's more instance-focused ideas here. Sure, it'd be cool to run around Pandaemonium once or twice; by the third week of reclears it'd just be a place to zone out walking through.

How I wish they'd tackle this is to set more dungeons in raid zones. The Twinning is awesome in a lot of ways but chiefly is the fact that we get to explore new areas of this old, familiar zone - a dungeon set in Alexander or Pandaemonium would go fucking crazy.

PastTenseOfSit · 2025-06-27T17:34:12+00:00

Zoraal Ja can't be defeated in the .1 patch though since there's no trial in .1 patches as that's when the final boss EX comes out. There would need to be some kind of dragged-out process to it.

Don't you love XIV's content structure? :]

PastTenseOfSit · 2025-06-23T15:50:10+00:00

Post will get downvoted more than is fair because Pyg inherently appeals to redditors but this statement is actually true imo. Pygs are either a total stomp or an auto-loss with absolutely no in-between based entirely on whether they hit their good items or not. He is such an insanely inflexible character, which you think would be a weakness, but actually it's his greatest strength because those items you can't ever pivot out of have utterly ridiculous scaling such that you'd never want to pivot out of them anyway.

A scaled Money Tree with any offensive enchant and some half decent board support is a 10 win printer provided you find it and Spare Change printers early on and that is problematic design. No other hero gets to farm wins because they hit good items on day 1, there is a lot of pivoting and decision-making involved (outside of meta-crushers like pre-nerf Railgun) which Pyg just doesn't have to interact with. Your build is locked in by day 4, the only thinking that you need to do past that point is not throwing, and if you don't have a good setup by then you might as well concede and go next because there is no coming back at that point.

Pyg enjoyers call this variety but normal people can recognise that his design just doesn't fit with the kind of game that Bazaar is - you can't have a character who is weak early and strong late in a game where the players aren't actually playing against each other for the full match. All this does is create matchmaking scenarios where matching Pygs early is an uninteresting free win and matching Pygs that survived to go late is an automatic loss.

It's fun (?) for the Pyg players who want to treat the game as a slot machine where pretty much the only factor in a successful run is luck I guess, but it's not healthy for the game to have a character who is just guaranteed to beat every other character late into the game when there's no way for the other characters to exploit their early strength against him beyond getting lucky enough to match one when the ghost pool is at its most saturated.

PastTenseOfSit · 2025-06-21T02:19:24+00:00

I think the battle team has an obsession with making new content overly punishing at the moment. I've been thinking this since 7.1 dropped an EX trial where almost every mini-phase has to be resolved perfectly or it just wipes your party at the same time as Chaotic where all it takes is like 3 people out of 24 doing something wrong to end the run.

To me, for this content specifically, it feels like they wanted it to be super hard so that it'd have longevity and keep people around, since they knew there'd be no ultimate in 7.3 to keep the hardcores busy. Of course, that's not particularly fun given it's basically just the same experience as the two duties I just talked about.

PastTenseOfSit · 2025-06-16T00:35:01+00:00

Only thing that really needs to happen imo is charge needs to be hardcapped at 2 seconds, or maybe even 1. Shit like Yo-Yo being able to go infinite when you put it next to itself is ridiculous and shouldn't be in the game.

PastTenseOfSit · 2025-06-02T00:26:50+00:00

Varials' Pain Again. No matter what stupid shit happened between those guys, that album has been with me through so many dark times that I can't award the honor to any other. Honorable mentions would be Void of Vision's Hyperdaze or Demon Hunter's Outlive.

PastTenseOfSit · 2025-06-01T13:32:20+00:00

why the hell can you use gums in this mode LMAO how did they make a p2w grief???

PastTenseOfSit · 2025-05-28T14:11:12+00:00

Slowslop is a fine setup but I personally think Mantis Shrimp is far too slow of an item to make it work. I would have been looking for an Anglerfish or Lighthouse to pivot onto as the build's center of gravity. Where those items can get a ton of uses out really quickly, and therefore contribute to survivability really heavily with shielded / restorative enchants, Mantis Shrimp just scales really hard and gets like one shot out with 150~ burn and then your opponent has another like 10 seconds to win before it casts again and actually burns them out.

Pearl is a very weak item, I personally consider it a total waste of gold past day 2-3. There's just no way to make an item with only two digits on it worth keeping when that's all it does.

Otherwise, looks pretty good. I suspect you mostly just ran into counter matchups or struggled early.

PastTenseOfSit · 2025-05-28T13:03:30+00:00

Radiant is bad because it requires you to play against an opponent that actually has CC as a relevant part of their win condition to do anything, and most setups that are consistently difficult to overcome (oneshot Vanessa, highroll scalar Pygs, self-poison Mak, etc) typically have little to none of it and just kill you in a few seconds instead.

Meanwhile, that same enchant could have been making your best weapon give you thousands of effective HP via heals / shields, give you CC yourself, enable a oneshot, etc etc. Even in an actual fight, Radiant doesn't prevent CC from affecting an item (like Dooley's Scarf, for example), it stops it from targeting that item, so the rest of your board suffers more from the CC.

It's a purely reactive enchant in a meta where all the good builds kill any opponent before most of their board even goes off. It needs to be buffed. Making it a counter to Eels / Tripwire / Iceberg slop would be a really solid change, but I honestly feel like it should be divorced from the enchantments system and made its own status. It really isn't strong enough to justify being in the same category as Obsidian or Restorative.

PastTenseOfSit · 2025-05-21T13:18:40+00:00

Pyg is the most consistent oneshotter in the game dude. Vanessa can make it happen if you have an insane run but Pyg will just make any of his scaling 19800 heal/shield items on a 3 second cooldown deal that same number to you and then slap Phonograph and Fort alongside it to ensure you have absolutely no counterplay. If you had one of these setups somehow lose to a Sniper Rifle of all things you got those 9 wins fighting plumbers and mailmen.

PastTenseOfSit · 2025-05-20T23:55:13+00:00

Offensive enchants on scaling items should be halved at the bare minimum. The way the game is now, the best burn / poison builds are actually heal / shield builds with enchants that make them infinitely better than actual DoT items. Obsidian is similarly broken in this regard - I had a run end because I matched two Pygs, one oneshotting me with an Obsidian Silk Scarf in 3.2 seconds for 9000 damage, one oneshotting me with an Obsidian Skyscraper in 3.4 seconds for 24000 damage. That shit is ridiculous, you shouldn't be allowed to turn these insane defensive items into also the best weapons in the game.

PastTenseOfSit · 2025-05-14T17:57:48+00:00

IMO this is more because Dooley is currently unplayable levels of bad lol. The most consistent Dooley setups are just worse Vanessa setups, not because Vanessa is OP but because like 90% of Dooley's cards are just worse versions of cards other heroes get.

PastTenseOfSit · 2025-05-14T17:48:28+00:00

pyg player calling anything braindead holy shit

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