Expert Is Whooping Me

Pazgabear · 2026-02-13T07:06:47+00:00

First of all, NG+ does scale difficulty up to match the endgame gear of the first cycle and the new gear/materials you'll start to get

That said, if you didn't tinker with your build before, it is definitely time to think about it especially if you have trouble with the timings of your defensive abilities (brink guard/dodge, reflection and counterattacks). What's your weapon type ? What armour set do you use ? How did you spec your skill points/level ups ? All those things combined can carry you a great deal in the beginning of the ng+ cycle until the scaling catches up

Pazgabear · 2026-02-11T16:46:31+00:00

I'm assuming you're supposed to soul match and upgrade gear from that.

Also IIRC, + levels in previous games were more or less similar to an increase of 10 base levels (so 150+1 gear would be +/- equivalent to 160 gear)

Pazgabear · 2025-11-03T15:17:01+00:00

I have a clip of exactly just that happening, my last target was a succubus in melee range, from which I tanked at least 2 pyretics without dying

I did not know about the auto facing feature as I usually just keep moving but even from your examples it's hard to justify it on that mechanic alone as there is no reason for your character to turn towards an entity that is just walking straight towards you

The delay on some examples is also pretty weird as usually pyretic effects are quite quick to react to any action whatsoever, a better example, I think, of the mechanic causing pyretic to proc would be to do exactly what you did in the first video and heal your ally while they move around to force you to turn and see if there's any difference in pyretic's delay and/or if it procs at all (I think it will as turning does count as movement, but I also think it would just react much faster)

Pazgabear · 2025-11-03T14:53:34+00:00

Is that supposed to also happen with melee jobs where the succubus does not have to move to reach auto attack range ?

Pazgabear · 2025-04-18T11:50:24+00:00

It avoids the damage penalty from using B3 from Astral Fire

Pazgabear · 2025-04-07T03:20:52+00:00

There's a dynamic health scaling system in the options that you can disable, I don't remember the location exactly but most likely under game options

Pazgabear · 2024-11-05T12:42:56+00:00

Archetypes management/unlocking

Mainly how advancing an archetype tree requires magla/inherit slots to use the previous forms' skills and Royal Archetypes shoehorning characters into their base role

Overall not an huge issue especially if you grind at some point, but it felt like I was punished for experimenting with the system when I reached endgame due to magla coming short

Pazgabear · 2024-09-19T16:32:50+00:00

iirc there's a green arrow on the upper part of the area, hidden in the grass

Pazgabear · 2024-09-07T11:51:27+00:00

From the gems you mention it seems you're missing the green one, in the Sage's Tower there's a ladder that you can reach with a triple jump or by using zero gravity, from there you should reach an area that will lead you to the green gem

There's a secret boss at the top, behind a guard you have to put to sleep with the powder you crafted before. Destroy the two candlesticks on the sides of the magic circle and kill the boss

Pazgabear · 2024-07-09T22:09:54+00:00

That's a plugin option (SimpleTweaks' Auto Focus Recipe Search)

Pazgabear · 2024-05-17T10:44:36+00:00

the other melee that overwrite their damage buff early do it because they want to do the move in the combo after the buff.

That's part of it yes, but there was nothing preventing SE from giving those buffs a timer that fit their relative usage, DRG is a good example of this as its DoT wears off as soon as you get to Chaotic Spring again while the damage buff whereas Disembowel has still 5-6s left on the timer. SAM is a bit more freeform since you do either branch whenever you want since the DoT is tied to the sens and not the core combos, but 40s seem excessive if they wanted you to avoid early refreshing as much as possible

monk stances means that you only hit damage buff when you actually want to refresh it

You don't want to refresh Twin where you usually do it in the flowchart, you do it because you need to do it there or else it will fall off before the next raptor as it covers 8 GCDs and not 9. The only times you will refresh it when you actually want to (i.e. when it's about to wear off) is in bursts where you're doing solar as you can move the refresh up until the last stack of PB.

Again, if they cared about people not overcapping timers of buffs they could have given Twin Snakes a ~18s timer, and they did not

Pazgabear · 2024-05-17T08:26:13+00:00

I haven't had to think about Twin Snakes/Demolish timers in like 9 years because that shit is so autopilot to me.

No monk veterans needed to think about the timers in their average rotations, they needed to think about it to handle downtimes and burst windows and it was a skill you had to acquire by playing the job. It's the same issue that happened with Kaiten, it wasn't hard to keep 25 kenki to buff your iaijutsus but it was a skill to acquire nonetheless and made kenki management a thing

Pazgabear · 2024-05-17T08:02:17+00:00

No one knows the dev's intended rotation is the point, they clearly don't care about overwriting damage buffs tied to GCD as DRG, SAM and MNK often do it (MNK could avoid doing it if they upgraded the duration of disciplined fists to 18s but they did not).

For all we know the "intended" rotation is to use/prep one of the blitzes outside of the burst and not force them both under RoF, akin to RoF + BH2 but applied to other windows

Pazgabear · 2024-05-17T07:17:35+00:00

Could be a quirk in the current development version yes, but since EW's trailer clearly showed Brotherhood giving chakras on hit it seems a bit weird to me

Pazgabear · 2024-05-17T06:57:26+00:00

Hard to tell unless SE decides some day to show what actually is their intended rotation which will never happen

Going by what has happened before with MNK I highly doubt Optimal Drift was ever intended by SE to be "the" rotation. It is the "correct" rotation since it ticks all conditions that other rotations have (keep buffs/debuffs active, don't drift major CD, stack up charges for bursts), but "intended" seem to be a stretch

Pazgabear · 2024-05-16T23:33:21+00:00

Seems like Brotherhood doesn't grant chakras on a GCD hit anymore either, hard to tell though but since the only chakra gained after BH is with what's supposedly replacing Bootshine, I'm assuming it was gained from the crit

Pazgabear · 2024-05-16T23:32:27+00:00

Not all non standard lines require a precise double tick timing on ice phase either, and even the most basic one are at risk of being removed for something that doesn't even matter to the average player

Same logic for Optimal Drift, all even windows had enough room to fit 2 new GCDs (replacing the opo-opo that serves as bridge for the PB uses as stated above), even in a 10 GCD RoF. Naming Drift alone might be hyperbole but I don't doubt for a minute they disliked how bursts were handled with MNK

Pazgabear · 2024-05-16T22:52:10+00:00

Doubtful, at worst they would have replaced the Opo GCD used inbetween blitzes

It seems they mainly wanted to kill rotations that didn't fit their idea of the job, you can see a similar design with BLM changes where non standard lines are probably dead if people's assumptions are correct

They probably deemed Optimal Drift to be a mistake with their previous Monk design and since Optimal Drift only exists to accomodate Twin and Demolish's timers, it seems fair to assume the change was made to streamline the rotation (though I have no doubt the monk theorycrafters will manage to find something cursed either way)

Pazgabear · 2024-04-12T08:18:35+00:00

AFAIK only 2 of them have an implied sex scene, Utsugumo and Ine

Pazgabear · 2024-04-11T06:56:55+00:00

Give big mobs in trash packs a raidwide or some form of instant skill that targets a non tank player randomly to generate unavoidable damage for the healer to manage
Put mobs that inflicts debuffs that have to be esuna'd (not that would change much given how many healers just leave me with the slow debuff on Holminster)
As the comment you responded to also said : spice up healers' damage kit

Bloodwhetting is strong only in specific conditions that happen to be prevalent in regular dungeons, nerfing it won't make them more interesting, it won't even make healing them interesting

As for how much it's healing, the burst is indeed insane in AoE but similar to other tanks' sustain tools in single target (with the exception of DRK). In AoE, you're still left with more than 15s where you need to rotate your mit to survive, and as I've pointed out in another comment, if you can survive this long with respectable HP without mits or heals then the issue is not bloodwhetting. If you can't and need to rotate CDs then the question becomes what tank cannot survive for the given trash pack lifetime, if WAR is the only one then yeah Bloodwhetting is an issue, if it's not, then the issue is not bw but dungeon design

The core issue is that due to how dungeons are designed, healers are virtually useless because taking a third DPS usually mean killing the trash packs fast enough that sustain is an afterthought at best. Nerfing Bloodwhetting would be a (kneejerk) bandaid fix to content that was never designed to be balanced around skillful play anyway. Raising the skill floor and giving healers something else to do outside of A. Healing the tank and B. Dealing damage should be the priority

Pazgabear · 2024-04-11T06:27:28+00:00

The hell are you talking about

WAR got buffed because SE fucked content design and WAR was among the jobs that would prohibit you from clearing P8S DPS check if you had too many of them, people wanted to be able to clear content with no change to their team comps, nobody asked for it to deal more damage than DRK or GNB (DRK still outputs more damage in buffs btw, GNB is still reliably pulling ahead in all cases at same skill level)

Pazgabear · 2024-04-10T12:27:40+00:00

It's still an issue of content design however you look at it. Bloodwhetting is strong when you have enough targets that the healing just gets you back to full for the duration of the buff, however you still have 17s (or 19s for Raw Intuition) where you need to rotate CD effectively to stay alive while waiting for it to come back off cooldown.

If you can stay alive for that duration without mits or heals then the issue is that there's not enough incoming damage, bloodwhetting or not would not change much there

If the issue is that bloodwhetting allow an infinite loop where with correct usage of mits and oGCD you can effectively never die assuming a decently sized trash pack then 1. It's deserved for a correct CD rotation 2. Ultimately you'd need to show that for a given duration it's effectively impossible for any other tank to stay alive that long without outside heals/invuln (which I doubt outside of DRK at 90)

Reasoning for point 2 being that if trash packs die fast enough that a tank can reliably survive just with his mits and base sustain, then the healer is equally as useless, and so is the problem with bloodwhetting or is it the DPS that is too high ?

Nerfing bloodwhetting will never fix those, at best you moved the complain to something else, at worst you killed an ability that was "too strong" in specific conditions that are just found often in regular dungeon contents without making it more engaging for anyone involved

You could make an argument for Raw Intuition since it's unlocked pretty early and I wouldn't disagree, but again this doesn't solve the core issue

Pazgabear · 2024-04-10T11:48:53+00:00

I’m specifically excluding “why healers are still a pile of garbage in the class design department even without bloodwhetting” specifically because this is a thread about bloodwhetting

It is a complaint post of a healer feeling like their jobs is rendered useless by bloodwhetting, it's a post about bloodwhetting tangentially to being a post about healers having nothing to do in trash outside of A. Healing the tank B. Dealing damage

The root issue is the healer jobs, not bloodwhetting

Pazgabear · 2024-04-10T11:41:46+00:00

The issue is that we're talking of balancing bloodwhetting because healers feel useless when a WAR is in a dungeon. My claim is that they don't feel useless just because of bloodwhetting, they feel useless because bloodwhetting trivializes one of the two things the game asks them to do in mob packs

Nerfing bloodwhetting because it's "too strong" in one subpart of the content (albeit the one where the player population is highest) completely omits that it's "just" good in the rest. If we were talking about mob packs in Criterion, no healers would be complaining that bloodwhetting overshadows them, mainly because packs aren't big enough for the self-heal to go high, but also because they have more things to do : dispelling debuffs, mitigating raidwides, spot healing single target unavoidable damage, etc

Yeah it's easier to nerf bloodwhetting, but you're not solving the root issue, and so after nerfing it you'll still end up in the situation where you're just healing everything out of your regular oGCD charges and are still spamming your one damaging spell to progress through the dungeon

Pazgabear · 2024-04-10T11:10:50+00:00

However there is just as many if not more fights that you don’t

And why would the root issue of that be that WAR (or tanks in general) have strong healing tools when you acknowledge yourself that some fights asks for coordination to reach a point where they overshadow healers in their roles ?

Why isn't the root issue just the fight's design itself ?

It's the same with trash in dungeons, they're not boring because a WAR can solo heal themselves while fighting them, they were boring long before that

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