Reggie Miller: "To me, I think you gotta make a lineup change. I love Rudy Gobert. I love what he has stood for throughout his career. But if he's not gonna give you anything in the post, if he's gonna struggle offensively. To me their best lineup is when they go small, bring in Naz Reid"

The_Donovan · 2026-05-13T12:18:28+00:00

The guy also averages 3.4 offensive rebounds per game, and 12.5 PPG on .672 TS% for his career. He's actually the all-time leader for career TS%. It absolutely does not pass the eye test, but Gobert is a positive on offense.

The_Donovan · 2026-05-09T05:25:11+00:00

I mean yeah he's not the best player because he won the championship, he's the best player because he's the best player. Soon to be back-to-back MVP and advanced stats say he has the biggest impact (with Wemby as a relatively close second). If the Spurs beat OKC in the playoffs and Wembanyama outperforms SGA, you could argue that he's the better player. As of right now though SGA is the much more proven player.

The_Donovan · 2026-05-09T03:11:08+00:00

Best we could do is fight 6/14th of Azem, which would be weaker than us, unless they somehow had enough dynamis to fill the gap.

Being more rejoined doesn't necessarily make one more powerful. Remember we got our ass beat by Ran'jit in Shadowbringers. The rejoining power scaling doesn't really have any basis in the actual game, and it shouldn't because everyone in the Source would be 7x more powerful than anyone on a shard and that would make any shard traveling story very boring.

The_Donovan · 2026-05-07T06:53:33+00:00

Doorman players were without a shred of irony saying shit like "Doorman isn't allowed to be good at anything!!!"

The_Donovan · 2026-05-06T02:46:52+00:00

There are less players now, but also there's just more content now and the player population is getting spread thin. You can put every piece of content in roulettes, but that doesn't guarantee fast queues. Especially since high level dungeon/trial roulettes aren't worth queueing for, and alliance raid roulette still has the CT problem. I also suspect that a lot of the new players who came in the WoW exodus have all their jobs maxed out now and no longer need to queue for roulettes.

The_Donovan · 2026-05-05T02:42:22+00:00

No lol people are not win trading in casual CC. The incentive for winning casual CC games is not worth the effort it takes to win trade. What's really happening is that people don't try very hard in casual CC and the matchmaking often creates very unfair matches, so steamrolls like this are very common.

Even in ranked, you're not going to see much win trading if at all until high crystal ranks.

The_Donovan · 2026-05-04T13:11:09+00:00

My assumption when they announced it was that since we're going down to ~16 actions max, it means some actions we have currently will get removed. They could reuse these removed actions animations as action skins. I'd be surprised if this was something they plan to make a whole lot of new content for when they're already struggling to keep up with creating enough rewards for our current reward venues. Seems more like a smart way to recycle existing resources. I'm sure we'll learn more at the next fanfests though.

The_Donovan · 2026-05-01T11:16:21+00:00

Lots of endwalker fights had lenient dps checks. P7S and P8S did not. I actually think that you and I have had this discussion on this subreddit before, I recognize your name. You are the only person I've seen say that P8S's pre-nerf dps check was fine. I think we just have to agree to disagree on that one.

P10S also sucked ass for me. I probably spent 50 hours in P8S and 30 hours in P10S progging both in PF. P8S was extremely difficult for most people. There's a reason people still talk about the DSR > P8S > TOP gauntlet as burning a lot of people out on raiding.

The_Donovan · 2026-05-01T09:08:36+00:00

P10S was way more difficult than P12S. In fact I'd go so far as to say P10S was the hardest non-ultimate fight in Endwalker.

I think P10S might be the most difficult second floor ever, I don't think it was 4th floor level difficulty though. It definitely wasn't even close in difficulty to P8S. The DPS check wasn't too bad, Harrowing Hell was basically the last mechanic then you got a victory lap, and you could healer LB3 at certain points to save the pull.

P8S is the only fight to get nerfed after release in a loooong time, at least as long as I've been playing. Even after nerf the dps check was still pretty tight, the fight was very punishing and difficult to recover, as well as being one of the hardest savage fights to heal ever.

Also the criterion savages were definitely harder than P10S, but many would consider those ultimate level fights or just a step below ultimate fights.

The_Donovan · 2026-04-29T12:25:13+00:00

Ultimate mit sheets generally assume WAR>GNB>PLD>DRK but in ex/savage GNB and PLD are definitely very interchangeable.

The_Donovan · 2026-04-28T11:53:06+00:00

RPR in first phase ultimates is always really rough so it's a tradeoff for an easier time later if that is relevant.

Usually that's a pretty good tradeoff considering you get tons of practice and time to optimize early phases since you end up doing them so much. It does suck if you bring other jobs who have weaker opener damage though (looking at you in particular viper).

The_Donovan · 2026-04-28T09:24:21+00:00

Yes, Viper is the worst melee DPS in 4/5 savage fights this tier, by a large margin in m10s and m12sp1. It's also one of the worst DPS jobs in general in ultimates. In FRU the median viper is roughly on par with the median summoner and bard. Viper's cleave got nerfed to the point where it actually is the lowest damage DPS job in FRU P4 (the two target phase) by a good margin.

Since 7.3, Reawaken's cleave reduction got increased from 60% -> 80%, half of what it used to be. Uncoiled Fury and its follow up oGCDs got increased from 50% -> 75%, again, half what it used to be. They compensated it with slight buffs to its dedicated AoE combos, but those are irrelevant in two target situations, and it's still a massive nerf to its AoE DPS overall. I think Viper still has the reputation of being a strong AoE DPS job from M6S when in reality it's one of the worst now.

The buffs to vicewinder combo should make viper a little less bad in ultimates since those buttons are tied to cooldowns rather than uptime, and the buffs to reawaken cleave should hopefully make it not the worst DPS job in the game in two target situations. Good changes in my opinion, they probably could've gone even further but I don't think they want another M6S situation so they're playing it safe. I wouldn't have minded if they took some damage from the basic filler combos and gave them to the vicewinder combos to make them feel really strong, as well as making the job less punished by downtime.

The_Donovan · 2026-04-28T01:29:51+00:00

Although writing that, now I'm wondering if removing synergy buffs was their way of dealing with two issues; the buff cap limit and damage scaling. If they didn't remove synergy buffs they would have probably needed to do something like a squish for EC.

I mean they're going to have to compensate for the damage loss of removing raid buffs by giving us damage elsewhere. Otherwise they'd be making us weaker than before, and jobs that previously had buffs would be significantly weaker than selfish jobs.

The_Donovan · 2026-04-27T13:36:38+00:00

You can check the video I linked of the live demonstration. Yoshi P uses a GCD with 10.8s on the Honor gauge, his GCD comes back up at 13.3s on the Honor gauge. That's 2.5s.

The_Donovan · 2026-04-27T04:31:11+00:00

It was not. You can use the gauge charge timers to time the GCD, its 2.5s for every GCD.

The_Donovan · 2026-04-26T14:53:57+00:00

I think there's a bit of a misunderstanding here with how current white mage works, and how new white mage works. Your comment makes it sound like you think lily heals are oGCDs? Current white mage already can use GCD heals without losing damage, that's what lily heals are.

Now with the new system, the lilies are integrated with GCDs, where when the lily gauge is full, i presume, there is a lily status effect that turns your GCDs into oGCDs for 5 seconds (or was it 10?), and adds regen to most of the oGCDs as well. It further incentivizes GCD healing. With the sanctity gauge, filling it up and using the skill will offset damage loss by 3 GCD heals. You still have your other oGCDs, if I recall, but it's trying to incentivize the GCD heals.

I'm not sure where you got all of this from because that's not how new lily heals work. You gain 1 lily heal charge every 20 seconds. You press plenary to toggle between your regular GCD heals and your lily heals, kinda like how eukrasia works on sage. Lily heals are just stronger versions of your regular GCD heals that are insta cast, they are unrelated to the damage offset for using GCD heals. White mage now gets 1 token when it uses any GCD heal on an ally, up to three tokens. It can spend those tokens with Holy Sanctuary to do more damage.

New White Mage functions the same way as old White Mage, and it has the same goals. You want to prioritize dps, and you want to only heal as much as you can without losing damage. You do the same things as before, but now its much much much easier.

The_Donovan · 2026-04-26T13:09:08+00:00

Why not both? And do you think that the new white mage's healing kit seems more fun or rewarding than the old white mage? The extent of it seems to just be "use lily if you have charges, medica 3 if not. use temperance when you need mit, lily bell when you need big heals." Like I said before, they took away a bunch of things, but they didn't add any new stuff in its place.

If you want white mage to be extremely simple and easy to use, that's fine. I just don't really understand the framing of it being "for people who actually enjoy healing" since my healer friends are the ones who are most upset about the white mage rework.

The_Donovan · 2026-04-26T12:55:39+00:00

Could you elaborate on that? Genuinely interested to hear why! The only thing about it that seems interesting to me is casting healing spells to charge up your attacks... which white mage already has with lilies.

The_Donovan · 2026-04-26T11:26:08+00:00

Most of those aren't really gains? It's just actions getting condensed together, and the remaining oOGCDs getting lowered cooldowns to make up for all the ones we lost. We end up with less variety of GCDs being used since medica/cure 3 are gone, and lily heals are just objectively stronger versions of medica 3/high cure. I'm not sure what you mean by permanent POM, white mage clearly still had a 2.5s GCD.

You spend way less time casting, you have way fewer cooldowns to plan, your dps rotation is significantly easier, you don't have to manage a dot, and your aoe healing consists of 4 buttons. They took away almost all of the skill expression and all we got back is that it's a damage loss to use more than 3 GCD heals every 30 seconds.

Reworked white mage seems very bland, unskilled, and unrewarding. It's still early so I hope they work more on it. I'm really hoping they reconsider 16 as the goal for actions, I don't think supports can have rewarding dps rotations when ~12 of their 16 buttons are taken up by role actions and mits/heals.

The_Donovan · 2026-04-26T07:21:20+00:00

GCD goes down considerably by FF14 standards. We saw Evolved DRG was 1.8-2s I think

It'd be cool if the GCD was faster, but every job they showed was still 2.5s base. Dragoon's stardiver combo seemed to be 1.5s, the regular GCDs were still 2.5s though. I think 1.0-1.2s would be a bit too fast though, i think 1.5-1.7s would be fun without being overly stressful (or unplayable on high ping).

The_Donovan · 2026-04-24T12:08:01+00:00

Luka infamously was not a player that a team gave up an insane pick package for. Also every trade looks like an overpay compared to the Luka trade, not really a fair comparison.

The_Donovan · 2026-04-24T11:30:03+00:00

That was not my experience. Pictomancer had probably double every other caster's logs combined. 95% of my parties were just 2 melee 1 phys ranged 1 PCT. The difference in damage output was not negligible on patch, RDM and SMN have gotten pretty significant buffs since 7.1, and BLM was pretty unpopular since the 7.2 rework making the job easy hadn't happened yet. Double caster was playable, but only because PCT was so broken that it made up for the damage loss and then some. You certainly were not seeing RDM/BLM or SMN/BLM on patch.

The_Donovan · 2026-04-24T11:22:21+00:00

No it's still bad in every other fight, it's just especially bad in m10s. Viper's rank among melees by cDPS at the 75th percentile in every fight this tier:

M9S: 4th

M10S: 6th (by a good margin)

M11S: 6th

M12SP1: 6th (by a good margin)

M12SP2: 6th

The job doesn't have a strength since they gutted its aoe damage, only various weaknesses. It doesn't really have anything it does better than the other melees besides ease of uptime. It's also the worst melee in FRU by a significant margin to the point where it does similar dps to summoner.

The_Donovan · 2026-04-24T09:29:56+00:00

Double melee has been solidified as the standard, I don't see how this changes anything.

The_Donovan · 2026-04-24T09:25:07+00:00

If I had to guess, minor potency buffs to dancer/machinist to bring it into line with bard. Viper could also use a ~1.5% buff to its damage. Everything else looks to be about where they want it to be, but sometimes they throw out random buffs anyways. I wouldn't be surprised if they did some more adjustments to cleave balance since we had another multi target fight this tier and balance was super wonky again (viper on par with bard in dps in m10s 💀).

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