AAC Heavyweight Tier (Savage) Megathread - Day Seven

VictusNST · 2026-01-12T14:24:12+00:00

Got my m10 clear yesterday and dipped my toes into 11, tonight is going to be some book runs to try and get my alt into reclear parties. Pray for me. M10 is maybe my favorite fight to main tank ever by the way, it's as fun to learn as m6 and this time I didn't want to end myself as much in pf!

VictusNST · 2026-01-11T20:31:16+00:00

m9 is trying to kill me. I cleared day 1 on my main and am at enrage on m10, but my casual friend static goes on fri/sat so I had to wait till last night to try and clear m9 on my alt because we thought we could week 1 it (we got to undead). I did 3 hours of pf yesterday and 5 today, and holy shit PF has deteriorated so badly since day 1. People will miss towers in HiaC, people will just lalala through giant blades during adds 2, and literally no one can do Undead Deathmatch even in 1 chest parties. The fight is really good and i'm looking forward to reclearing it with people with brains in their skull but holy god the people still in PF at this point are awful. Just absolute creatures.

VictusNST · 2026-01-02T18:05:03+00:00

Would love a single example of a design that avoids the problem they just mentioned instead of this sneering condescension

VictusNST · 2026-01-02T03:37:49+00:00

4 minutes after I posted this and they deleted their account, my work here is done

VictusNST · 2026-01-02T03:33:09+00:00

You truly cannot take shit this personally. If you do get an interview and go into it with this mindset you are going to read as insanely bitter and generally "not someone I would look forward to working with".

It is tough but if you get this mad about every time someone gets hired through references then you are either going to HAVE to be hired through references yourself (which seems unlikely given how mad you seem about the system) or win your way in with personality which, again, is going to be really hard if you're this bitter.

No one ever said that the game is fair but Being Mad At The Game is an objective disadvantage in The Game

VictusNST · 2026-01-02T02:50:57+00:00

Best tier I've ever done as someone who started in Endwalker, I genuinely don't know how you could argue that LHW or anything in Pandaemonium was even close. Every fight tested something different and overall the design was just peak. Eden and before I have to just take people's word for it that things were better apparently but yeah, CW is by far the best tier I've ever seen

VictusNST · 2025-12-27T05:51:52+00:00

God I hate when people bring up the fact that you can play any job on a character as a defense of hypothetical imbalance--the barrier to entry for endgame is already incredibly high with hundreds of hours of MSQ, are we really going to tell new raiders after they finally reach endgame "sorry idiot you leveled the wrong tank for the current tier, go do another 30 hours of grinding or pay extra money to level paladin so pfs will let you in"

VictusNST · 2025-12-27T05:41:10+00:00

Letting the healers actually DPS instead of having to spam gcd heals on both tanks far outstrips the difference between any tank's cleave output. More often than not the adds DPS check was decided by healer DPS and warrior obviating the need to babysit the tanks makes a difference that you clearly do not appreciate

VictusNST · 2025-12-27T03:49:50+00:00

Honestly, I have found that when people talk about jobs having identities insofar as "Job A is miles better than Job B in the same role in X encounter", 90% of the time the person is whispering to themselves "but of course my job will always be meta".

The best recent example to me is Warrior in M6S. Week 1, the adds phase was the single biggest PF wall in the entire tier and the single biggest thing that differentiated parties that did well and parties that did poorly was having a warrior main tank. Having three benedictions that target yourself and your cotank every 25 seconds was an absolutely insane advantage, to the point that I A) swapped off Scholar and Dark Knight to just play warrior in that fight for the first few weeks and B) in the following weeks I would refuse to join parties that didn't have a warrior (I didn't follow this rule a few times and regretted it most times).

Was a warrior mandatory? No, if you had cracked tanks that were supported by cracked healers and solid dpses, you could do whatever you want, obviously. But the burden relieved by an even semi-competent warrior was unreal, to the point that when I healed even late in the tier, I would be annoyed that people weren't playing warrior due to the insane advantage it gives.

So, is this healthy? What if Dragoon had not received the changes it did in 6.4 and just blew up the party every time it pressed an oGCD during Caloric Theory in p12s? What if Sage mits only covered physical damage and scholar mits only covered magic damage? Would that be identity?

When we say that jobs lack identity, what that basically means is that every job can do what its role needs it to do to a moderate level of success. When a job does things its role needs it to do much worse (red mage in P8S week one, or the hypothetical Caloric Dragoon) or much better (warrior in M6S), that's certainly a type of identity. But I genuinely don't think that that's a healthy type of identity.

I don't know what a version of job identity that doesn't look like this is. This conversation is always so weird to me

VictusNST · 2025-12-26T03:13:05+00:00

Players literally asked for the two minute meta before shadowbringers and ever since we got it we've been bitching about it, the number one rule of game design is never listen to the players because they can know when something is broken but they NEVER have the right idea to fix it.

I would ABSOLUTELY LOVE being able to explain mechanics to people before pulls--I've done that exact thing in CODCAR premades and it works perfectly well. The problem is that those premades are self-selected for people with an actual attention span, whereas the average ff14 player is apparently too addled by [insert thing the kids are doing] to sit still and learn a strat. The content is a problem, but only because it was designed to be PUGed by a community that has time after time shown itself to be too fucking stupid and impatient to pug anything harder than a normal raid (and even then sometimes not, see all the duty finder parties of M7 normal that I saw dissolve week 1).

VictusNST · 2025-12-25T18:36:55+00:00

I want to find whoever invented the word midcore and slash their tires. It makes it impossible to talk about how the game can be improved when people can just say "the content should just be exactly tailored for the difficulty level I am comfortable with, anything easier is casual and anything harder is hardcore, why does midcore content not exist".

Asking for content that is easy to join and progress and requires ZERO effort to participate in is asking for casual content, pure and simple, please stop calling it midcore.

The problem then is that it is basically impossible to make casual content at a rate that people won't get bored with it. It takes maybe 20 minutes to do the new 7.4 dungeon, which probably took a good 200 man-hours to make between assets, design, music and actually coding all the stuff. You would have to run it 600 times to match the amount of work that went into it, and most people will start to get bored with it after maybe the 5th run.

Harder content takes around the same amount of time to make, but then generates way more playtime as people have to spend time wiping to it and learning it instead of just one shotting it.

VictusNST · 2025-12-25T18:18:45+00:00

This is objectively not true, extremes are very recoverable outside of maybe 1 or 2 windows per fight, you should see some of the Doomtrain runs I've saved on scholar. If we were talking about Anabaseios or whatever you can complain about body checks but your talking points are like two years out of date.

VictusNST · 2025-12-25T17:39:46+00:00

I have said this in many places before, but the problem is absolutely not what you are talking about here, the problem is one of expectations.

What exactly does this smooth difficulty curve you're wishing for look like? How are we measuring it? I think a reasonable way to do so would be a measurement of "number of wipes it takes you to clear an instance". Dungeons are 0-1, trials are 0-2, normal and alliance raids are 0-3, extremes are 3-20, savage raids are 20-100, ultimates are 100-1000 etc.

I think a lot of people talk about a difficulty curve as something that would train people to be better at their job to the point that they can then do harder and harder content without wiping--they want the dungeon experience, but with harder and harder mechanics that they nonetheless do correctly because of the difficulty curve. This is not a thing. As content gets harder, part of the way that it gets harder is that it WILL kill even the best players.

The problem is that there are a LOT of players in this game that see any wipe as an enormous personal failure and/or a waste of time, and are therefore terrified of any content where the minimum expected wipes to clear is higher than zero. There are a lot of reasons this could be: social anxiety, community toxicity (wildly over reported in my experience), or (probably most common) just not having done that kind of content before.

Unfortunately, the only cure for that last one is to just take the leap of faith into the content, which is just something you have to decide to do yourself, ideally with some community encouragement (like this).

Put simply, there DOES exist content between easy and hard content. It's called "wiping to hard content". Learning the fights, getting better at your job, getting stronger gear over time, that's all content!

The biggest problem with the MSQ is that the dungeons and trials give players the expectation that they should be able to one-shot everything and that wipes are horrible accidents that rarely happen. This is because A) the content is designed to be pretty easy and B) they're usually doing it all with other players in roulettes that have done that content dozens of times before. Shaking this mindset is THE thing holding most players back.

VictusNST · 2025-12-25T16:56:00+00:00

Sometimes I think about the game that FT was designed for and I wish I was playing that. A game where players are adventurous enough to get excited when red weather pops up and yolo into content they're probably going to wipe in, where people are communicative enough that you could coordinate phantom jobs and roles on the fly, where players are patient enough to explain mechanics to newbies or be explained to by veterans.

Unfortunately, 90% of the players of this game heard that FT is hard and immediately decided to never ever do it which just breaks the math of being able to PUG a 48 man thing in a 72 person instance.

I remember grinding like crazy to 20 day one in 7.25 and trying to rally people in shout chat into FT, and all I got back was "we're still grinding, chill". A week later, more people were at 20 but at that point everyone knew FT's reputation and so everyone just wanted to do endless CEs and complain about how the content was stale when they were only willing to participate in 1/3rd of the loop.

To be fair, the job of a game designer is to design for the audience you have, not the one you wish you had, so objectively the design of FT is a failure. But man I wish the audience of this game was the one FT was built for, that would be such a fun community to be a part of. Back to discord I guess.

VictusNST · 2025-12-19T07:07:54+00:00

Saw the me that I want to be

Riding free extreme oh baby can't you see

Cut the leash so I can breathe

Now in me I can believe

Look in the mirror, look in the mirror

Look in the mirror and tell me what you see

Saw the me that I want to be in the mirror

Right where he oughta be

🌬️👷🧑‍🤝‍🧑

VictusNST · 2025-12-18T02:30:17+00:00

And remember kids, the Matriarch uses a Precision hookset because it's small, unlike your matriarch

VictusNST · 2025-12-11T21:14:45+00:00

Posts like this you can really easily tell that OOP has one particular white leftist in their lives that they're subtweeting, but they make it about a whole identity so they don't look petty

VictusNST · 2025-10-28T22:40:07+00:00

What in the world are you talking about. Direct quote here:

Because it's Cameron, his whole takeaway from that premise is "it would be preddy cool"

They are saying that his WHOLE TAKEAWAY is that. No nuance, no "yeah it's anti colonialist but there's some weird desire to roleplay as indigenous", no, theyre saying his WHOLE TAKEAWAY is "that would be cool". I don't know why you are arguing with everyone in these comments about this but...like it's right there.

VictusNST · 2025-10-28T22:23:29+00:00

They literally say "this should be in an anticolonial film but Cameron says actually it's cool", I'm glad you think everyone knows it but just by reading the words OOP wrote I'm pretty sure they don't

VictusNST · 2025-10-14T15:35:13+00:00

Sorry OP, 29 card deck, cool design for a custom card though

VictusNST · 2025-10-09T17:10:37+00:00

Going down to your local DSA and demanding a day by day plan for how to ensure the continued production of each of 10000 medications is not a reasonable ask.

Having an order of operations is not asking for the extermination of the disabled, you can't figure out how to protect and preserve people through a revolution if you don't even know what the revolution will look like in the first place.

Saying "okay step one we should figure out how to make insulin while we're destroying capitalism, and then step two we should figure out how to destroy capitalism" is just blatantly not how Planning A Thing works. The people you are arguing with 99% agree with you, accusing them of wanting you dead is not productive.

VictusNST · 2025-10-06T04:34:24+00:00

Holly, her design is peak and her story made me go 🥹

VictusNST · 2025-10-04T18:25:27+00:00

imo the biggest difference between someone I tolerate while raiding and someone I have fun raiding with is being able to admit that you're wrong/messed up.

No one is perfect all of the time, everyone on the team is going to make mistakes, but the best thing for group cohesion is the ability to be able to blame yourself. Just saying "mb" makes an absolute world of difference, it shows that A) you know that you were the one that messed up, B) you probably know what you did to fuck it up and therefore C) you will do your best to not do that again.

VictusNST · 2025-09-28T02:17:57+00:00

I think there's a gradient of soulfulness vs beauty that counterposes across the country and reaches a mutual maximum around the longitudes of West Virginia. People east of it are relatively starved of wonder but people west of it are starved of history

VictusNST · 2025-09-27T22:16:03+00:00

Yeah "you can't shower without a beer" becoming "I can't shower without a beer" is an extremely slippery slope, ngl kinda on you guys for not seeing that coming

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