Final Fantasy XIV - Kiwi Free Company

[Zeke Von Genbu]

Abyssal Drain is fucking god tier for dungeons though, you can do wall to wall pulls getting 3 or more packs and just pop arms length and reprisal and when you get low hit an AD for a full heal then quietus/spin to win.

Abyssal Drain isn't enough when Warrior does everything you just said except more because Nascent Flash is a godlike ability in wall to wall pulls alongside War's CD suite, to the point where in some dungeons you can premade 3 dps 1 War and succeed. You can just self sustain through the bosses and your dps kill everything so fast. Drk was better at wall to walls when you could Blood Price (blood weapon, but you gain about 5% of your mp every time you get hit) + Dark Arts Abyssal drain back in HW and could Dark Passenger blind everything. You don't get ShB AD enough for it to be that impactful when Nascent is the same except better on half the CD. ShB Warrior is probably the most powerful wall to wall tank we've ever seen relative to what dungeons it is used in.

Oh and Living Dead sucks too much to make Drk truly amazing in wall to wall because you can't invuln ignore them to dps spam unless you use Bene.

In general, things change often enough that jobs will outgrow their stereotypes long before those stereotypes are dispelled in the popular consciousness of the community.

A good example would be WAR. When 5.0 came out, WAR was by far the weakest of the tanks with the added hassle of having a completely different stat priority from the other tanks. This gave it a really bad reputation early on in the xpac and you'll still see casual players trashing it because they haven't kept up with the massive buffs it got in 5.3 and now 5.5.

Another example, but in the other direction, would be SCH. SCH spent so long at the top of the meta in Stormblood that you'd consistently see fairy andys swearing up and down that it was still meta even midway into Shadowbringers. The collective copium bubble from the scholar playerbase didn't really pop until relatively recently.

Scholar is meta in speedkills even now, which is a niche activity I know, because Chain Strategem is a good buff that aligns well with a good amount of raid buff windows which is why like 80% of speed kills use Sch and this ironically is what holds War back because Inner Release has 0 synergy with Chain Strat due to the auto crits. Whm needs more coddling than a Blm to reach its potential because WHM can't move or weave off gcds worth anything because of how much it must use Glare to remain dps optimal. Scholar has its jank, but it is relatively powerful jank because stacking two Asts isn't worth it.

The Scholar playerbase has been bitching about Scholar since SB because they were arguably the best class in HW alongside Ninja and Warrior, and SE nerfed their fairy and their mana really hard in response. You didn't see SB Scholar in 4.0 if you thought Scholar was meta throughout all of Stormblood, it was pretty damn bad but White Mage was worse in SB because their Lily system sucked massive nuts and their capstone ability was a meme. No one is on copium about Scholar, they're fighting for second place pretty much because Ast is obviously the best healer in ShB.

If you want a better example of a job losing its stereotypes ShB Brd in raids while not being meta is extremely playable and reasonably competitive, it even make top end speedkills sometimes, it is just a lot of effort vs using Dancer so people still meme on it. Also SB Mch was relatively bad the entire expansion pretty much, same with ShB Mch sadly enough. That job just can't catch a break since HW ended and its reign over the meta died out.

 

[Übertroon]

I still clench my butt sometimes (as a healer) when some chad decides to pull wall to wall in either Malikah's or Qitana's Ravel, simply because your stats aren't quite overcapped due to level syncs, and some of my SCH tools are not online yet.

I don't play healer, and even I start sweating when the tank says in party chat that the healer is about to earn his recommendations

 

[M3xus]

You're not tanking right if the healer ain't earning comms.

 

[Gravemind]

ALL MOBS, MINIMAL COOL DOWNS, NO DEATHS COWABUNGA PULLS HERE WE GO.

Bruh, what if I need those CDs for the next boss fight? Gotta stagger and cycle that shit. Healers adjust.

I don't play healer, and even I start sweating when the tank says in party chat that the healer is about to earn his recommendations

Why sweat? Just do your DPS AoEs and don't stand in things. You create less need to sweat the more you AoE down while staying up.

You're not tanking right if the healer ain't earning comms.

I almost always commend the healer, even if they can't handle the big boy, big dick pulls. Only time I don't is when they either consistently pretend that they're the Tank, pop Sprint, and pull ahead (when I'm already going to pull ahead anyway), and/or they let me drop to autoattacks during a boss, usually right after a tankbuster, which is a thing that happens just often enough that it makes me sometimes wary of running Expert roulette.

I swear, I've finally noticed such a stark contrast between generally levelling and running Expert in the last two weeks. Dumb as they can be in levelling, people are at least amiable and sociable. In Expert, there's no fun allowed. Everyone EXPECTS big dick, all the time.

 

[CptnSnshn]

You're not tanking right if the healer ain't earning comms.

THE ONLY HP I GOT THAT MATTERS IS THE LAST ONE, NOW HELP ME FUCK ON THESE GOBLINS.

 

[Rubedo]

AV isn't even that hard, just don't overpull, coincounter has some huge-ass 360 swing that will oneshot most classes (worse it's not telegraphed and you have to watch the cast bar while every attack has almost the same name. might be easy to see in moonrunes, but getting the difference between "10 tonze swipe, "100 tonze swipe" and "100 tonze swing" at a glance is a pain in the ass). for the final boss you gotta cleanse yourself. honestly that's stuff you can explain in less than a minute.

and it's not about the loot really, iirc you got extra exp for killing stuff on your level that even stacked, so doing a dungeon on the level it unlocks could give you crazy amounts of exp easily. AV is also the only dungeon in the 47-50 range. with a leveled squad you can just blast through there (although the AI was still infuriately retarded dying to that mentioned swing).

Expect you're not pointing out that AV is one beginner's trap after another. The first room alone you'll have to learn when-and-when to pick your battles and as you said not overpulling, but it's easy to fumble into a overpull position if one member is in a pathway of an add while on-purpose moving to a spot where it's not possible, but dumbasses are gonna be dumbasses and can't control it. Coincounter's easy and he does telegraph his moves like the 10 tonze swipe where he holds it one-handed while his shoulders are telegraphing for a wide swing, Glower he does the standard cliched "charging my eye lazer" pose, and the 100 tonze swing he clinches his club to his chest while looking like he's powering up (which is a good time to stun him). Plus for the first and last boss you still gotta tell them "2 and/or 3 stacks, eat fruit".

The majority of that extra exp is from the Morbol Seedlings and spawning more from the pods, but the majority of the time everyone wants to get AV done and just killing off the pods before they spawn more Seedlings. Which they'll go "they're not worth the extra XP" like dumbasses when the majority of the extra XP comes from the Seedlings/Pods, then again everything in AV is just aggravating to the point that you want to verbally tear someone apart.

 

[Tachibana]

Dungeon meta would be more important if this game actually had hard dungeons. The fact that the XIV team essentially gave up making hard optional dungeons after Heavensward is one of my biggest pet peeves.

Dungeons are easily the most boring content in this game. The only thing that changes are the graphics on your screen. You always pull mobs in packs of 1-3, there are 2-3 packs, then a boss, rinse repeat.

Abyssal Drain isn't enough when Warrior does everything you just said except more because Nascent Flash is a godlike ability in wall to wall pulls alongside War's CD suite, to the point where in some dungeons you can premade 3 dps 1 War and succeed. You can just self sustain through the bosses and your dps kill everything so fast. Drk was better at wall to walls when you could Blood Price (blood weapon, but you gain about 5% of your mp every time you get hit) + Dark Arts Abyssal drain back in HW and could Dark Passenger blind everything. You don't get ShB AD enough for it to be that impactful when Nascent is the same except better on half the CD. ShB Warrior is probably the most powerful wall to wall tank we've ever seen relative to what dungeons it is used in.

Oh and Living Dead sucks too much to make Drk truly amazing in wall to wall because you can't invuln ignore them to dps spam unless you use Bene.




Scholar is meta in speedkills even now, which is a niche activity I know, because Chain Strategem is a good buff that aligns well with a good amount of raid buff windows which is why like 80% of speed kills use Sch and this ironically is what holds War back because Inner Release has 0 synergy with Chain Strat due to the auto crits. Whm needs more coddling than a Blm to reach its potential because WHM can't move or weave off gcds worth anything because of how much it must use Glare to remain dps optimal. Scholar has its jank, but it is relatively powerful jank because stacking two Asts isn't worth it.

The Scholar playerbase has been bitching about Scholar since SB because they were arguably the best class in HW alongside Ninja and Warrior, and SE nerfed their fairy and their mana really hard in response. You didn't see SB Scholar in 4.0 if you thought Scholar was meta throughout all of Stormblood, it was pretty damn bad but White Mage was worse in SB because their Lily system sucked massive nuts and their capstone ability was a meme. No one is on copium about Scholar, they're fighting for second place pretty much because Ast is obviously the best healer in ShB.

If you want a better example of a job losing its stereotypes ShB Brd in raids while not being meta is extremely playable and reasonably competitive, it even make top end speedkills sometimes, it is just a lot of effort vs using Dancer so people still meme on it. Also SB Mch was relatively bad the entire expansion pretty much, same with ShB Mch sadly enough. That job just can't catch a break since HW ended and its reign over the meta died out.

Nothing wrong about WAR being good at something. But it's dungeons. White mage is better than Scholar and Astrologian in dungeons.

I fail to grasp why so many people use "speedkills" as a reference for game balance. The game doesn't reward you for "speedkills", it's not designed for "speedkills", and it's something a tiny minority of the playerbase does. Scholar as a job feels like it's incoherent pieces put together. Aetherpact exists and isn't compatible with Seraph, Scholar has too many buttons that effectively do the same thing, and Energy Drain promotes degenerate playstyles. Whoever is handling Scholar's design has been trying to get rid of Energy Drain for that very reason for two expansions.

When I'm told that people "meme" on jobs, all I think of are a bunch of autists on the Balance Discord spamming handicapped samurai emojis. What does "meme" on it even mean? MCH wasn't "bad" this entire expansion. It was a prime pick on 5.0, 5.1, and 5.2 because of its damage and not having to rely on other people like Dancer (Not everyone has a 99 percentile static). Square Enix had to buff Bard in 5.1, 5.3 and 5.4 for it to become "better" than MCH. All these patches had straight potency buffs for Bard.

 

[Ravana]

People think way too much about the game and its mechanics. Empty your mind like the dragoon and jump and stab your way across Eorzea

 

[Spoonge]

Hit 50 recently as dragoon(road to 70 is great). I've been playing with controller, but strongly considering moving over to keyboard. I like controller a lot for general purpose, but after hitting 50 and completing all available job stuff I looked up rotation stuff, and even after practicing a bit, it just feels bizarre with controller setup.

If you're going to go mouse and keyboard do yourself a favour and get one of those gaming mouses if you dont already have one already. I picked up a steelseries one with two buttons on the side and its a lifesaver once you build up the muscle memory. On my warrior I have the aoe combo mapped to them and its beautiful.

 

[Smug Chuckler]

Dragoon is simple, you haven't seen how fucked up Samurai is.

 

[FencePost]

Dragoon is simple, you haven't seen how fucked up Samurai is.

The rotation is fairly simple, it's just hard as fuck to remember any abilities' names because they're the romanized version of the moon runes; plus most of the ones that are in actual english have the same words in them and thus look identical at a glance and can't stick to my smooth western brain

 

[ZMOT]

Every attack Coincounter does is telegraphed now, and has been for quite some time.

shows how long I haven't played

Expect you're not pointing out that AV is one beginner's trap after another. The first room alone you'll have to learn when-and-when to pick your battles and as you said not overpulling, but it's easy to fumble into a overpull position if one member is in a pathway of an add while on-purpose moving to a spot where it's not possible, but dumbasses are gonna be dumbasses and can't control it. Coincounter's easy and he does telegraph his moves like the 10 tonze swipe where he holds it one-handed while his shoulders are telegraphing for a wide swing, Glower he does the standard cliched "charging my eye lazer" pose, and the 100 tonze swing he clinches his club to his chest while looking like he's powering up (which is a good time to stun him). Plus for the first and last boss you still gotta tell them "2 and/or 3 stacks, eat fruit".

at 47 you should be able to do your pulls properly, you certainly aren't a beginner anymore. pulls are easy when you can literally "pull" them back, the only difficulty here is people bumrushing shit and then aggro adds left and right.
haven't seen the new telegraphs, but back then you had to watch a 2-3 second cast at the top or try to look through all the effects while most people focus on their bar at the bottom. it wasn't really hard either, just annoying.

 

[Sunflower Samurai]

at 47 you should be able to do your pulls properly, you certainly aren't a beginner anymore. pulls are easy when you can literally "pull" them back, the only difficulty here is people bumrushing shit and then aggro adds left and right.

Yeahhh depending on your world/server even people above level 50 or 60 can be complete and utter smoothbrains because they either got carried by a friend or got the road to 70 buff so expecting newbies to be competent at 47 can be too much lmao

 

[Zeke Von Genbu]

Nothing wrong about WAR being good at something. But it's dungeons. White mage is better than Scholar and Astrologian in dungeons.

I fail to grasp why so many people use "speedkills" as a reference for game balance. The game doesn't reward you for "speedkills", it's not designed for "speedkills", and it's something a tiny minority of the playerbase does. Scholar as a job feels like it's incoherent pieces put together. Aetherpact exists and isn't compatible with Seraph, Scholar has too many buttons that effectively do the same thing, and Energy Drain promotes degenerate playstyles. Whoever is handling Scholar's design has been trying to get rid of Energy Drain for that very reason for two expansions.

When I'm told that people "meme" on jobs, all I think of are a bunch of autists on the Balance Discord spamming handicapped samurai emojis. What does "meme" on it even mean? MCH wasn't "bad" this entire expansion. It was a prime pick on 5.0, 5.1, and 5.2 because of its damage and not having to rely on other people like Dancer (Not everyone has a 99 percentile static). Square Enix had to buff Bard in 5.1, 5.3 and 5.4 for it to become "better" than MCH. All these patches had straight potency buffs for Bard.

Warrior is fine to be cheesing dungeons, I'm more pointing out that Abyssal Drain isn't a big deal just because you can emulate Nascent Flash Chaotic Cyclone once every 60 seconds.

You can speedkill anything, this is why speed running exists regardless of if it is broadcasted or not, people will aim to improve their time in something if they like the game enough. It doesn't matter if a game is designed for it, it doesn't matter if Yoshi P himself said speedkilling is gay, people will still do it. You can optimize everything and the harder you push a game that more flaws you can find in its design and balance. While in single player games this doesn't matter nearly as much, in multiplayer games it matters more especially cooperative games where everyone is usually expected to contribute reasonably to the overall success of the group. If all you care about is clearing dungeons and doing MSQ, then who cares if Bard's or Ninja was awful in 5.0? What purpose does balance serve if not to ensure that jobs are reasonably comparable in what they bring based on their pros and cons?

Speedkills being a metric for balance is just one of many ways you can judge it, because if all we care about is clearing Savage at a reasonable pace assuming good player skill then nothing needs buffs unless your job doesn't function well at all (like 4.0 Warrior where your gauge could get screwed up if you stance danced at all). Bard cleared Savage week 1 if you were good enough so did it never need buffs? Monk cleared stuff fine, yet it got a soft rework and has gotten buffs multiple times when it was undertuned relative to its peers. Savage isn't typically tuned high enough anymore to create balance issues by itself unless we bring some other metrics, we haven't had Savage be the sole dictator since Midas at the latest or Gordias if you want a really extreme example. If we want to talk about "meta", which is why I said Sch is meta now citing speedkilling even though I acknowledge as a niche activity, then what "meta" criteria do you consider relevant?

Machinist's actual dps is bad relative to what it arguably should be depending on which percentile we use if it is to be like Samurai and Black Mage. If you go for around the above average ranges we see today it loses to most the melee, SMN, and BLM in actual dps (not raid dps, ACTUAL dps). At best Machinist is a job you pick if your group isn't good at uptime, but that to me is a bad metric because that means the better you group is then the worst Machinist. Bard was in a pretty bad spot until recently sure, but that doesn't make Mch good. If we use E12S Oracle of Darkness, Machinist loses to Dancer in rdps at 50 percentile which is literally the middle of the pack based on these numbers. I don't need 99th percentile to make Dancer better, even if again this is by small margins that ultimately don't inhibit your ability to clear the majority of the time.

tl;dr Speedkilling is one way to judge balance because it is where optimizing shows where the jobs stand relative to each other, and it actually shows it in a mostly positive light if we look at all fights collectively, the only jobs you rarely see in top times is Mch, Whm, Mnk, and War and you usually find half of these only maybe 10 or so seconds apart somewhere. That is 4 jobs out of 17 jobs. If we just use "can you clear Savage?" as a metric, then pretty much nothing needs buffs because Savage isn't as intense as it was back in the early half of HW where balance issues were at their worst.

 

[Gravemind]

Yeahhh depending on your world/server even people above level 50 or 60 can be complete and utter smoothbrains because they either got carried by a friend or got the road to 70 buff so expecting newbies to be competent at 47 can be too much lmao

I never knew how absolutely dogshit other Tanks could be while leveling until I tried leveling a DPS on the side.

I imagine the experience hasn't changed one bit in all these years, even though at baseline the very LEAST of what you have to do consists of spamming your AOE against trash, especially now that Tanks no longer have "muh TP" as an excuse.

 

[Fcret]

at 47 you should be able to do your pulls properly, you certainly aren't a beginner anymore. pulls are easy when you can literally "pull" them back, the only difficulty here is people bumrushing shit and then aggro adds left and right.

This is how it works in theory. In practice, you'll be queued into AV with at least one DPS who eats glue and a healer that hasn't upgraded any of their gear since level 10.

 

[Smug Chuckler]

lol I just did Titan (Hard) with an alt, everyone had a sprout, we wiped four times and I had to argue with a few that you didn't have to attack the bomb rocks that spawn with delayed explosions. Nobody attacked the trapped players except me, healers didn't dispell, one blamed a healer for not healing since he was trapped, other healer was the good old "how do i swiftcast?" type, everyone was spread out making dodging the aoe's more difficult, one tank keep moving the boss around like an idiot while people get cleaved and the other tank fell off the platform and no commendations. fug my life

 

[Gravemind]

lol I just did Titan (Hard) with an alt, everyone had a sprout, we wiped four times and I had to argue with a few that you didn't have to attack the bomb rocks that spawn with delayed explosions. Nobody attacked the trapped players except me, healers didn't dispell, one blamed a healer for not healing since he was trapped, other healer was the good old "how do i swiftcast?" type, everyone was spread out making dodging the aoe's more difficult, one tank keep moving the boss around like an idiot while people get cleaved and the other tank fell off the platform and no commendations. fug my life

Sounds about right. People have been more incompetent at Titan Hard than Titan Extreme for a long while in my experience.

 

[Tachibana]

Warrior is fine to be cheesing dungeons, I'm more pointing out that Abyssal Drain isn't a big deal just because you can emulate Nascent Flash Chaotic Cyclone once every 60 seconds.

You can speedkill anything, this is why speed running exists regardless of if it is broadcasted or not, people will aim to improve their time in something if they like the game enough. It doesn't matter if a game is designed for it, it doesn't matter if Yoshi P himself said speedkilling is gay, people will still do it. You can optimize everything and the harder you push a game that more flaws you can find in its design and balance. While in single player games this doesn't matter nearly as much, in multiplayer games it matters more especially cooperative games where everyone is usually expected to contribute reasonably to the overall success of the group. If all you care about is clearing dungeons and doing MSQ, then who cares if Bard's or Ninja was awful in 5.0? What purpose does balance serve if not to ensure that jobs are reasonably comparable in what they bring based on their pros and cons?

Speedkills being a metric for balance is just one of many ways you can judge it, because if all we care about is clearing Savage at a reasonable pace assuming good player skill then nothing needs buffs unless your job doesn't function well at all (like 4.0 Warrior where your gauge could get screwed up if you stance danced at all). Bard cleared Savage week 1 if you were good enough so did it never need buffs? Monk cleared stuff fine, yet it got a soft rework and has gotten buffs multiple times when it was undertuned relative to its peers. Savage isn't typically tuned high enough anymore to create balance issues by itself unless we bring some other metrics, we haven't had Savage be the sole dictator since Midas at the latest or Gordias if you want a really extreme example. If we want to talk about "meta", which is why I said Sch is meta now citing speedkilling even though I acknowledge as a niche activity, then what "meta" criteria do you consider relevant?

Machinist's actual dps is bad relative to what it arguably should be depending on which percentile we use if it is to be like Samurai and Black Mage. If you go for around the above average ranges we see today it loses to most the melee, SMN, and BLM in actual dps (not raid dps, ACTUAL dps). At best Machinist is a job you pick if your group isn't good at uptime, but that to me is a bad metric because that means the better you group is then the worst Machinist. Bard was in a pretty bad spot until recently sure, but that doesn't make Mch good. If we use E12S Oracle of Darkness, Machinist loses to Dancer in rdps at 50 percentile which is literally the middle of the pack based on these numbers. I don't need 99th percentile to make Dancer better, even if again this is by small margins that ultimately don't inhibit your ability to clear the majority of the time.

tl;dr Speedkilling is one way to judge balance because it is where optimizing shows where the jobs stand relative to each other, and it actually shows it in a mostly positive light if we look at all fights collectively, the only jobs you rarely see in top times is Mch, Whm, Mnk, and War and you usually find half of these only maybe 10 or so seconds apart somewhere. That is 4 jobs out of 17 jobs. If we just use "can you clear Savage?" as a metric, then pretty much nothing needs buffs because Savage isn't as intense as it was back in the early half of HW where balance issues were at their worst.

They certainly don't design the game around "speedkilling". That entire argument is pointless because I can speedrun whatever game exists. If they consider a job underperforms, they'll give it a 10 potency buff in the next patch.

What the fuck does "Clearing savage at a reasonable pace" even mean? If I go on the balance discord, they'll all say week 1, because most of them have nothing better to do in their lives than play this video game.

"X loses to Y" is barely relevant as the DPS differences are minute at best. Why should that inform my decision to play a job at all? FFXIV is a PvE game, not a PvP game.

 

[Fcret]

Sounds about right. People have been more incompetent at Titan Hard than Titan Extreme for a long while in my experience.

Someone told me that players used to pay for Titan (Normal) and Titan (Hard) carries back in the day just because they gate the MSQ. It's mind-boggling how bad some people are.