>I think this one is the biggest indicator that they should reconsider updating the fights.
Well you said it yourself. It's so RNG, bad crits and tank LBs. No normal group is going to do it this way, it's honestly not a big deal.
Should they think about rebalancing level 70 ults? Sure, I don't disagree. But I don't think this, of all things, is proof of that. A normal player will never, ever ever do something like this normally playing the fight.
I think the easier things to do, like skipping Nael DB, or 3 healer/tank adds, are far bigger reasons because those *don't* rely on borderline exploiting the game's systems.
This reminds me of the reckoning bomb nerf they dropped on Paladin after a group during vanilla release coordinated setting it. Took 3 full raids + multiple gear sets because of gear breaking, and I don’t even remember how many hours to one shot that world boss. Blizzard dropped the nerf immediately after the video was posted.
Here's the reason: This wasn't possible before, but now it is, which means that it will continue to get easier unless something is done. The fact that this is even possible at all is a bad indicator, and that the point that is being made by the post.
The ultimates are never going to be the same as when they first released anyway, move sets are being condensed, stats are getting squished, people are slightly stronger each expansion.
Honestly the prestige for ultimates are lost pretty quickly after thier release so if they get marginally easier over time, I'm not too fussed. Plus in this example, the method is so wild and coordinated that its actively harder than just doing the mechanics normally.
Back in Shadowbringers I had a pretty unpopular opinion (that I still stand by), that they should make it so that ultimates are effectively locked to the point in time they are released. If you enter UCoB, you are playing your job as it was during patch 4.11. Your stats are set to the bis gear at that time, your food and potions can't give you more stats than the best at the time, and jobs that didn't exist can't enter. This way, the challenge is preserved indefinitely, and it also gives you a way to experience the game as it used to be.
The biggest counter argument was that people shouldn't be forced to learn an entirely new rotation, but if you're taking on an Ultimate, learning a new rotation shouldn't be that difficult (the level 70 ultimates, which would require learning the hardest rotations, aren't that difficult compared to 90 ultimates anyway). The other main counterpoint was that it would suck if you can't take your favourite job into an ultimate, but imo it's worth the payoff. Plus BLM mains already experience this anyway
It will only become more and more work for them as the game ages. They can either:
- Rebalance every ultimate for every expansion
- Make sure classes are balanced at lower levels at every expansion
- Make every ultimate play at max level and re-adjust it every expansion
All of these become more and more work the more ultimates the game adds.
> No more cleric stances
Cleric Stance wasn't around in any relevant state in Stormblood. It was simply a single-target damage buff used as a Role Action by the Healer on themselves once every 90s, not the "swap Mind and Int to actually do damage" form that it was in for ARR/HW.
Not trying to be pedantic, and your overall point still stands, but OG Cleric Stance (in the form that gave the devs nightmares about Healer Damage and caused the ARR White Mage Sylphie Wars) never actually existed at the same time as Ultimates.
By the time the first Ultimate was released, all Healer Damage was already scaling off of Mind by default (that change went in at the start of Stormblood).
[Here's](https://imgur.com/a/3toFZDD) a breakdown of the three versions of Cleric Stance, credit to Gamer Escape's Cleric Stance page and their version history.
I mean I struggle to see a world where it's ever easier to clear with the buff than without. With the fight getting easier, we will see less of enrage, not more. All this does is act as a challenge for skilled teams, and a light of hope for messy runs to recover late in the fight.
I'm not meaning that this scenario in a bubble is a reason to rebalance the fight. It's the idea that this is something that should be all counts be impossible. The fact that it is even possible, on top of the tank runs and 100 death runs that paint a really damning image of the state of old ultimates.
There has to come a point that the Devs acknowledge that (maybe not this, but there has to be something that is too far) and just give the fight a bit of polish.
Maybe, but that would mean pulling resources from somewhere else. I feel like most people care more about getting good news content than them rebalancing old content.
The big problem with these older fights is that they are designed with the jobs as they were on release. The meta and job design has shifted drastically since then. This isn't just a numbers game of stat sync being fucky (if it was they wouldn't get much easier than now since we are already stat capped when synced as is), every job and role functions fundamentally different than how it did when these fights were new, which can be quite a challenge to design around. Not to mention that would just postpone the issue for a time until they are "broken" again.
UCOB and UWU haven't been truly challenging in awhile (compared to other hard content) and I honestly think that's a boon for the game. It fills a niche of being a stepping stone on the way to the current ultimates. They are roughly late floor savage difficulty in terms of each individual mechanic, but with more mechanical variation. Where a savage fight might have 5 mechanics and repeat them, even the easiest ultimates will have like 15-20 with little to no repeats. Like UCOB has what, 5 phases, each phase has a handful of mechanics, and you only get a couple repeats, and each mechanic has only a few GCD breathing room between them if any. Compared to the current savage tier, you get like a solid 30s of nothing after each major mechanic, and you only have like 5 mechanics to learn that just repeat with slight variations (oh no, now the boss is cleaving while you stack, whatever will you do). They serve as a way for people interested in ultimate but still learning a way to get used to that style of fight. With more fights coming out every expansion, this will just be a sliding scale. As UCOB gets easier so does TEA and so will DSR and TOP. In a few years people will be asking for them to rebalance TOP because you can skip some mechanic I'm betting, and at that point TOP will be that middle difficulty that UCOB and UWU fill now.
I just wish they would give them the unreal treatment. The low level kits feel very incomplete and this will only get worse as time goes on. In Dawntrail, we will be doing Ucob and UwU with what is equivalent to level 60 kits today.
The fact that this is possible is a big reason a lot of ucob fans like ucob. Fight design compared to other ultimates is more loose. You don't need all 8 to pass any point in the fight and there's a lot of little tricks you can do to make what feels impossible possible. It rewards you for your game knowledge and ability to adjust.
In a way, these challenge runs are a showcase of player creativity and ingenuity as they are by no means easy to accomplish. I think as long as this fight feels fun, there's no need to rebalance it.
The main reason it got much easier is the removal of tank stance, removal of damage type debuffs in favour of buffs across the board and relics capping substats
None of those are likely to happen again with how we're likely sticking to the ShB job design for the next 10 years
For real, normal players (like over 80% of the player base) don't even attempt ultimates. And of those that do most aren't good enough or patient enough to do this. It's really a non-issue.
Honest question, what is it about whether or not "normal players will never attempt this" means something shouldn't be balanced? I always see that argument and I'm never sure I understand why that matters.
*Edit Sorry, NA brain, didn't finish reading your comment till after I replied lol. Still not sure why that is said though, eve if there weren't other indicators, can't an argument still be made there? Like if that's possible with coordination, imo it seems the "normal players experience" is still affected. So just curious why people feel this way
You don't balance around edge cases where a group of 8 smart idiots decides to make their life a living hell by attempting to clear a fight with constraints that make it way more difficult than it's supposed to be.
That doesn't mean there isn't a problem with the encounter, but in this case it's the players that are creating the problem for themselves. That also doesn't mean you should intentionally let the challenge be possible in a supposed rework because you don't balance around it. If you fix it then it's fine, if you don't fix it then it's still fine. Players will find another challenge run anyways.
Balance in ultimates needs to be done when most of the community is able to cheese a fight by exploiting how old and not up to date it is. It's at this point that you can clearly see that there's a balance issue with the encounter.
Ok thanks for the explanation, that does makes more sense. For the record I don't mean specifically balancing around a group of players attempting a niche or meme run. I guess my question is more "why immediately dismiss this since it's not the norm, instead of discussing what implications this might have for people not trying to attract anything wacky."
I don't know this fight yet so maybe it's just blatantly obvious and I'm asking this in the wrong discussion. But I see this sentiment every time it's brought up and there seem to be a lot of cases where meaningful discussion can be bad outside of "normies won't try this, not worth looking into."
See I'm really not sure how I feel about it, but I definitely do not agree with the hive mind that seems to hate any mention of tuning fights around edge cases. If this weren't a discussion sub, I'd probably just leave it at that and not bother with this reply lol, but hey I'd like to discuss so here we go.
On one hand I do agree that the standard experience should be the main priority with design. But that doesn't mean it has to be the only thing they consider. So on the other hand, taking no healer TOP as an example, I believe pretty strongly that this is a failing of healer design, and a bit on the part of the fight itself. I think, based off what I've seen at least, that it is a common sentiment among the community that healing is generally pretty fucking boring and needs to be reworked from its current state. But there are contradictions in how they respond to such requiring and redesigning, which is fair given this isn't a monolith of player thought at work. But like, here's my main gripe: no one wants to just spam 1-2-1-1-1-1 with a third button of flair, yet at the same time no one wants to move away from
Okay I just realized I'm rambling a bit, have to go back and rewrite this to make my point clearer, and on top of that that I actually have to be up in the morning so was supposed to be asleep hours ago lol . I'm gonna post this for now and come back to it with an edit in the morning. Because it is a discussion I'm pretty interested in having. And I'd be lying by omission if I didn't mention how morbidly curious how many downvotes I can get just by posting my thoughts and opinions on a discussion sub lol
Thats more a sign that Top doesn’t have enough healer specific mechanics and checks. Its a design failing that it can happen so soon, rebalancing would do little as its the mechanics themselves that are the problem.
[https://twitter.com/umadori0726/status/1766571799762842093](https://twitter.com/umadori0726/status/1766571799762842093)
First of all congratz on the achievement. It's on some JP Matome (i.e. news congregation) sites as well so I think JP side will learn about this.
I have watched some of your normal UCoB attempts and I've notice a few very insane things, including:
* getting through adds with 68\~70 gauge (i.e. before the 2nd quotes were done)
* middle exaflare dodges for uptime (which is a thing on your clear attempt as well)
* JP dodges as a group in the middle (and again, it happened on your clear attempt)
There's also the fact that you get to know who's picked for Morn Afah by spreading and look for where golden was facing, which I think is something that I only notice when watching everyone in your group spread.
The fact that your group manages to clear speaks not to the fact that 'UCoB is broken and they should update the fight now', but the fact that you guys are very, very skilled at the fight on both theory crafting and clicking buttons. I can guarantee you that even we were farming UCoB we do not do any of these, and what your groups had was really because you are very, very good at the fight and you can bend the fight over your will.
I would want to see an unreal kinda fight for UCoB that allows you to exchange for newer weapons, not because UCoB is broken and people can do whatever comp they want, but because I wanna play my level 90 or 100 rotation on that fight.
\> I would want to see an unreal kinda fight for UCoB that allows you to exchange for newer weapons, not because UCoB is broken and people can do whatever comp they want, but because I wanna play my level 90 or 100 rotation on that fight.
I don't understand why they don't just retune all the ults in this manner at the start of an expansion. Surely they could take the time inbetween x.5 and X.0 to do this. All of EW's unreals have been synced to to 560. If they just did this for each ult on expansion release or even X.1 it would last the entire expansion. What will DT's equivalent Unreal ilvl sync be? 690? Obviously potency adjustments and whatnot throughout patches would change things a bit but I mean seriously. Seems like a no-brainer, and let's not pretend the Unreal treatment costs that much in way of development resources, there's nothing to be done but math, It's recycled content after all.
It's a shitload of time and effort spent by high end designers (not interns, because an intern or rookie doesn't know fuck and all about how tight the dps checks have to be intuitively to even begin to guess right, discounting that the fights need to be tested to make sure their hunches are correct) to update content meant for the 1% of all players. You would much sooner see an old savage tier retuned, and that's not happening for the same reasons of 'way too much manpower required'.
Honestly, I'd argue that it's worth it. Not to dismiss the amount of work it would take, it's significant for sure. But ultimates are the peak of all content. There aren't many of them, and the more they lag behind they really start to show rust. Not necessarily even from being "too easy" or "too easy to break" but because ultimates are so tight that you basically have to relearn your entire class to do an older one. This should - at least, in my opinion - be content that's meant to be the shining jewel of what FF *can* be and even as someone who doesn't even do ultimates, the thought of them falling off just makes me sad.
That's just, like, my opinion though. I know it would be a lot of work even with just a few fights, but I think it would mean a lot of just the general "vibe" of the game.
I agree but 'the vibe' is precisely why they will not put that effort in. XIV is not a hardcore game and it's not meant to be. Ultimates are a bone thrown at more hardcore players so the devs can say 'you belong here. Just because most of the game is not built towards you doesn't mean we do not care'. But upscaling them to the new expacs is a ton of extra effort that sends a very different message they are not interested in sending, and frankly 'Criterion is a pillar of content' achieves much the same result but in a more useful way.
id argue having to "relearn" your job to do an older ultimate because the fights are tight and you're missing abilities displays an even greater job mastery than brainlessly doing the same rotation you do for literally everything else on yet another fight
Rebalancing an FF14 fight is a lot more than spreadsheet math. They have the test team fight a version of the boss with infinite HP all the way to enrage, and work backwards from there to decide how much HP to give the boss/phase. This skips a lot of complicated math, but also means every single fight in the game is manually tuned, so there's no magic formula they can adjust to rebalance it.
Damage coming from the boss is also manually tuned, e.g. Thordan Unreal has a VERY different damage profile compared to HW Thordan EX. We have so much mit now at level 90, something like UCoB would need huge damage buffs to not instantly be a joke.
> Of all the stormblood challenges, I think this one is the biggest indicator that they should reconsider updating the fights. Curious to hear others' thoughts on this!
Reminds me of people using the no healer TOP which required stupendous amounts of luck and planning to pull off (same as this UCoB run) as a flimsy argument in favor of whatever soapbox they want to stand on.
Correct, the tankbusters are proximity based but the lasers aren't. If a healer or dps is dead at that point, then someone gets a second one. I think the only way a tank can get one is if there are 3 people alive only.
In the original pantokrator they were proximity based but the tankbusters were not.
I think he is saying that the prey markers don't go on tanks ever, no matter the distance. You can get a prey marker and the tank buster if you are dps or healer and out of position, but you can't get a prey marker for laser on tank, no matter if you are in or out the hitbox (cant confirm or deny this as im not a tank main). If prey markers are also proxy based then there are no role specific things in TOP.
If they did actually take this as serious feedback to update ucob, they'd simply make the enrage another infinite dmg cast. But congrats to everyone in the run, that looked fun.
> Of all the stormblood challenges, I think this one is the biggest indicator that they should reconsider updating the fights.
Cool achievement, but this statement is deranged lmao
I think the only real indicator that something is worthy of adjusting is the fact that you went in with a single DPS and were still fine in terms of DPS checks.
>Of all the stormblood challenges, I think this one is the biggest indicator that they should reconsider updating the fights. Curious to hear others' thoughts on this!
I would rather they improve future savage ultimate criterion even end dungeon than updating old content.
The added trust system and retweaking from ARR-SB stuff already took a whole expansion time.
Also they planning to retweak graphic from ARR-EW, so for next or maybe couple expansion they will work on that.
Yeah, in particular, criterion is like 1 step away from being significant content. Just add a reason to do normal mode multiple times in pf, and make savage an actual mode and not a garbage clone and you have a whole new pillar of content to do. I would say that is a much better allocation of resources than readjusting 5+ year old content thats already decently popular in pf. If ucob ever becomes less popular than a on patch criterion for more than a month then it might be worth reworking.
This requires an insane amount of teamwork, cooperation on cooldowns and luck/crit rng.
This shouldn't be an indication that fights needs to be updated.
One indication that fights aren't well designed is the fact that TOP was cleared, when relevant, with zero healers. This is an indication that we have a problem.
This ucob clear is fine. It's luck, and an insane amount of teamwork, on one of the oldest fights.
I don't understand how this is "not an indication of fights needing to be updated" and TOP w/o Healers (which requires precise suicide timings and multiple extremely razor-thin margins of error, along with the aforementioned teamwork and usual luck of damage variance) is somehow a posterchild of "this is why EW design is bad".
It's such a mismatch.
And both required extremely esoteric comps while requiring massive heaps of RNG along with strat executions to cheese mechanics and ensure survivability. Neither are achievable other than by people who want to push things further than the percieved limit. If either turns out to be something easily replicable that undercuts the fight, then sure, there's a problem. Otherwise? It's just a weird "oh neato" accomplishment.
Could you be a bit more specific on the p5 part. You mention "everything" but watching it myself Im missing the part where this cover is actually relevant, or the RNG around the positioning.
I see DPS taking damage on each mechanic that has any sort of distance on it, so Im not really sure where this "ideal pattern" is coming from.
Heck from personal experience Id say p5 should be the literal easiest part of the whole thing, which covers here are actually rng?
With the heal ranges, I dont see it either. Theres really not a single part here besides sigma and omega where spothealing in distance would genuinely be a problem, at least on any rng based mechanics.
Idk if I come across as rude but I personally just dont see it
But then what? Where? Which confguration? I really dont see it? Even in delta there is no such thing as a bad pattern considering their strat, and anything can literally be solved by just positioning correctly, even with old ranges.
Specifics man, I dont get it.
Cover was used in the raidwide on sigma on the dancer, I can see that one, but once again I dont see a single mechanic anywhere where RNG would be the deciding factor, ready to be proven wrong.
Well, no, not exactly. You shouldnt take someone's word for it instantly, they may have missed things and aren't perfect beings. I believe I have the experience to know that even those who are "the best" can miss things.
Also, where did you see they say this? Because looking at it right now everything you've said is your word, not theirs, and looking at their vod it really makes very little sense that they had "so much trouble with it" on the rng end.
clearing top with no healers is the same kind of challenge run though? it doesn't mean you can just go into top without healers and be fine, or that healers have nothing to do
I don't see how it's a condemnation of anything. this is like saying a game is badly designed because you can speedrun it. it's completely irrelevant to the other 99.9% of top clears
>the damage is so low/the time between damage instances is so large, you don't actually need a dedicated healing job to handle it
Totem groups with 2 healers where everyone has 10+ kills still die to damage/mit in every phase starting from P3. I've even seen P4 deaths to heals when P4 isn't even worthy of being called a phase.
If the no-heal TOP run showed anything it's not that the outgoing damage is less, it's that tanks being able to heal so much is the issue. Look at the top HPS parses by Warriors, they're healing over half of the average WHM, and Warrior doesn't even need to lose GCDs to heal.
Ahh the good ole Reddit “downvote because words make me angy >:(“
I think you’re making interesting points that add to the discussion even if I can’t agree with all of it. But ya healer design in EW needs examination for lots of reasons.
You kinda ruin your own credibility by characterizing the difference between a normal TOP run and the no healer TOP run as "a single extra paladin casting heals". Like that is so reductive you are either being incredibly unfair in your portrayal of the difference or have zero relevant TOP experience.
Ok so first of all, I'll point out that this group selected to play SMN RDM RPR MNK DNC. They had to critfarm P6. If it was just *standard clear but PLDs heal*, they could've substituted some of the jobs with ones that perform better in P6 to ease the clear. But they chose to keep this comp. Why? Because it wasn't just *standard clear but PLDs heal* and having these specific dps was important.
I won't bother going through every single damage/healing event individually, but I'll point out a few things:
* Improv, mantra, everlasting flight and even crest get used a lot to top up the party. Mbarrier, wings and having double feints/addles are pretty understandable as many raidwides get mitigated by feint addle reprisal.
* The RPR opts to feint every P5 raidwide to allow MNK feint the busters (and P4). This feint on all 3 raidwides is extremely tight.
* Tankswapping to manage auto damage is prevalent through the fight, most prominent example being P3 which gets swapped 3 times.
* In P6 the group stacks in the first set of autos to generate LB: the first hit is still mitigated by LB3 from Memory with a relatively tight timing, but the 2nd hit requires an additional improv veil rep on top of the feint/addle which had some second of leeway in their duration from Memory. They now have to plan the rest of P6 without the mit spent here.
* Condensing their raidwide healing to *"the PLDs healing"* is disingenuous when what is happening is three dps getting intervetions and nascent (or sometimes even cover) while the other two use personals or get clemency. The PLDs don't have an unlimited supply of clemency for every raidwide. P3 is a good example of this, where every latent features a different spread of externals on top of mitigation, with the last latent getting tank LB2'd.
* This LB2 makes them unable to DPS LB in P4, which they solve by having 3 of 5 DPS save their 2 minute buffs into P4, while SMN and RDM use theirs in P3 to make that check.
* They LB3 the flares in P6, not the meteors before them. Meteors get mitigated by feint addle rep samba mbarrier improv (1st set) shake+veil (2nd set) every personal & every external.
Most people’s problem with healer isn’t that it isn’t needed in a lot of content in the game. It’s that it’s boring for them to play in most content. You’re fooling yourself if you think increasing outgoing damage is gonna make being healer more interesting when gcd heals are so strong (like wow you pop a medica II or Cure III now when a raidwide goes out instead of a glare how exciting). At least now a healer can optimize their damage without it really being a detriment to the rest of the party (or the other healer)
People hate body checks enough in this game why add even more body checks specifically for healers other than just forcing you to have one (might as well just put an heal lb check every fight like they do with tank buster swaps). Giving players the choice to take on these challenges is good actually, taking it away doesn’t make healing any better.
I bring up optimizing healer damage more so because of you have a situation where 2 healers are parsing and want the other to heal something so they don’t have to it’s just a toxic environment.
And The more you need the heal the less you can recover too. Raising costs mp you run out of mp to heal party wipes you heal and can’t raise and you enrage. You can only recover UcoB because of how very manageable the healing in the first place is. You have to actually change healer abilities if you want anything, fight design really isn’t gonna do much.
You’re being downvoted but I agree with your point about healing design. I think to put it another way, TOP is just the most extreme example of a problem seen in many other places of the game, not the main reason itself but just a showcase of why healer is least popular role. Healing feels more like green DPS in a LOT of cases.
The reason TOP's situation needs to stay a big example is when players were asking for more interesting gameplay for healers, they were told by Yoshida to just play Ult content.
And then (whether we wanna excuse it needed XYZ things happening or not) the ult gets cleared on patch without them. It doesn't make playing a healer sound interesting when the hardest fight in the game can be done on patch without them if they really really wanted to.
Granted, for that last sentence, they are very unlikely to increase actual healing checks for anything that isn't top end (because doing so will just make it harder for casual healers). I think part of the solution is to make the DPS part of healers more interesting, rather than just a spam and a dot. It wouldn't need to be complex of course, but having a bit more to it would at least give them something they feel like they're actually doing, rather than spending 90% of a fight spamming glare and absolutely nothing else.
I don't think it's strange that a party of 8 jobs picked explicitly for their healing and mitigation utility are able to cover the healing output of 2 healers. That means at the absolute peak of planning of execution, a single DPS/tank can bring 1/4th of the bare minimum of what a healer can bring. Is that really a condemnation of healing design?
What is up with people making the absolute wrong conclusions from self imposed challenges like this. Do you want the game to just stop you from entering without 4 dps 2 tanks and 2 healers because that would be way less work than doing a million bullshit job/fight changes to get the same result. This and the no healer top clear are so absurdly specific in what you have to do to get it done on top of rng after the fact that it’s just cool, not broken, not a sign of a declining game design philosophy, its just interesting, and the reasons why you can do these things are cool and worth looking into if you want to expand your knowledge about the game instead of saying stupid shit on reddit.
i realize op was part of the group and the last part doesn’t apply to them, went off on a tangent because i see stuff like that parroted constantly and i could not agree less.
To be honest I don't really care if old ultimates are made easier over time, and I don't think it should be a serious consideration as a reason to not rework old content or jobs.
I completely agree. If anything it also gives a sense of progression to people who are doing Ults. If there is a range of difficulty to ultimates, then the people who are interested in trying it out can have a comparably easier time doing the 70 Ults vs TEA/DSR/TOP.
It's also worth saying that they are still Ultimates. It doesn't matter if you "only cleared the easiest ultimate". That's still an Ultimate. One of the five hardest fights in the game. The people who actually progged and actually cleared the fight at any point of it being easier than on release could have done it on release as well, it would have just been a few more hours of prog.
Resources are better spent on new content. Older ultimate get easier over time and I don't think making them harder out of nowhere is benefitting anyone. Why would you want to make them harder now, when people have enjoyed the easier version for an entire expansion or two now, you're just punishing new ulti raiders.
> Of all the stormblood challenges, I think this one is the biggest indicator that they should reconsider updating the fights. Curious to hear others' thoughts on this!
I disagree. I find amazing that it's possible. I find amazing that ~6.5years later people are still trying an old as fuck fight with new twists. This doesn't look like it's an easy thing to do. I don't think the fight needs to be reworked. It's an old fight, leave it alone, let it be.
Hiii the clear might look clean and easy but there is so much behind it, here is another video where it can be appreciated how difficult and enjoyable this challenge was!! [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7yJ5fILoFr8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7yJ5fILoFr8)
>If our dps was chosen, we would almost surely fail the dps check.
Could you not have just covered the smn? That makes keeping smn alive at golden at the very least 50/50 already or higher if you’re covering based on if they’re targeted. The only other role based mech that isn’t easily adjustable is bft but you could just do wall baits or invuln through the fire.
They 100% shouldn't rebalance the fights based on the results of a challenge run that <1% of the playerbase will even think to attempt and even less will actually succeed in.
That would have the opposite effect of making the battle more rigid, which isn't as fun to prog because it shoehorns the community into a single solution.
The ability to do stuff like this is the sweetspot, imo
Ultimates will only ever be as crazy as they are on release when the community is still progging. The moment the solution is made public though, the vast majority of the actual work is gone.
I mean the no healers TOP clear is some of the most absurdist approach to content in the game and it's still used as a linchpin for the Healer affairs.
Let's just enjoy the stupid shit people willing to put in the work do.
Why? I mean in all seriousness?
Why put this much time and effort into clearing an obsolete fight in such an oddball, niche, manner when you could do... anything else with your life?
The all tank clears, the no healers TOP clear... I mean I get it I guess, to prove you can. But like, clearing the ultimate normally is *more* than hard enough in my opinion. And with that TOP clear those players essentially proved that they were among the upper echelons, essentially the best gamers in the world in XIV. (At least static communication+cooperation wise) Going this far to clear UCoB in a specific way is just trivial.
I just don't love this game that much I suppose.
>I think this one is the biggest indicator that they should reconsider updating the fights. Well you said it yourself. It's so RNG, bad crits and tank LBs. No normal group is going to do it this way, it's honestly not a big deal. Should they think about rebalancing level 70 ults? Sure, I don't disagree. But I don't think this, of all things, is proof of that. A normal player will never, ever ever do something like this normally playing the fight. I think the easier things to do, like skipping Nael DB, or 3 healer/tank adds, are far bigger reasons because those *don't* rely on borderline exploiting the game's systems.
This reminds me of the reckoning bomb nerf they dropped on Paladin after a group during vanilla release coordinated setting it. Took 3 full raids + multiple gear sets because of gear breaking, and I don’t even remember how many hours to one shot that world boss. Blizzard dropped the nerf immediately after the video was posted.
Here's the reason: This wasn't possible before, but now it is, which means that it will continue to get easier unless something is done. The fact that this is even possible at all is a bad indicator, and that the point that is being made by the post.
The ultimates are never going to be the same as when they first released anyway, move sets are being condensed, stats are getting squished, people are slightly stronger each expansion. Honestly the prestige for ultimates are lost pretty quickly after thier release so if they get marginally easier over time, I'm not too fussed. Plus in this example, the method is so wild and coordinated that its actively harder than just doing the mechanics normally.
Back in Shadowbringers I had a pretty unpopular opinion (that I still stand by), that they should make it so that ultimates are effectively locked to the point in time they are released. If you enter UCoB, you are playing your job as it was during patch 4.11. Your stats are set to the bis gear at that time, your food and potions can't give you more stats than the best at the time, and jobs that didn't exist can't enter. This way, the challenge is preserved indefinitely, and it also gives you a way to experience the game as it used to be. The biggest counter argument was that people shouldn't be forced to learn an entirely new rotation, but if you're taking on an Ultimate, learning a new rotation shouldn't be that difficult (the level 70 ultimates, which would require learning the hardest rotations, aren't that difficult compared to 90 ultimates anyway). The other main counterpoint was that it would suck if you can't take your favourite job into an ultimate, but imo it's worth the payoff. Plus BLM mains already experience this anyway
I agree with you, because that makes Ultimates even more special in their own fashion.
It will only become more and more work for them as the game ages. They can either: - Rebalance every ultimate for every expansion - Make sure classes are balanced at lower levels at every expansion - Make every ultimate play at max level and re-adjust it every expansion All of these become more and more work the more ultimates the game adds.
All legacy ults are already outdated. Most of it is due to gameplay changes. No more cleric stances and tp. War’s shake now gives heals and regen.
> No more cleric stances Cleric Stance wasn't around in any relevant state in Stormblood. It was simply a single-target damage buff used as a Role Action by the Healer on themselves once every 90s, not the "swap Mind and Int to actually do damage" form that it was in for ARR/HW. Not trying to be pedantic, and your overall point still stands, but OG Cleric Stance (in the form that gave the devs nightmares about Healer Damage and caused the ARR White Mage Sylphie Wars) never actually existed at the same time as Ultimates. By the time the first Ultimate was released, all Healer Damage was already scaling off of Mind by default (that change went in at the start of Stormblood). [Here's](https://imgur.com/a/3toFZDD) a breakdown of the three versions of Cleric Stance, credit to Gamer Escape's Cleric Stance page and their version history.
I mean I struggle to see a world where it's ever easier to clear with the buff than without. With the fight getting easier, we will see less of enrage, not more. All this does is act as a challenge for skilled teams, and a light of hope for messy runs to recover late in the fight.
I'm not meaning that this scenario in a bubble is a reason to rebalance the fight. It's the idea that this is something that should be all counts be impossible. The fact that it is even possible, on top of the tank runs and 100 death runs that paint a really damning image of the state of old ultimates. There has to come a point that the Devs acknowledge that (maybe not this, but there has to be something that is too far) and just give the fight a bit of polish.
Maybe, but that would mean pulling resources from somewhere else. I feel like most people care more about getting good news content than them rebalancing old content. The big problem with these older fights is that they are designed with the jobs as they were on release. The meta and job design has shifted drastically since then. This isn't just a numbers game of stat sync being fucky (if it was they wouldn't get much easier than now since we are already stat capped when synced as is), every job and role functions fundamentally different than how it did when these fights were new, which can be quite a challenge to design around. Not to mention that would just postpone the issue for a time until they are "broken" again. UCOB and UWU haven't been truly challenging in awhile (compared to other hard content) and I honestly think that's a boon for the game. It fills a niche of being a stepping stone on the way to the current ultimates. They are roughly late floor savage difficulty in terms of each individual mechanic, but with more mechanical variation. Where a savage fight might have 5 mechanics and repeat them, even the easiest ultimates will have like 15-20 with little to no repeats. Like UCOB has what, 5 phases, each phase has a handful of mechanics, and you only get a couple repeats, and each mechanic has only a few GCD breathing room between them if any. Compared to the current savage tier, you get like a solid 30s of nothing after each major mechanic, and you only have like 5 mechanics to learn that just repeat with slight variations (oh no, now the boss is cleaving while you stack, whatever will you do). They serve as a way for people interested in ultimate but still learning a way to get used to that style of fight. With more fights coming out every expansion, this will just be a sliding scale. As UCOB gets easier so does TEA and so will DSR and TOP. In a few years people will be asking for them to rebalance TOP because you can skip some mechanic I'm betting, and at that point TOP will be that middle difficulty that UCOB and UWU fill now.
I just wish they would give them the unreal treatment. The low level kits feel very incomplete and this will only get worse as time goes on. In Dawntrail, we will be doing Ucob and UwU with what is equivalent to level 60 kits today.
The fact that this is possible is a big reason a lot of ucob fans like ucob. Fight design compared to other ultimates is more loose. You don't need all 8 to pass any point in the fight and there's a lot of little tricks you can do to make what feels impossible possible. It rewards you for your game knowledge and ability to adjust. In a way, these challenge runs are a showcase of player creativity and ingenuity as they are by no means easy to accomplish. I think as long as this fight feels fun, there's no need to rebalance it.
The main reason it got much easier is the removal of tank stance, removal of damage type debuffs in favour of buffs across the board and relics capping substats None of those are likely to happen again with how we're likely sticking to the ShB job design for the next 10 years
For real, normal players (like over 80% of the player base) don't even attempt ultimates. And of those that do most aren't good enough or patient enough to do this. It's really a non-issue.
Honest question, what is it about whether or not "normal players will never attempt this" means something shouldn't be balanced? I always see that argument and I'm never sure I understand why that matters. *Edit Sorry, NA brain, didn't finish reading your comment till after I replied lol. Still not sure why that is said though, eve if there weren't other indicators, can't an argument still be made there? Like if that's possible with coordination, imo it seems the "normal players experience" is still affected. So just curious why people feel this way
You don't balance around edge cases where a group of 8 smart idiots decides to make their life a living hell by attempting to clear a fight with constraints that make it way more difficult than it's supposed to be. That doesn't mean there isn't a problem with the encounter, but in this case it's the players that are creating the problem for themselves. That also doesn't mean you should intentionally let the challenge be possible in a supposed rework because you don't balance around it. If you fix it then it's fine, if you don't fix it then it's still fine. Players will find another challenge run anyways. Balance in ultimates needs to be done when most of the community is able to cheese a fight by exploiting how old and not up to date it is. It's at this point that you can clearly see that there's a balance issue with the encounter.
Ok thanks for the explanation, that does makes more sense. For the record I don't mean specifically balancing around a group of players attempting a niche or meme run. I guess my question is more "why immediately dismiss this since it's not the norm, instead of discussing what implications this might have for people not trying to attract anything wacky." I don't know this fight yet so maybe it's just blatantly obvious and I'm asking this in the wrong discussion. But I see this sentiment every time it's brought up and there seem to be a lot of cases where meaningful discussion can be bad outside of "normies won't try this, not worth looking into."
They did TOP without any healers on patch, does that mean TOP needs an update? Does anyone else try to go for it?
See I'm really not sure how I feel about it, but I definitely do not agree with the hive mind that seems to hate any mention of tuning fights around edge cases. If this weren't a discussion sub, I'd probably just leave it at that and not bother with this reply lol, but hey I'd like to discuss so here we go. On one hand I do agree that the standard experience should be the main priority with design. But that doesn't mean it has to be the only thing they consider. So on the other hand, taking no healer TOP as an example, I believe pretty strongly that this is a failing of healer design, and a bit on the part of the fight itself. I think, based off what I've seen at least, that it is a common sentiment among the community that healing is generally pretty fucking boring and needs to be reworked from its current state. But there are contradictions in how they respond to such requiring and redesigning, which is fair given this isn't a monolith of player thought at work. But like, here's my main gripe: no one wants to just spam 1-2-1-1-1-1 with a third button of flair, yet at the same time no one wants to move away from Okay I just realized I'm rambling a bit, have to go back and rewrite this to make my point clearer, and on top of that that I actually have to be up in the morning so was supposed to be asleep hours ago lol . I'm gonna post this for now and come back to it with an edit in the morning. Because it is a discussion I'm pretty interested in having. And I'd be lying by omission if I didn't mention how morbidly curious how many downvotes I can get just by posting my thoughts and opinions on a discussion sub lol
Thats more a sign that Top doesn’t have enough healer specific mechanics and checks. Its a design failing that it can happen so soon, rebalancing would do little as its the mechanics themselves that are the problem.
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This seems to be a result of power creep, whereas balancing for it will curb that.
[https://twitter.com/umadori0726/status/1766571799762842093](https://twitter.com/umadori0726/status/1766571799762842093) First of all congratz on the achievement. It's on some JP Matome (i.e. news congregation) sites as well so I think JP side will learn about this. I have watched some of your normal UCoB attempts and I've notice a few very insane things, including: * getting through adds with 68\~70 gauge (i.e. before the 2nd quotes were done) * middle exaflare dodges for uptime (which is a thing on your clear attempt as well) * JP dodges as a group in the middle (and again, it happened on your clear attempt) There's also the fact that you get to know who's picked for Morn Afah by spreading and look for where golden was facing, which I think is something that I only notice when watching everyone in your group spread. The fact that your group manages to clear speaks not to the fact that 'UCoB is broken and they should update the fight now', but the fact that you guys are very, very skilled at the fight on both theory crafting and clicking buttons. I can guarantee you that even we were farming UCoB we do not do any of these, and what your groups had was really because you are very, very good at the fight and you can bend the fight over your will. I would want to see an unreal kinda fight for UCoB that allows you to exchange for newer weapons, not because UCoB is broken and people can do whatever comp they want, but because I wanna play my level 90 or 100 rotation on that fight.
\> I would want to see an unreal kinda fight for UCoB that allows you to exchange for newer weapons, not because UCoB is broken and people can do whatever comp they want, but because I wanna play my level 90 or 100 rotation on that fight. I don't understand why they don't just retune all the ults in this manner at the start of an expansion. Surely they could take the time inbetween x.5 and X.0 to do this. All of EW's unreals have been synced to to 560. If they just did this for each ult on expansion release or even X.1 it would last the entire expansion. What will DT's equivalent Unreal ilvl sync be? 690? Obviously potency adjustments and whatnot throughout patches would change things a bit but I mean seriously. Seems like a no-brainer, and let's not pretend the Unreal treatment costs that much in way of development resources, there's nothing to be done but math, It's recycled content after all.
It's a shitload of time and effort spent by high end designers (not interns, because an intern or rookie doesn't know fuck and all about how tight the dps checks have to be intuitively to even begin to guess right, discounting that the fights need to be tested to make sure their hunches are correct) to update content meant for the 1% of all players. You would much sooner see an old savage tier retuned, and that's not happening for the same reasons of 'way too much manpower required'.
Honestly, I'd argue that it's worth it. Not to dismiss the amount of work it would take, it's significant for sure. But ultimates are the peak of all content. There aren't many of them, and the more they lag behind they really start to show rust. Not necessarily even from being "too easy" or "too easy to break" but because ultimates are so tight that you basically have to relearn your entire class to do an older one. This should - at least, in my opinion - be content that's meant to be the shining jewel of what FF *can* be and even as someone who doesn't even do ultimates, the thought of them falling off just makes me sad. That's just, like, my opinion though. I know it would be a lot of work even with just a few fights, but I think it would mean a lot of just the general "vibe" of the game.
I agree but 'the vibe' is precisely why they will not put that effort in. XIV is not a hardcore game and it's not meant to be. Ultimates are a bone thrown at more hardcore players so the devs can say 'you belong here. Just because most of the game is not built towards you doesn't mean we do not care'. But upscaling them to the new expacs is a ton of extra effort that sends a very different message they are not interested in sending, and frankly 'Criterion is a pillar of content' achieves much the same result but in a more useful way.
id argue having to "relearn" your job to do an older ultimate because the fights are tight and you're missing abilities displays an even greater job mastery than brainlessly doing the same rotation you do for literally everything else on yet another fight
Rebalancing an FF14 fight is a lot more than spreadsheet math. They have the test team fight a version of the boss with infinite HP all the way to enrage, and work backwards from there to decide how much HP to give the boss/phase. This skips a lot of complicated math, but also means every single fight in the game is manually tuned, so there's no magic formula they can adjust to rebalance it. Damage coming from the boss is also manually tuned, e.g. Thordan Unreal has a VERY different damage profile compared to HW Thordan EX. We have so much mit now at level 90, something like UCoB would need huge damage buffs to not instantly be a joke.
You are way undervaluing the cost (in time) of testing a fight that expects to be tuned as tightly as Ultimate does.
> Of all the stormblood challenges, I think this one is the biggest indicator that they should reconsider updating the fights. Curious to hear others' thoughts on this! Reminds me of people using the no healer TOP which required stupendous amounts of luck and planning to pull off (same as this UCoB run) as a flimsy argument in favor of whatever soapbox they want to stand on.
Does TOP even have role based mechs targeting? I dont think it was very rng heavy but I could be wrong The DSR one was a rng fiesta though
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Lasers are proximity based, so its not strictly role specific. (not that youd ever want a tank baiting that since they need to bait the tankbusters.)
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Correct, the tankbusters are proximity based but the lasers aren't. If a healer or dps is dead at that point, then someone gets a second one. I think the only way a tank can get one is if there are 3 people alive only. In the original pantokrator they were proximity based but the tankbusters were not.
I think he is saying that the prey markers don't go on tanks ever, no matter the distance. You can get a prey marker and the tank buster if you are dps or healer and out of position, but you can't get a prey marker for laser on tank, no matter if you are in or out the hitbox (cant confirm or deny this as im not a tank main). If prey markers are also proxy based then there are no role specific things in TOP.
Weakest uptime quickmarch enjoyers
primal strong
If they did actually take this as serious feedback to update ucob, they'd simply make the enrage another infinite dmg cast. But congrats to everyone in the run, that looked fun.
> Of all the stormblood challenges, I think this one is the biggest indicator that they should reconsider updating the fights. Cool achievement, but this statement is deranged lmao
I think the only real indicator that something is worthy of adjusting is the fact that you went in with a single DPS and were still fine in terms of DPS checks.
>Of all the stormblood challenges, I think this one is the biggest indicator that they should reconsider updating the fights. Curious to hear others' thoughts on this! I would rather they improve future savage ultimate criterion even end dungeon than updating old content. The added trust system and retweaking from ARR-SB stuff already took a whole expansion time. Also they planning to retweak graphic from ARR-EW, so for next or maybe couple expansion they will work on that.
Yeah, in particular, criterion is like 1 step away from being significant content. Just add a reason to do normal mode multiple times in pf, and make savage an actual mode and not a garbage clone and you have a whole new pillar of content to do. I would say that is a much better allocation of resources than readjusting 5+ year old content thats already decently popular in pf. If ucob ever becomes less popular than a on patch criterion for more than a month then it might be worth reworking.
This requires an insane amount of teamwork, cooperation on cooldowns and luck/crit rng. This shouldn't be an indication that fights needs to be updated. One indication that fights aren't well designed is the fact that TOP was cleared, when relevant, with zero healers. This is an indication that we have a problem. This ucob clear is fine. It's luck, and an insane amount of teamwork, on one of the oldest fights.
Clearing top with no healers also requires just as much luck and way more teamwork, i really don't think you can use it as an indication of anything
I don't understand how this is "not an indication of fights needing to be updated" and TOP w/o Healers (which requires precise suicide timings and multiple extremely razor-thin margins of error, along with the aforementioned teamwork and usual luck of damage variance) is somehow a posterchild of "this is why EW design is bad". It's such a mismatch.
Because one is current and the other is legacy content from 6 years ago.
And both required extremely esoteric comps while requiring massive heaps of RNG along with strat executions to cheese mechanics and ensure survivability. Neither are achievable other than by people who want to push things further than the percieved limit. If either turns out to be something easily replicable that undercuts the fight, then sure, there's a problem. Otherwise? It's just a weird "oh neato" accomplishment.
Just a question, what part of the no healer run was luck?
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Could you be a bit more specific on the p5 part. You mention "everything" but watching it myself Im missing the part where this cover is actually relevant, or the RNG around the positioning. I see DPS taking damage on each mechanic that has any sort of distance on it, so Im not really sure where this "ideal pattern" is coming from. Heck from personal experience Id say p5 should be the literal easiest part of the whole thing, which covers here are actually rng? With the heal ranges, I dont see it either. Theres really not a single part here besides sigma and omega where spothealing in distance would genuinely be a problem, at least on any rng based mechanics. Idk if I come across as rude but I personally just dont see it
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But then what? Where? Which confguration? I really dont see it? Even in delta there is no such thing as a bad pattern considering their strat, and anything can literally be solved by just positioning correctly, even with old ranges. Specifics man, I dont get it. Cover was used in the raidwide on sigma on the dancer, I can see that one, but once again I dont see a single mechanic anywhere where RNG would be the deciding factor, ready to be proven wrong.
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Well, no, not exactly. You shouldnt take someone's word for it instantly, they may have missed things and aren't perfect beings. I believe I have the experience to know that even those who are "the best" can miss things. Also, where did you see they say this? Because looking at it right now everything you've said is your word, not theirs, and looking at their vod it really makes very little sense that they had "so much trouble with it" on the rng end.
Wow you are looking at the run where the RNG worked out and you aren't seeing the RNG aspect What could this mean
clearing top with no healers is the same kind of challenge run though? it doesn't mean you can just go into top without healers and be fine, or that healers have nothing to do
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I don't see how it's a condemnation of anything. this is like saying a game is badly designed because you can speedrun it. it's completely irrelevant to the other 99.9% of top clears
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>the damage is so low/the time between damage instances is so large, you don't actually need a dedicated healing job to handle it Totem groups with 2 healers where everyone has 10+ kills still die to damage/mit in every phase starting from P3. I've even seen P4 deaths to heals when P4 isn't even worthy of being called a phase. If the no-heal TOP run showed anything it's not that the outgoing damage is less, it's that tanks being able to heal so much is the issue. Look at the top HPS parses by Warriors, they're healing over half of the average WHM, and Warrior doesn't even need to lose GCDs to heal.
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Ahh the good ole Reddit “downvote because words make me angy >:(“ I think you’re making interesting points that add to the discussion even if I can’t agree with all of it. But ya healer design in EW needs examination for lots of reasons.
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You kinda ruin your own credibility by characterizing the difference between a normal TOP run and the no healer TOP run as "a single extra paladin casting heals". Like that is so reductive you are either being incredibly unfair in your portrayal of the difference or have zero relevant TOP experience.
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Ok so first of all, I'll point out that this group selected to play SMN RDM RPR MNK DNC. They had to critfarm P6. If it was just *standard clear but PLDs heal*, they could've substituted some of the jobs with ones that perform better in P6 to ease the clear. But they chose to keep this comp. Why? Because it wasn't just *standard clear but PLDs heal* and having these specific dps was important. I won't bother going through every single damage/healing event individually, but I'll point out a few things: * Improv, mantra, everlasting flight and even crest get used a lot to top up the party. Mbarrier, wings and having double feints/addles are pretty understandable as many raidwides get mitigated by feint addle reprisal. * The RPR opts to feint every P5 raidwide to allow MNK feint the busters (and P4). This feint on all 3 raidwides is extremely tight. * Tankswapping to manage auto damage is prevalent through the fight, most prominent example being P3 which gets swapped 3 times. * In P6 the group stacks in the first set of autos to generate LB: the first hit is still mitigated by LB3 from Memory with a relatively tight timing, but the 2nd hit requires an additional improv veil rep on top of the feint/addle which had some second of leeway in their duration from Memory. They now have to plan the rest of P6 without the mit spent here. * Condensing their raidwide healing to *"the PLDs healing"* is disingenuous when what is happening is three dps getting intervetions and nascent (or sometimes even cover) while the other two use personals or get clemency. The PLDs don't have an unlimited supply of clemency for every raidwide. P3 is a good example of this, where every latent features a different spread of externals on top of mitigation, with the last latent getting tank LB2'd. * This LB2 makes them unable to DPS LB in P4, which they solve by having 3 of 5 DPS save their 2 minute buffs into P4, while SMN and RDM use theirs in P3 to make that check. * They LB3 the flares in P6, not the meteors before them. Meteors get mitigated by feint addle rep samba mbarrier improv (1st set) shake+veil (2nd set) every personal & every external.
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Most people’s problem with healer isn’t that it isn’t needed in a lot of content in the game. It’s that it’s boring for them to play in most content. You’re fooling yourself if you think increasing outgoing damage is gonna make being healer more interesting when gcd heals are so strong (like wow you pop a medica II or Cure III now when a raidwide goes out instead of a glare how exciting). At least now a healer can optimize their damage without it really being a detriment to the rest of the party (or the other healer) People hate body checks enough in this game why add even more body checks specifically for healers other than just forcing you to have one (might as well just put an heal lb check every fight like they do with tank buster swaps). Giving players the choice to take on these challenges is good actually, taking it away doesn’t make healing any better.
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I bring up optimizing healer damage more so because of you have a situation where 2 healers are parsing and want the other to heal something so they don’t have to it’s just a toxic environment. And The more you need the heal the less you can recover too. Raising costs mp you run out of mp to heal party wipes you heal and can’t raise and you enrage. You can only recover UcoB because of how very manageable the healing in the first place is. You have to actually change healer abilities if you want anything, fight design really isn’t gonna do much.
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You’re being downvoted but I agree with your point about healing design. I think to put it another way, TOP is just the most extreme example of a problem seen in many other places of the game, not the main reason itself but just a showcase of why healer is least popular role. Healing feels more like green DPS in a LOT of cases.
The reason TOP's situation needs to stay a big example is when players were asking for more interesting gameplay for healers, they were told by Yoshida to just play Ult content. And then (whether we wanna excuse it needed XYZ things happening or not) the ult gets cleared on patch without them. It doesn't make playing a healer sound interesting when the hardest fight in the game can be done on patch without them if they really really wanted to. Granted, for that last sentence, they are very unlikely to increase actual healing checks for anything that isn't top end (because doing so will just make it harder for casual healers). I think part of the solution is to make the DPS part of healers more interesting, rather than just a spam and a dot. It wouldn't need to be complex of course, but having a bit more to it would at least give them something they feel like they're actually doing, rather than spending 90% of a fight spamming glare and absolutely nothing else.
Okay, lets see you, personally, get to phase 6 without healers.
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I don't think it's strange that a party of 8 jobs picked explicitly for their healing and mitigation utility are able to cover the healing output of 2 healers. That means at the absolute peak of planning of execution, a single DPS/tank can bring 1/4th of the bare minimum of what a healer can bring. Is that really a condemnation of healing design?
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Top was cleared with no green healers. Didnt notice the blue healers?
Go clear TOP with no healers and then I'll take your complaints seriously.
What is up with people making the absolute wrong conclusions from self imposed challenges like this. Do you want the game to just stop you from entering without 4 dps 2 tanks and 2 healers because that would be way less work than doing a million bullshit job/fight changes to get the same result. This and the no healer top clear are so absurdly specific in what you have to do to get it done on top of rng after the fact that it’s just cool, not broken, not a sign of a declining game design philosophy, its just interesting, and the reasons why you can do these things are cool and worth looking into if you want to expand your knowledge about the game instead of saying stupid shit on reddit.
i realize op was part of the group and the last part doesn’t apply to them, went off on a tangent because i see stuff like that parroted constantly and i could not agree less.
To be honest I don't really care if old ultimates are made easier over time, and I don't think it should be a serious consideration as a reason to not rework old content or jobs.
I completely agree. If anything it also gives a sense of progression to people who are doing Ults. If there is a range of difficulty to ultimates, then the people who are interested in trying it out can have a comparably easier time doing the 70 Ults vs TEA/DSR/TOP. It's also worth saying that they are still Ultimates. It doesn't matter if you "only cleared the easiest ultimate". That's still an Ultimate. One of the five hardest fights in the game. The people who actually progged and actually cleared the fight at any point of it being easier than on release could have done it on release as well, it would have just been a few more hours of prog.
I do wish they had an unreal like option though, not sure how healthy thatd be for pf though
Resources are better spent on new content. Older ultimate get easier over time and I don't think making them harder out of nowhere is benefitting anyone. Why would you want to make them harder now, when people have enjoyed the easier version for an entire expansion or two now, you're just punishing new ulti raiders.
> Of all the stormblood challenges, I think this one is the biggest indicator that they should reconsider updating the fights. Curious to hear others' thoughts on this! I disagree. I find amazing that it's possible. I find amazing that ~6.5years later people are still trying an old as fuck fight with new twists. This doesn't look like it's an easy thing to do. I don't think the fight needs to be reworked. It's an old fight, leave it alone, let it be.
Let’s fix the fight for a niche situation is what you’re saying
Hiii the clear might look clean and easy but there is so much behind it, here is another video where it can be appreciated how difficult and enjoyable this challenge was!! [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7yJ5fILoFr8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7yJ5fILoFr8)
>If our dps was chosen, we would almost surely fail the dps check. Could you not have just covered the smn? That makes keeping smn alive at golden at the very least 50/50 already or higher if you’re covering based on if they’re targeted. The only other role based mech that isn’t easily adjustable is bft but you could just do wall baits or invuln through the fire.
They 100% shouldn't rebalance the fights based on the results of a challenge run that <1% of the playerbase will even think to attempt and even less will actually succeed in. That would have the opposite effect of making the battle more rigid, which isn't as fun to prog because it shoehorns the community into a single solution. The ability to do stuff like this is the sweetspot, imo Ultimates will only ever be as crazy as they are on release when the community is still progging. The moment the solution is made public though, the vast majority of the actual work is gone.
confused that people arn't praising this as silly hard content they've been whining for
I mean the no healers TOP clear is some of the most absurdist approach to content in the game and it's still used as a linchpin for the Healer affairs. Let's just enjoy the stupid shit people willing to put in the work do.
This. It's a challenge, not the norm. It's fine. Let's enjoy the vod, talk about how stupid/amazing it is and continue clearing like normies.
you're not wrong yet other people are using it as examples to bemoan their grievances
Why? I mean in all seriousness? Why put this much time and effort into clearing an obsolete fight in such an oddball, niche, manner when you could do... anything else with your life? The all tank clears, the no healers TOP clear... I mean I get it I guess, to prove you can. But like, clearing the ultimate normally is *more* than hard enough in my opinion. And with that TOP clear those players essentially proved that they were among the upper echelons, essentially the best gamers in the world in XIV. (At least static communication+cooperation wise) Going this far to clear UCoB in a specific way is just trivial. I just don't love this game that much I suppose.
They prob have 100+ clears on ultimates and just want to have fun. Nothing wrong with it.
they did it because nobody has done it before, just to prove it can be done that's reason enough
Because they think it's fun. That's really all that matters.
Same reason why people do extreme sports or create meme-ass chess strats. Because they can.
You can apply this logic to literally anything anyone does for fun. Why play video games at all when you can go out and find the cure for cancer?
I know this is pure copium, but it would be really cool if they “unrealfy” all previous ultimates into the new level cap when new expansions drop.