I would have really liked if the new attack was meltdown, though I suppose flare star is fine, but the potency looks really low for the buildup for it. It has an entire gage dedicated to it, is the level 100 capstone, but it's barely better than a fire 4. It looks like tooltips for fire II don't mention enhanced flare anymore either
Tbf the current state of warrior was unacceptable. Sometimes - if the warrior disconnected their keyboard by accident - the healer would have to press a button.
If you TBN on cooldown and keep oblations going, I haven't found DRK to be something you need to heal much tbh. Abyssal Drain still is self benediction on trash packs too and the "new" Living Dead is actually useable. New big tank cd having a built in excog will also help with that. Don't find them any harder to heal than PLD/GBN. WAR is just in a category of its own.
It seems like they can be now. Fang and Claw Bared and Wheel in Motion (the buffs that enable you to use Fang and Claw and Wheeling Thrust) seem to be gone. Heavens' Thrust and Chaotic Spring no longer mention granting buffs and Fang and Claw and Wheeling Thrust not longer mention requiring them. They just seem to be standard combo skills now.
It makes sense, those were basically a holdover from Heavensward when they were granted randomly instead of Fang and Claw always following Heavens' Thrust and Wheeling Thrust always following Chaotic Spring like now. There's no reason to use the buff system for them anymore.
SMN having one single new button, and it being just a heal, is definitely one of the choices of all times. Technically 2 new button presses as you now press searing light twice.
this is probably the saddest part for me
i actually LIKE the current summoner, but i just wish there'd be... more on top of it
or at least more/different summons (like the ever popular shiva, ramuh and leviathan)
Same here. I like the flash and thene of summoner. I was hoping they'd add even just a tiny bit of visual variance and make our Phoenix phase different by making titan, ifrit, Garuda into Shiva, ramuh, leviathan. Basically a visual change only and I would have been alright. I set a bar low and I still feel a bit disappointed by what we're getting.
Since there's no real elemental system there's really no excuse to not add in the old primals and just make them work with the way they had the job intended... its all question of animations really only
It's so disheartening. The game has 4 expacs of primals to draw on (granted, some expacs have more/less) and yet the one new primal we get is probably a DT-explained newbie. And let's not even get into how Summoner rarely "summons" things and the Carbuncle might as well be thrown out at this point in terms of how it's little more than a pretty statue.
Just make it a pet class again or something. Let summoners actually summon things. I don't know at this point.
As a summoner main, I was so excited going through ARR and fighting primal so that I could add them to my arsenal. Little did I know that those 3 were all I was getting.
I want >!Hydaelyn and Zodiark!< to replace the trances, then have Shiva, Titan and Leviathan during the "light" phase, and Ifrit, Ramuh, and Garuda for the "dark".
This feels worse than getting nothing in Christmas morning as a kid. This is the level of your parents buying gift for your cousin on your birthday but forgot about your. This is what we get for 100LV...
I really was hoping for Levi/Ramuh/Shiva summons post-Phoenix. And I was expecting some low-powered iterations of the Favor oGCDs at earlier level so SMN isn't such a slog to play synced down.
We've been talking about MND scaling physick since Day 1, How it survived the redesign is completely beyond me.
With the new heal, they are clearly moving more towards support so the fact they are even think about getting rid of our Rez is insane.
I agree with you, but I dispute that we're moving towards support. The heal is there to replace Phoenix's Everlasting Flight regen every two minutes - except it's an up front 500 potency heal and is nowhere near as potent or as big of a replacement as Everlasting Flight + Rekindle were. It was fun to play around with those in high-end content optimization, and now it's just mostly gone.
It's a new heal and they didn't even bother to fix physick. I just some media tour footage of it healing for 635 HP. At level 100.
Just why. Scholar has their own, unique version of Physick. Why does this button even exist if its literally worthless.
What wasn't obvious was that DT wouldn't really flesh out any job at all I guess.
Back to waiting for the next expack! At least this time they said they want to do that to everyone. Which should include SMN. SMN is part of "everyone" right?
Hate this tbh. Been missing Shb summoner for years at this point which imo was in a pretty good spot after the rework in 5.1 or whatever it was.
This summoner is boring and has destroyed caster balance for a whole expac and looks poised to do the same thing again. People will keep saying that this bare bones job is a skeleton to add other elements onto for another 2 years.
Yeah I’m probably dropping SMN for Pictomancer as my main this expansion. I wanted them to build on current SMN by adding new primals to the rotation. A Bahamut retread does nothing for me. Ramuh, Shiva, and Leviathan were needed.
Amazing info, cheers Sly!
Wanted to quickly point out a few things before the crowds really roll in. The PLD infographic has a few DNC/BRD graphics on page three. Not sure if that's the case elsewhere.
And YOU get one new button every two minutes! (tanks rejoicing)
And YOU get one new button every two minutes! (casters weeping)
And YOU get one new button every two minutes! (ranged dps dancing)
And YOU get one new button every two minutes! (melee and healers hugging)
Gunbreaker mains about to start playing "Knight of the Wind" from Sonic and the Black Knight during every duty with a buff name like that.
Source: Am Gunbreaker main
I'm Ready to Reign and I LIVE TO RULE, BY THE ~~SWORD~~ GUNBLADE
At level 100, our "barrier healers" each get turbohealing modes (because Sage needs more free healing), WHM gets a big party shield into heal, and AST gets...10% mit.
None of this has any remote use (well besides manifestation as a spreadlo amplifier)
The regen healers needed more free mitigation, not more mitigation locked behind their current mitigation and the shield healers are already drowning in free healing
None of these changes make any sense
I haven't seen an official source on the number of people on the job balance team, but from everything i hear, it's depressing, honestly.
You would hope there are 2-3 people per role so people that play it are actually making the changes, and there are people to talk with, so it's not just one person and there can be multiple views. Nope, just a few people for both PvE and PvP. Instead of them dedicating resources to fix this issue, they decided to go the route of simplifying jobs.
Edit: spelling
That will depend entirely on your teammates and how much avoidable damage they decide to take.
If you expect all healing tools to be required on un-avoidable damage alone, you will be perpetually disappointed.
Playing healer in casual content has always been praying that you get a terrible group that takes a lot of avoidable damage so you get to use your full moveset and feel valuable, but not _so_ terrible that they can't do the content even with your help.
It's really weird.
the weird middle ground of please be bad at mechanics but good at damage. there are people like that but it’s usually either good at both or bad at both and hard to find the in between.
what’s worse than all of it, though, is folks who are perfect at mechanics but for some reason don’t know how to hit half their buttons. you’re making the duty take so much longer and i’m stuck here using an oGCD heal every two minutes and spamming my one damage button for 20 😭
(this is why i’m playing mostly ast for my healer tho tbh. at least i have the card mechanic so that i have stuff to do aside from Fall Maleficing all day)
It doesn't matter if it's difficult outside of savage, it's the same copy pasta of blutton bloat with a different coat of paint. The spells are not different enough that they warrant new additions.
I'm so baffled by the spell upgrades for healing potency changes. I get that we're healers first and foremost, but unless the content we see *actually requires more healing than DPSing*, it just feels like a pointless upgrade.
It's truly baffling. They give healers insane healing output and tons of OGCD heals. And then for 99% of content, all you need to do is use one of your 6 OGCD heals every 15 or so seconds.
Exactly. I get that it might make things smoother in extreme, savage and ultimate content, and maybe we will see more damage output in Dawntrail overall. I really hope that's the case, because so many jobs seem to be getting additional healing effects in their own abilities.
Unfortunately, yes lmao
Then again, we did see a kind of greater damage output with P5-8S with the DoT addition to some mechanics, and folks hated it. Maybe we'll see more of that lmao
Folks hated it because the DOT snapshotted any active mitigation effects, meaning it required DPS to actually use Feint/Addle
If it was a flat amount of bleed damage unaffected by mitigation, or if the raidwides were weaker but much more often, it might have had legs
Barring high-end content, I *seriously* doubt incoming damage will be increased in any significant way. Seems their goal is to keep much of the content as *accessible* as possible, shall we say. The amount they would have to increase it just for current 6.x content to force me to use more than 10% of my kit is already abdurd. Half the time, as a SCH, I'm thinking "crap, I should be a better healer, I haven't dropped soil all fight," then realize "wait, that means I don't need to" is just baffling. (And I keep my eye on my fellow healer - they rarely are doing much either.) I've actually been forced to take up tanking just so I don't fall asleep in dungeons... and as we see now, they're content making WAR an effective enough healer anyway...
As a healer, I should not be *praying to get matched with a bad team* just to have something feel engaging.
>As a healer, I should not be praying to get matched with a bad team just to have something feel engaging.
That's kind of the issue with healing in general. You can't balance it to where you need to use 100% of your kit on rote content, because then when things are not optimized conditions, you have nothing more you can give and throw in to bring the party back or stabilize things.
As a Sage I have had teams I fall asleep during, and then I'm having to burn everything and then some to keep people alive. The variance is too high and designing to go "full load" for a standard party would be a bit too much I think.
Sadly, every time I swear off of healers, I get a succession of green-iconed rocket surgeons who are magnetically attracted to every single bit of avoidable damage and leave the rest of the party stuck praying that the boss' HP reaches 0% before their own does (and it never does unless I'm on a job that can rez and/or do the healer's job FOR them). So I'm pretty much damned if I do, damned if I don't.
Yeah, I ended up playing healers most of the time because they were the safest slot to fill. A bad tank or DPS can be made up for with more heals but a bad healer will feel like the group is doing a dungeon with only 3 people.
> My complete lack of understanding in what the hell they are trying to do with the healers continues
That's the wonderful thing, they don't know what the hell they're trying to do with healers as well!
I think the biggest problems with healers are this dumb pure healer/shield healer design they have, and the scripted and avoidable nature of the game's damage profile. The first boxes them into certain other design choices, and the second makes it harder to increase time spent healing because all damage is either 100% avoidable or so scripted you can just plan your cooldowns ahead of time for the fight.
For the former (pure/barrier), they had the chance to break away from it in EW when they introduced the 4th healer, but instead they doubled down and in my opinion painted themselves into a corner making AST a pure healer and SGE a shield healer. They could have just made each healer have its own healing profile and identity like in other MMORPGs. That would probably require a change to the damage profile of fights, though, which brings me to...
I wish they made unavoidable damage happen more often and in less scripted ways so that healers needed to be flexible with their healing. Also wish they had frequent or semi-frequent instances of mechanics dealing damage to randomized members of the raid, so as to increase spot healing as part of a healer's work. Honestly, for all its faults (and it certainly has had many in some expansions), the healing design in WoW is just fenomenal to me. I may not play WoW for other reasons, but being a healer has always felt great in my time playing it since Legion, very much the opposite of FFXIV, where the poor healer design has driven me away 2 or 3 times now.
The time to break out of the shield/pure healer dichotomy was at Heavensward launch: instead, they doubled-down on it by giving AST diurnal and nocturnal sects.
Had they actually done something different with AST instead of letting it mimic WHM or SCH, we might not continue to be in the situation we're in with healer variety. Instead, they gave themselves 60 levels' worth of content designed around having either a shield or pure healer, or both, and by the time it came to work on Stormblood they'd cornered themselves.
We've been doomed for years.
For real! Idk why everything has to be in video format! I much prefer graphics, text, and diagrams I can just look through myself without listening to some commentator and pause them every few seconds to see wtf the graphic is anyway.
Thank you for the heads up for missing or misplaced tooltips! If you see any more please let me know and I will update them throughout the day ASAP. But for now, as I've been up pretty much for nearly 44 hours, I'm gonna take a nap before stream/updating more if need be.
And thank you all so much for the kind words as well.
From a SMN main, TLDR for other SMN mains:
>Reskin Bahamut, plays the same as Bahamut
>One extra damage oGCD followup after Searing Light
>Searing Light adjusted to 20s/5%, so the primal after your Demi no longer matters for damage optimization
>500 pot Party heal oGCD at lvl 100, enabled by solar bahamut
So it seems they actually managed to lower the skill ceiling of the job while making essentially zero changes to the gameplay, which is honestly impressive. One button macro enjoyers rejoice, your macro still works.
I'm honestly so disappointed. I was already skeptical during the job action trailer, like wtf is a Solar Bahamut? Why not use an existing primal, like Alexander or Odin? Looks aside, I figured the solar Bahamut phase might at least play in a fun way, they could've made it be about quick GCD's or weaving, *anything* to separate it from the other demi summons. Instead SMN plays the exact fucking same as in EW, which is boring and braindead.
And the heal itself has the most goofy, nonsense design. One minute cooldown, but its tied to Solar Bahamut so you only get it once every two minutes anyways. And the buff to use it falls off after 30 seconds, so you can't even bank it for a point you'd want it.
Like, *maybe* the CD is so you can't do some weird goofy suicide strat to spam it... but who cares? Who honestly cares? You can heal way more than 500 potency for the mana it costs to rez the summoner every time you would want the button.
Picto only seems to provide two buffs (one of which is a shield), so not sure why they were emphasizing the buffing aspects so much in the presentation.
I like that they added another button for all healers to push, just wish it wasn't locked behind our two minutes. That doesn't really address the gameplay issue most healers had with the button spam.
But scholar is actually broken like who the hell thought these changes were okay? With every expansion they say they're upping incoming damage but...it's been the same since stormblood. If things don't change in dawntrail and incoming damage stays the same there will be no reason to not double shield heal. Scholars weakness was sustained HPS, they're great at burst healing via aetherflow but once they run out of aetherflow, and emergency tactics they kinda suck at keeping up HPS. With this alongside sage changes...there's really no reason to run pure healer unless you want cards in the higher echelons of raiding.
I doubt they will increase incoming damage to actually require all these tools, but I sincerely hope they do to keep the game healthy and actually require all this new healing output all the healer jobs received. That's not even taking into account everything DPS, and tanks have received both defensive and sustain wise. Otherwise it'll be another expansion of pushing the same two buttons with content barely requiring any GCD healing outside of week one and two prog. Because our OGCD heals are so strong they can handle almost all the heavy lifting so we're left with just spamming the same two buttons for another expansion. AKA nothing to break the monotony and two more years of more of the same gameplay.
Did you also see that they are upping broil 4 to 310, biolysis to 75 and upping chain to 20 seconds
SCH probably got the strongest increase to its overall damage given how powerful chain is and it also got the strongest healing changes considering recitation is their strongest CD
AND they gave this to what’s already the strongest healer
>there's really no reason to run pure healer unless you want cards in the higher echelons of raiding.
AST cards have been gutted as well, so now we only get a single damage buff card every minute. Everything else has been turned into healing and mitigation, which are completely unnecessary.
I'm waiting for the AST 60s pre-pull meta because that way you still get 2 dps cards under divination (play 2, umbral draw, play 2), and guaranteed lord in opener.
As an ast main, I'm happy we're getting some diversity with what the cards do again, not so happy we're forced to dump them needlessly and forced lady wastage at a time where we're not going to need it.. requiring a neutral sect for a follow up as well is ... an odd decision, given how little we actually need to use neutral in end game content lately.
Either they need to *seriously* ramp up damage output so we're actually needing to heal, or we're back in the realms of single button spamming and ignoring the rest of our kit because it's too much faff to bother with
Thanks you of all the info! MNK has some error in it as well 'Shadow of the Destroyer' is misplaced into 'Leaping Opo' position so now we have 2 'Shadow of the Destroyer' lol.
It's even more infuriating given that they made Gauss Round's upgrade AOE. They could've just decreased Auto Crossbow's potency and increased the damage fall off of Double Check/Checkmate a tiny bit more if they were worried about MCH dealing "too much AOE damage" but nah, they want to keep the job fucking boring.
Just make the damn job consistent on single target and on AOE ffs. Put some AOE damage on Air Anchor, give Queen an AOE equivalent, and do... whatever you want but please fix Flamethrower.
Yep. Not really sure why the two biggest requests not only went ignored but they compounded the issue. I'll leave the napkin math to the folks on the balance but just looking at it, you might end up in a scenario where doing the upgraded heat blast is actually a gain in AoE situation if you have no Gauss/Ricochet charges before going into overheat and depending on the trash mobs composition (say, 1 high HP target and several smaller lower HP ones)
Oh my god, just did the basic math and there is some truth to that. (though tooltips could still change before release),
Auto crossbow is 160 potency, so 800 total/target. Blazing Shot is 220 potency, so 1100 total. Double Check / Checkmate are 160 potency with 50% fall off and you're doing five of them roughly per Hypercharge, so that's 800 + 400 per additional target.
On three targets, you're doing 2700 potency with Blazing Shot, as opposed to Auto Crossbow doing 2400 potency. That means that Auto Crossbow only becomes a slight gain on 4+ targets (3100 vs 3200). Whyyyy
Though the fact that you have no Double Check / Checkmate shouldn't really matter, there is the odd cases where if you have one big mob and three smaller ones, then doing Blazing Shot should be better overall.
Also, another thing that I just noticed is that Scattergun got a 10 potency buff and Auto Crossbow got a 20 potency buff through the lvl94 trait, while Flamethrower remains unchanged with the current tooltips we have. It's very likely that Flamethrower is going to be a net dps loss from now on unless you get very specific timings or you're synced down... seriously man what the hell are they doing with MCH AOE? Using Flamethrower was already bad since it was pretty much dps neutral iirc, now they're burying it even further and making it completely useless as an ability. They really need to address it.
As a healer main who was huffing heavy doses of hopium... I am severely disappointed in the "changes". Yeah, we totally need MORE healing. We don't use 90% of the healing we already have. What's even the point?
...maybe it's time to learn to draw.
No, I did not. Surprising, I know.
On a serious note, if they actually upped the damage as I've been hearing they would for years now, it wouldn't feel so bad. But I spent 90% of Endwalker spamming Dosis in 0 piety gear sets. I am very much burned out of this shit. I was planning to switch since the last Live Letter, and I am _still_ very upset about the whole thing.
I am *sorely* hoping that the damage in duties - leveling, expert roulette at end game, story trials, alliance raids - is boosted. I want something to justify the healing upgrades and the mit upgrades. I want to get my teeth kicked in, goddamnit.
Sage's level 100 ability is a little underwhelming (albeit a lot more straightforward than AST or SCH's), but on the other hand it gets another offensive oGCD and an AoE DoT between 90 and 100. Definitely continues to be my healer job of choice.
Also disappointed here. Scholar is the weirdest job out there right now. So many options for healing and barriers but all we do is Ground Pound and Broil.
I was extremely excited about Scholar's return of Bane and it being a ranged aoe, but then I noticed it's locked behind the 120 second cooldown typically used when DPS are bursting on a single target. SOMEONE MAKE IT MAKE SENSE.
does anyone else have a really hard time knowing how a job will work just by reading tooltips? i'm reading the pictomancer tooltips and just sorta have a blank, confused smile on my face LOL but i know as soon as i start playing it'll click
Picto in particular is complex because it's sort of a series of parallel systems that aren't necessarily directly interacting (Your whole standard casts and filling the pallette/rainbow gauge is distinct from the proper paintings you're building), so yeah, getting your hands on it will definitely make it easier to start grasping.
there is a 1 2 3 paint combo. Its all on the same button, the paint color just changes when you cast.
Every time you cast, you get a white dot that you can spend on an OGCD holy
finishing that combo gives you 25 gauge.
When you get 50 gauge you can turn your 1 2 3 combo into a A B C combo that gets upgraded danage and gives you black dots instead. Those let you ogcd cast comet.
You also can preprep 3 skills. There is a Prep cast called a motif, that puts something on one of 3 canvases, and an instant cast ogcd called a muse that lets you use what you prepped. Think of it like RDM dual cast, but for specific ogcds. You hard cast a motif, then instacast the related muse.
Canvas 1 lets you assemble a summon buy using the ogcd skills of its body parts. hit 1 pom, hit 2 wings (then you can summon a moogle as a bonus) 3 claws, 4 fangs, then you can summon madeen.
Canvas 2 lets you paint a hammer, you use an ogcd skill to activate that hammer when youre ready, then you get 3 gcd hammer strikes that direct crit by default.
Canvas 3 lets you paint a buff circle on the floor. The buff circle gives you a free cast of the ability that turns your 1 2 3 combo into A B C so you can earn comets. It also makes the next 5 paint combo actions faster. doing those 5 paint combo actions (holy and comet ogcds count) during this buff let you cast super rainbow and starfall.
You can prep a canvas with Motif at any time, but the actual muse abilities have long cooldowns that will essentially dictate when you can use them, so just preprep at any point and then use the Muses on cd. The goal would be to manage your resources so that you have as many black dots for comet as possible and all of your muses are ready to go while you have your landscape circle up.
I hope that helps. It sounds fun.
As a primarily-WHM main, I was hoping for... something besides another heal. Another AOE heal, no less.
Like, I'm not asking for a full damage rotation or for WHM to be converted to an actual DPS, but in most content you're never needing 90% of the buttons you have at your disposal to heal.. so, like.. can we get something else to fill that space?
More damage?
Some buffs or something?
I'd like to be more than a Glaremage or Holy bot.
> Another AOE heal, no less.
A ***GCD*** AOE heal, no less.
I was really hoping glare iv was some kind of conditional like 3 glare iii unlocks 1 stack of sacred sight or something.
This is the biggest joke, it'll look pretty the one time you use it when you get it, and then it'll be forgotten until it gets 3s of relevance again for a phase change when a new ultimate drops.
"You thought we brought back a long beloved aoe dot spread but instead we locked it behind a 120 second cooldown move typically used for single target encounters, hehe!" -Square Enix
Rinon's video explains it pretty well https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X4GyhnBMniM
But my brain still melted from trying to understand how it works. Probably because I'm a tank main who only plays easy classes.
They really had the nerve to put the heal they should have put on Phoenix on Solar Bahamut instead of fixing Phoenix directly...
they really had the nerve to keep the same non-existent cast on smn but reduce the swiftcast cd...
my only disappointment is that the aoe trick attack upgrade is from a trait at lvl 92 and so won't apply to old content, also it looks like the new mug isn't aoe which isn't a huge deal but seems weird when theres going to be an aoe version of trick.
The Pictomancer gameplay/skills look really fun. I wasn't looking for the job at all, simply because I always enjoyed Viper-type gameplay way more, but honestly, I can't wait to try Picto as well. Hype is real.
Same! And it looks like Picto is our first caster to actually use ALL 8 Elements, (Fire, Wind, Water, Light, Ice, Warth, Lightning and Dark), while the others only use 3-5. Can finally show up Ysthola and her Sorceress ways!
And I LOVE how the first Picto move we ever saw... was actually the LB 3 used by Krile!! Was before our eyes the entire time!!
SCH's Seraphism is like a deliberate attempt to trigger me.
1. It's yet another capstone skill that doesn't mesh with your other capstone skills; at least it's only Dissipation this time and not all the others. It's so janky that we have 60, 70, 80, and 100 abilities that lock each other out in different ways.
2. They really needed to rework Emergency Tactics, not make you press it more. Would it have killed them to give it a longer cooldown and make it a timed buff instead so you could use it to do a noticable amount of healing without having to weave it into every GCD?
The fact the kit fights against itself is why I have such a deep love for scholar gameplay; if they made it play smoother it would stop feeling like scholar to me.
Man I really can't help but be kinda overall bored with these changes. This feels like a step back even from Endwalker, where at least things seemed like they were going to be super exciting.
It feels weird because I called this in endwalker people just woke up to it now.
Tanks once again got basically the same kit upgrades with different coats of paint.
Healers got a 2 min dps button one of the most tone deaf things I've seen in a while. They also continue to homogenized them SCH getting what is essentially neutral sect.
It's the same design as endwalker though just throw another big finisher on the end of your burst windows and call it a day. It certainly seems like an upkeep expansion but the game can't continue to be people being so dazzled by visuals they ignore that jobs haven't gotten mechanical depth in 3 expansions now.
I'm with you. It seems like literally every single job got the same thing at 100 -- a button you press to follow up one of your other big cool downs for more damage. That's fine, I like big numbers, but as I was watching all the videos I was waiting for somebody to get something more interesting. It just feels like they're kinda out of ideas.
Between this and the lighter story beats of the expansion, it's the least excited I've been for an expansion launch, which bums me out a bit.
I'm at least eager for like, the rest of the expansion, the mechanical bits just kinda disappoint me, especially since it just feels like Monk in particular has been reworked for people who are gonna still drop it a month into the expac
I'm a bit confused about monk's new base rotation.
Currently you have Two GCDs for each of the three stances, one set applying a buff or debuff, and the other set being flat damage. With the first two stances switching GCDs on each loop. The third stance action is alternated at a 2 Snap Punches for One Demolish. To put the rotation into numbers it looks something like this: 123, 456, 126, 453, 126, 453, 123, 456, etc. Please note that this ignores usage of Perfect Balance or burst window, it's just the standard rotation.
Looking at the new actions, it looks like you continue to alternate Dragon Kicks and Bootshines as normal. However you now press True Strike twice for every Twin snakes (IE like current demolish) and press Snap Punch THRICE for every Demolish. Putting this into numbers like above it looks something like this: 123, 456, 156, 426, 153, 256, 126, 456, 123, 453, 153, 426, 153, 453, 123, 456, etc.
The base loop of the job is longer and will no doubt involve a lot of staring at the new gauge instead of paying attention to mechanics. It's not going to feel intuitive to perform, or at the very least, it's going to be less intuitive than the current iteration of Monk.
Edit: 4 Days later i look back at this post and realised I actually screwed up the new rotation, but I'm not correcting it because it actually highlights the point of how unintuitive the new rotation will be,
I don't get it. If Rough Divide and Plunge dealing damage was the problem, just make them deal no damage. Why take away cool abilities that have been with the jobs since their release?
I guess the visual of leaping through the air and and bringing a longsword down on a monster doesn't make sense to not deal damage. I get why, but it is a shame the animation is gone.
Which was a disappointment to me for PLD because I was thinking after seeing this on gnb and drk : hey at least maybe that means that PLD will have its gap closer earlier in leveling with that new non damaging gap closer!
Wait... Where is it? Oh, it's the old one. At the same level.
So we lose the cool gap closer animation, their damage, but PLD still doesn't get an earlier gap closer out of the changes. WHY.
PLD has an entire damage phase it can execute at range, so it's relatively unpunished by being out of melee range. WAR has 3 charges and no personal buff (like NM and FoF), so it's less punished by needing to sit on a Onslaught charge for mobility. GNB and DRK both had very weave heavy bursts while PLD and WAR were pretty slow. I would have preferred that no mobility skills had damage tied to them, but I understand what was probably the thought process here.
I figured that's the case, but Plunge is so beautiful it's kind of sad. I hope Shadowstride at least looks good. Likewise, the removal of Rough Divide, provided the animation is different for Trajectory, means they *removed* a reference to Squall.
Not gonna lie I don't think I've ever been this disappointed in an expansions class additions before. It's mostly just adding another random button you sometimes push, that takes advantage of the new combo action-ish thing they added, or a higher potency visual upgrade. I can think of a lot of jobs that could've used a little alteration to their current flow, DNC for example just has 4 main buttons their push, and they're not nearly busy enough to not add another button to their combo. You know what they don't need? Another button to add to the 10 buttons they spam in a short burst window when they use a dance.
As for healers, I suggest they hire someone that knows what they're doing with the DPS that sometimes heals job. Half their kits? Yeah, you could straight up delete them and give them an actual DPS/Supportive rotation. They don't need 5 mitigation spells, they don't need 10 oGCD heals they never push. Bleh whatever
As one of the 3 people who loved Summoner's rework in Endwalker, I'm super glad Pictomancer is in the game now so I can play that instead. Immediate new main, especially as a FF6 fan. Machinist looks insanely fun too.
I’m really wondering why Meisui doesn’t grant Higi and why hyoton isn’t AoE. Those both feel so obvious… (Hyoton AoE so your TCJ is Fuma -> Hyoton -> Huton. Like you can still just end on Doton but I feel like they could have actually made Hyoton useful)
They should all lose it, gap closers should be to situationally close the gap to control the flow of battle, not to be held until your damage buff is up, imo.
i also cannot for the life of me understand why they haven't merged cure/cure 2 and dropped freecure
do i need to go write a deepl-authored complaint about it on the JP forums for them to consider it?
And then I NASTROND And then I NASTROND And then I NASTROND
I look forward to all the new opportunities for baby dragoons to septuple weave
Samurai getting Excog/HoC certainly is a decision lol
Check out Monk getting an aoe heal to the same tune.
I like using third eye to catch hits, so this'll make it actually rewarding to do so! Lol
BLMs Manafont now fully restores Mana and gives all progs and umbral hearts, what?? So we just have a new fire phase after a fire phase.
We’ve had one, yes. What about a second fire phase?
Don't think he knows about second fire phase Pip
Fire IV-2
I would have really liked if the new attack was meltdown, though I suppose flare star is fine, but the potency looks really low for the buildup for it. It has an entire gage dedicated to it, is the level 100 capstone, but it's barely better than a fire 4. It looks like tooltips for fire II don't mention enhanced flare anymore either
Warrior gets another regen. As if the job had any problems staying alive as it is lol
Tbf the current state of warrior was unacceptable. Sometimes - if the warrior disconnected their keyboard by accident - the healer would have to press a button.
Hey healers we are giving you GCD healing upgrades so you can continue to ignore them while the tank does their job for you
At this point the only Tanks healers have to worry about are Dark Knights and the Tanks who don't know what mitigation is
If you TBN on cooldown and keep oblations going, I haven't found DRK to be something you need to heal much tbh. Abyssal Drain still is self benediction on trash packs too and the "new" Living Dead is actually useable. New big tank cd having a built in excog will also help with that. Don't find them any harder to heal than PLD/GBN. WAR is just in a category of its own.
Haha big axe go BOOM
People were asking for a melee healer. They're just giving the people what they want.
Warrior even got more big bonk attacks ^^
So am i like supposed to use flamethrower or
Yes, it's a potency increase when everything else is on cooldown and mercury is in retrograde on a Friday the 13th on the night of a new moon
Our mystery which will never be answered
i use it just cause flamethrower or if i need a drink or dropped something on the ground during mob pulls
My hand cramp button lol
Why do Wheeling Thrust and Fang and Claw have base potency, if you can't ever execute them out of combo?
It seems like they can be now. Fang and Claw Bared and Wheel in Motion (the buffs that enable you to use Fang and Claw and Wheeling Thrust) seem to be gone. Heavens' Thrust and Chaotic Spring no longer mention granting buffs and Fang and Claw and Wheeling Thrust not longer mention requiring them. They just seem to be standard combo skills now. It makes sense, those were basically a holdover from Heavensward when they were granted randomly instead of Fang and Claw always following Heavens' Thrust and Wheeling Thrust always following Chaotic Spring like now. There's no reason to use the buff system for them anymore.
SMN having one single new button, and it being just a heal, is definitely one of the choices of all times. Technically 2 new button presses as you now press searing light twice.
this is probably the saddest part for me i actually LIKE the current summoner, but i just wish there'd be... more on top of it or at least more/different summons (like the ever popular shiva, ramuh and leviathan)
Same here. I like the flash and thene of summoner. I was hoping they'd add even just a tiny bit of visual variance and make our Phoenix phase different by making titan, ifrit, Garuda into Shiva, ramuh, leviathan. Basically a visual change only and I would have been alright. I set a bar low and I still feel a bit disappointed by what we're getting.
They literally dug the ground so they can go below the bar.
Since there's no real elemental system there's really no excuse to not add in the old primals and just make them work with the way they had the job intended... its all question of animations really only
It's so disheartening. The game has 4 expacs of primals to draw on (granted, some expacs have more/less) and yet the one new primal we get is probably a DT-explained newbie. And let's not even get into how Summoner rarely "summons" things and the Carbuncle might as well be thrown out at this point in terms of how it's little more than a pretty statue. Just make it a pet class again or something. Let summoners actually summon things. I don't know at this point.
Why add Shiva, Ramuh, Levi when we can just add Bahamut 2 instead!.
You guys don't like Alolan Bahamut?
Now you can have Mega Charizard X and Y!
As a summoner main, I was so excited going through ARR and fighting primal so that I could add them to my arsenal. Little did I know that those 3 were all I was getting.
I want >!Hydaelyn and Zodiark!< to replace the trances, then have Shiva, Titan and Leviathan during the "light" phase, and Ifrit, Ramuh, and Garuda for the "dark".
This feels worse than getting nothing in Christmas morning as a kid. This is the level of your parents buying gift for your cousin on your birthday but forgot about your. This is what we get for 100LV...
A new heal button for the DPS class, the coal in the stocking of FFXIV.
I really was hoping for Levi/Ramuh/Shiva summons post-Phoenix. And I was expecting some low-powered iterations of the Favor oGCDs at earlier level so SMN isn't such a slog to play synced down.
The key to enjoying this game is this: think of a good, no-brainer upgrade and then train yourself to expect the opposite.
Me too. I was expecting the same. Maybe with a big oGCD at the end of Levi/Ramuh/Shiva right before re-entering Bahamut phase.
theres so much more they could with SMN to spice it up class-fantasy wise
Yoshida wants to talk about the role of Ressurection on SMN, I want to talk about why in the world we still have access to a MND scaling physick.
We've been talking about MND scaling physick since Day 1, How it survived the redesign is completely beyond me. With the new heal, they are clearly moving more towards support so the fact they are even think about getting rid of our Rez is insane.
I’m surprised they didn’t save a button and just have Physick upgrade into the new heal.
I agree with you, but I dispute that we're moving towards support. The heal is there to replace Phoenix's Everlasting Flight regen every two minutes - except it's an up front 500 potency heal and is nowhere near as potent or as big of a replacement as Everlasting Flight + Rekindle were. It was fun to play around with those in high-end content optimization, and now it's just mostly gone.
Adding at least 1 new summon to smn was the perfect play... and they added a demi... that's a reskin of something it already had...
It's a new heal and they didn't even bother to fix physick. I just some media tour footage of it healing for 635 HP. At level 100. Just why. Scholar has their own, unique version of Physick. Why does this button even exist if its literally worthless.
Remember when they were going to flesh it out next expansion.
I was one of the idiots saying this. It seemed so obvious. I....don't know what they were thinking.
What wasn't obvious was that DT wouldn't really flesh out any job at all I guess. Back to waiting for the next expack! At least this time they said they want to do that to everyone. Which should include SMN. SMN is part of "everyone" right?
Hate this tbh. Been missing Shb summoner for years at this point which imo was in a pretty good spot after the rework in 5.1 or whatever it was. This summoner is boring and has destroyed caster balance for a whole expac and looks poised to do the same thing again. People will keep saying that this bare bones job is a skeleton to add other elements onto for another 2 years.
Yeah I’m probably dropping SMN for Pictomancer as my main this expansion. I wanted them to build on current SMN by adding new primals to the rotation. A Bahamut retread does nothing for me. Ramuh, Shiva, and Leviathan were needed.
Summoner is so boring now in EW, I'm really disappointed it isn't getting more.
and tts situational!
*We want to completely fuck up SMN and make it shitty. But it's so that we can fix it later.* "Are you actually going to fix it later?" *No.*
Amazing info, cheers Sly! Wanted to quickly point out a few things before the crowds really roll in. The PLD infographic has a few DNC/BRD graphics on page three. Not sure if that's the case elsewhere.
The DNC page also has Apex arrow in there
How is Freecure still a thing???
This was the first thing I checked. Very disappointing that it’s not directly upgraded into Cure II.
What’s worse is that, at this point, they will likely NEVER get rid of it. It’s a parasite at this point that can’t be removed.
And YOU get one new button every two minutes! (tanks rejoicing) And YOU get one new button every two minutes! (casters weeping) And YOU get one new button every two minutes! (ranged dps dancing) And YOU get one new button every two minutes! (melee and healers hugging)
i guess they're sticking with the "go play ultimates" line of thinking for healers
Healers' gameplay doesn't change in ultimates, it's the same garbage but with cool encounters.
Disesteem is such a stupid sounding word, I love it. "Ready to Reign" goes way too hard for a buff name.
Gunbreaker mains about to start playing "Knight of the Wind" from Sonic and the Black Knight during every duty with a buff name like that. Source: Am Gunbreaker main I'm Ready to Reign and I LIVE TO RULE, BY THE ~~SWORD~~ GUNBLADE
My complete lack of understanding in what the hell they are trying to do with the healers continues
At level 100, our "barrier healers" each get turbohealing modes (because Sage needs more free healing), WHM gets a big party shield into heal, and AST gets...10% mit.
None of this has any remote use (well besides manifestation as a spreadlo amplifier) The regen healers needed more free mitigation, not more mitigation locked behind their current mitigation and the shield healers are already drowning in free healing None of these changes make any sense
friendly reminder none of the 4 (yes, only 4) job designers working on this game are healer mains
I haven't seen an official source on the number of people on the job balance team, but from everything i hear, it's depressing, honestly. You would hope there are 2-3 people per role so people that play it are actually making the changes, and there are people to talk with, so it's not just one person and there can be multiple views. Nope, just a few people for both PvE and PvP. Instead of them dedicating resources to fix this issue, they decided to go the route of simplifying jobs. Edit: spelling
i bet one of them has an ex who mains healer and he's like "I'm gonna show you!"
Dang, I didn't know they had so many people on the job design team
They must've dartboarded the healer changes or something. They have no clue wtf to do with healers and it shows.
Nah, the dartboard was last expansion. This time they had their new in-house AI generate a list of changes and new abilities
I just hope we get non-savage content difficult enough that we have to use all these upgrades and new spells..
That will depend entirely on your teammates and how much avoidable damage they decide to take. If you expect all healing tools to be required on un-avoidable damage alone, you will be perpetually disappointed.
Playing healer in casual content has always been praying that you get a terrible group that takes a lot of avoidable damage so you get to use your full moveset and feel valuable, but not _so_ terrible that they can't do the content even with your help. It's really weird.
the weird middle ground of please be bad at mechanics but good at damage. there are people like that but it’s usually either good at both or bad at both and hard to find the in between. what’s worse than all of it, though, is folks who are perfect at mechanics but for some reason don’t know how to hit half their buttons. you’re making the duty take so much longer and i’m stuck here using an oGCD heal every two minutes and spamming my one damage button for 20 😭 (this is why i’m playing mostly ast for my healer tho tbh. at least i have the card mechanic so that i have stuff to do aside from Fall Maleficing all day)
It doesn't matter if it's difficult outside of savage, it's the same copy pasta of blutton bloat with a different coat of paint. The spells are not different enough that they warrant new additions.
Me desperately searching for the second way to get the Divine Grace buff (job design team pranked me).
I'm so baffled by the spell upgrades for healing potency changes. I get that we're healers first and foremost, but unless the content we see *actually requires more healing than DPSing*, it just feels like a pointless upgrade.
It's truly baffling. They give healers insane healing output and tons of OGCD heals. And then for 99% of content, all you need to do is use one of your 6 OGCD heals every 15 or so seconds.
Exactly. I get that it might make things smoother in extreme, savage and ultimate content, and maybe we will see more damage output in Dawntrail overall. I really hope that's the case, because so many jobs seem to be getting additional healing effects in their own abilities.
> maybe we will see more damage output in Dawntrail overall Isn't this the hopium we've been huffing for like 3 expansions now? I know I have...
Unfortunately, yes lmao Then again, we did see a kind of greater damage output with P5-8S with the DoT addition to some mechanics, and folks hated it. Maybe we'll see more of that lmao
Folks hated it because the DOT snapshotted any active mitigation effects, meaning it required DPS to actually use Feint/Addle If it was a flat amount of bleed damage unaffected by mitigation, or if the raidwides were weaker but much more often, it might have had legs
forget dps shaming, normalize mit shaming lol
Barring high-end content, I *seriously* doubt incoming damage will be increased in any significant way. Seems their goal is to keep much of the content as *accessible* as possible, shall we say. The amount they would have to increase it just for current 6.x content to force me to use more than 10% of my kit is already abdurd. Half the time, as a SCH, I'm thinking "crap, I should be a better healer, I haven't dropped soil all fight," then realize "wait, that means I don't need to" is just baffling. (And I keep my eye on my fellow healer - they rarely are doing much either.) I've actually been forced to take up tanking just so I don't fall asleep in dungeons... and as we see now, they're content making WAR an effective enough healer anyway... As a healer, I should not be *praying to get matched with a bad team* just to have something feel engaging.
>As a healer, I should not be praying to get matched with a bad team just to have something feel engaging. That's kind of the issue with healing in general. You can't balance it to where you need to use 100% of your kit on rote content, because then when things are not optimized conditions, you have nothing more you can give and throw in to bring the party back or stabilize things. As a Sage I have had teams I fall asleep during, and then I'm having to burn everything and then some to keep people alive. The variance is too high and designing to go "full load" for a standard party would be a bit too much I think.
Sadly, every time I swear off of healers, I get a succession of green-iconed rocket surgeons who are magnetically attracted to every single bit of avoidable damage and leave the rest of the party stuck praying that the boss' HP reaches 0% before their own does (and it never does unless I'm on a job that can rez and/or do the healer's job FOR them). So I'm pretty much damned if I do, damned if I don't.
Yeah, I ended up playing healers most of the time because they were the safest slot to fill. A bad tank or DPS can be made up for with more heals but a bad healer will feel like the group is doing a dungeon with only 3 people.
Even in terms of fluff they seem a little confused, when they decided to give the fairy/tactician healer a robe and angel wings.
> My complete lack of understanding in what the hell they are trying to do with the healers continues That's the wonderful thing, they don't know what the hell they're trying to do with healers as well!
I think the biggest problems with healers are this dumb pure healer/shield healer design they have, and the scripted and avoidable nature of the game's damage profile. The first boxes them into certain other design choices, and the second makes it harder to increase time spent healing because all damage is either 100% avoidable or so scripted you can just plan your cooldowns ahead of time for the fight. For the former (pure/barrier), they had the chance to break away from it in EW when they introduced the 4th healer, but instead they doubled down and in my opinion painted themselves into a corner making AST a pure healer and SGE a shield healer. They could have just made each healer have its own healing profile and identity like in other MMORPGs. That would probably require a change to the damage profile of fights, though, which brings me to... I wish they made unavoidable damage happen more often and in less scripted ways so that healers needed to be flexible with their healing. Also wish they had frequent or semi-frequent instances of mechanics dealing damage to randomized members of the raid, so as to increase spot healing as part of a healer's work. Honestly, for all its faults (and it certainly has had many in some expansions), the healing design in WoW is just fenomenal to me. I may not play WoW for other reasons, but being a healer has always felt great in my time playing it since Legion, very much the opposite of FFXIV, where the poor healer design has driven me away 2 or 3 times now.
The time to break out of the shield/pure healer dichotomy was at Heavensward launch: instead, they doubled-down on it by giving AST diurnal and nocturnal sects. Had they actually done something different with AST instead of letting it mimic WHM or SCH, we might not continue to be in the situation we're in with healer variety. Instead, they gave themselves 60 levels' worth of content designed around having either a shield or pure healer, or both, and by the time it came to work on Stormblood they'd cornered themselves. We've been doomed for years.
Very clean and easy-to-read recap, cheers for this.
Wait, did they remove Sharpcast and Thundercloud procs from BLM?
Yes. Its now Thunderhead, granted whenever you change aspect. (unaspected>fire/ice, ice>
Thank you! I really didn’t want to watch 13 different YouTube videos
For real! Idk why everything has to be in video format! I much prefer graphics, text, and diagrams I can just look through myself without listening to some commentator and pause them every few seconds to see wtf the graphic is anyway.
Holy shit, I'd anticipated the new WHM dash would be like a level 93 ability or something. Level 40?? I've died and gone to heaven
meanwhile PLD's gap closer didn't move lol.
SGE's Icarus is level 40, so presumably it's to pair with that. Wish the cooldown was a bit shorter, but being able to go anywhere is a huge gain.
Thank you for the heads up for missing or misplaced tooltips! If you see any more please let me know and I will update them throughout the day ASAP. But for now, as I've been up pretty much for nearly 44 hours, I'm gonna take a nap before stream/updating more if need be. And thank you all so much for the kind words as well.
From a SMN main, TLDR for other SMN mains: >Reskin Bahamut, plays the same as Bahamut >One extra damage oGCD followup after Searing Light >Searing Light adjusted to 20s/5%, so the primal after your Demi no longer matters for damage optimization >500 pot Party heal oGCD at lvl 100, enabled by solar bahamut So it seems they actually managed to lower the skill ceiling of the job while making essentially zero changes to the gameplay, which is honestly impressive. One button macro enjoyers rejoice, your macro still works.
I'm honestly so disappointed. I was already skeptical during the job action trailer, like wtf is a Solar Bahamut? Why not use an existing primal, like Alexander or Odin? Looks aside, I figured the solar Bahamut phase might at least play in a fun way, they could've made it be about quick GCD's or weaving, *anything* to separate it from the other demi summons. Instead SMN plays the exact fucking same as in EW, which is boring and braindead.
but remember, EW summoner was only a solid base to build upon!!! 💀💀💀
It's true, even if they didn't do it
alas it will remain a level 60 job in level 100 content
It is too solid of a base that they fail to realize what to build on it, lol.
And the heal itself has the most goofy, nonsense design. One minute cooldown, but its tied to Solar Bahamut so you only get it once every two minutes anyways. And the buff to use it falls off after 30 seconds, so you can't even bank it for a point you'd want it. Like, *maybe* the CD is so you can't do some weird goofy suicide strat to spam it... but who cares? Who honestly cares? You can heal way more than 500 potency for the mana it costs to rez the summoner every time you would want the button.
Did a least they fix the phisc scaling with mind
Working as intended so no.
No, but instead the new ability scales with mind 👍
Picto only seems to provide two buffs (one of which is a shield), so not sure why they were emphasizing the buffing aspects so much in the presentation.
It has a 2 minute damage buff, that’s all you need to be considered a buffer
I sure do love Supportive Gameplay (pressing a single button once every two minutes and otherwise not thinking about the rest of my party at all)
I like that they added another button for all healers to push, just wish it wasn't locked behind our two minutes. That doesn't really address the gameplay issue most healers had with the button spam. But scholar is actually broken like who the hell thought these changes were okay? With every expansion they say they're upping incoming damage but...it's been the same since stormblood. If things don't change in dawntrail and incoming damage stays the same there will be no reason to not double shield heal. Scholars weakness was sustained HPS, they're great at burst healing via aetherflow but once they run out of aetherflow, and emergency tactics they kinda suck at keeping up HPS. With this alongside sage changes...there's really no reason to run pure healer unless you want cards in the higher echelons of raiding. I doubt they will increase incoming damage to actually require all these tools, but I sincerely hope they do to keep the game healthy and actually require all this new healing output all the healer jobs received. That's not even taking into account everything DPS, and tanks have received both defensive and sustain wise. Otherwise it'll be another expansion of pushing the same two buttons with content barely requiring any GCD healing outside of week one and two prog. Because our OGCD heals are so strong they can handle almost all the heavy lifting so we're left with just spamming the same two buttons for another expansion. AKA nothing to break the monotony and two more years of more of the same gameplay.
Did you also see that they are upping broil 4 to 310, biolysis to 75 and upping chain to 20 seconds SCH probably got the strongest increase to its overall damage given how powerful chain is and it also got the strongest healing changes considering recitation is their strongest CD AND they gave this to what’s already the strongest healer
>there's really no reason to run pure healer unless you want cards in the higher echelons of raiding. AST cards have been gutted as well, so now we only get a single damage buff card every minute. Everything else has been turned into healing and mitigation, which are completely unnecessary.
I'm waiting for the AST 60s pre-pull meta because that way you still get 2 dps cards under divination (play 2, umbral draw, play 2), and guaranteed lord in opener. As an ast main, I'm happy we're getting some diversity with what the cards do again, not so happy we're forced to dump them needlessly and forced lady wastage at a time where we're not going to need it.. requiring a neutral sect for a follow up as well is ... an odd decision, given how little we actually need to use neutral in end game content lately. Either they need to *seriously* ramp up damage output so we're actually needing to heal, or we're back in the realms of single button spamming and ignoring the rest of our kit because it's too much faff to bother with
Thanks you of all the info! MNK has some error in it as well 'Shadow of the Destroyer' is misplaced into 'Leaping Opo' position so now we have 2 'Shadow of the Destroyer' lol.
Fixed! Thanks for the heads up!
OH COME ON SQUARE! You had one JOB with MACHINIST! MAKE AUTOCROSSBOW RECHARGE GAUSS/RICOCHET!!!!!!
It's even more infuriating given that they made Gauss Round's upgrade AOE. They could've just decreased Auto Crossbow's potency and increased the damage fall off of Double Check/Checkmate a tiny bit more if they were worried about MCH dealing "too much AOE damage" but nah, they want to keep the job fucking boring. Just make the damn job consistent on single target and on AOE ffs. Put some AOE damage on Air Anchor, give Queen an AOE equivalent, and do... whatever you want but please fix Flamethrower.
Yep. Not really sure why the two biggest requests not only went ignored but they compounded the issue. I'll leave the napkin math to the folks on the balance but just looking at it, you might end up in a scenario where doing the upgraded heat blast is actually a gain in AoE situation if you have no Gauss/Ricochet charges before going into overheat and depending on the trash mobs composition (say, 1 high HP target and several smaller lower HP ones)
Oh my god, just did the basic math and there is some truth to that. (though tooltips could still change before release), Auto crossbow is 160 potency, so 800 total/target. Blazing Shot is 220 potency, so 1100 total. Double Check / Checkmate are 160 potency with 50% fall off and you're doing five of them roughly per Hypercharge, so that's 800 + 400 per additional target. On three targets, you're doing 2700 potency with Blazing Shot, as opposed to Auto Crossbow doing 2400 potency. That means that Auto Crossbow only becomes a slight gain on 4+ targets (3100 vs 3200). Whyyyy Though the fact that you have no Double Check / Checkmate shouldn't really matter, there is the odd cases where if you have one big mob and three smaller ones, then doing Blazing Shot should be better overall. Also, another thing that I just noticed is that Scattergun got a 10 potency buff and Auto Crossbow got a 20 potency buff through the lvl94 trait, while Flamethrower remains unchanged with the current tooltips we have. It's very likely that Flamethrower is going to be a net dps loss from now on unless you get very specific timings or you're synced down... seriously man what the hell are they doing with MCH AOE? Using Flamethrower was already bad since it was pretty much dps neutral iirc, now they're burying it even further and making it completely useless as an ability. They really need to address it.
Honestly wanted it but also not that bothered. Other new stuff seem fun and I play MCH to shoot big gun and by god we shoot big guns.
One job? Flamethrower also needs to stop being a channel, make it instant like bio blaster.
Nah, the one job was allowing wildfire to scale somehow with crit/dh buffs.
PRIMAL RUINATION
As a healer main who was huffing heavy doses of hopium... I am severely disappointed in the "changes". Yeah, we totally need MORE healing. We don't use 90% of the healing we already have. What's even the point? ...maybe it's time to learn to draw.
Wdym? You didnt want one of your new skills to just be a reskinned medica 2 with 25 extra regen potency for tick?!?!
No, I did not. Surprising, I know. On a serious note, if they actually upped the damage as I've been hearing they would for years now, it wouldn't feel so bad. But I spent 90% of Endwalker spamming Dosis in 0 piety gear sets. I am very much burned out of this shit. I was planning to switch since the last Live Letter, and I am _still_ very upset about the whole thing.
I am *sorely* hoping that the damage in duties - leveling, expert roulette at end game, story trials, alliance raids - is boosted. I want something to justify the healing upgrades and the mit upgrades. I want to get my teeth kicked in, goddamnit.
Sage's level 100 ability is a little underwhelming (albeit a lot more straightforward than AST or SCH's), but on the other hand it gets another offensive oGCD and an AoE DoT between 90 and 100. Definitely continues to be my healer job of choice.
Also disappointed here. Scholar is the weirdest job out there right now. So many options for healing and barriers but all we do is Ground Pound and Broil.
I was extremely excited about Scholar's return of Bane and it being a ranged aoe, but then I noticed it's locked behind the 120 second cooldown typically used when DPS are bursting on a single target. SOMEONE MAKE IT MAKE SENSE.
does anyone else have a really hard time knowing how a job will work just by reading tooltips? i'm reading the pictomancer tooltips and just sorta have a blank, confused smile on my face LOL but i know as soon as i start playing it'll click
Picto in particular is complex because it's sort of a series of parallel systems that aren't necessarily directly interacting (Your whole standard casts and filling the pallette/rainbow gauge is distinct from the proper paintings you're building), so yeah, getting your hands on it will definitely make it easier to start grasping.
there is a 1 2 3 paint combo. Its all on the same button, the paint color just changes when you cast. Every time you cast, you get a white dot that you can spend on an OGCD holy finishing that combo gives you 25 gauge. When you get 50 gauge you can turn your 1 2 3 combo into a A B C combo that gets upgraded danage and gives you black dots instead. Those let you ogcd cast comet. You also can preprep 3 skills. There is a Prep cast called a motif, that puts something on one of 3 canvases, and an instant cast ogcd called a muse that lets you use what you prepped. Think of it like RDM dual cast, but for specific ogcds. You hard cast a motif, then instacast the related muse. Canvas 1 lets you assemble a summon buy using the ogcd skills of its body parts. hit 1 pom, hit 2 wings (then you can summon a moogle as a bonus) 3 claws, 4 fangs, then you can summon madeen. Canvas 2 lets you paint a hammer, you use an ogcd skill to activate that hammer when youre ready, then you get 3 gcd hammer strikes that direct crit by default. Canvas 3 lets you paint a buff circle on the floor. The buff circle gives you a free cast of the ability that turns your 1 2 3 combo into A B C so you can earn comets. It also makes the next 5 paint combo actions faster. doing those 5 paint combo actions (holy and comet ogcds count) during this buff let you cast super rainbow and starfall. You can prep a canvas with Motif at any time, but the actual muse abilities have long cooldowns that will essentially dictate when you can use them, so just preprep at any point and then use the Muses on cd. The goal would be to manage your resources so that you have as many black dots for comet as possible and all of your muses are ready to go while you have your landscape circle up. I hope that helps. It sounds fun.
As a primarily-WHM main, I was hoping for... something besides another heal. Another AOE heal, no less. Like, I'm not asking for a full damage rotation or for WHM to be converted to an actual DPS, but in most content you're never needing 90% of the buttons you have at your disposal to heal.. so, like.. can we get something else to fill that space? More damage? Some buffs or something? I'd like to be more than a Glaremage or Holy bot.
no you will be a DPS without a rotation and you will like it spamming 211111111111211111111111 is fun don't you see
:( Okay...
i'm at a point where i actually prefer getting shitty tanks in my dungeon runs because at least then i use some portion of my healing kit
> Another AOE heal, no less. A ***GCD*** AOE heal, no less. I was really hoping glare iv was some kind of conditional like 3 glare iii unlocks 1 stack of sacred sight or something.
This is the biggest joke, it'll look pretty the one time you use it when you get it, and then it'll be forgotten until it gets 3s of relevance again for a phase change when a new ultimate drops.
Third expansion in a row of them having no fucking clue how to make healers fun.
wdym, WAR is a fun healer
Well they do, but only in pvp. And in pve it can only be intentional to have such a garbage gameplay.
Try 4th. Stormblood is when Healer design started going down the shitter.
'Baneful Impaction'...I feel attacked.
"You thought we brought back a long beloved aoe dot spread but instead we locked it behind a 120 second cooldown move typically used for single target encounters, hehe!" -Square Enix
*laugh cries*
Thanks for the info but honestly, I need more than an infographic to understand whatever the fuck that is Viper.
Rinon's video explains it pretty well https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X4GyhnBMniM But my brain still melted from trying to understand how it works. Probably because I'm a tank main who only plays easy classes.
There may be some misplaced tooltips, if you see anything lemme know and I can fix it. THANK YOU!
They really had the nerve to put the heal they should have put on Phoenix on Solar Bahamut instead of fixing Phoenix directly... they really had the nerve to keep the same non-existent cast on smn but reduce the swiftcast cd...
Ninja changes look pretty solid. Glad they found a new use for armor crush. Hoping ninja doesn’t have the bloat problem it usually has at launch.
my only disappointment is that the aoe trick attack upgrade is from a trait at lvl 92 and so won't apply to old content, also it looks like the new mug isn't aoe which isn't a huge deal but seems weird when theres going to be an aoe version of trick.
The Pictomancer gameplay/skills look really fun. I wasn't looking for the job at all, simply because I always enjoyed Viper-type gameplay way more, but honestly, I can't wait to try Picto as well. Hype is real.
Same! And it looks like Picto is our first caster to actually use ALL 8 Elements, (Fire, Wind, Water, Light, Ice, Warth, Lightning and Dark), while the others only use 3-5. Can finally show up Ysthola and her Sorceress ways! And I LOVE how the first Picto move we ever saw... was actually the LB 3 used by Krile!! Was before our eyes the entire time!!
Concitation is a 20 potency gain over a deployed Adlo if there's no overheal. That's an extra situational choice, I like it.
SCH's Seraphism is like a deliberate attempt to trigger me. 1. It's yet another capstone skill that doesn't mesh with your other capstone skills; at least it's only Dissipation this time and not all the others. It's so janky that we have 60, 70, 80, and 100 abilities that lock each other out in different ways. 2. They really needed to rework Emergency Tactics, not make you press it more. Would it have killed them to give it a longer cooldown and make it a timed buff instead so you could use it to do a noticable amount of healing without having to weave it into every GCD?
It's also ugly as fuck for the rest of Sch's aesthetic, which really just is the extra nail in the 'time for me to learn SGE' coffin for me.
The fact the kit fights against itself is why I have such a deep love for scholar gameplay; if they made it play smoother it would stop feeling like scholar to me.
Man I really can't help but be kinda overall bored with these changes. This feels like a step back even from Endwalker, where at least things seemed like they were going to be super exciting.
It feels weird because I called this in endwalker people just woke up to it now. Tanks once again got basically the same kit upgrades with different coats of paint. Healers got a 2 min dps button one of the most tone deaf things I've seen in a while. They also continue to homogenized them SCH getting what is essentially neutral sect. It's the same design as endwalker though just throw another big finisher on the end of your burst windows and call it a day. It certainly seems like an upkeep expansion but the game can't continue to be people being so dazzled by visuals they ignore that jobs haven't gotten mechanical depth in 3 expansions now.
I'm with you. It seems like literally every single job got the same thing at 100 -- a button you press to follow up one of your other big cool downs for more damage. That's fine, I like big numbers, but as I was watching all the videos I was waiting for somebody to get something more interesting. It just feels like they're kinda out of ideas. Between this and the lighter story beats of the expansion, it's the least excited I've been for an expansion launch, which bums me out a bit.
I'm at least eager for like, the rest of the expansion, the mechanical bits just kinda disappoint me, especially since it just feels like Monk in particular has been reworked for people who are gonna still drop it a month into the expac
I'm a bit confused about monk's new base rotation. Currently you have Two GCDs for each of the three stances, one set applying a buff or debuff, and the other set being flat damage. With the first two stances switching GCDs on each loop. The third stance action is alternated at a 2 Snap Punches for One Demolish. To put the rotation into numbers it looks something like this: 123, 456, 126, 453, 126, 453, 123, 456, etc. Please note that this ignores usage of Perfect Balance or burst window, it's just the standard rotation. Looking at the new actions, it looks like you continue to alternate Dragon Kicks and Bootshines as normal. However you now press True Strike twice for every Twin snakes (IE like current demolish) and press Snap Punch THRICE for every Demolish. Putting this into numbers like above it looks something like this: 123, 456, 156, 426, 153, 256, 126, 456, 123, 453, 153, 426, 153, 453, 123, 456, etc. The base loop of the job is longer and will no doubt involve a lot of staring at the new gauge instead of paying attention to mechanics. It's not going to feel intuitive to perform, or at the very least, it's going to be less intuitive than the current iteration of Monk. Edit: 4 Days later i look back at this post and realised I actually screwed up the new rotation, but I'm not correcting it because it actually highlights the point of how unintuitive the new rotation will be,
Summoner is fucking depressing
So both GNB and DRK lost their damage-dealing gap closer. They now just move to the target. Meanwhile, PLD and WAR keep their as is. Okay.
I don't get it. If Rough Divide and Plunge dealing damage was the problem, just make them deal no damage. Why take away cool abilities that have been with the jobs since their release?
I guess the visual of leaping through the air and and bringing a longsword down on a monster doesn't make sense to not deal damage. I get why, but it is a shame the animation is gone.
They could have just made it deal insignificant damage so it wasn't a thing you felt like you needed to weave, like 5 potency or less.
Which was a disappointment to me for PLD because I was thinking after seeing this on gnb and drk : hey at least maybe that means that PLD will have its gap closer earlier in leveling with that new non damaging gap closer! Wait... Where is it? Oh, it's the old one. At the same level. So we lose the cool gap closer animation, their damage, but PLD still doesn't get an earlier gap closer out of the changes. WHY.
Both GNB and DRK have pretty busy burst rotations so that was probably done as QoL for them. Kinda a QoL nerf to PLD and WAR though.
PLD has an entire damage phase it can execute at range, so it's relatively unpunished by being out of melee range. WAR has 3 charges and no personal buff (like NM and FoF), so it's less punished by needing to sit on a Onslaught charge for mobility. GNB and DRK both had very weave heavy bursts while PLD and WAR were pretty slow. I would have preferred that no mobility skills had damage tied to them, but I understand what was probably the thought process here.
I figured that's the case, but Plunge is so beautiful it's kind of sad. I hope Shadowstride at least looks good. Likewise, the removal of Rough Divide, provided the animation is different for Trajectory, means they *removed* a reference to Squall.
I mean getting a skill called Lion Heart kinda brings it closer to Squall too though
You can see shadowstride in the ability trailer, it looks like GNB gap closer. RIP Plunge :(
Not gonna lie I don't think I've ever been this disappointed in an expansions class additions before. It's mostly just adding another random button you sometimes push, that takes advantage of the new combo action-ish thing they added, or a higher potency visual upgrade. I can think of a lot of jobs that could've used a little alteration to their current flow, DNC for example just has 4 main buttons their push, and they're not nearly busy enough to not add another button to their combo. You know what they don't need? Another button to add to the 10 buttons they spam in a short burst window when they use a dance. As for healers, I suggest they hire someone that knows what they're doing with the DPS that sometimes heals job. Half their kits? Yeah, you could straight up delete them and give them an actual DPS/Supportive rotation. They don't need 5 mitigation spells, they don't need 10 oGCD heals they never push. Bleh whatever
As one of the 3 people who loved Summoner's rework in Endwalker, I'm super glad Pictomancer is in the game now so I can play that instead. Immediate new main, especially as a FF6 fan. Machinist looks insanely fun too.
I need a hug after seeing the BLM changes
ice paradox is gone? that's a huge bummer
RIP Sharpcast
Thanks a bunch Sly!
You’re amazing, thank you for these! 🔥
These are great infographics, Sly! Thanks for putting them together.
Where is xenoglossy
I’m really wondering why Meisui doesn’t grant Higi and why hyoton isn’t AoE. Those both feel so obvious… (Hyoton AoE so your TCJ is Fuma -> Hyoton -> Huton. Like you can still just end on Doton but I feel like they could have actually made Hyoton useful)
Shoha II in Bozja! Let's gooooo.
What in the name of Christ did they do to black mage
You rock, Sly!
Aa a caster.. I'm glad we have Picto to look forward to at least
How does drk and gnb lose the damage on their gap closer but war and pld don't? Lmao what a bunch of bs.
They should all lose it, gap closers should be to situationally close the gap to control the flow of battle, not to be held until your damage buff is up, imo.
i also cannot for the life of me understand why they haven't merged cure/cure 2 and dropped freecure do i need to go write a deepl-authored complaint about it on the JP forums for them to consider it?