Board 8 > FFXIV Topic Part 7 -- Sage: It Goes in Every Field

(+) Yeah! (+)

Not to diminish the accomplishment (but I'm about to diminish the accomplishment)

Jobs have gotten so massively buffed and potency has changed than even min ilevel can't account for all of it (examples: machinist and sam are nutty compared to other jobs at 50, TP and tank stance dps nerf no longer exist). Also if it really wasn't at min ilevel it is getting outgeared by two tiers. And sprouts are kind of meaningless when I'm sure that people who know mechanics have created alts to try and get into his random queues.

Still impressive! I just don't really have an indicator of how impressed to be because no one really does synced coils anymore.

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Ive done T5 and T9 synced on BLU and Id say they were comparable to the harder extremes. Not sure if BLU is net easier or harder (more dps of course, but tanking and healing is weird).

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He's inadvertently setting the objective to 'Loot' in the PF, so sprouts who haven't beaten it yet aren't even able to join his party.

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Luis_Sera89 posted...

He's inadvertently setting the objective to 'Loot' in the PF, so sprouts who haven't beaten it yet aren't even able to join his party.

Even with Duty Complete on it can be people with alts on other servers that have beaten it on their mains. I don't think that's too weird considering how many stalkers he has and how alt-friendly FF14 is.

LordoftheMorons posted...

Ive done T5 and T9 synced on BLU and Id say they were comparable to the harder extremes. Not sure if BLU is net easier or harder (more dps of course, but tanking and healing is weird).

This tracks to me, the top FF14 raiders routinely complete new extremes in one lockout blind, and asmongold is obviously a high level player.

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Yeah, that's what I'm saying, he's the only one truly going in blind. At absolute worst, someone in his party may have only done it unsynched and not know any actual mechanics.

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Talking about the Coils of Bahamut? Is that something I should even try to do?

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mccheyne posted...

Talking about the Coils of Bahamut? Is that something I should even try to do?

Definitely worth doing for the story. Normally what you would do nowadays is either wait until level 80 and solo it unsynced (or maybe for a few of them duo), or make a PF advertise the first time bonus to get some people to run you through it (make sure to say you'll be watching the cutscenes).

It's possible that Asmon's stream might cause a temporary burst of interest in running them synced, so it might be worth trying to do that soon if you'd like to experience the actual mechanics.

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Luis_Sera89 posted...

Yeah, that's what I'm saying, he's the only one truly going in blind. At absolute worst, someone in his party may have only done it unsynched and not know any actual mechanics.

Oh I completely misunderstood lol. My bad

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You may run into a bit of a hiccup doing level 80 unsynched coils once you hit T9, lol. Tried for hours.


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The things people need to remember when watching him clear content:

• The people he's queuing with aren't "randos" per se, they are people that jumped into his PF as soon as he put it up, so a few of them are definitely experienced players and most of them have a level 80
• Even with Min ilvl, the base stats and abilities of the classes is much stronger than it was when the content was fresh
• A lot of the fights have also been nerfed at various points. I was watching the Melusine fight, and I distinctly remember that you would die if you got attacked while petrified, which no longer is the case
• He's a seasoned MMO player, and a lot of the mechanics transfer over from WoW. He immediately picks up on a lot of the mechanics and relates them to a similar fight in WoW

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I never could get T9 solo at 80. Had to join a PF to get it out of the way.

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Shadow Dino posted...

I never could get T9 solo at 80. Had to join a PF to get it out of the way.

Soloing T9 is an interesting problem in managing your burst damage. You need enough burst to kill two of three golems before they can get close enough to merge, then you need to do it again like 30 seconds later, then you need enough damage to burst Nael down before you die from ice balls from the dragons. I remember seeing a video of a Samurai doing it shortly after ShB release, but I've never tried myself.

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I am absolutely, 100%, NOT touching these pet jobs after I hit 80. I cannot deal with this pet AI animation delay. I have also never bounced around the enmity list as more in the last 700 hours of play than I have a Summoner. I can be at a consistent 2 with a slight bar creep towards the Tank's A, look down for 2 seconds at my cooldowns, and then glance back up to fine myself at #6, lol.

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Oooh yeah, that's the ice ball one!

Managed to get it with RDM after looking up exactly what percentage I needed to burst damage at to avoid those damn ice-ball instant deaths.

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UshiromiyaEva posted...

I have also never bounced around the enmity list as more in the last 700 hours of play than I have a Summoner. I can be at a consistent 2 with a slight bar creep towards the Tank's A, look down for 2 seconds at my cooldowns, and then glance back up to fine myself at #6, lol.

You probably shouldn't put too much stock into the enmity list but this sounds about right for summoner. Your damage comes in huge bursts with downtime in between so it makes sense to me that you'd start very high and then start to fall off until your next burst phase. You're on console IIRC but if you had a DPS meter you'd be able to see it better. Though if you're having trouble staying at high enmity that's probably a DPS problem, and depending on your level you probably just don't have the good shit yet.

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It's only 1 day of experience at 60 to be fair, running every roulette. I farmed the level 50 to 60 quests after doing 10 levels as Scholar and am gonna do the next 10 as Summoner.

Scholar is just kinda boring so far.

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SCH suffered worse than most from job rebalances/reworks across expansions. It's lost a lot of it's old skills over time and now most of it's best skills are gained at later levels. SCH mains were logging in to Day 1 of Shadowbringers and finding literally half of their toolbars greyed out from removed spells.

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Maybe this is something that will change, but am I crazy in thinking Energy Drain as SCH is so weak that you'd be insane to use aether for it unless Aetherflow is about to pop back and I still have meter?

My guess is that MP use must increase a lot later and the MP drain is more important then? Right now I've never even had to use Lucid Dreaming before.

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ED was actually one of the spells removed from SCH at the beginning of Shadowbringers, but people complained about it enough that they gave it back in, like, patch 5.1 or something. It's basically just a bit of additional DPS to use Aetherflow stacks on, but it's the only offensive use of Aetherflow stacks, so when it was lost there was nothing productive to use excess stacks on if the content wasn't particularly healing intensive (so most of ShB *cough*).

Gaining HP and MP from it is more of a secondary effect. If you need to use ED for the HP/MP gain you probably have bigger problems going on.

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I have a very unpopular opinion: Scholar having Energy Drain is terrible for the overall balance of the job and the game in general.

Consider other jobs with unique resources. Warrior uses its Beast Gauge exclusively for abilities that do damage; Paladin uses its Oath Gauge exclusively for abilities that mitigate damage; Dancer uses its Feathers exclusively for abilities that do damage; and the pattern holds throughout the rest of the cast. Every job's unique resource is either used to do damage, or for abilities that do not do damage.

(White Mage is an interesting semi-exception in that you first use its resource to not do damage, and then by using 3 of these abilities you gain access to an ability that does damage. I don't consider this an issue because Afflatus Solace and Rapture are typically used in places where you would want to heal anyway, and Misery gives you a partial DPS refund for those lost GCDs. It's probably the most elegantly designed class resource, honestly.)

Meanwhile, Scholar has two competing uses for its Aetherflow - you can use one of its healing or mitigation abilities, or you can Energy Drain. Now, FF14 is a DPS-focused game. Optimizing anything means finding how to squeeze the most possible damage out of your performance. Because Scholar has these competing uses for its unique resource, the "optimal" use for it will always be forgoing the healing tools and using more Energy Drain. This dumps more pressure on your co-healer and invalidates several what should be Scholar's most useful healing buttons, because in 98% of all cases the healing is unneeded to the point that it would be more efficient to use those Aetherflow stacks on Energy Drain.

At the same time, Scholar has a unique issue in that its resource is gated at 3 stacks per minute, with no ability to hold extras. This means that you must use 3 stacks per minute or you've lost the remainder forever. This is a problem because you almost never need to spend all 3 stacks on healing. Hence, Energy Drain - by giving you a use for the stacks that wasn't healing, SE figured they were giving players a tool to ensure no stack ever went to waste. The problem is, damage is always going to have a higher value for players than healing, because incoming damage is not high enough in the vast majority of content to require using every single resource for healing.

My solution to this whole issue is replacing Energy Drain with something akin to WHM's Divine Benison while still costing a stack. That way, even if you don't need to actually heal you can still throw a shield on the tank to mitigate some autoattacks or something, and by removing a direct DPS gain from Aetherflow you get rid of the temptation to never use the resource for healing.

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WHM had their shitty time in Stormblood. SCH is having their shitty time in Shadowbringers. Time for AST to have a shitty time in Endwalker.

(I dont truly hope for this, but I at least hope SCH becomes fun to play again.)

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Not_an_Owl posted...

Meanwhile, Scholar has two competing uses for its Aetherflow - you can use one of its healing or mitigation abilities, or you can Energy Drain. Now, FF14 is a DPS-focused game. Optimizing anything means finding how to squeeze the most possible damage out of your performance. Because Scholar has these competing uses for its unique resource, the "optimal" use for it will always be forgoing the healing tools and using more Energy Drain. This dumps more pressure on your co-healer and invalidates several what should be Scholar's most useful healing buttons, because in 98% of all cases the healing is unneeded to the point that it would be more efficient to use those Aetherflow stacks on Energy Drain.

This is kind of an outdated mindset. In dedicated groups (and even in pugs) it's better to think of both the healers' resources as being shared. The goal is to reduce the amount of resources BOTH healers have to use so that they can get as much combined DPS as possible. Think about it, one energy drain isn't worth as much as a WHM's Glare. If you use a healing skill and save the WHM a heal, you do more damage. In that sense, Aetherflow stacks are just another tool. It isn't a problem that Energy Drain exists because damage is not always the "optimal" use for a stack. That's a greedy mindset. At the same time, artificially enforcing the healing mindset by removing the skill was a disaster. There was no outlet for overflow. The job would need to be significantly redesigned to accommodate that.

Incidentally this is why caster rezzes are so highly valued, you are saving the healers time and MP and in theory it increases the damage and healing of the entire group as a result.

Not_an_Owl posted...

My solution to this whole issue is replacing Energy Drain with something akin to WHM's Divine Benison while still costing a stack. That way, even if you don't need to actually heal you can still throw a shield on the tank to mitigate some autoattacks or something, and by removing a direct DPS gain from Aetherflow you get rid of the temptation to never use the resource for healing.

It isn't a shield but this is kind of what Excog is? A delayed heal that you throw on the tank and cashes itself in later, to make sure you get healing value out of your stack. It means your co-healer doesn't have to heal the tank as much, resulting in more damage from them.

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HeroDelTiempo17 posted...

This is kind of an outdated mindset. In dedicated groups (and even in pugs) it's better to think of both the healers' resources as being shared. The goal is to reduce the amount of resources BOTH healers have to use so that they can get as much combined DPS as possible. Think about it, one energy drain isn't worth as much as a WHM's Glare. If you use a healing skill and save the WHM a heal, you do more damage.

For sure, this is absolutely a better mindset. In an ideal world healers would sit down and plan out the use of their combined kit to cover every instance of damage in a fight with minimal overheal and maximized DPS uptime. The problem is, in reality only a very small number of players will actually do that and I almost never see it in pugs. So if I'm playing SCH in a group with minimal communication and I can be reasonably confident my co-healer is going to overheal the heck out of everything anyway, what motivation do I have to use my stacks on anything other than Energy Drain? Remember that I still have the fairy and Seraph to fall back on if I actually decide I need to heal. How many encounters would I actually have to use those stacks for healing? There's like, E11S, E12S, Diamond Weapon EX, and the UItimates.

I suppose you could argue this is more an issue with the playerbase needing to communicate more and coordinate better, but Energy Drain exacerbates that issue by actively encouraging the SCH to shovel the majority of the healing load onto their partner since an OGCD with potency attached is easier to realize and comprehend than "you just saved your co-healer a GCD they can use for Glare".

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Not_an_Owl posted...

So if I'm playing SCH in a group with minimal communication and I can be reasonably confident my co-healer is going to overheal the heck out of everything anyway, what motivation do I have to use my stacks on anything other than Energy Drain? Remember that I still have the fairy and Seraph to fall back on if I actually decide I need to heal. How many encounters would I actually have to use those stacks for healing? There's like, E11S, E12S, Diamond Weapon EX, and the UItimates.

Well, your problem boils down to "bad players are bad." I mean yeah, if the other dude is overhealing everything you SHOULDN'T be using stacks on healing! But I promise you bad players are always going to be bad. This is not a game design problem, and removing ED mostly just punished the good players.

Not_an_Owl posted...

I suppose you could argue this is more an issue with the playerbase needing to communicate more and coordinate better, but Energy Drain exacerbates that issue by actively encouraging the SCH to shovel the majority of the healing load onto their partner since an OGCD with potency attached is easier to realize and comprehend than "you just saved your co-healer a GCD they can use for Glare".

Case in point here even from a selfish perspective. Broil is 290 potency. Ruin 2 + ED is 300 potency. The Aetherflow stack is NOT worth 10 potency and neither is the HP/MP. The actual design of ED does not encourage spamming it unless your only concern is your personal DPS, and even then, you're only gaining DPS here if you are not healing at ALL. If you have to use a GCD heal when you could have used a "free" AF heal, you have lost DPS. So again this is just a "people are bad at the game" issue.

Also you will have an extremely bad time in dungeons if you are only using Energy Drain, which should inherently teach people the value of the healing skills. It's really just a small subset of bads and toxic tryhards that will be determined to only spam ED in 8-mans.

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Sorry to interrupt but unrelated question that came to me after a video I just watched.

The Cryptlurker stuff is BiS, right? And you can't have more than one of Tomestones gear, right?

So with cross job gear like tanks, you just have to decide on a single meld even if it would be best with different materia like Warrior?

EDIT: literally the second I hit post I remembered you can buy additional copies of Tomestones gear if the other copies are in storage, so I guess...you would just have to dance the gear between your Armory Chest and your two retainers?

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UshiromiyaEva posted...

Sorry to interrupt but unrelated question that came to me after a video I just watched.

The Cryptlurker stuff is BiS, right? And you can't have more than one of Tomestones gear, right?

So with cross job gear like tanks, you just have to decide on a single meld even if it would be best with different materia like Warrior?

Your BiS is going to be a mixture of Augmented Cryptlurker and Edenmorn gear, outside of relic weapons and the occasional extreme edge case. So with jobs that share gear, you do indeed have to pick one to meld for. For tanks, if you play WAR at all you generally want to meld for WAR because other tanks lose far less in performance from using WAR melds than WAR loses from using other tank's melds.

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Don't spam ED. That said, you will almost never have to use all three stacks on heals. Every other cycle you'll have recitation for a free indom or excog (please don't use it on pre-pull adlo, thanks). I am much more willing to energy drain if I have Recitation available.

Then there's Dissipation for even more stacks. Lots of scholars are scared to lose fairy skills for 30 secs but you shouldn't be. You can cast a whispering dawn a couple of gcds before Dissipation if you're that worried.

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Got a little time to play today before heading out. Time to challenge Bismarck.

Edit: They also keep mentioning Thordan and his knights twelve. That.........gives me a Knights of the Round vibe. Holy fuck would that be a crazy fight if true.

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UshiromiyaEva posted...

You may run into a bit of a hiccup doing level 80 unsynched coils once you hit T9, lol. Tried for hours.

I've done this on MCH but you have to burst like a mother the moment phase 2 hits.

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mccheyne posted...

Got a little time to play today before heading out. Time to challenge Bismarck.

Edit: They also keep mentioning Thordan and his knights twelve. That.........gives me a Knights of the Round vibe. Holy fuck would that be a crazy fight if true.

lol hoo boy

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I figured out why Summoner makes me uncomfortable now.

In small scale content, I see my boy and I see what he's doing, I know he's a slow asshole but at least I can see him.

In the large scale content I cannot see my boy and I do not trust trust him. I know he is probably doing what he is supposed to be doing but I have NO FAITH.

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I've been informed that cr1tikal has started playing on Cactuar.

We are really cementing our status as meme server, huh.

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Yeah, I was shocked the game defaulted to Cactuar. You would imagine the world would be full.

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People like Cr1tikal, right?

Is he the "Yeah babyyyyyy that's what I'm talking about!" guy?

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Yeah I thought for sure it would still be congested. No idea how this stuff works apparently.

When I first started in the middle of the Heavensward cycle, Cactuar was a mid-tier world in terms of population. It was kind of the reject cast-offs of the raid and RP servers with the main identity being meme shit. Over the past few expacs it gradually ballooned to being the third most active NA server, and that was BEFORE this surge started by asmo. I'm a little fucked up about it.

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UshiromiyaEva posted...

People like Cr1tikal, right?

Is he the "Yeah babyyyyyy that's what I'm talking about!" guy?

Yeah that's him. And as someone who used to watch his stuff, yes and no. He's kind of a douche, but he's a douche in the normal eceleb way and he's pretty vocally against the extremely douchey segment. He played Among Us with AOC. I've watched his shitpost videos since before he transitioned into full-on Internet Personality status and lost me so he's a very weird guy to me.

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From a casual perspective, Cr1tikal is very well-loved

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I just turned on BLM for the first time since beating Praetorium.

Lol I have potions and ethers for the entire left quarter of my cross hotbar 1.

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I have no idea how you're supposed to use Flare at 50

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UshiromiyaEva posted...

I figured out why Summoner makes me uncomfortable now.

In small scale content, I see my boy and I see what he's doing, I know he's a slow asshole but at least I can see him.

In the large scale content I cannot see my boy and I do not trust trust him. I know he is probably doing what he is supposed to be doing but I have NO FAITH.

Ah, pet ghosting, the bane of endgame Summoners everywhere. It's the number one desired fix for them going into Endwalker

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https://twitter.com/ffxivstruggle/status/1415701250667057154?s=19

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I love that account.

BK_Sheikah00 posted...

I have no idea how you're supposed to use Flare at 50

I spent spent 15 minutes straight on training dummies with BLM level 50 last night because for some reason it SHOULD be simple but it was giving me trouble, before realizing you're supposed to be using Fire 3nto go into you're fire phase. From what I can tell, it tends to go like this.

Thunder 2 -> Fire 3 -> Fire 2 -> Fire 2 -> Flare -> Manafont -> Flare -> Transpose -> Freeze -> And then repeat from the beginning.

You can only use the Manafont for the second Flare in you're opening of course due to the cooldown, so you won't be able to get that double Flare in on the same trash pack. You just cut those 2 steps out if Manafont is on cooldown.

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I seem to recall hearing that BLM are supposed to carry ethers to triplecast flare before the transpose/freeze, but I only have THM at like 15 so :shrug:

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Man I just can't imagine any trash mobs where the need for 3 flares in a row every 2 minutes is worth ethers on the hotbar.

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It's not like they really break the bank, though.

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Maybe if I was using the cross bar I could see it.

As is I would not waste one of my 32 slots.

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Is 10 seconds to Teraflare the best raid moment in the game?

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yes
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BK_Sheikah00 posted...

Is 10 seconds to Teraflare the best raid moment in the game?

I'm more fond of the end of E8N myself.

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BK_Sheikah00 posted...

Is 10 seconds to Teraflare the best raid moment in the game?

I counter with "10 seconds to Divine Judgement"

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