Tier lists have landed in FFXIV and I’ve oddly enough spent the weekend thinking about them at length. Tier lists aren’t bad, in fact they are VERY POWERFUL TOOLS — but how they are being used at times is HORRENDOUS.
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Timestamps:
0:00 Tier lists are both great and awful at the same time
0:23 Playing Warframe Again
0:42 Warframe has A LOT A LOT of tier lists lol
1:24 Real World Example
2:11 I can be silly about it
2:50 Reality is more convoluted
3:41 My recommendation!
3:59 HOW THIS RELATES TO FFXIV TIER LISTS
5:07 What do YOU enjoy?
5:48 Use cases are critical
7:38 Context in FFXIV
8:00 EXAMPLE 1 – 99th percentile parsing black mage
8:55 Example 1 PROBLEM LOL
10:10 EXAMPLE 2 – Party finder queens
12:01 EXAMPLE 3 – Dark Knight is apparently bad lol
13:48 Wrapup
This video might get spicy. The fundamental idea behind tier lists isn’t a bad one, in fact it’s a very popular idea with good intention– why would I want to invest my resources, time being the biggest one, into something that is not going to perform as well as something else?
I brewed a lot on this video’s topic as I dipped my toes into warframe again. Which made me think a lot about final fantasy 14 funnily enough and our tier lists. Warframe is, honestly, packed with tier lists and sometimes they make sense and other times not so much.
[Cause I took this weekend completely off of final fantasy 14 and kept off social media cause things got way too intense and I wasn’t having fun]
Like why it makes sense is that Warframe is also a game with a literal combinatorial explosion of builds, combos, mods, helminth system abilities and other factors that make combing over large swaths of data general statements can be useful to help drill your attention down to assess a few high value choices.
But making a general statement like X is factually better than Y is oversimplifying it to the point it’s untrue.
Let me explain, to do so bear with me for a moment because I’m going to give a real world example I encounter a lot and then tie it right back to tier lists and final fantasy 14.
I’m often asked by friends, colleagues and acquaintances looking at the field as a senior software developer, I even taught full stack software development the glowing question:
What programming language would you recommend me to learn or use in general, not even a particular use case but in general. Which is often loaded as “What language will get me the best job?”
[
Which while that is an innocent question it is a lot more involved than meets the eye. But am I going to blame someone for asking that? No, because that’s a pretty important question with a significant time investment to become even parsing basic string input.]
So I could give a cute knee-jerk reaction lathered in my own biases and laugh at the idea of building a new website around a fossil like PHP versus my genuine recommendations of something more modern like python or node with typescript or the dotnet framework which microsoft really really stepped up their game.
But even there I rattled off 3 big examples of things I’ve had great experiences with that I could recommend whole heartedly.
(I wouldn’t have said that 5 years ago about dotnet and microsoft and here I am using it professionally in a brand new job architecting out the solution. Also Node with typescript and python are beautiful and I’ve enjoyed using both immensely too. I could sit down for hours talking about pros and cons of them and why I pick what I do and for what.)
But dumping on php, that’s cute, that’s clickbaity that’s fun. But the real answer is that it depends on the market you’re in, what your career goals are and ultimately what you enjoy more. The actual answer is a bit more convoluted and individualistic.
Hold that thought! Let me make that concrete in terms of final fantasy 14 and gaming in general, the real answer to your tier list you want in final fantasy 14 depends on what sort of GROUP you’re in or group you’re looking for to say progress through dragonsong war ultimate– aka the market you’re in, what your particular goals are such as do you want to heal it or tank it, and what you enjoy more which breaks down into a plethora of categories.
Such as do you enjoy a faster rotation or slower one? Do you appreciate mobility abilities or not? Do you prefer being rooted down with casts more like a black mage or be very mobile like summoner. Do you want to give away some of your own personal DPS to buff allies or keep all of that DPS to yourself?
Do you value helping the healers of the party out with abilities like summoner’s phoenix heal over time or dancer’s curing waltz
source
Played warframe this weekend and I had A LOT of thoughts on Tier Lists. So here is the video! Context is vital, without it a tier list is useless. 🍕🍕🍕
Timestamps:
0:00 Tier lists are both great and awful at the same time
0:23 Playing Warframe Again
0:42 Warframe has A LOT A LOT of tier lists lol
1:24 Real World Example
2:11 I can be silly about it
2:50 Reality is more convoluted
3:41 My recommendation!
3:59 HOW THIS RELATES TO FFXIV TIER LISTS
5:07 What do YOU enjoy?
5:48 Use cases are critical
7:38 Context in FFXIV
8:00 EXAMPLE 1 – 99th percentile parsing black mage
8:55 Example 1 PROBLEM LOL
10:10 EXAMPLE 2 – Party finder queens
12:01 EXAMPLE 3 – Dark Knight is apparently bad lol
13:48 Wrapup
🍕🍕🍕
Warfame Tier list
S- Whatever is the most fun to you
F – Not playing Hydroid while listening to sea shanties
The more you compress information down, in a list or otherwise, the more nuance you lose. As long as you keep that in mind, it's still useful. The broader the use case for the information is, the less useful it is when compressed.
People need to understand the context of tierlists. Like a tierlist for high end Savage is going to be completely different than a tierlist for casual play or solo play where you rely on DF and PF with randoms you can't communicate with. I had this argument with someone when I said I think SGE needs tweaks so it doesn't struggle so much in dungeons and the argument was "It's godly in Savage" as if high end raiders don't only make up like 1-3% of the playerbase and as someone who plays solo a lot using DF, SGE is F tier there because most of the casual playerbase struggles immensely on it and because I play hard content and casual content, to me, SGE is more of a problem than a god because most players do not play at hardcore Savage levels. People really should start specifying exactly who their tierlists apply to because we really have new players talking like they're top parsers in the world and on the flip side, there are loads of high end raid players that talk as if everything should be balanced solely around the highest end players, the 90% be damned.
I tried to put these together, but it gets so messy…. I love playing healer, I hate playing melee. Let's take my most disliked healer, AST, versus my favorite melee, DRG. It's easy to place within a role, but across all jobs , I can't decide what's better: doing what I love doing, but in the most frustrating way… or doing what I hate doing in the least annoying way?
WTB prime flow 😂
Best class is the one your best with and that's the truth. Tier lists are just opinions and sometimes take facts into it but still there's room for others opinions 🤷
What I'd like to see are some more varied tier lists. I'm genuinely curious about which classes have the best tools for speed clearing dungeons and the best aoe damage, or which classes are least reliant on burst, especially the one and two minute windows for playing in pugs where you can't expect coordinated buff windows. All the tier lists seem to be geared towards best case scenario Savage statics, and while I may dip my toes into pugging, I have zero interest in joining a static.
I never thot Id enjoy scholar so much but your constantly going ON AND ON about your love for scholar made me give it a second shot in shb and now its lv90, i made its ewaf gear a glam (TAIL RIBBON ON HROTH!) and its probably my 3rd or 4th favorite class behind ast, gnb and war. I thought I would like Sage more but scholar just feels so much more comfy and those big d-shields are divine. So thanks for not shutting up about your faves I truly enjoy it way more than I ever wouldve on my own 😽😹
Playing red mage
Good connection : dual cast… dual cast…
Bad Connection : Jolt, dual cast… is it on yet?
No matter how good it is in tier list, I can't use it.
Meanwhile sch is the best for me. I can move around doing mechanic and damage without worrying casting time.
The tier list for warframe is everything is op and the game is made for babies, its too easy always has been always will be.
The devs suck at making challenging meaningful content.