Final Fantasy XIV’s director provides a formal statement, and shares context behind Hephaistos nerf

gamepur.com:

The Pandæmonium Abyssos Savage raids are some of the content in Final Fantasy XIV right now, and when they were first released, the final boss was much stronger than the development team initially thought. On September 13, after having been out for less than a week, the team gave the final boss in the Abyssos: The Eighth Circle, Hephaistos, a nerf, a rarity in the game’s history. Today, Naoki Yoshida, Producer and Director of Final Fantasy XIV, has issued a statement about that nerf and clarified the decision further.

Yoshida shared his statement on the Final Fantasy XIV website. Here, he breaks down how the balancing team approaches these Savage battles, how they create the difficulty of an encounter, and how they make it slightly more complex than their balance teams can handle because the top raiding groups in Final Fantasy XIV are the best in the game; the team wants to give them victories that are won “by-the-skin-of-your-teeth.” The balance team achieves this by providing the boss a “little bit extra,” which translates to a one to two percent increase in health pool value.

Following these routine adjustments, the Final Fantasy XIV community struggled with this battle, and the development team went forward to adjust Hephaistos’ health pools. The hope was to ensure the Final Fantasy XIV community didn’t feel they were restricted to using specific DPS Jobs, ensuring all Jobs in the game were capable of contributing to every raiding party.

The health pool adjustment, while a nerf, was done because Yoshida believes the team miscalculated the difficulty. “The adjustment to Abyssos: The Eighth Circle was never intended to be a “nerf,” but merely the correction of values that were set inappropriately for a fourth-stage