Posted January 26, 2026 by Elbody
Hello everyone, you probably got scare jumped today by a sudden massive balance patch today. Curses gone? Bosses are tougher now? What is going on? Please endure with me on my madness for a bit.
I suspected the difficulty was incorrect from day 1, at day 2, it started to become apparent to me, at day 3, I ran the numbers, and came out to the horrible conclusion: The difficulty was broken in many ways, not immediately, but down the line, everyone was going to face infinite scaling in one way or the other.
Patching this would require a significant increment in the difficult, and that lead to a very unique situation never faced before in FFBot, the patch would halt the progress of many channels, and the more I waited, the harsher that halt on progress would be. The patch needed to happen as quickly as possible, this is why I patched first, explained later. You might have catch a lot of the conversation on Discord, but if you weren't there, this devlog will provide the ins and out in bigger detail, down to math.
As for the Curses, more on that later, but to put it simply, it did not meet the goals I wanted it to meet, and in many cases, it actually make problems worse, while also significantly slowing down the pace of something inevitably, was gonna happen regardless on how strong the curse was.
I know it probably felt rushed, sudden, and illogical. For that I am sorry, I could have done a better job at communicating, or even delay by one day, so everyone would be in the known. I feel however, acting fast was crucial to not have a bigger problem that would take exponentially longer for stats to adjust. Be ready for a boring essay for those who are curious.
The way Bosses in Season 0,1,2 and now 5 scaling, is almost like a flatline. Difficulty is measured in Tier, for example the very first boss is Tier 5, the second, tier 21 the third, tier 38, 50.. etc, with small increments further accentuated by NG+ (the higher, the sharper the tier) additionally, every NG+ boost the starting point on the first stage by 600 tiers. These tiers, dictate the stats of the encounter. Furthermore, each NG+ multiplies the stats of the boss by said NG+
Its important to note for later, the stats don't dictate the experience gained by the players, only the raw tier, and the NG+.
In the early seasons, this system is perfect, since players also evolve in a flat line, and they offset the tier scaling of ng+ bosses by ascending, allowing to reach higher exp / and stats, to combat those small increments over time that the bosses get.
tl;dr: bosses scale in a flat way with small increments, players do too, and get increments by ascending.
Season 3 and 4 offer a different scaling method, since Jobs also give stats, and with so many to choose, the power comes from creativity and build expression more than stat adjustment. But for today's topic, is not important.
On Season 5, we are back to the old Flat increase on EXP, since there is no longer a job system that would give you crazy modularity with stat bonuses increases. A lot of testing went in to this of course, and was one of the vital aspects of the 2 betas that I ran on my channel. Numbers seemed fine, progression was slow and steady, just as envisioned. If it wasn't for a couple of problems.
Newly introduced mechanic in Season 5, in an effort to further halt progress by offsetting the massive power from awakenings. These curses, ultimately, ended up not working at all for the purposes they were meant to exist.
Issue number 1: The experience. Remember the progression in Season 5 for bosses and players happen in a flat line of small increments, with maximum curse usage, the experience suddenly increase multiplicatively by 3. This, overtime, is enough to make stats so high, that the 60% curse penalty simply doesn't matter.
This is not perceptible the first hours/days, but over time, runs with maximum curse and x3 experience become longer, and longer, as the penalties have diminishing returns compared to the gains. This, put together with bosses not particularly getting stronger due to their scaling being virtually flat, and we got a problem in our hands.
The big streams with big ascensions got to experience this phenomenon first, specially when a large amount of ascensions makes this curve already pronounced (Eventually, bosses would catch up normally with their small increments, but with a constant x3 experience? would require potentially years, if not impossible at all)
Issue number 2: It sucks to feel you are dealing 40% damage compared to -what you should-. This doesn't end up mattering, since the stat gains are going to be massive anyways, but it simply doesn't feel that way. The only though that lingers, is "I'm getting my legs cut off". This I knew from the start it was going to be a slow burn and would take time for people to accept as part of the game, after all, I tried similar mechanics in early seasons during beta, and not a single time were well received. It simply makes FFBot less satisfying, is why typically in each gauntlet introduced, instead of decreasing the power of the players, I increased the power and gimmicks of the bosses from a design perspective, historically, it always worked much better.
Simply removing the EXP bonus is a terrible solution, now its just penalty AND reducing it would just lead us to the same problem, but further in the future (Sooner even with big ascensions).
This mechanic, is poison to the fun of FFBot, and needed to go. Not only makes the challenge inexistent over time, but also, makes players not feel great. Among many other issues.
Turns out, the power of the awakenings alone is bast superior to anything in Season 0, 1 and 2. It cannot in any logic, remain as it is. Is not so bast as Season 3 and 4, that required their own scaling methods for the bosses, but it needs something in between. With flatline boss progression, the EXP always directly correlate to the tier (difficulty) of the boss 1:1. This was fine on less powerful seasons were players at most only had to worry about, 1 esper.
So we have to take a different approach, we need to separate that 1:1, but very slightly, since awakenings don't offer incremental progression like jobs did. The solution is to adopt:
Every 2 Ng+, stat of the boss will got up by one extra, meaning, that a NG+3 boss, will have NG+4 stats, giving experience worth NG+3.
Etc etc etc. This might sound extremely harsh, but trust me, it is not. For comparison, In Season 4, Ng+5 have pretty much equivalent of NG+12 stats, while still giving exp from NG+5, and still was easy to dominate even without god builds.
I oversimplified everything that is going underneath, but these were the core aspects of the problem, and the solution.
My biggest regret is not noticing the math sooner, this should have become apparent during the betas, and catch right there, I understand a sudden increase in difficulty out of nowhere feel horrible, but please understand, is better to have a shift now, really early on the season than to do it a month later, it almost already too late as it is.
I apologize again for the confusion, I understand it almost feel like a rushed betrayal, I hope it offers some context on how I seen things, and why I needed to act fast, and I hope in a month, this situation won't be perceived as terrible as if feels right now. This is why I typically avoid balance changes in the middle of a Season, and I feel I failed on the delivery of Season 5, thank you all for sticking and by and to continue supporting the game, I will keep doing my best to improve the game as much as I can for the foreseeable future.