Ranged DPS, choose a weakness that would justify a buff

[Akiudo]

This should make you realize that fflogs data is not all that matters. If DNC is weaker, why is it the preferred choice for speedrunners even now?

the notion that the evil evil parsing side is off by more than 500 dps, like off by enough more that groups simply realize this other class is better is one i will sincerely doubt.

Realistically the answer will be more in the realm of: "people just like to use what they know", yes people are like that. if not that than maybe they are right, dnc is stronger than mch at 99,5+ percentiles and therefore better for speedruns, especially as due to proccs alone dancer is a class with more volatile damage numbers than mch. in a normal group if the dancer is allways 300 under the mch unless its his god run than you will say fuck that, dnc sucks. if you are doing 30 runs in a row just hoping for the one best run ever that changes completly, at that point you may aswell say "whatever, everyone else just play perfectly, we try till our dancer has his god run".

However, even if performance on dancer was as consistent as it is on mch, which it is not, its still a fucked up thing to make a class effectivly suck for 99% of the playerbase so the top 1% doesn't "abuse" it, mind you the top 1% of raiders, not of all players. speedrunners going for top spots are a ridiculisly small sub group and there will allways be a "best" class, balancing around that is like draining the ocean while trying to get 2 perfectly equal cups of water, its futile AND stupid.

[Lastelli]

the notion that the evil evil parsing side is off by more than 500 dps, like off by enough more that groups simply realize this other class is better is one i will sincerely doubt.

Realistically the answer will be more in the realm of: "people just like to use what they know", yes people are like that. if not that than maybe they are right, dnc is stronger than mch at 99,5+ percentiles and therefore better for speedruns, especially as due to proccs alone dancer is a class with more volatile damage numbers than mch. in a normal group if the dancer is allways 300 under the mch unless its his god run than you will say fuck that, dnc sucks. if you are doing 30 runs in a row just hoping for the one best run ever that changes completly, at that point you may aswell say "whatever, everyone else just play perfectly, we try till our dancer has his god run".

However, even if performance on dancer was as consistent as it is on mch, which it is not, its still a fucked up thing to make a class effectivly suck for 99% of the playerbase so the top 1% doesn't "abuse" it, mind you the top 1% of raiders, not of all players. speedrunners going for top spots are a ridiculisly small sub group and there will allways be a "best" class, balancing around that is like draining the ocean while trying to get 2 perfectly equal cups of water, its futile AND stupid.

That's part of the deal. Higher variance means higher risk. Your payoff for that higher risk is higher potential damage at higher percentiles. Making DNC as good as MCH in an average run would just kill MCH in all possible scenarios. DNC being lower than MCH at lower percentiles is a necessity dictated by its own design. At least now MCH is good in a prog/unoptimized setting...and this is the only case where it's marginally better than the other two.
Also, you're ignoring the specificities of the 3 jobs. Among the 3 ranged dps, DNC benefits greatly from downtime, unlike MCH and BRD. BRD, on the other hand, becomes absurdly powerful in a multi-target scenario, which is pretty good for DNC as well thanks to standard/tech finish and saber dance (MCH struggles in this case). Just because savage doesn't usually show these peculiarities, it doesn't mean they aren't there (look at ultimate data, for instance). If you want to homogenize single target damage for the 3 ranged, the first step is to make sure to remove these scenarios where one has a clear advantage over the others.

Anyway, give it a little time and you'll see DNC reaching MCH level of rdps on fflogs soon enough.

[zuzu-bq]

I understand Physical Ranged people being down after the supremacy of Disembowel since Heavensward. But free complete mobility comes with a price, and thanks to that the variance between a good and an average Phys Ranged player is smaller than other roles since they have no uptime worries. So the need to position in order to properly keep uptime is not existent in this role. I did wish the role had more supportive skills so people didn't feel bad though, but those are really hard to balance so maybe SE is afraid of it.

As a side note, SMN's insane mobility makes them to usually have the lowest variance between skill outside of Physical Ranged.

[Myon88]

As a side note, SMN's insane mobility makes them to usually have the lowest variance between skill outside of Physical Ranged.

Hm I don't know about that. If you peruse this tier's combat data in a certain place, and look at the interquartile range of the box plot for each job's dps output, I think you'd find summoner is pretty much dead even with rdm and the melee jobs. That is to say, for the most part people are roughly as good or bad as each other at playing each job.

The only outliers are (as you can guess), black mage having the widest difference between good and bad players, and the physical ranged having the smallest. In short, when people are bad at black mage, they're really, really bad at black mage. And the physical ranged having simple rotations and a low skill ceiling mean there's not as big a difference between a good or bad physical ranged player (ouch). So, stuff we all know already.

Unless, you have some other methodology that points to a different conclusion? I'd certainly be interested to see it.

It's popular to say that summoner is now 'easy' because of the buffs to their mobility in 5.1. From a movement standpoint, that's certainly true, but it's far from the whole picture of what makes up a job's difficulty. As I have said before, people have a massive, massive blind spot when it comes to identifying what makes jobs difficult. Things to do with movement or 'uptime' are overrated (because they're easy to understand, you can't hit something = no damage), and things to do with depth or rotational complexity are underrated (for the opposite reason, people who don't understand it won't see it).

Now, it's rather unfortunate for the physical ranged that despite this being the case, their actual rotation is rather easy too, so there's not a lot you can argue for them there either. Happily, that isn't the case for summoners, and you need only look at the countless examples of people mangling their trances and demi windows and tri-disaster resets to see that.

But you don't have to take my word for it, as I've said, the combat data for this tier already encapsulates all that information. There are people out there making these mistakes right now and recording their performances, and if those errors weren't costing them as much dps as I claim, it would be shown clearly in the percentile spread.

[Akiudo]

I understand Physical Ranged people being down after the supremacy of Disembowel since Heavensward. But free complete mobility comes with a price, and thanks to that the variance between a good and an average Phys Ranged player is smaller than other roles since they have no uptime worries. So the need to position in order to properly keep uptime is not existent in this role. I did wish the role had more supportive skills so people didn't feel bad though, but those are really hard to balance so maybe SE is afraid of it.

As a side note, SMN's insane mobility makes them to usually have the lowest variance between skill outside of Physical Ranged.

while what you say about variance/skill range is true the problem is that in reality it is "barely" true, true nonetheless yes, but going from lower quartile to upper quartile (so 25->75% parses) on the all fights metric

bard gains 8.2% dps
monk gains 9,2%, (not the lowest variance melee, both dragoon and nin have lower variance)

yet this so much bigger variance gets compensated in the form of 5,2% dps even at the 25 percentile range, it basically boils down to "its easier to mess up as monk, monk loses 1% more dps on average than bard going down 50 percentile points so lets compensate monk by putting him 6,2% ahead at the upper (75, lets not even talk about really high parses) end"

sorry but there is just a gigantic different between "compensating for having a harder time for something" and "compensating so hard you can outperform the competition with 1 hand behind your back"

That's part of the deal. Higher variance means higher risk. Your payoff for that higher risk is higher potential damage at higher percentiles. Making DNC as good as MCH in an average run would just kill MCH in all possible scenarios.

that right here makes me question if you understand the word "Average", if say just as an example dancer had a 300 dps variance completly down to luck of proccs, crits not included as those are a factor for every class,

lucky run +150, bad run -150 than making it so dancer in his god run is 150 higher than an equally skilled mch and in a bad run 150 lower would if you run a boss 10 times once per week leave your group basically as strong with the dancer as with the mch, most groups would probably even prefer the mch for higher consistency and would also show up as the same average on logs.

Now on the other hand making it so dancer is 250 weaker than mch in a bad run and 50 higher in a god run would punish every single group using a dancer on an average run (average run, not average group, so for the "we are gods" crowd their average "99+ group percentile run), if however your one goal is to go for the best time possible, down to saving 1 second than praying for the rng god to heed your prayers may be worth it to you, which is what we can see with dancer being the most used in speedrun groups. however again, that is trying to explicitly balance speedrun groups, something for which there is probably the least need of anything in this game, this is literally balancing the game around 0,5% or less of the playerbase, (even worse, a part of the playerbase that probably feels the least bound to a certain class on a personal level and would sell their grandma if it raised there damage) in a way that works highly imbalancing down the line, as there isn't even a tipping point in favor of dancer in any kind of general setting, whereas the tipping point for "mch is stronger" starts at "4 out of 5 runs some of the best groups in the world produce when running 20 times in a row", its just that dancer get taken for the 1 out of 5 runs cause in the end only the god run counts anyways

[Lastelli]

that right here makes me question if you understand the word "Average", if say just as an example dancer had a 300 dps variance completly down to luck of proccs, crits not included as those are a factor for every class

I understand how basic statistics work, but it seems to me that you're just severely underestimating how much DNC dps can vary depending on luck of both procs and crit assuming that the rotation is correctly executed (which doesn't happen at lower percentiles). Balancing DNC and MCH around the average means that DNC will outdps MCH by a good 3% at the 99th percentile and that's the perfect way to kill MCH. Given how reliant DNC is on crit, I wouldn't be surprised if by the end of this tier, when all jobs are BiS, DNC will lead by a significant margin at higher percentiles. Actually, we already see how many people think MCH need more damage because they don't bring enough utility (compared to DNC)...of course they're wrong, MCH shouldn't be buffed if other ranged are kept as they are now, but making DNC much stronger than MCH when they're a little bit lucky and much stronger when they're very lucky is just asking to kill a job.

Then there are the other problems I mentioned that you keep ignoring. Nerf BRD and DNC multitarget damage, take away curing waltz, improv, minne and other such skills, make it so that all three jobs benefit from downtime in the same way instead of making DNC op when there's a lot of downtime and then maybe we can start talking about single target dps balance. You think MCH is "too strong"? I suggest you take a look at fflogs data for ultimate, the content that needs a good balance the most because it's the biggest challenge in the game right now.

[Connor]

I don’t know much about dps or balance but I just want Foe Requiem back

Surely Bard wouldn’t become meta if it had like Foe Requiem and some defensive support songs like a weak hp regen song or an actual shield effect on Warden’s Paean. They could have 1.5 seconds cast times and mp drain like before to balance them out (how come dancers get to spend GCDs on dancing but Bard can’t use them on singing lol). Maybe it’d make it meta for progression though, if it could like regen HP or increase party damage with Requiem. Cast times and MP usage would be the obvious weakness but then would that be enough of a weakness to counteract having access to support songs?

Dancer could be more damage oriented with its buffs like it is now. I don’t know what more could be added to make it stand out more. Maybe if it had more abilities like Standard Step where it uses GCDs for a support effect? Including compensatory damage when used. Also I think it’d be cool if Improvisation gave either a small damage buff or some kind of HP recovery to those inside it, to make it worth using for more than just when the boss is invuln or as a standard pop-and-drop oGCD for 3 seconds of healing amount increase. Naturally their weakness is having the lowest DPS of the three ranged, but then good use of Steps can make up for that low personal DPS?

Machinist I have no idea for tbh lol. I don’t really play it enough to know how it could improve. Maybe it could get its debuffs like Dismantle / Rend Mind back? Maybe give it some kind of ability like old Hypercharge on a long cooldown? Machinist being the ‘selfish dps’ of ranged is cool but I just wonder if that’s really enough to make it stand out on its own. I guess it has the whole ‘selfish dps but also mobile’ thing but I wonder if that’s enough to make people think ‘I’m glad we have a Machinist’. Maybe Machinist could be about balancing its own ‘selfish dps’ style with the ‘support oriented’ style that ranged are apparently supposed to have (according to SE lol). The weakness being that it’d have less/weaker support abilities than the other two ranged, in exchange for the highest damage.

Idk that’s my idea of how ranged could stand out as their own jobs and not just as ‘easy mode mobile job with lower damage than everyone else’. I think there’s enough there to balance out reinforcing the support aspect of ranged dps. Then again, I did say I don’t know much about balance lol, so maybe it’d just make 3X Ranged the meta for all content.

Lastly while I’m here talking about ranged can Bard please get Wide Volley back? Make it one of those weaponskills that only work in a combo if it’s too strong to replace Quick Knock as an upgrade. Idk I just really miss the animation from it Yoshi plz

[Akiudo]

I understand how basic statistics work, but it seems to me that you're just severely underestimating how much DNC dps can vary depending on luck of both procs and crit assuming that the rotation is correctly executed (which doesn't happen at lower percentiles). Balancing DNC and MCH around the average means that DNC will outdps MCH by a good 3% at the 99th percentile and that's the perfect way to kill MCH. Given how reliant DNC is on crit, I wouldn't be surprised if by the end of this tier, when all jobs are BiS, DNC will lead by a significant margin at higher percentiles. Actually, we already see how many people think MCH need more damage because they don't bring enough utility (compared to DNC)...of course they're wrong, MCH shouldn't be buffed if other ranged are kept as they are now, but making DNC much stronger than MCH when they're a little bit lucky and much stronger when they're very lucky is just asking to kill a job.

Then there are the other problems I mentioned that you keep ignoring. Nerf BRD and DNC multitarget damage, take away curing waltz, improv, minne and other such skills, make it so that all three jobs benefit from downtime in the same way instead of making DNC op when there's a lot of downtime and then maybe we can start talking about single target dps balance. You think MCH is "too strong"? I suggest you take a look at fflogs data for ultimate, the content that needs a good balance the most because it's the biggest challenge in the game right now.

i never said "balance them around the average" at least not in a "balance them around the 50% percentile level" or whatever way, you are conjuring things here, if anything i said "balance them in a way there is a tipping point that leads to some kind of equality" and "don't balance that tipping point around speedrunners", if dnc "on average" was 100 dps above mch at 99% that would kill mch for speedruns, so what, again we are talking a ridiculous small size of the playerbase here doing a thing not even "intendet" by the developers, (i highly doubt the devs will jump to the defense for some fflogs speedrun rankings), also i don't ask to make them "stronger when they are a little bit lucky" and "much stronger when they are really lucky" i ask to make them "a bit stronger with good/great luck, equal with "average" luck and worse with "bad" luck", instead of "a little bit better with the luck of the gods, worse every other case" again , the only people that care (and capitalize on that) are those that simply do so many runs till every single star in the universe aligns.

to your other points though, "not wanting to argue one of several points someone makes" is not the same as ignoring arguments, thank you.

but for all i care ? sure, go ahead, do all these things about support and multi dot potential and whatever that you wrote down, on support in general i'm ambivalent, i do think it is nice to have, i am willing to take a dps cut for it, i refuse to accept that the pittance of support bard has over mch is worth 700 or even 200 dps, if the balance team thinks the support bard has left should be worth more than 100 dps than for the love of god, please just take it away, aside from that i sincerely believe that the fact certain classes scale WAY better with 2 enemies than others is bad, like its fine for classes to have different strengths, but there being like 3 or so classes that can capitalize on something like that like theres no tomorrow while for everyone else its anywhere in the range of "oh yea nice, 50 extra dps for me" or "yeay, 2 enemies, these are worth absolutely nothing" is balancing cancer, especially if generally we don't have these kind of fight, in fact when ultimate came out i wrote a pretty lengthy post why and how bard single target dps could be buffed while bringing their 2 target potential more in line with other classes, sorry i wasn't singing you praise for this novel idea.