Yes, this is the reason they started tightening windows and making jobs so similar. Yoshi P saw that culture of party's outright banning jobs from groups and he changed course on balancing.
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It´s not an opinion, it´s how balancing works.
You judge by perfect circumstances, but they´ll never happen permanently. Just look at the healer... one of them could solo-heal, so the other can farm their 100 parse easily. And so the whole group can assist any other teammember too. But it´s not gonna happen in random-groups, the most statics and definately not with casuals. It´s a PvE game and if you just look at the top, you´ll automatically exclude some classes or even a whole part of the community by balancing around a handful of log-farmers. It´s another thing in a PvP game with championship series, where balancing around the top matters way more than about the average.
Just check the logs on each percentile. Reaper is the top DPS on 10,20,30...until 95. This shows that it has a low skill floor, low skill ceiling and short said " It´s broken". MNK directly follows RPR and don´t even outclass him at 100 that hard. And the devs need to balance around that. It´s not a hierarchy and not just an opinion, it´s how things have to work if you want to achieve as much balance as possible and to make the game more enjoyable for everyone on any class.
And again.... The more circumstances a class have to care about, the more difficulty it is.
- Positionals
- Buffs / Debuffs
- Dots
- oGCD´s
- Weaving
- Stunlocks
- Uptime
- Max melee range
- Cast time
- Circumstances aka RNG mechanics or a bad tank which mostly cost melee-uptime / positionals
- The amount of buttons you´ve to use to do the same damage as others who rely on 123
- Gauges
DRG has to take care for everything but casttimes. MNK miss the stunlocks and has less buttons, meanwhile RPR has only 123 gameplay and 1 buff to care about. Then you´ve stuff like SMN, which has to care about what... casting times on Ruin, or RDPS classes with either a gauge or DoTs with a long duration, meanwhile they´re able to play any bossmechanic safety and easy down without any damage loss?!
Why do you think so many "Ultimate-boosted" poeple made this with MCH or so?! Because it´s an easy pick to get carried, or atleast a safe pick to execute.
The ninja point concerned the sudden need to line everything with trick as like the only optimal path (I played it upon release as well). Ninja became a large focus in raiding (nearly locking it in). Outside of ninja some jobs had different cds for damage increase/ogcds (drg for example) which required planning with different fights. The need to "fit into trick attack" as a metric for opinions of burst design was very frequent.
More recently, im referring to alot of jobs cds coming down to 60s with no punishment for drifts or accounting for it. In the past, You could line up cds at burst's but than know it won't be up at 60s everytime. But I understand that the whole point was the initial burst.
Now we know nearly every job is going to burst at the same intervals. My point is not that this is good or bad but that alot of designs are just getting easier to plan for the sake of..... Um easing optimization. Iron out the wrinkles because those old cds were outdated despite persisting for a long time I guess. Was that part of class design or simply went unnoticed the whole time.
And yes memory is a fickle thing I agree.
Realistically the people at 95 percentile are playing roughly the same way as the ones at the max ranking, looking at only top spots i think may be misleading because of too little data/crit rng/party team comp/kill time.
Also, i have already made this argument earlier in the thread, but while difficulty is subjective, while looking at fflogs you can clearly see reaper as a class is less susceptible to player skill than others :
if you filter by different percentiles, you can see several class move in the rankings according to ease of play, for example summoner is higher at low percentile and drg is higher at higher percentiles, if you look at reaper it is always number 1, but the lead tends to grow the lower player skill is, which means the difference between a great reaper and a mediocre one is smaller, so while reaper has some non trivial optimization stuff like double or triple enshroud burst windows, you dont need to play that well to perform close to your ceiling comparatively to other classes.
https://www.fflogs.com/zone/statistics/42/#dataset=95
https://www.fflogs.com/zone/statistics/42/#dataset=75
https://www.fflogs.com/zone/statistics/42/#dataset=40
Knowing this, i dont think its unfair to call reaper an easier job to play, and i dont even think its a bad thing, i think its good since its always going to be a broadly appealing class regardless of balance just because of looks and animations alone, but knowing this, right now its 100% overpowered, and i think that in this case the fact thats it also is easy feels exra bad, because it makes you kinda go "whats the point of trying harder for less results on other jobs".