Why do people care about potency so much?

job balance is important in the overall grand scheme of things but it's not always relevant. It depends on what kind of content you are doing. It is nice to be able to do all the available content with the job/ role that you enjoy the most.

However, Balance is always finicky and hard to achieve. Generally, games buff/nerf classes/ roles on rotation. You will never have a perfect balance. The same thing also happens with League of Legends. They rotate FOM characters to keep things interesting but at the end of the day, every champ has to not break competitive play. Of course, nothing is ever perfect and some always find ways to break the balance.

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Originally Posted by Alexvai

Players don't really care about potency, they care about the balance between jobs. For example the difference between mch and dnc that are both phys ranged (or smn and picto) is so huge that it feels bad to play the former instead of the latter. Also i'm amazed at how SE is capable of fucking up jobs rotation every time they tweak potencies. Now picto don't even get to use the hammer combo bc it's a dps loss over the basic combo(?) like hello who the hell tested these changes

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Rotation design is way more impactful to how a job feels than the actual damage numbers. I do more personal damage when playing MCH or DRG than while on Dancer but I feel like I’m doing more damage on DNC due to how the damage is spread out with dopamine buttons like Starfall and Dance of the Dawn distracting you from low your damage is on average with their huge numbers.

An increase in potency that is noticeable enough to actually make a job start to feel more impactful than another job would have to be a game breaking overbuff

I think people are conditioned to care about balance due to how much it actually matters in other games like Marvel Rivals or LOL and takw that mindset into XIV even though you can clear all content with any job choice

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Originally Posted by Voryn

There are people who do week 1 savage and new ultimates.

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I meant people who try and CLEAR a whole tier in one week, not just people progging week 1. People who actually get those first or second lockout full clears are an insanely small minority of players

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Originally Posted by Sarantserel

People have been doing calculations accounting for the Direct Crits on hammer. If you consider the 4s cast time and that filler gives you access to Cyan/Yellow/Magenta/Comet (and that those filler abilities will crit and direct hit too throughout the fight), hammer is looking to be a loss over just doing filler.

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Forget to mention this to the other guy but yeah that is really bad. This is one of the few cases where potency can affect rotation design (it’s pretty much one and the same here). It’s not the players job to play the rotation the “right way”, it’s okay to optimize your damage. Here the optimal playstyle is now more boring from a job design perspective

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Originally Posted by Amh_Wilzuun

So? We’re not playing Heavensward

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we arent. back then, the game could still be considered "fun"

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Originally Posted by Amh_Wilzuun

Forget to mention this to the other guy but yeah that is really bad. This is one of the few cases where potency can affect rotation design (it’s pretty much one and the same here). It’s not the players job to play the rotation the “right way”, it’s okay to optimize your damage. Here the optimal playstyle is now more boring from a job design perspective

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At this point you really have to wonder whether the devs are purposefully neglectful/don't care about doing their job and the state of the game or are genuinely this incompetent (and I'm so sorry to say this because I know how toxic this sounds) because if players with a spreadsheet can figure this out on the same day the patch notes drop how is it possible that the professional developers don't notice - or care about - this during weeks of patch preparation? And even if they themselves are not the greatest theory crafters I'm sure there are people they can reach out to to do some calculations for them? (Though you would assume that if your job is balancing being able to do those calculations comes with the job description...)

This is such a big balancing misstep. For the price I pay every month plus expacs I expect at least a baseline level of quality checks and I'm honestly not seeing them in PvE anymore. (I know things were always messy when it comes to the balancing team's decisions but this accidental(?) destruction of the pct rotation is really just a big head scratcher.)
I'm praying even harder now that this team will never in any way cross over into PvP development because hell no.

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Originally Posted by Raim

No its not. The hammer always direct critical hits. The only time the normal combo would beat it is if all of its hit crit which is pretty unlikely.

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Not really from new calculations hammer is only worth using during reopener. What you're missing is that you need to paint the hammer before you can use it and with that it's less potency than what you can get using the palette combo

Current MCH is an insult to older players that used to enjoy it. Alongside DRK, they're the watered down precursors to SMN and BLM.

We obviously don't know for sure, but the PCT changes really feel like they just did them to nerf the job, especially in downtime fight, expecting players to just continue playing the job as they did before, but without really understanding the implications that some of the changes could mean when it came time for players to optimize. It feels like it was just assumed that we'd just do the 7.1 rotation without thinking about the actual numbers.