Help me understand why dps can't be closer in damage output

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Originally Posted by Carighan

It's 5.5%, when I checked yesterday it was closer to 6% (keep in mind imbalance is done from the median where everyone would ideally be, not from top to bottom).

It's a bit high, but it's also still quite close, in particular given the comparatively high number of damage classes this game has. Other games have specs and the like, but they generally do not balance except for a "target spec", GW2 in particular is extreme about this with millions of possible specs for a single class but the devs only look at a handful of particular traits and abilities to even balance at all, nevermind balance against other classes.

WoW for a long time aimed for a 5% imbalance or less, in which case yeah, this is too much. I agree in that regard. OTOH in any game before WoW and its massive success of modern-day inclusive raiding where all classes can participate instead of some being intentionally designed for different content, anything below a 50%++ difference would be "eh, close enough!". There was in fact a funny moment somewhere early WoW Cataclysm where the community started focusing on <3% imbalance instead of <5%, and the devs were caught off-guard by it.

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Explain how you got to 6%. People generally use upper quartile to get a "when it's played properly, but not optimized to the extreme" score. And 75th percentile is also the default when looking looking at the "entire tier" scores. So no idea why you claim median should be the default, but median is about the same difference anyway so it doesn't even really matter.

No I meant 6% from the median between the different jobs. In an idealized world you'd nerf the top performing class by 5.5% (in your numbers) and boost the lowest performing class by 5.5% and everyone else according to their divergence from the point where those two outliers have now met. Making everyone have the exact same DPS output, in the middle of what was formerly the spread.

Although in the real world companies need to pick their battles so most (non-SQEX, who hates easy solutions) would pick the top and the bottom performer each patch and nerf the former while boosting the latter. This'll leave the former 2nd best and 2nd worst as the biggest outliers for next patch, but it also means you only got two calsses to focus on each patch. And if you somehow cause secondary effects making for an unplanned extreme outlier, it'll automatically get selected next patch.

To apply this to FFXIV, next patch would buff Dancer by ~1600 rDPS, while nerfing Dragoon by the same amount.

Ah I see, but even then it's not 6%. Keep in mind we are talking about median (middle value), not the mean (sum divided by n). There are 13 dps jobs, making the 7th job the median score. Which is RPR.

RPR at "all bosses", upper quartile = 32595
DNC at "all bosses", upper quartile = 29810

29810/32595=0.9145

In that sense DRG is fine.
DRG at "all bosses", upper quartile = 33242

33242/32595=1.0198

Aaah, sorry, I totally missed that part. Yeah I should not have used median, I keep confusing the two. >.<

You're comparing apples to oranges. XIV doesn't have many variables beyond damage, and predictable scripted models of encounters and deterministic rotations for most of them without any customizable talents or builds. Everybody plays with the same buttons without any rng beyond a minority of jobs. This 5% or whatever the number is, is not there by margin of error, but by design.

Various reasons have been given in the past as to why they decided to start pushing this balancing philosophy, but ultimately it probably boils down to making sure players are encouraged to bring two melee dps over anything else. Justifications such as "difficulty" or "friction" are hard to take seriously when jobs like Viper and the current iteration of Black Mage are performing strong, or when jobs like Bard are fairly weak compared to the effort to get the most out of it.

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Originally Posted by Carighan

Aaah, sorry, I totally missed that part. Yeah I should not have used median, I keep confusing the two. >.<

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I don't see why you should not have used median. Median is a fine way to look at these things.
And when looking at the mean, that is still not "5.5%, or closer to 6%".

DRK 33237
MNK 33125
BLM 33077
VPR 33014
NIN 32917
SAM 32863
RPR 32593
PCT 31799
RDM 31246
SMN 31044
MCH 30619
BRD 30038
DNC 29813

Mean 415385/13 = 31952.69231
DNC deviation from the mean = 29813 / 31952.69 = 0.933

So DNC deviates -6.7% from than mean, or -8.5% from the median.

Because Melee players will throw a tantrum because they don't have the best damage in the game as well as the best limit break in the game against bosses.

The average Melee player will come up with arguments like this to defend the damage difference -

• I have to stay close to the boss to keep up damage
• I don't have freedom of movement
• I have to fight for and optimize my uptime
• Ranged bring raid buffs and utility, melee bring damage!1

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"I have to stay close to the boss to keep up damage" and "I have to fight for and optimize my uptime"

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No you don't.

Yoshi-P has said in the past that they design mechanics for boss fights with melee uptime in mind.


99% of boss mechanics in this game resolve at max melee range, you don't need to fight for uptime, cut the cap.

For the rest of mechanics, strategies that come out are designed with uptime in mind.


The only thing you need to do is read your tooltips and realise which ability requires you to be behind the boss and which one requires you to be at it's side.

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"I don't have freedom of movement"

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In the rare case you're forced off a boss, unless you're a monk you have a ranged attack.

Some damage is better than sitting there like a lemon.

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Ranged bring raid buffs and utility, melee bring damage!1

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I'm sorry but.... What is Brotherhood, Arcane Circle, Dokumori, Battle Litany?

What is Feint, Arcane Crest, Mantra?


Raid buffs and Utility!


All but 2 melee bring a raid buff, every melee brings Feint.

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Originally Posted by Carighan

The problem is not that they cannot be closer, they are. I don't get the request. We're currently looking at +/-6% damage output, which while not perfect (5% was a common variance to aim for in WoW for many years) is also not far apart at all, giving a maximum 14% between top and bottom. Which is given how FFXIV fights are designed far far far below the DPS check. That's the other thing, DPS checks in FFXIV are... mild, to put it, well, mildly. DPS output balance is nearly meaningless comparing other MMORPGs because it's tested so rarely. It's always a huge deal when it matters as a result, but that's more because it's so rare.

However, separate from the "why isn't our output closer", I guess we should ask "Why are the three sub-roles of DPS designed so badly as sub-roles?" to which I'd answer: think bigger, no class or role in FFXIV is well-designed, on account of the long GCD + significant netcode delay prohibiting good design and hence the devs opting to shove gameplay design into the encounters, not the classes.

It could be improved, but can you imagine the tear-floods if melees lost significant uptime like in older MMOs because being in melee reach is genuinely dangerous, or casters constantly lost 30%-50% of their casts to movement, having virtually no tools to continue while moving (their whole deal)? And in return, when standing still both did 50%++ more damage than others? Imagine how unbalanced that would be for any individual fight, and that's what MMOs used to be like before due to constant player feedback about "Muh damaaaaaage!!!" every edge got sanded off and class/role identities largely eroded.

I play long enough to know when you swapped DPS ideally for every fight. Of course most did not, but you could significantly lower the difficulty of fights if you went from 15 of class X to 10 of Y + 5 or Z for the next one, etc etc. Far more because there wasn't such a small +/- 6% gap, there was often a 50%++ damage increase from one class to the other. And some classes also worked mechanically different, for example in some older MMOs it was assumed that pet classes would not be brought to large AoE-fights because well, their pets took full AoE damage and were not affected by most heals or defensive skills and you had to manually maneuver them around GTAoEs anyways. This was just part of the expected design until WoW reduced pets to external DoTs with model graphics that also fired abilities every X seconds like some form of autoattack. You could trivially remove them at that point at no loss of functionality, but that stuck, see FFXIV now having done the same with Summoners and Scholars. Was this good? IMO no, but I can totally see why the previous design was also disliked by many people, if you were a pet class, good luck doing a whole slew of fights.

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This is the most accurate answer.

When it comes to FFXIV, sometimes things just don't make sense. We had bosses the size of an entire arena in Endwalker, yet even if melees missed every positional, they would still likely be ahead of Physical Ranged. At most, they'd lose maybe 1 GCD per minute if they played well. In TOP, which many consider the hardest fight in the game, the only mechanic I can remember giving melees trouble was Pantokrator.

Maybe this is just meant to enforce their vision of the game. There are more melee jobs than the other 2 roles, so Physical Ranged and raise taxes will always exist. This also seems to be a trend with newly released and reworked jobs: they're pushed ahead of the curve early so more people will play them. Obviously, this does the game more harm than good, since people are forced to play specific jobs in raids, when one of the game's main appeals is that you can play every job on a single character. We also have roles that are losing players, such as Healer and Physical Ranged.

When players once tried to shift the meta away from that vision, Physical Ranged was buried to make sure it wouldn't happen again. You can also see this in Dawntrail, where we effectively had only 1 strong caster at a time, even though both should be on the same level, according to Yoshi-P. In an ideal world, taxes would be around 5%.