NIN/MNK difficulty?

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Originally Posted by Shamox

Probably because you can't tell if NIN a player is good or bad by only looking at its personal dps.

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this - dps actually show nothing else but your (more or less) personal output. the truth with randoms sadly looks different its not unusual to meet f.e. RDMs who don't res/heal on their own before they had been asked for support; off heals who rather let people die instead of stopping to dps. smns who won't use con or devo on other caster because it would boost their "rivals", Blms who won't move at all eating every aoe, Drgs who theter melee chars instead Brds etc, etc... just to stay on top of the enmity bar or parsing ranking list. => which proofs that fflog numbers are actually not worth anything - aside of being a ego-mirror. Good player or high quality skill on a cls consists of way more factors than numbers, which fflogs never can calculate, consider or show. I personally would rather run with a 3.8k RDM who is aware of his proactive-support-role on a soloheal-farm run than with a 4.3k RDM who stays tunnel viewed until the healer collapsed or hysterical starts to screams "help me out pls!?" while half of the grp is kissing the ground. What leads us to...

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Originally Posted by Shamox

I wouldn't really take any of these FFlogs stats as hard-facts since there's many factors that actually impacts on your dps and just as I said you don't judge a class difficulty nor a player's skill only by its dps.

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this sentence is one of the less sentences in your math war-discussion which can be signed without any regrets - everything else is just personal & subjective. fflogs is just an indicator but not a source for hard-facts or any kind of bullet-proofed arguments.

My two cents: using a simplistic deviation measure between arbitrarily chosen percentiles in order to estimate the difficulty of a job is meaningless if we don't include any additional rDPS gain due to utility, especially if we're talking about NIN since optimal use of TA and SW is what really makes a great NIN.

And this still wouldn't solve another important issue: since most hc parties do not include a MNK and MNK has a little more than half the number of parses that NIN has, we can reasonably assume that there's a higher % of "skilled" NIN than "skilled" MNK on fflogs parses. So we should also check the skewness of the distributions of mnk and nin parses and this still wouldn't give the whole picture.

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Originally Posted by Lastelli

My two cents: using a simplistic deviation measure between arbitrarily chosen percentiles in order to estimate the difficulty of a job is meaningless if we don't include any additional rDPS gain due to utility, especially if we're talking about NIN since optimal use of TA and SW is what really makes a great NIN.

And this still wouldn't solve another important issue: since most hc parties do not include a MNK and MNK has a little more than half the number of parses that NIN has, we can reasonably assume that there's a higher % of "skilled" NIN than "skilled" MNK on fflogs parses. So we should also check the skewness of the distributions of mnk and nin parses and this still wouldn't give the whole picture.

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Sorry, but that's not how statistics work (as has already been explained to address all of these arguments already).


The percentiles aren't "arbitrarily chosen" they're the median and a maximum that can be reasonably attained without heavily catered parses that make up the majority of the 99% and Max percentiles across all fights. That is literally what a median player will be capable of compared to an expert, it's the Median and Maximum points you would see in a Min-Q1-Q2-Q3-Maximum spread. Ninja's performance, again, isn't magically independent of its own Trick Attack, it benefits from it as well and that impact will be reflected within the data. And there isn't an issue with there being less Monk parses than Ninja parses, as far as statistics are concerned once you've got N=20 in a sample the deviation between the minimum to Q1 to median to Q3 to Maximum isn't going to change in any significant way. It only matters in the case of an incredibly small sample size, not a large one and a second larger one.

The fflogs data seems to show that it is easier for an exceptional monk to differentiate themselves from an average monk than for an exceptional ninja to do the same. There is less of a reward for truly outstanding nin play than monk play according to those numbers. It does not really indicate anything about the difficulty of each class. Is an average parse for ninja and monk both the exact same difficulty? No... It's comparing apples to oranges. Different classes will be easier or harder for different players, all you can really do is try both and see.

Also, to say monk is more punishing than nin because they can give up more personal dps does not show the whole story. A nin missing TA hurts rdps, not visible on personal logs. Not properly using smoke screen and shadewalker when required can result in deaths or a wipe. A different kind of punishment than personal dps loss, but part of the class. I'm very much a fan of fflogs but they don't tell the whole story here.

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Originally Posted by Laflama_Blanca

I'm very much a fan of fflogs but they don't tell the whole story here.

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Actually, it does. If you know how to navigate FFLogs someone could tell you what someone was doing at what point in the fight (down to the second) where they were doing it and who was next to them when they did it all by looking at the fight log. They would be able to see that a healer ate a tank buster because the ninja didn't use shadewalker after a grand cross for example.

yeah you could if you want to - but honestly who does that? its more like "oh wow the first 20 SAMs easily reach 6k+ dps" and not like "oh wow the first 20 SAMs got awesome support from Asts, Drg, Nin, Brd, pots and highend food" – nobody actually is looking behind the scenes its more likely just a quick view on the rankinglist itself "oh wow SAM indeed is really op!!!111". – fflogs at its best will always stays as an indicator but not more.

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Originally Posted by Neela

yeah you could if you want to - but honestly who does that? its more like "oh wow the first 20 SAMs easily reach 6k+ dps" and not like "oh wow the first 20 SAMs got awesome support from Asts, Drg, Nin, Brd, pots and highend food" – nobody actually is looking behind the scenes its more likely just a quick view on the rankinglist itself "oh wow SAM indeed is really op!!!111". – fflogs at its best will always stays as an indicator but not more.

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You really shouldn't dismiss something that you yourself don't use. Plenty of people use fflogs to improve themselves, the ranking is a bonus for most that use it. Even those who do their best to circlejerk over the rankings use it to examine fights in detail and minmax. The tools fflogs provide are rather in-depth and useful for anyone who looks to fine tune (more people than you would think).

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Originally Posted by F_Maximillian

You really shouldn't dismiss something that you yourself don't use. Plenty of people use fflogs to improve themselves, the ranking is a bonus for most that use it. Even those who do their best to circlejerk over the rankings use it to examine fights in detail and minmax. The tools fflogs provide are rather in-depth and useful for anyone who looks to fine tune (more people than you would think).

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This is true, fflogs provides a wealth of information. It's very useful to use the logs when optimizing a fight and to see what other players are doing differently. But people have not been using it in that context in this thread.

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Originally Posted by Laflama_Blanca

This is true, fflogs provides a wealth of information. It's very useful to use the logs when optimizing a fight and to see what other players are doing differently. But people have not been using it in that context in this thread.

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Well of course, I'm not going to delve into an entirely subjective argument (that's what it is, difficulty depends on who you ask). I'm merely stating that fflogs has more use than a place for people to dps circlejerk.

Im aware of what u "can" do on fflogs but I'm also aware of the fact that the majority won't use it that detailed. And especially in this topic fflogs were mentioned for dps statistics as an argument for which cls is the easiest to play - therefor fflogs won't help to find an objectiv descision - thats all bout it here anyway : /

On the topic of parses/class difficulty, help me with the following thought experiment:

Imagine two almost identical classes A and B. With both classes the real test of skill is being able to use Ability 10, which you can only do if you perfectly manage cooldowns, DOTs, etc. However, in class A Ability 10 does 500 damage and in B it only does 400 damage. Doesn't Class A therefore appear more difficult on the parses (higher skill ceiling) even though A and B are equally difficult to execute optimally? With A simply having a higher reward for optimal play (granted that might be how you define difficulty, but that seems like more of a tuning issue than a mechanics one--the classes play identically in this hypothetical)?

Well, so I think this whole ratio thing is flawed in that DPS is a measure of output and job difficulty is a matter of input. As far as I know there aren't a ton of random elements to DPS classes in FFXIV but where there are procs, direct hits, and crits you are going to see higher standard deviation in the classes that see greater benefit from them. If you get lucky and everything crits or just crits at the right time you'll get a lot more DPS but you didn't actually do anything different. Anyone who's spent any time gathering or crafting knows how streaky RNG can be in this game.

I think the guy who was talking about casts per minute was on the right track. I actually know for a fact (because I spoke directly with their community rep during a beta test) that the developers at Blizzard who worked on WoW tracked two things in particular when assessing a class's difficulty: button presses per minute and bits of information tracked. Each buff, debuff, resource, and cooldown is a different bit of information. The more of each the harder the class. If you look there's a TED talk that discusses the affects of video games on the brain and there's an exercise with little dots that change color. The average person could reliably handle maybe 3 dots and remember which dot was which color at the end. Gamers could usually handle something more like 7. The point, however, is that all participants found additional dots to be a more challenging task.

From what I'm hearing, it sounds like people using the performance ratio metric are suddenly saying monk is harder this expansion... coincidentally after a mechanic which relies on crits was introduced. A few months ago I saw bard, another very crit dependent class, being put forth as deceptively difficult.

I'd like to put it another way. Slot machines aren't difficult to operate but casinos can adjust the payouts to whatever ratios they want.