The potential problem with low level Roulettes in 6.0

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Originally Posted by PyurBlue

Will all jobs have the exact same multiplier? No, but using the same one for all jobs in a role is pretty reasonable. If that didn't work it would mean that classes were very imbalanced.

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Jobs at lower levels ARE very imbalanced. the Monk example might be a 3 fold increase, but something like Dancer or Red Mage is much, much less. So applying the same ratio to all jobs would make those jobs pretty much useless.

Regardless of where they go, FFXIV is way too timid with giving beginners new buttons. I get they are worried about intimidating new players, but at a 2.5 sec GCD I think people can handle 3-piece combos by 20.

My suggestion give more skills with low potency at early levels and upgrade skill potency when they have enough level. This will make many jobs more appealing for new players.
This strategy also works with old players.. when they sync to low level dungeon they will get their all needed skills with low potency.
Right now low level dungeon experience not much different than 3 button arcade game.

People coming from more fast paced games (litterally any other major MMO) will get bored out of their mind in like at least first 50 hours playing this game when it comes to combat. It's not representative of how the combat plays at max level at all so it's a waste of potential players who'd enjoy the game. We need to unlock abilities much faster. Imo we should have almost full kit at lvl 50. I don't think spreading abilities out is necessary for keeping the leveling experience exciting. The job quests would need minor rewriting perhaps but that's imo a non-issue.

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Originally Posted by SamRF

People coming from more fast paced games (litterally any other major MMO) will get bored out of their mind in like at least first 50 hours playing this game when it comes to combat. It's not representative of how the combat plays at max level at all so it's a waste of potential players who'd enjoy the game. We need to unlock abilities much faster. Imo we should have almost full kit at lvl 50. I don't think spreading abilities out is necessary for keeping the leveling experience exciting. The job quests would need minor rewriting perhaps but that's imo a non-issue.

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Absolutely agree.
I think the "giving all skills when syncing down" route opens the door to them ignoring lower levels skill distribution, which would only make things worse.
They should have more skills available at lower levels, and if necessary, grant more skill upgrades at higher levels.

I've come from fast paced games. .and this game's combat doesn't bore me at all, and to think, I'm a tank, which is supposedly the most boring job/class in MMO history according to people here. I got 15 days left on my free trial(or whatever it is) and gonna start my sub at the end. Can we stop speaking for everyone?

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Originally Posted by Quintessa

I've come from fast paced games. .and this game's combat doesn't bore me at all, and to think, I'm a tank, which is supposedly the most boring job/class in MMO history according to people here. I got 15 days left on my free trial(or whatever it is) and gonna start my sub at the end. Can we stop speaking for everyone?

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I don't think we are speaking for anyone.. Its peoples personal opinion. Its a forum and people sharing their ideas.
If you are not bored its good. Game certainly needs more new players.
But offline day count 100+ players with under 50 level jobs exist in every FC which implies there is a problem at low level content.

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Originally Posted by AngelCheese77

EverQuest 2 does this. Essentially all the skills are kept but the damage is significantly lowered to the player they mentor to. But I don't know how this game deals with skills, so it may be difficult to even do that.

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Potency for abilities is generally unchanging (unless some trait changes the ability itself and replaces it with a version with different potency or something similar), but how that potency maps into actual damage is based on gear stats. That's how the damage is 'lowered' when synching into lower level content: by lowering the stats of the gear.

Unfortunately, the level sync math is already somewhat broken, given how gear is synched down. In some cases at high-end content it can leave people undergeared to a point where they should not have been able to queue, and in many other cases at low-end content it trivializes it (hence why people can faceroll so much early content, even synched down).

Specifically, my understanding—and someone please correct me if I'm wrong here—is that a given piece of gear which exceeds the ilevel maximum will be individually synched to that ilevel by removing all materia bonuses (i.e., taking only the base stats of the gear), then scaling down by an amount based on the difference in ilevels. But because stats have gone up from expansion to expansion at a higher rate than the ilevel has, synching ilevel 500 gear to ilevel 100 will give you gear with considerably better stats than any actual ilevel 100 gear has.

And since potency -> damage/healing power is based on those stats, that "better than actual gear of this level" situation means the damage/healing output will also be higher than you could actually get at that level, contributing to the "even synched to level 50, we can faceroll Crystal Tower raids" scenario; even with abilities and traits from later levels missing, the base stats that go into those calculations are still a lot higher than they would actually be at level 50 in level 50 gear.

This is also how it can backfire at the high end; let's say someone has their level 80 ilevel 430 weathered gear and wants to queue into a level 80 dungeon that takes ilevel 435 minimum and syncs to ilevel 445. They go and get two ilevel 480 accessories, because the accessories are the cheapest and it will raise their gearset average to around i439; that's enough to make the ilevel check, since that's done as an average. But once they get into the dungeon, those i430 pieces are left untouched but the i480 accessories are synched down to i445. And since this is level synching within an expansion, the scaling down is actually fairly likely to end up being roughly equivalent to real i445 gear. Now they may be insufficiently geared to survive the dungeon effectively; their effective average ilevel is now about i432, which would not have let them queue into the dungeon in the first place.

The upshot of which is "scaling consistently without having to have synched-down stats manually set for each piece of gear—or manually mapping it to some equivalent gearset at the target level—is hard, which contributes to existing balance issues."

Much as it pains me when I see my hotbars turn to a sea of disabled icons when Roulette dumps me in Sastasha, I suspect that letting me keep level 80 abilities in there would exacerbate an already-unbalanced level synching situation. For it to work, level synching would probably need to be rethought first.

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Originally Posted by Quintessa

I've come from fast paced games. .and this game's combat doesn't bore me at all, and to think, I'm a tank, which is supposedly the most boring job/class in MMO history according to people here. I got 15 days left on my free trial(or whatever it is) and gonna start my sub at the end. Can we stop speaking for everyone?

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Some of the DPS literally go 30 levels with less buttons than a baby tank would have to press. ARC from level 1 to 30 only has 4 skills it presses: one filler (Heavy Shot), one being an oGCD every 15 seconds (Bloodletter), one self buff every 80 seconds (Raging Strikes), and the other being a DoT they press every 30 seconds (Venomous Bite—they get Windbite right at level 30 after completing the ARC storyline, so I don’t count it here). It used to have more to it (e.g., Hawk’s Eye, more oGCDs like actually-dealt-damage Repelling Shot and Blunt Arrow), but they’ve trimmed skill sets down from when I started that low level ARC is so monotonous.

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Originally Posted by PyurBlue

Will all jobs have the exact same multiplier? No, but using the same one for all jobs in a role is pretty reasonable. If that didn't work it would mean that classes were very imbalanced. Also keep in mind that in leveling content perfect equality isn't a requirement. As things are now, in a given dungeon one class might have AoE while another doesn't. One player might have role skills while another doesn't as these don't get synced. A common multiplier for all DPS, all healer, and all tanks is perfectly reasonable.

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Using his MNK example, what if the MNK in question is only 40? Applying a universal multiplier to bring down a level 80 MNK would make a level 40 MNK deal close to half the damage of a level 15 MNK, even playing absolutely flawlessly. "nerfing damage" is far from a simple concept, as it requires a huge amount of balancing, analysis of toolkits at literally every level that a job gains a new part of its toolkit, and would be a logistical balancing nightmare; you'd literally be getting weaker in older dungeons as you leveled up then when you were at that level, quite the oxymoron.

Unless they go dungeon by dungeon, job by job, meticulously nerfing damage by EXACT amounts for EACH instance in the game, damage nerfs will always either:

1) cause the 80's to still be overpowered if they balance around the 80 not doing an optimal rotation, meaning any 80 doing an optimal rotation will still utterly shatter any level 15 out of the park.
2) cause the 80's to have to perform flawlessly to match the limited toolkit of a level 15 if they balance around performing a near optimal rotation to keep up, meaning by far and large with the skillbase of FF14's players, instances will become longer/harder for basically no reason.

And how do you balance tanks and healers? Think About it. a lvl 29 GLD will never have Hallowed Ground from a level 80 synced PLD. a 22 MRD won't have the lifesteal of a level 80 WAR with Nascent Flash. A level 80 synced WHM would have benediction; where the 43 WHM wouldn't. You think they're going to spend and take the time editing & balancing ALL those skills at EVERY level too?

And if you'd have to do ridiculous changes to these abilities to the point they're no longer the same ability (Like doing something absurd like turning Hallowed Ground into 1% mitigation, or Benediction into 10% heal), then...what was the point?. If you have to utterly gut these abilities to make sure balance is upheld to the point they may as well not exist or no longer resemble the real ability, then it's not the same toolkit anymore, and completely invalidates the point of trying to create a system that lets you use all your fancy new abilities at lower levels.

There are far too many variables, far too many things to keep track of for any 'simple' nerfing solution to work if they want to maintain balance. Heck, some jobs simply won't even have AOE at level 20 whereas the same jobs synced down from 80 would, meaning your dungeon literally takes longer because you had a low level character in your group.

Oh, and the fact that each expansion basically invalidates all this balancing meaning they'd have to do it AGAIN for every expansion. Yeah, I can only imagine how wonderful that sounds to the devs.

There's simply no chance they're going to allow skills while synced, since they've made it clear they want every 22 GLD to be on the same footing as every other 22 GLD, skill wise. An actual realistic scenario is an ability level squish, pushing more of the later abilities into lower level ranges. That way every player of the same job has equal access to the same skills, the amount of skills at lower level and thus the speed of combat is increased, only without an absurd logistical nightmare of balancing issues plaguing it.

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Originally Posted by Seraphor

Jobs at lower levels ARE very imbalanced. the Monk example might be a 3 fold increase, but something like Dancer or Red Mage is much, much less. So applying the same ratio to all jobs would make those jobs pretty much useless.

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Very imbalanced in this case would mean that some party compositions would struggle with content. That's not the case, so they aren't very imbalanced. Additionally, with scaling based on level 80, low level balance wouldn't be any worse than balance at the end game.

3 wouldn't be the scaling factor for any of the examples brought up prior to your post, so I think you're misunderstanding what's actually being suggested. 3 is the ratio of average potency between the two levels, which is not DPS. A realistic factor for level 80 scaling to level 15 is 0.001. The goal is to scale 20,000 DPS down to something around 20 in this case. The scale factor would raise from that to 1 as you go up to level 80 content like I said in my first post and it would apply equally well to all jobs, at least in a given role, since they all have fairly close damage. You wouldn't be able to tell by feel whether you had a stat synced party of level synced party.

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Originally Posted by MariaArvana

Using his MNK example, what if the MNK in question is only 40? Applying a universal multiplier to bring down a level 80 MNK would make a level 40 MNK deal close to half the damage of a level 15 MNK, even playing absolutely flawlessly. "nerfing damage" is far from a simple concept, as it requires a huge amount of balancing, analysis of toolkits at literally every level that a job gains a new part of its toolkit, and would be a logistical balancing nightmare; you'd literally be getting weaker in older dungeons as you leveled up then when you were at that level, quite the oxymoron.

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A single value for the multiplier obviously won't work, which is why I suggested something different in the very first post that I made. Bosses are roughly the same difficulty through the leveling process with the exception of the first few that tend to die a little faster. If you graph boss health vs level you end up with a general idea of the what the multiplier has to be for any combination of true level and dungeon level. This isn't enough to perfectly match one level to another, but thankfully there is no reason to try to be that precise because level sync as it is now allows for a fair amount of variation in DPS (not to mention that there are factors that you can't control like player ability).

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Unless they go dungeon by dungeon, job by job, meticulously nerfing damage by EXACT amounts for EACH instance in the game, damage nerfs will always either:

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There is no need for that unless they're going to try to balance Ultimates (and not even that is true since Ultimate balance isn't that tight, some of the changes in Shadowbringers are pretty nice buffs in Ultimate). The goal with syncing for dungeons is just to make sure that ~20 minute content takes around 20 minutes.

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1) cause the 80's to still be overpowered if they balance around the 80 not doing perfect rotation, meaning any 80 doing a perfect rotation will still utterly shatter any level 15 out of the park.

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This is specifically what is trying to be avoided though, so if done correctly, this won't happen. Perfection isn't an issue, we're not dealing with tight tolerances.

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2) cause the 80's to have to perform flawlessly to match the limited toolkit of a level 15 if they balance around performing a near optimal rotation to keep up, meaning by far and large with the skillbase of FF14's players, instances will become longer/harder for basically no reason.

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Even if this was the case, I find it preferable. My current preference when it comes to level sync is to not even play the content. However, saying that a level 80 rotation needs to be played flawlessly is a significant exaggeration. Low level rotations aren't foolproof, like I mentioned earlier. The average potency for the low level GLA 1-2 combo is 250. Breaking that combo is at best 200 potency and at worst 100 potency. That's a possible 2.5 times penalty for messing up your Satasha rotation. That's equivalent to the difference between 10th percentile and 99th DPS percentile on fflogs in Copied Factory. The 50%-70% percentiles aren't flawless but they're much closer to perfect than the no combo GLA I mentioned.

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And how do you balance tanks and healers? Think About it. a lvl 29 GLD will never have Hallowed Ground from a level 80 synced PLD. a 22 MRD won't have the lifesteal of a level 80 WAR with Nascent Flash. A level 80 synced WHM would have benediction; where the 43 WHM wouldn't. You think they're going to spend and take the time editing & balancing ALL those skills at EVERY level too? There are far too many variables, far too many things to keep track of for any 'simple' solution to work if they want to maintain balance. Heck, some jobs simply won't even have AOE at level 20 whereas the same jobs synced down from 80 would, meaning your dungeon literally takes longer because you had a low level character in your group.

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Hallowed Ground lasts 10 seconds and you get to use it at most twice per dungeon. Sure it's huge mitigation but in the grand scheme of things it doesn't make much difference because most low level content doesn't need 100% damage reduction. The role skills that low level tanks give up (reprisal and arms lengths) in the current system are arguably worth more in the lower level dungeons in terms of overall mitigation because they have more uptime. The level 80 WHM's Benediction is weaker than the level 30 AST's ED which is a full heal up to about level 25-30 on a much shorter CD. Still I addressed these skills before, if they're going to be a problem they can be changed slightly with traits or something along those lines, like becoming 50% mitigation and 50% healing respectively. You'd be trying to match overall MPS (mitigation per second) and HPS in these cases, along with DPS.

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Oh, and the fact that each expansion basically invalidates all this balancing meaning they'd have to do it AGAIN for every expansion. Yeah, I can only imagine how wonderful that sounds to the devs.

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They already did it for Shadowbringers if I recall due to the tank stance change. Developing a game takes work, and I thank the devs for their efforts. Making this change won't be free but it also doesn't appear to be anymore costly than other changes made in the past.

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There's simply no chance they're going to allow skills while synced, since they've made it clear they want every 22 GLD to be on the same footing as every other 22 GLD, skill wise.

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Not all level 22 GLA's are equal though. Syncing ignores roll skills and some job skills are locked behind more than level. 22 GLA's also have to compete with 22 (synced) PLD's which can wear better gear and gain stats from the job stone. We can also go back to when cross class existed for even more variation in same level skills, but that's been removed from the game so I can understand why that point would be discarded.

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An actual realistic scenario is an ability level squish, pushing more of the later abilities into lower level ranges. That way every player of the same job has equal access to the same skills, the amount of skills at lower level and thus the speed of combat is increased, only without an absurd logistical nightmare of balancing issues plaguing it.

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That's certainly an alternative, and it would be better than what we have now, but it's not my preference. Conceptually there isn't much to just bringing down damage, there may be practical challenges depending on how FF14 is coded, but that's not something visible to the playerbase to bring up as more than a hypothetical. For the sake of simplicity I'm assuming that the scaling factor is all that matters and that ilvl sync is ignored. I don't know if those two things can work together. If they do it slightly changes the graph for mapping levels. You'd need to graph the DPS graph and the ilvl graph and then divide the DPS graph by the ilvl graph to get an effective potency graph which would be used for scaling. Alternatively SE could just work out rotation potencies at a few select levels to work out that graph directly. That's also not hard, just look at The Balance guides.

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Originally Posted by PyurBlue

A single value for the multiplier obviously won't work, which is why I suggested something different in the very first post that I made. Bosses are roughly the same difficulty through the leveling process with the exception of the first few that tend to die a little faster. If you graph boss health vs level you end up with a general idea of the what the multiplier has to be for any combination of true level and dungeon level. This isn't enough to perfectly match one level to another, but thankfully there is no reason to try to be that precise because level sync as it is now allows for a fair amount of variation in DPS (not to mention that there are factors that you can't control like player ability).

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-But you know, it's less precise than what they have now so...why would they intentionally make it wonkier and place much heavier work on themselves when the system they have now functions perfectly fine for them? or an alternate system like the one I suggested that is basically their exact same system with only a few levels changed around? You severely underestimate how much devs love shortcuts and using Occam's Razor; it's how they meet deadlines, especially ones as tight as FF14's patch cycle.

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Originally Posted by PyurBlue

Even if this was the case, I find it preferable. My current preference when it comes to level sync is to not even play the content. However, saying that a level 80 rotation needs to be played flawlessly is a significant exaggeration. Low level rotations aren't foolproof, like I mentioned earlier. The average potency for the low level GLA 1-2 combo is 250. Breaking that combo is at best 200 potency and at worst 100 potency. That's a possible 2.5 times penalty for messing up your Satasha rotation. That's equivalent to the difference between 10th percentile and 99th DPS percentile on fflogs in Copied Factory. The 50%-70% percentiles aren't flawless but they're much closer to perfect than the no combo GLA I mentioned.

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-The thing about balancing in game design, especially in MMOs, is that you have to account for the extreme ends when designing systems, or you'll find your player base abusing and/or exploiting your system, or the system not acting the way you want it to (See: pretty much everything they've implemented, ESPECIALLY diadem & Eureka Anemos.) If they want to balance a system tightly (which should be extremely apparent is their intent in leveling dungeons), they have to take into account the highest echelons of player skill into these systems. If they keep the system too light in its adjustments, Actual good players will completely wreck and annihilate the balance of the lower dungeons, which is something they want to avoid.

Hence, they are forced to account for those skilled players and make the check much tighter when balancing it, leading to what I mentioned. It's a catch 22; no matter how they design it, it'll fall apart in a way they didn't want.

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Originally Posted by PyurBlue

They already did it for Shadowbringers if I recall due to the tank stance change. Developing a game takes work, and I thank the devs for their efforts. Making this change won't be free but it also doesn't appear to be anymore costly than other changes made in the past.

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-There was no 'change' to the actual content in regards to tank mastery & tank stance. The only thing they did was make the STR stats on Fending accessories equal to Striking/Maiming, which cancelled out the damage loss for 70 & below; Literally copy-pasting the formula for STR on Striking gear onto Fending gear. Done, took all of about 20s. For tank stance, backspace all the lines of code not relating to enmity, then change the enmity multiplier to 10, done, super simple. Again, see how much they love shortcuts?

They have however occasionally nerfed leveling dungeons, but those were always by global variables like 10%, which is also super easy. Change the variable in the enemy HP generator formula from 1.0 to 0.9; took all of 5s, and maybe in the enemy potency formula as well if they wanted to reduce damage.

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Originally Posted by PyurBlue

Hallowed Ground lasts 10 seconds and you get to use it at most twice per dungeon. Sure it's huge mitigation but in the grand scheme of things it doesn't make much difference because most low level content doesn't need 100% damage reduction. The role skills that low level tanks give up (reprisal and arms lengths) in the current system are arguably worth more in the lower level dungeons in terms of overall mitigation because they have more uptime. The level 80 WHM's Benediction is weaker than the level 30 AST's ED which is a full heal up to about level 25-30 on a much shorter CD. Still I addressed these skills before, if they're going to be a problem they can be changed slightly with traits or something along those lines, like becoming 50% mitigation and 50% healing respectively. You'd be trying to match overall MPS (mitigation per second) and HPS in these cases, along with DPS.

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-You realize the huge pulls a PLD could pull off with it due to how squishy lower level dungeon mob HP is? I could think of at least one pull per dungeon where you'd be able to annihilate 3-5 packs in the time it'd take to annihilate 1, saving multiple minutes off the run. 10s doesn't look like a lot of time, but it's HUGE for the healer to get those extra AOEs in to help melt the pack before damage is ever an issue. Especially in a system where synced from high players have access to their full AoE toolkits to melt said packs. The difference between a low level party and a synced one would be titanic in terms of potential kill-time efficiency. Take a look at the first mega pull of Mt Gulg vs the 5 separate pulls of the first leg of Mt Gulg to see just how broken a tank having all these CDs would look like in lower level dungeons, where the low level tank wouldn't stand even a slight chance at attempting the same.

Beyond that, again, there's simple things a 20 GLD would never be able to match, no matter what that would prevent the MPS & HPS from ever being even remotely equal without nullifying half of the PLD's toolkit to do so.

A 20 GLD has: Rampart, passive block.
A 80 synced PLD has: Rampart, Sentinel, Hallowed Ground, repriesal, passive block, shelltron, Clemency, Arm's length. Literally 5 more buffs & 1 super self heal tool more than the GLD. Unless you nullify all the others and make them 0% (which again, why bother in the first place then? Since that's literally contradicting the purpose of keeping your skills; there's no point if they don't exist or are so weak they may as well not exist.), that low level GLD will NEVER have even close to the same MPS as a synced 80 PLD, which could bust open low level dungeons and make super pulls utterly trivial.

Oh, and any < 76 WAR will NEVER have any lifesteal besides Storm's Path, while a synced 80 WAR could lifesteal for days with NF. Unless you want to nerf that down to 0% to make the HPS equal; which again, why bother in the first place if it contradicts the point of your system? Especially since NF is a crucial integral part of the job's identity at level 80 in how it handles pulls.

And what's your plan for raid buffs? Do the devs also have to account for the levels of everyone else in the party to make sure the extra % they give won't completely blow away packs in dungeons like a hot knife through butter?

Just showing that syncing is far from ideal; When you have to go and either nullify half of a job's kit to make its HPS/MPs equal, or add in 50 different traits, you've long since gone into the 'why are we even doing this when simpler options exist' territory.

And if they're going to be making abilities tiered with traits, why even bother with all that nonsense (especially since making them tiered with traits means they have to learnt the skills earlier anyway, basically just using my pitched system anyway but adding far more complexity to it.) when making them available earlier is an infinitely easier thing to program than spending time fine-tuning all these small gears and bobs, only for it to get completely broken each expansion and spend all that dev time doing it again? History of their development and their methods has shown time and again they're not going to do drastic overhauls unless they perceive some issue, then they go to the easiest solutions. Your syncing system has way too many moving gears and points to balance it's a logistical nightmare; there's zero chance they'll opt for it over simply moving skills back in level (or simply doing nothing, which is quite frankly the most realistic case) and spending that dev time on more important things. It's just being realistic.

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Originally Posted by Packetdancer

Specifically, my understanding—and someone please correct me if I'm wrong here—is that a given piece of gear which exceeds the ilevel maximum will be individually synched to that ilevel by removing all materia bonuses (i.e., taking only the base stats of the gear), then scaling down by an amount based on the difference in ilevels. But because stats have gone up from expansion to expansion at a higher rate than the ilevel has, synching ilevel 500 gear to ilevel 100 will give you gear with considerably better stats than any actual ilevel 100 gear has.

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Please note that I do agree with you just correcting the minor errors in your explanation.

The ilevel sync works by first removing materia bonuses (as you said), but then lowers each synced gearpiece's stats to the gear types primary and secondary stat caps of that ilevel. What causes this to be problematic when syncing is that non-pink gear is itemized to have one secondary at cap and one secondary at 70% of cap. What ends up happing is that high enough ilevel gear will sync so that both secondary stats are at cap.

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And since potency -> damage/healing power is based on those stats, that "better than actual gear of this level" situation means the damage/healing output will also be higher than you could actually get at that level, contributing to the "even synched to level 50, we can faceroll Crystal Tower raids" scenario; even with abilities and traits from later levels missing, the base stats that go into those calculations are still a lot higher than they would actually be at level 50 in level 50 gear.

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The Crystal Tower raid problem is that the first two were tuned for i90 and i110 max but sync to i130 and that Accuracy (a damage loss prevention stat) was turned into Direct Hit (a damage boosting stat). The Accuracy to Direct Hit change actually effected most of ARR's and HW's content.

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Originally Posted by Esmoire

Regardless of where they go, FFXIV is way too timid with giving beginners new buttons. I get they are worried about intimidating new players, but at a 2.5 sec GCD I think people can handle 3-piece combos by 20.

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There is also a negative effect by over limiting skills available for 30+ levels. Ingrained muscle memory of only a portion of the rotation.

I was once a lowbie CNJ/WHM. The amount of spamming a few hard casts available built muscle memory in so hard, it really took me a while to pay attention to the level 50+ era of skills where the WHM (and many other classes ) begin to bloom. I was so used to regen,cure 2, medica/2 usage it took me a while to get the newer sill sets into my brain/muscle memory so i wasnt an effective healer in my early HW runs. The new skills are soo much better than the old but i suddenly felt pushed out of my comfort zone to use the newer and (unkown to me at the time) better oGcds because i had for 51 levels been a hard casting regen/cure bot.

I feel thats an issue across the job base. I hear that DRK doesnt really shine and show its better potential until lvl 70. Thats insane. A tank role shouldn't be that late at getting to its best through no fault of the player. Thats madness that they think that is an OK progression path.

The legacy DPS classes too are pitiful when they are their starting job phases (LNC, ARC etc) . Ive never come across some one overwhelmed by a 5-6 button usage rotation in any MMO ( a typical amount for the first 30 or so levels) so why do they think its OK to force us to be limited by 2-4 tops for 30 levels?

So weird

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Originally Posted by MariaArvana

-But you know, it's less precise than what they have now so...why would they intentionally make it wonkier and place much heavier work on themselves when the system they have now functions perfectly fine for them?

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It's within the tolerance we have now, it's not less precise, that's one of the reasons why I'm supporting this idea.

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You severely underestimate how much devs love shortcuts and using Occam's Razor; it's how they meet deadlines, especially ones as tight as FF14's patch cycle.

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Everyone loves shortcuts, but ultimately the devs aren't there to not develop a game. Just because making changes will take work doesn't mean those changes aren't feasible.

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-The thing about balancing in game design, especially in MMOs, is that you have to account for the extreme ends when designing systems, or you'll find your player base abusing and/or exploiting your system, or the system not acting the way you want it to (See: pretty much everything they've implemented, ESPECIALLY diadem & Eureka Anemos.) If they want to balance a system tightly (which should be extremely apparent is their intent in leveling dungeons), they have to take into account the highest echelons of player skill into these systems. If they keep the system too light in its adjustments, Actual good players will completely wreck and annihilate the balance of the lower dungeons, which is something they want to avoid.

Hence, they are forced to account for those skilled players and make the check much tighter when balancing it, leading to what I mentioned. It's a catch 22; no matter how they design it, it'll fall apart in a way they didn't want.

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So they should never do anything? Absolute statements aren't true by default. Attempting to change the level sync system isn't doomed before it begins.

When it comes to player skills, I'm not seeing the difference between sync methods. Good players are going do more damage no matter what. That won't change with the sync system unless it removes the player from the process entirely, which defeats the point of the game. If you're worried that unexpected consequences will arise that will somehow let synced jobs with high level skills completely outpace lower level job, that's what and planning and testing are for. The new sync system doesn't even have to introduced directly into the dungeons, it could be added first as an unsync option intended for PF instead where players would be able to use it and attempt to break it in order to assist the devs in tuning the system. When everything is worked out in the end, add it as a DF option that works with roulettes.

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-There was no 'change' to the actual content in regards to tank mastery & tank stance. The only thing they did was make the STR stats on Fending accessories equal to Striking/Maiming, which cancelled out the damage loss for 70 & below; Literally copy-pasting the formula for STR on Striking gear onto Fending gear. Done, took all of about 20s. For tank stance, backspace all the lines of code not relating to enmity, then change the enmity multiplier to 10, done, super simple. Again, see how much they love shortcuts?

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I was referring to a blanket adjustment to all pre 5.0 content but I'm not able to find the source for that and might be misremembering, so feel free to ignore that point.

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They have however occasionally nerfed leveling dungeons, but those were always by global variables like 10%, which is also super easy. Change the variable in the enemy HP generator formula from 1.0 to 0.9; took all of 5s, and maybe in the enemy potency formula as well if they wanted to reduce damage.

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Right, which is what I would expect when we're not dealing with tight balancing tolerances. Just shave off a nice round number because going up to 15% or down to 5% wouldn't make a noticeable difference. The same goes with the idea of scaling damage.

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-You realize the huge pulls a PLD could pull off with it due to how squishy lower level dungeon mob HP is?

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At the lowest levels, like 20 or less, it's no more than a GLA could do. Mobs are that weak. HG would start to become significant somewhere in the 30-50 range (obviously not after 50 since it's a 50 skill), but what exactly are you worried about? Parties will kick and hope for a replacement for the most scarce role in the game with the correct skills to show up? Unlikely. Right now DPS is at the biggest risk for that since they are fast to replace and can have a wide range of DPS outputs due to AoE skill levels and it still doesn't happen. HG isn't going to make dungeons take half as much time to clear. Come to think of it how many tanks even use it regularly as a CD in DF? Some people won't touch it unless the healer is dead.

All of this isn't even taking into account the possibility of balancing HG below level 50, like the previously mentioned reduction to 50% mitigation. Nor does it take into account that there are other mitigation tools. 10 seconds doesn't necessarily cover an entire pull and if the tank is weaker outside of the 10 seconds of invincibility, then it's not clear that there is an advantage gained.

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I could think of at least one pull per dungeon where you'd be able to annihilate 3-5 packs in the time it'd take to annihilate 1, saving multiple minutes off the run.

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I'm trying to think of dungeons where I don't just pull everything. It's not a long list. HG would just be another cooldown. I suppose if you planned out your dungeon pull with your party you could optimize the run a bit but that's probably not going to happen in DF.

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10s doesn't look like a lot of time, but it's HUGE for the healer to get those extra AOEs in to help melt the pack before damage is ever an issue.

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What is the baseline we're comparing to though? It's not a healer spending 100% up time healer, or at least it doesn't have to be. AST from Sastash can heal while keeping 100% DPS uptime theoretically. Realistically it will take some damage mitigation on the part of the tank, but that mitigation doesn't have to be 100%. If pulls are long SCH might pull ahead due to fairly healing. It's really only WHM that causes issues because you have to choose between healing or attacking at low level. But again no one is kicking WHM's so it doesn't seem like this is any kind of real problem.

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Especially in a system where synced from high players have access to their full AoE toolkits to melt said packs.

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They aren't going to do any more damage because those tool kits will be scaled down in damage.

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The difference between a low level party and a synced one would be titanic in terms of potential kill-time efficiency. Take a look at the first mega pull of Mt Gulg vs the 5 separate pulls of the first leg of Mt Gulg to see just how broken a tank having all these CDs would look like in lower level dungeons, where the low level tank wouldn't stand even a slight chance at attempting the same.

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But this is just bypassing the entire solution. The point is to balance the two. Yes if you did nothing the level 80 skill would clearly be better, so you weaken them.

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Beyond that, again, there's simple things a 20 GLD would never be able to match, no matter what that would prevent the MPS & HPS from ever being even remotely equal without nullifying half of the PLD's toolkit to do so.

A 20 GLD has: Rampart, passive block.
A 80 synced PLD has: Rampart, Sentinel, Hallowed Ground, repriesal, passive block, shelltron, Clemency, Arm's length. Literally 5 more buffs & 1 super self heal tool more than the GLD. Unless you nullify all the others and make them 0% (which again, why bother in the first place then? Since that's literally contradicting the purpose of keeping your skills; there's no point if they don't exist or are so weak they may as well not exist.), that low level GLD will NEVER have even close to the same MPS as a synced 80 PLD, which could bust open low level dungeons and make super pulls utterly trivial.

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Reprisal and Arm's Lengths are already "issues" in the current level sync so they don't count. Clemency is a DPS loss so you wouldn't want to use it anyway. That leaves 3 skills. Halve or third the mitigation values on them, problem solved. The PLD has lower mitigation for a longer duration. Overall they have about the same mitigation.

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Oh, and any < 76 WAR will NEVER have any lifesteal besides Storm's Path, while a synced 80 WAR could lifesteal for days with NF. Unless you want to nerf that down to 0% to make the HPS equal; which again, why bother in the first place if it contradicts the point of your system? Especially since NF is a crucial integral part of the job's identity at level 80 in how it handles pulls.

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If this was a problem WAR would have gained skills at 75 and not 76. As it stands now, the 75 dungeon syncs at 76 so 75 WAR's already compete with 76 WAR's under level sync. If that still bothers you, quarter the healing under level 76.

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And what's your plan for raid buffs? Do the devs also have to account for the levels of everyone else in the party to make sure the extra % they give won't completely blow away packs in dungeons like a hot knife through butter?

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The devs weren't bothered by some parties having AoE and some not, so raid buffs are a non issue.

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Just showing that syncing is far from ideal; When you have to go and either nullify half of a job's kit to make its HPS/MPs equal, or add in 50 different traits, you've long since gone into the 'why are we even doing this when simpler options exist' territory.

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I don't agree. Your points are built on chasing an extremely tight balance tolerance for no reason that I can see. Not many people care to optimize outside for Extreme and Savage for a good reason, that being it doesn't make much difference. Leveling content isn't tuned to be hard and as a result doesn't require extreme precision.

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And if they're going to be making abilities tiered with traits, why even bother with all that nonsense (especially since making them tiered with traits means they have to learnt the skills earlier anyway, basically just using my pitched system anyway but adding far more complexity to it.) when making them available earlier is an infinitely easier thing to program than spending time fine-tuning all these small gears and bobs, only for it to get completely broken each expansion and spend all that dev time doing it again? History of their development and their methods has shown time and again they're not going to do drastic overhauls unless they perceive some issue, then they go to the easiest solutions. Your syncing system has way too many moving gears and points to balance it's a logistical nightmare; there's zero chance they'll opt for it over simply moving skills back in level (or simply doing nothing, which is quite frankly the most realistic case) and spending that dev time on more important things. It's just being realistic.

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OK fair enough. But if there is some issue that makes the devs completely unwilling to look at the idea, there is no way of knowing without asking them. What you say, and what I say for that matter, is not indicative of what matters to the devs. You can speculate if you want, but that's pretty easy to dismiss.

I also don't mind you having an opinion different from mine, but I think it's reason for the reverse to be true. Changing level sync is one of the more important things the devs to spend time on in my opinion. Roulettes are part of the game and I'd also like a system that didn't just toss old content aside as the game ages.

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Originally Posted by Peace-Division

There is also a negative effect by over limiting skills available for 30+ levels. Ingrained muscle memory of only a portion of the rotation.

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Very true. Level sync was a very negative experience as a new player and the effects of it followed me all the way to the level cap. I'm fairly certain that being offered nothing but GCD heals early on contributes to poorly managing OGCD resources.

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Originally Posted by Alice_Chrystal

So basically beeing able to use your fundamental Tool-Kit at 50 or 60 and adding the subtleties after that?

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An FC friend and I were discussing a similar issue and basically arrived at a similar conclusion as this, where like if you took Red Mage and moved all of the main abilities and spaced them appropriately leading up to 50, with the exception of Manafication at 60, Verholy at 70 (you'd have Verflare before or at 50, to get a taste of the melee finisher), and Scorch at 80. Traits could even stay the same.

You'd be trading the feeling of "Oh nice ability/change" in the 60s or 70s level range (which, having leveled a good chunk of them to 80 recently, is very much a thing) for feeling like the job was basically just about feature complete at 50 and more importantly feels better to play in the 1-50 range, which is definitely important for new players (and given the continued support and encouragement for players to revisit 50 and below content, important for veterans as well)...and still achieve the same result we have now with the same amount of abilities at level-cap.

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Originally Posted by PyurBlue

Halve or third the mitigation values on them, problem solved. The PLD has lower mitigation for a longer duration. Overall they have about the same mitigation.

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I assume this would be via some sort of tiered change that kicks in at certain levels but doesn't apply past that? Having 10%, 15%, and 10% again at end-game just to have them last longer would necessitate quite a bit more rebalancing of content past when Gladiator is relevant.

Which, in trying to solve one issue you've introduced another, in that now the person who levels Gladiator has to remember that the same abilities that did 20% for 20 seconds, etc., now do half that for double the duration (questionable use at that level, not sure when you'd need cool downs that last that long, 10% or otherwise) but only in a certain level range, and potentially adjust accordingly, introducing a wrinkle into learning their job that only exists in a specific scenario that isn't even relevant to end-game?

Sure, the numbers look like they work on paper. Consider how that would feel to actually play - not so simple to solve, now is it?

A higher potency weapon skill to replace fast blade. I really don't want to be using that for another 10 levels.

[QUOTE=Berethos;5372948]I assume this would be via some sort of tiered change that kicks in at certain levels but doesn't apply past that?[quote]
It could be tiered or extrapolated at each level for a more continuous change. It depends partially on what's easier to code, which only SE knows.

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Having 10%, 15%, and 10% again at end-game just to have them last longer would necessitate quite a bit more rebalancing of content past when Gladiator is relevant.

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I don't think I understand what you're saying here. Values should only increase with level, not jump back and forth.

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Which, in trying to solve one issue you've introduced another, in that now the person who levels Gladiator has to remember that the same abilities that did 20% for 20 seconds, etc., now do half that for double the duration (questionable use at that level, not sure when you'd need cool downs that last that long, 10% or otherwise) but only in a certain level range, and potentially adjust accordingly, introducing a wrinkle into learning their job that only exists in a specific scenario that isn't even relevant to end-game?

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Skill durations aren't changing, the longer duration comes from the PLD having more defense skills than GLA. PLD with halved or thirded effectiveness Rampart, Sentinel, Sheltron vs GLA with normal Rampart for example.

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Sure, the numbers look like they work on paper. Consider how that would feel to actually play - not so simple to solve, now is it?

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That's why I didn't change duration. It's harder to feel the reduced effectiveness of the mitigation skills than a change in effect length, especially if those reductions are only imposed in specific content. A PLD with reduced skill effectiveness would just play normally.

If they don't let us keep our entire skillset, I would at least like to see every single class get a spamable AOE before level 16 when roulettes start. It is incredibly painful to run low level dungeons when you have a rogue and lancer, for example, as your DPS because they don't get their AOEs until mid 30s for rogue/ninja and level god damn 40 for lancer/dragoon. This should have been fixed a long time ago. Everyone should get an AOE the same level tanks get theirs. Even healers. Just take the stun off Holy and have an upgrade given at 46 if you feel like holy spam would be too powerful at low levels with the stun.

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Originally Posted by PyurBlue

Everyone loves shortcuts, but ultimately the devs aren't there to not develop a game. Just because making changes will take work doesn't mean those changes aren't feasible.

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The thing is, time is their mortal enemy. So regardless of the feasibility of things, they have quotas to meet and they will do that which they perceive will help the health of the game more and weigh the development costs & time spent vs projected gains. They're developing the game all the time, just not in the way you want.

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Originally Posted by PyurBlue

So they should never do anything? Absolute statements aren't true by default. Attempting to change the level sync system isn't doomed before it begins.

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Of course it's not. But again, they've made it clear time and again that they desire balance in their level sync system, and so they're not going to do anything until they have a system that works exactly the way they want while making sure there's no issues, weighing all the cons & pros, all the things that would need balancing, create expected deadlines & time spent vs projected gain numbers. If I, a simple player that has only taken a couple courses on rudimentary software design because she was bored outside her normal courses in university, can point out all the glaring flaws and the sheer amount of things they'd need to modify/change/edit/add/remove/etc in your system just to make it work compared to their current extremely simple system, their actual experienced game designers will have long since either tossed it out, or be looking elsewhere for a simpler idea.

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Originally Posted by PyurBlue

When it comes to player skills, I'm not seeing the difference between sync methods. Good players are going do more damage no matter what. That won't change with the sync system unless it removes the player from the process entirely, which defeats the point of the game. If you're worried that unexpected consequences will arise that will somehow let synced jobs with high level skills completely outpace lower level job, that's what and planning and testing are for. The new sync system doesn't even have to introduced directly into the dungeons, it could be added first as an unsync option intended for PF instead where players would be able to use it and attempt to break it in order to assist the devs in tuning the system. When everything is worked out in the end, add it as a DF option that works with roulettes.

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Except that simply divides the queues; which need I remind you, are designed to fill parties as fast as possible; another reason why it'd never see DF use without being mandatory. And I seriously doubt they'd ever do such a giant overhaul in the first place just to make it a PF only option. As far as the first bit, again; I'm simply pointing out every possibility, which by their job, a game design has to account for. There's a reason the #1 rule in software design is "plan assuming your end user will do anything and everything to break you system, whether through ingenuity or ignorance." Without taking in EVERY factor, EVERY possible outcome, any system they implement will just as easily crash down on them.

At least in their current system, High level player's skill is kept in check by the limited toolkits.

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Originally Posted by PyurBlue

Right, which is what I would expect when we're not dealing with tight balancing tolerances. Just shave off a nice round number because going up to 15% or down to 5% wouldn't make a noticeable difference. The same goes with the idea of scaling damage.

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Which again, comes back to the MNK scenario; Given that jobs learn different parts of their toolkit at drastically different levels, you're essentially asking for them to go through every job at every level to determine what part of their toolkit they have access to, and then hit them with % reduction based on that. Since -20% on a BRD, who barely gets anything pre-50 will be vastly different than applying that same -20% to a SAM who gets a lot of powerful potency attacks at the same level.

If your solution can't be solved with a universal multiplier for every job at every level to create the same balance as currently, it's already less precise and far more complicated than what they have now.

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Originally Posted by PyurBlue

At the lowest levels, like 20 or less, it's no more than a GLA could do. Mobs are that weak. HG would start to become significant somewhere in the 30-50 range (obviously not after 50 since it's a 50 skill), but what exactly are you worried about? Parties will kick and hope for a replacement for the most scarce role in the game with the correct skills to show up? Unlikely. Right now DPS is at the biggest risk for that since they are fast to replace and can have a wide range of DPS outputs due to AoE skill levels and it still doesn't happen. HG isn't going to make dungeons take half as much time to clear. Come to think of it how many tanks even use it regularly as a CD in DF? Some people won't touch it unless the healer is dead.

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Originally Posted by PyurBlue

I'm trying to think of dungeons where I don't just pull everything. It's not a long list. HG would just be another cooldown. I suppose if you planned out your dungeon pull with your party you could optimize the run a bit but that's probably not going to happen in DF.

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Go pull every pack up to the first boss of Tam-Tara with 5 completely random healers without dying once, take vids, compare that to pulling 5 packs in Mt Gulg and then tell me it's "no more than a GLD could do." Or every single mob up to the first boss of Halatali with the same requirements.
Also people kick for even less reasons than that. I've seen tanks get kicked for single pulling, you really think people aren't above the possibility of kicking for a better tank? Plus, unless you're queuing in off hours, tanks/healers almost always get insta-refreshed anyway. (I've personally never waited longer than 20s for a tank to come in during the couple of times a tank was kicked in my party.)

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Originally Posted by PyurBlue

All of this isn't even taking into account the possibility of balancing HG below level 50, like the previously mentioned reduction to 50% mitigation. Nor does it take into account that there are other mitigation tools. 10 seconds doesn't necessarily cover an entire pull and if the tank is weaker outside of the 10 seconds of invincibility, then it's not clear that there is an advantage gained.

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Originally Posted by MariaArvana

When you have to go and either nullify half of a job's kit to make its HPS/MPs equal, or add in 50 different traits just to maintain balance, you've long since gone into the 'why are we even doing this when simpler options exist' territory.

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^

Also, You chain CDs. Once the tank leaves Hallowed, he should have a 30% rolling on up so that he stays buff and not just instantly drop dead or becoming weaker. 10s of 0 damage is a huge advantage gained, because it gives the healer 100% uptime during the 10s; 10s of knowing that whatever the healer does, you will not drop dead.

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Originally Posted by PyurBlue

What is the baseline we're comparing to though? It's not a healer spending 100% up time healer, or at least it doesn't have to be. AST from Sastash can heal while keeping 100% DPS uptime theoretically. Realistically it will take some damage mitigation on the part of the tank, but that mitigation doesn't have to be 100%. If pulls are long SCH might pull ahead due to fairly healing. It's really only WHM that causes issues because you have to choose between healing or attacking at low level. But again no one is kicking WHM's so it doesn't seem like this is any kind of real problem.

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The average mob does about ~28 damage in Sastasha out of a tank's ~450 health. In our current system (or about 84 damage per pack of 3), an AST can get that much uptime due to their OGCD alone and because most tanks don't pull much more than 2 packs in most cases. An AST isn't keeping anywhere close to 100% uptime in sastasha when the tank is losing 1/3rd-1/2 their health every GCD going past the 2-pack mark with their OGCD on a 30s timer.

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Originally Posted by PyurBlue

But this is just bypassing the entire solution. The point is to balance the two. Yes if you did nothing the level 80 skill would clearly be better, so you weaken them.

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Which again, requires way more investment than you realize, as from a pure math standpoint, is extreme more effort than other solutions which require immensely less effort.

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Originally Posted by PyurBlue

Reprisal and Arm's Lengths are already "issues" in the current level sync so they don't count. Clemency is a DPS loss so you wouldn't want to use it anyway. That leaves 3 skills. Halve or third the mitigation values on them, problem solved. The PLD has lower mitigation for a longer duration. Overall they have about the same mitigation.

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But a 20 GLD can't use either, so they do count against it, you can't simply ignore that mitigation difference when it is in fact a + to the PLD's toolkit. Clemency may be a DPS loss, but if it saves the pull, its a dps gain, hence why its a tool for the PLD. (Such as saving yourself on the Mt Gulg mega pulls if the healer falls behind a bit - staying alive and losing a GCD of damage is infinitely less valuable than staying alive to complete the mega pull which saves literal minutes.)

As for the last point, then, again: what is the point of halving/quartering/whatever these skills down and butchering them, when the whole purpose of your system is to allow 80's to use their full toolkits? If you have to edit and butcher skills just to give you system even the slimmest chance of maintaining balance, you're no longer playing the exact job you had at 80, merely a gutted version of it. I really can't explain this any clearer.

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Originally Posted by PyurBlue

If this was a problem WAR would have gained skills at 75 and not 76. As it stands now, the 75 dungeon syncs at 76 so 75 WAR's already compete with 76 WAR's under level sync. If that still bothers you, quarter the healing under level 76.

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The major difference here being that a 75 & 76 WAR have access to 99% of the same toolkit as each other, so the disparity is far, FAR less than a 20 MRD who not only has 6 less CDs than a 76 WAR, but also 0 lifesteal. And I could repeat myself on the 2nd part, but really. Even if you were to quarter the healing of it, it's still > 0, meaning the 80 WAR would still have literally infinitely times higher HPS than a 20 MRD...or any <76 WAR in AOE, for that matter. Also again, having to butcher a job's identity just to give your system an even slim hope of being balanced.

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Originally Posted by PyurBlue

The devs weren't bothered by some parties having AoE and some not, so raid buffs are a non issue.

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Because they never had to factor them in early dungeons when designing them? Literally the earliest non-trick attack Raid buffs are at 50 (Divination, Battle Voice). All of a sudden in your system though, you've got 80's hopping in with all their raid buffs. let me tell ya how fast you can annihilate packs with BV + Litany + Divination. In your system, they are now an issue that has to be factored in.

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Originally Posted by PyurBlue

I don't agree. Your points are built on chasing an extremely tight balance tolerance for no reason that I can see. Not many people care to optimize outside for Extreme and Savage for a good reason, that being it doesn't make much difference. Leveling content isn't tuned to be hard and as a result doesn't require extreme precision.

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For no reason? Because its literally the design the devs have been wanting to achieve with their sync system. you can't get much tighter than "everyone has access to the same skills outside of some scenarios in the early levels, which only really apply to tanks because healer & dps role actions are just fluff and not giving extra power to the healer's healing or dps's damage." With their system, a Dev can reasonably know that a group in halatali isn't going to be super mitigating enemy damage, throwing out raid buffs or massive swathes of multiple AOE GCDs & OGCDs to melt packs, or commit 100% of their healing to regens & OGCDs. In their current system, player skill variance is the only thing they can't account for; an issue that is magnified and needs to be much more directly addressed in your theoretical system due to the plethora of unexpected variance it can cause.

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Originally Posted by PyurBlue

OK fair enough. But if there is some issue that makes the devs completely unwilling to look at the idea, there is no way of knowing without asking them. What you say, and what I say for that matter, is not indicative of what matters to the devs. You can speculate if you want, but that's pretty easy to dismiss.

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Let me answer that for you. "Server Limitations." "next!" Yoshi-P has long since realized making promises in public often ends in backlash, so pretty much any feature they're not personally doing will be met with a PR-friendly/neutral response; hence why it's easy to use past development cycles and their general response to suggested things to quickly answer your own question.

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Originally Posted by PyurBlue

I also don't mind you having an opinion different from mine, but I think it's reason for the reverse to be true. Changing level sync is one of the more important things the devs to spend time on in my opinion. Roulettes are part of the game and I'd also like a system that didn't just toss old content aside as the game ages.

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You can have your opinions, but observations of their dev cycle and implementations give pretty good concrete facts about how likely a potential idea would be accepted. Just from my courses in software design and general observation, I'm giving an observed opinion based on those realistic facts. They have a very 'forward looking; only fix the old when necessary.' Approach to their game design.

It took them literally 6 years to fix ARR and they still have Hrothgar/Viera to deal with, along with designing all the usual content each patch, especially now with an impacted dev cycle due to COVID. The odds of them doing anything to the level syncing that isn't as simple as 'shift a single variable on the skills' is basically null.

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Originally Posted by PyurBlue

Skill durations aren't changing, the longer duration comes from the PLD having more defense skills than GLA. PLD with halved or thirded effectiveness Rampart, Sentinel, Sheltron vs GLA with normal Rampart for example.

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Your clarification here makes what you said previously make more sense in terms of the duration - the way I read it before it sounded like you were meaning the duration of all skills when combined, but rather on a per skill basis.

That being said - I still don't think it would feel good to play, assuming I'm understanding your suggestion here, that when playing on Paladin and being below a certain level, the damage reduction amount would be reduced to account for having more skills to use versus a Gladiator?

So Paladin would have Rampart, Sentinel, etc., which would last the same length, but do less damage reduction (like 10%, 15% below a certain level? And Gladiator's would do the normal intended amount, also at the same duration?

So assuming that is the correct interpretation...you still have the issue that you're asking the Paladin to play differently to survive the same packs...as it's ultimately the duration of the cooldown is only a portion of the consideration of when to use it, and honestly it's not at all the main consideration. Rampart is ultimately used not because it has a 20 second duration, but because it has a 20% damage reduction - that's the case in a trash pull and versus a tank buster. Most trash pulls at lower levels aren't going to benefit from being able to use more cooldowns in succession.

Instead it would almost certainly result in the Paladin feeling like they need to stack those cooldowns to achieve the same or similar damage reduction they had when they were lower level or they would feel squishier as a tank than the tank that comes in as a Gladiator with just a couple that do their intended full amount...which would still result in a different in how the job is played at higher levels, when the defensive cooldowns do their intended amount. You still end up introducing variations in how the job plays that make going into lower level content as a higher level player feel less good.

Your assumption that, in a same size pull, a Gladiator with a 20% Rampart and a numbers-synced Paladin with a 10% Rampart are both only go to press Rampart is faulty. The Paladin is, almost certainly, going to press an additional skill alongside that Rampart so they feel like the pull is like it was a Gladiator with a 20% Rampart.

That doesn't sound like it would be much fun to deal with, even if (again) the numbers look good on paper. I'd be having to press more buttons for the same effect, just because I'm a higher level going into a lower level dungeon.

In what gaming world does that sound fun?

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Originally Posted by MariaArvana

The thing is, time is their mortal enemy. So regardless of the feasibility of things, they have quotas to meet and they will do that which they perceive will help the health of the game more and weigh the development costs & time spent vs projected gains. They're developing the game all the time, just not in the way you want.

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This isn't new information to me. The thing is you're taking general facts and trying to apply them to a specific situation while lacking some critical information. Unless you know how long it would take to redesign level sync, what resources SE have available, etc, you can't rule it out as a possibility. You can point to difficulties that may arise and you have pointed out valid ones but you're in the same boat as me when it comes to knowing what is actually possible.

I'm putting forth an idea, not with the expectation that it is implemented into the game just because I want it but with the hope that the devs see it and consider it based on what they are willing to do.

I'm also not arguing against more moderate changes like redistributing skills for each class, but I don't have much reason to mention that idea when it's already popular in this thread.

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Of course it's not. But again, they've made it clear time and again that they desire balance in their level sync system, and so they're not going to do anything until they have a system that works exactly the way they want while making sure there's no issues, weighing all the cons & pros, all the things that would need balancing, create expected deadlines & time spent vs projected gain numbers. If I, a simple player that has only taken a couple courses on rudimentary software design because she was bored outside her normal courses in university, can point out all the glaring flaws and the sheer amount of things they'd need to modify/change/edit/add/remove/etc in your system just to make it work compared to their current extremely simple system, their actual experienced game designers will have long since either tossed it out, or be looking elsewhere for a simpler idea.

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I don't recall anything indicating that SE is perfectly happy with the level sync system. I do know that they've reworked skill progression, combined tiered skills in the past due to issues of button bloat, reworked cross class abilities, and reworked role abilities. To me it seems like skill design isn't totally set in stone.

I'd also point out that I've been responding to your criticism (and I don't mean for that to be taken negatively, I appreciate that you would critique my idea) this whole time pretty rationally. You are absolutely pointing out common general issues in software design but I'm not willing to use those as rigid constraints for a specific project that I cannot see the inner workings of.

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Except that simply divides the queues; which need I remind you, are designed to fill parties as fast as possible; another reason why it'd never see DF use without being mandatory. And I seriously doubt they'd ever do such a giant overhaul in the first place just to make it a PF only option. As far as the first bit, again; I'm simply pointing out every possibility, which by their job, a game design has to account for. There's a reason the #1 rule in software design is "plan assuming your end user will do anything and everything to break you system, whether through ingenuity or ignorance." Without taking in EVERY factor, EVERY possible outcome, any system they implement will just as easily crash down on them.

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A few things were conflated here. It would be a PF option initially for testing purposes, similar to how Eureka was used to test world visits. If they wanted to add an incentive to make it look like its own game mode (like Eureka) they could do that too. "Unreal dungeons" or "NG+ dungeons" with extra tome rewards or something. After the players have had a few months or however long doing that and trying to break the system, SE fixes issues and then adds the option to DF for regular use.

There is no need to split queues either as the option could be player specific. That I will admit is an assumption because I don't know how the level sync function works from a technical standpoint. We know the that the game has coding issues, but that doesn't preclude significant changes (like world visit).

[/quote]At least in their current system, High level player's skill is kept in check by the limited toolkits.[/quote]
In my system player skill is kept in check by math. We know what players can do at ilvl 505. It's about 20,000 DPS for the DPS classes. Impose a damage down on the best player that you can absolutely find that multiplies their damage by .00025 and that player will deal less damage than the average level synced Sastasha tank. There is no getting around that.

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Which again, comes back to the MNK scenario; Given that jobs learn different parts of their toolkit at drastically different levels, you're essentially asking for them to go through every job at every level to determine what part of their toolkit they have access to, and then hit them with % reduction based on that. Since -20% on a BRD, who barely gets anything pre-50 will be vastly different than applying that same -20% to a SAM who gets a lot of powerful potency attacks at the same level.

If your solution can't be solved with a universal multiplier for every job at every level to create the same balance as currently, it's already less precise and far more complicated than what they have now.

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However class skills were designed with the game's dungeon progression in mind. Classes while leveling are never perfectly balanced, your example even shows that, as you're saying that a level synced SAM is stronger than a level synced BRD. So when we take a level 80 SAM or level 80 BRD and apply the same multiplier to them, they don't necessarily line up exactly with their level synced counterparts. Where they do land however in on the average DPS for that level sync. You might end up with a ranking like this:

50 SAM > 80 SAM > 80 BRD > 50 BRD and all of this within a few percent of average level 50 DPS

There is no issue. No one is kicking BRD's and hoping that a SAM queues to fill their party. It would waste their time and they would also have to be assuming that everyone who joins the party would be playing perfectly.

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Go pull every pack up to the first boss of Tam-Tara with 5 completely random healers without dying once, take vids, compare that to pulling 5 packs in Mt Gulg and then tell me it's "no more than a GLD could do." Or every single mob up to the first boss of Halatali with the same requirements.
Also people kick for even less reasons than that. I've seen tanks get kicked for single pulling, you really think people aren't above the possibility of kicking for a better tank? Plus, unless you're queuing in off hours, tanks/healers almost always get insta-refreshed anyway. (I've personally never waited longer than 20s for a tank to come in during the couple of times a tank was kicked in my party.)

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I can consider recording videos although I'm not exactly jumping to do it, and I don't think the test you're proposing creates an equivalent situation. Ideally you would compare GLA pulling the entirety of Tam Tara with and without HG available. I suppose this can sort of be tested if you find a low level GLA, go in unsynced with two healers, one at level and one level 80, shield the GLA with the level 80 healer to simulate HG, and then have the GLA click off the shield after 10 seconds. Those 10 seconds are only about 4 GCD's, which is far shorter than the duration of the pull. HG would be helpful aboslutely but it's not going to trivialize the pull by itself.

Occasionally people will kick for anything, but that's not the norm. You mentioned that it's only happened to you a couple of times. While their kick may be rewarded with a tank that has more skills, that doesn't necessarily mean that they will have a better tank. The system I'm asking for reduces mitigation to make up for higher levels having more CD's. HG could even lose its invulnerability.

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^

Also, You chain CDs. Once the tank leaves Hallowed, he should have a 30% rolling on up so that he stays buff and not just instantly drop dead or becoming weaker. 10s of 0 damage is a huge advantage gained, because it gives the healer 100% uptime during the 10s; 10s of knowing that whatever the healer does, you will not drop dead.

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But half of skills aren't being nullified nor are 50 traits being added. We're primarily talking about 1 skill, HG, that might need to be changed and a blanket mitigation reduction in everything else. Once the PLD leaves HG there wouldn't be a 30% mitigation option available because it would have been scaled by the blanket reduction. The PLD would have to choose between trying to match a GLA by using multiple CD's at once or having less mitigation spread out over a longer time by using CD's in succession.

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The average mob does about ~28 damage in Sastasha out of a tank's ~450 health. In our current system (or about 84 damage per pack of 3), an AST can get that much uptime due to their OGCD alone and because most tanks don't pull much more than 2 packs in most cases. An AST isn't keeping anywhere close to 100% uptime in sastasha when the tank is losing 1/3rd-1/2 their health every GCD going past the 2-pack mark with their OGCD on a 30s timer.

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Right I did simplify things, but look at the line I was replying to. You were saying that 10 seconds of HG would help the healer melt the pack compared to without. It's true, it does help, but it's not an on/off switch for healer damage. Packs that die quickly allow AST to maintain 100% uptime already. Those same quick pulls will be required to get the max healer DPS gain from HG because it's only 10 seconds. After those 10 seconds, we have the situation that you point out where a 450 HP tank is taking 28*n damage per mob GCD. You've offset the entire mitigation process for the party by 10 seconds. The ratio of 10 seconds to the duration of the pull could be looked at as a really rough measure of the impact of HG on a given pull. Then you can do the same and compare to the length of the entire dungeon for total mitigation. HG has an effect but also has limitations. From my own experience a lot of tanks "save" it indefinitely. That's certainly a waste but it doesn't really make dungeons what I would consider noticeably harder. And there is still the solution of just reducing the mitigation to less than 100%.

Now that I'm thinking about it, all the other invulnerability are bigger headaches. Reducing 1 HP minimum to .5 HP doesn't do anything and might not even be possible if it did. These would either have to be left alone, which could be weird for low level healers, or turned into something completely different by traits. That shouldn't be difficult but it would alter the feel of the skills.

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Which again, requires way more investment than you realize, as from a pure math standpoint, is extreme more effort than other solutions which require immensely less effort.

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The pure math standpoint is what makes it look easy because we're not dealing with tight balance tolerances. The only difficulty is the coding.

If you want a level 80 class to feel completely indistinguishable from a level X class at every level, then the math is hard, but there is no point in doing that. That would preclude different classes from existing at all, preclude role skills, and preclude dungeons allowing different levels to enter at all. We have more room for error than you're implying.

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But a 20 GLD can't use either, so they do count against it, you can't simply ignore that mitigation difference when it is in fact a + to the PLD's toolkit. Clemency may be a DPS loss, but if it saves the pull, its a dps gain, hence why its a tool for the PLD. (Such as saving yourself on the Mt Gulg mega pulls if the healer falls behind a bit - staying alive and losing a GCD of damage is infinitely less valuable than staying alive to complete the mega pull which saves literal minutes.)

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I'm discounting the role skills because the current system just ignores that they are an imbalance, because the tolerances for balance aren't tight at all. The game as it is now doesn't care that the tank may be missing 10% mitigation every 60 seconds and 20% mitigation every 120(?) seconds. As far as the level sync system is concerned having Rampart, Reprisal, and Arm's Length is the same as having just Rampart. That's obviously wrong. But we're not dealing with tight tolerance so it's fine. Fair point on clemency.

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As for the last point, then, again: what is the point of halving/quartering/whatever these skills down and butchering them, when the whole purpose of your system is to allow 80's to use their full toolkits? If you have to edit and butcher skills just to give you system even the slimmest chance of maintaining balance, you're no longer playing the exact job you had at 80, merely a gutted version of it. I really can't explain this any clearer.

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How are skills being butchered? What is the PLD going to do differently if Rampart is 10% instead of 20%? You just pull and press the button. The point is to have more to do like you do at level 80. At level 80 the numbers are bigger, but that's just a distraction. It has no relevance, just like the exact values of Rampart, etc, have no relevance.

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The major difference here being that a 75 & 76 WAR have access to 99% of the same toolkit as each other, so the disparity is far, FAR less than a 20 MRD who not only has 6 less CDs than a 76 WAR, but also 0 lifesteal. And I could repeat myself on the 2nd part, but really. Even if you were to quarter the healing of it, it's still > 0, meaning the 80 WAR would still have literally infinitely times higher HPS than a 20 MRD...or any <76 WAR in AOE, for that matter. Also again, having to butcher a job's identity just to give your system an even slim hope of being balanced.

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Does that infinite % increase in lifesteal change that the tank needs healing? No. Over the length of the dungeon the mobs will do X damage. The MRD will reduce this by Y with mitigation, and the WAR would reduce this by Y+/- with a combination of less mitigation and some lifesteal. You're still trying to make level 80 WAR identical to level 20 MRD, but there is no reason to.

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Because they never had to factor them in early dungeons when designing them? Literally the earliest non-trick attack Raid buffs are at 50 (Divination, Battle Voice). All of a sudden in your system though, you've got 80's hopping in with all their raid buffs. let me tell ya how fast you can annihilate packs with BV + Litany + Divination. In your system, they are now an issue that has to be factored in.

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But you're ignoring that the current system has essentially the same issue. AoE is a huge multiplier on big pulls. Fire II is a horribly weak skill. Pull 8 mobs and it matters a quite a bit, at least when one of the alternatives is having your DRG reduced to Vorpal Thrust.

It's not that raid buffs don't make a difference, it's that they are not significant enough to change the dungeon experience in a game that doesn't require tight balancing.

At this point it looks like that's all there is to debate, how tightly the game is actually balanced. Your points are all valid when it comes to making classes totally equivalent across the entire level range, but if that was a requirement we'd need to throw the game as it is now out of the window completely. Comparing WAR's to MRD's makes comparisons a little easier to see but that specific match up is no more important than WAR vs GLA or PLD vs GNB. Balancing to one specific class at one specific level doesn't make much sense. What's important is the balance of a given role as a whole.

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For no reason? Because its literally the design the devs have been wanting to achieve with their sync system. you can't get much tighter than "everyone has access to the same skills outside of some scenarios in the early levels, which only really apply to tanks because healer & dps role actions are just fluff and not giving extra power to the healer's healing or dps's damage." With their system, a Dev can reasonably know that a group in halatali isn't going to be super mitigating enemy damage, throwing out raid buffs or massive swathes of multiple AOE GCDs & OGCDs to melt packs, or commit 100% of their healing to regens & OGCDs. In their current system, player skill variance is the only thing they can't account for; an issue that is magnified and needs to be much more directly addressed in your theoretical system due to the plethora of unexpected variance it can cause.

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The role skills aren't all fluff. Reprisal and Arm's Length are full fledged tank skills. Lucid and Swiftcast are kind of situational but when they matter, like when it comes to raise, they are significant healer buffs. I guess for DPS it's less impressive. Bloodbath is strong but it's level 12 so everyone has it.

Outside of role skills, skills still aren't equal at a given level because skills aren't only tied to level. Some are locked behind job quests and it's entirely possible for someone to queue into duties while missing skills. This doesn't drastically upset the balance of the game unless it's done continuously. Then there is the balance between classes which is even less tight. AoE isn't uniform and OGCD's aren't uniform. The game can tolerate some variation. The system I'm proposing falls within those tolerances.

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Let me answer that for you. "Server Limitations." "next!" Yoshi-P has long since realized making promises in public often ends in backlash, so pretty much any feature they're not personally doing will be met with a PR-friendly/neutral response; hence why it's easy to use past development cycles and their general response to suggested things to quickly answer your own question.

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That's not an answer. You could say the same to any proposed change and shut down the forum.

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You can have your opinions, but observations of their dev cycle and implementations give pretty good concrete facts about how likely a potential idea would be accepted. Just from my courses in software design and general observation, I'm giving an observed opinion based on those realistic facts. They have a very 'forward looking; only fix the old when necessary.' Approach to their game design.

It took them literally 6 years to fix ARR and they still have Hrothgar/Viera to deal with, along with designing all the usual content each patch, especially now with an impacted dev cycle due to COVID. The odds of them doing anything to the level syncing that isn't as simple as 'shift a single variable on the skills' is basically null.

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Then you're making your best opinionated guess and you don't really know. That's fine, but don't take more from a guess than you reasonably can. You can say that something is unlikely and I won't necessarily disagree, but you have no way of knowing whether or not you're correct. COVID isn't a factor in this. What is the time frame for the sync system to be updated? There isn't one, the disease could be eradicated before work on this begins.

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Originally Posted by Berethos

Your clarification here makes what you said previously make more sense in terms of the duration - the way I read it before it sounded like you were meaning the duration of all skills when combined, but rather on a per skill basis.

That being said - I still don't think it would feel good to play, assuming I'm understanding your suggestion here, that when playing on Paladin and being below a certain level, the damage reduction amount would be reduced to account for having more skills to use versus a Gladiator?

So Paladin would have Rampart, Sentinel, etc., which would last the same length, but do less damage reduction (like 10%, 15% below a certain level? And Gladiator's would do the normal intended amount, also at the same duration?

So assuming that is the correct interpretation...you still have the issue that you're asking the Paladin to play differently to survive the same packs...as it's ultimately the duration of the cooldown is only a portion of the consideration of when to use it, and honestly it's not at all the main consideration. Rampart is ultimately used not because it has a 20 second duration, but because it has a 20% damage reduction - that's the case in a trash pull and versus a tank buster. Most trash pulls at lower levels aren't going to benefit from being able to use more cooldowns in succession.

Instead it would almost certainly result in the Paladin feeling like they need to stack those cooldowns to achieve the same or similar damage reduction they had when they were lower level or they would feel squishier as a tank than the tank that comes in as a Gladiator with just a couple that do their intended full amount...which would still result in a different in how the job is played at higher levels, when the defensive cooldowns do their intended amount. You still end up introducing variations in how the job plays that make going into lower level content as a higher level player feel less good.

Your assumption that, in a same size pull, a Gladiator with a 20% Rampart and a numbers-synced Paladin with a 10% Rampart are both only go to press Rampart is faulty. The Paladin is, almost certainly, going to press an additional skill alongside that Rampart so they feel like the pull is like it was a Gladiator with a 20% Rampart.

That doesn't sound like it would be much fun to deal with, even if (again) the numbers look good on paper.

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It looks like this post slipped in while I was typing. It's probably a sign that these posts are getting a little big.

You're right that there are a few considerations for selecting CD's, but ultimately within one set of skills you end doing the same mitigation rotation if everything is scaled equally. Rampart first unless you need more mitigation to survive since it has the shortest CD. This let you fill in that short CD with other mitigation and maximize uptime. The biggest difference will be felt at the lowest of levels where damage isn't high and PLD shouldn't really feel all the squishy regardless. Combining mitigation to reach GLA's level would be a slight difference but I don't consider it drastic and it's not like it doesn't happen at higher levels.

Ideally you want to rotate cooldowns but there are differences between the ideal situation and reality. The clearest one is probably Arm's since it usually doesn't work on bosses. If it's up during a pull immediately before the boss I overlap it with other skills. Reprisal can also work like this because it's only down for 60 seconds. You would definitely overlap Sheltron with other skills unless you were having trouble building gauge.

There's no way you could scale down abilities to make them balanced for low level play. For example, DRG/LNC has no oGCD damage skills before level 30 (since they changed Leg Sweep in 4.0 to deal no dmg and also cross role). But having an 80 DRG sync'd down to level 16 gives them Geirskogul, High Jump, Spineshatter Dive, Nastrond, Stardiver, Mirage Dive, Dragonfire Dive. Even if these skills did like 30 potency, it's still much more than a level 16 Lancer's True Thrust->Vorpal Thrust. Melee don't have AoE before the mid 30s so you'd have melee using their AoE combo in low level dungeons but new players not having any AoE. There's honestly no way to do balance the potency to make it fair.

People so obsessed with balance yet they are ignoring fact S rank dying less than 30 second w/o executing its proper mechanic.. strange. I guess balance at low level dungeon very important.

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Originally Posted by HyoMinPark

If they weren’t going to allow players to keep their full toolkits when synced down, I would think that redistribution of how skills are acquired would be the best option. It’s something I’ve actually suggested with a job like DNC to combat proc RNG at levels below 72 (pre-Flourish), and I think some jobs could benefit from getting skills earlier.

Content redesign will likely always be completely out of the question. Too much work, and the developers have rarely expressed interest in going back to old content and adjusting the scaling of it.

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Pretty much this.

RDM/SAM/DNC did so much damage just because of how well their low level kits were designed.

I would advocate for letting us keep our skills.

1) Tanking is brain dead easy now, throw on tank stance and 123 single target or 12 for aoe

2) DPS damage will ALWAYS be determined by weapon damage which, news flash, gets lowered in synced content.

3) It's synced content. It doesn't really matter if it's killed quickly.