Crystalline Conflict Tier List (with deep maths!)

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Originally Posted by kayll

I don't agree with partywide damage buffs being "indeterminate" ,especially ones that just exist on you in an aura like Bards,They are almost always in play in the background and increasing your teams damage, probably enabling kills on players that would get away with minimal amounts of HP otherwise.

Sustained damage helps in the background as well,People aren't going to push into you with Half HP/Half MP, they are going to be the in back using an elixir and if someone is in the back and using elixir they aren't pushing the crystal and they aren't there setting up burst on your team.
Is it hard to calculate the value of that? Well yeah cause you can't see the future,but saying it does nothing doesn't seem fair.

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"Indeterminate" means "can't be calculated" by the way, not "ineffective." Like you said, I have no way of seeing the future. If I have no way to calculate a value, I have no way to rank jobs based on a value that doesn't exist. If you can come up with a way to actually calculate sustained DPS, I'll gladly implement it.

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Originally Posted by Myrha_Lhlalheva

"Indeterminate" means "can't be calculated" by the way, not "ineffective."

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I know what it means, That's why I listed Bards 30 yalm aura buff that has 100% uptime and applies a damage buff to party members who are within 30yalms and anyone who walks within 30yalms. It has a nearly 100% uptime for your entire team the entire game, This seems easy to calculate to me?
As for others with less than 100% uptime,You use the "AoE CC's will be calculated as if hitting 3 targets" to calculate CC capability, you could do the same for something like Red Mages Frazzle/Magicked Barrier for a measurement of Utility.
You came up with complex ways of calculating every other category but couldn't for other things which makes the tier list end up seeming biased.

I was honestly forced to use Sam in CC because their LB will always change the course of the match, especially if you're a very good player.

White Mage can also mess everything up because of that damnable Polymorph it has.

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Originally Posted by kayll

I know what it means, That's why I listed Bards 30 yalm aura buff that has 100% uptime and applies a damage buff to party members who are within 30yalms and anyone who walks within 30yalms. It has a nearly 100% uptime for your entire team the entire game, This seems easy to calculate to me?
As for others with less than 100% uptime,You use the "AoE CC's will be calculated as if hitting 3 targets" to calculate CC capability, you could do the same for something like Red Mages Frazzle/Magicked Barrier for a measurement of Utility.
You came up with complex ways of calculating every other category but couldn't for other things which makes the tier list end up seeming biased.

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Okay, my misunderstanding. But think about it. If I can't calculate sustained damage, how am I going to calculate a damage buff? Which jobs are on my team? How often are they using their burst windows? I can't assign value to something that modifies another, incalculable value. Unless you think jobs should just be graded by comparing the raw % values? But then you'd have to consider how to weigh range, LoS, target requirements, cooldown, and other things. There are way too many factors that cannot be controlled for, and no way to accurately score utility as a criterion. That's just one of the limitations of the methodology--if you think BRD should be A tier by dint of utility alone, or RDM utility pushes it into S tier or what have you, then I'm not going to stop you from making that judgment. I can only present you the numbers that I CAN calculate--hence the big disclaimer at the very beginning of the OP that nobody seems to have read.

Also, BRD has two separate 5% damage buffs, which matters because buffs are multiplicative. One of the buffs does have 100% uptime, but the other is only a 10s duration on a 20s cooldown.

Gonna chime in rq for Sam. How is its CC tied at bottom with DRG at 1/5?
It has a 2s hard stun and an AOE bind that can each be used twice in less than 20s.

The tier list is interesting too look at but the math used to justify the tier list and rankings of classes on that tier list is awkward at best and absolutely nonsensical at worst. The reasoning behind decisions to attempt to standardize and mathematical quantify abilities and skills only loosely translates to practical gameplay and even then is inconsistent because of the rubric you chose to grade those metrics on.

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Single-target Burst
1 GCD single target burst (henceforth STB) will be graded based on the highest possible burst with up to 3 oGCD’s, with LB’s being eligible for the GCD slot. No bonus damage will be counted from possible AoE. Hard crowd control inherent to the combo will allow an additional GCD to be counted.

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Why is PLD rated have more burst than BRD? BRD burst is average case 28k under 2GCDs with Apex + Triple Empyreal + Silence + Pitch Perfect, and even assuming suboptimal conditions with Double Empyreal + Mid Ranged Pitch, is still 22k. Meanwhile PLD struggles to get even close to that because it doesn't have a 12k GCD without LB, and Atonement is a mediocre GCD that has a full second animation delay before the animation comes out. Unless of course, we're going to count Sheltron burst as a part of the combo in which case congratulations, your frontliner spent 5s prepping their combo, has lost their primary defensive CD, and didn't get hit a single time before popping the shield.

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MoN is the strongest non-LB CC, but it's not exactly a short cooldown. Afflatus Purgation is an excellent LB, nobody is denying that. But it does have significant opportunities for counterplay, especially if your team has good players who are actually paying attention to the enemy WHM's LB bar and position/punish correctly. Its burst damage is also not actually that high in comparison to what other jobs can put out. Its only real burst is from Afflatus Misery, which is just 12k potency in an AoE. Even Purgation->Misery only comes out to 30200 potency, and requires an LB--not very strong compared to what DRG can do with just regular buttons.

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This entire segment is nonsensical, especially because it doesn't hold up to the rest of the rubric. Your claim is that WHM ST burst is bad because it's tied to it's LB; we'll disregard Seraph Strike's 8.8k damage, disregard the fact that polymorph means the burst has almost zero counterplay, and disregard the fact the full combo has 20y range. However, RPR has a 5 in ST burst despite having some of the most mediocre melee burst outside of LB that is almost entirely contingent on Plentiful Harvest? Because if you stay alive for a full minute, manage to consistently survive with 5+ stacks of Plentiful Harvest, are able to maintain a winning state where you can farm stacks, and if enemies don't have the presence of mind to guard when they see a death warrant come out, you can maybe do as much damage as a DRG? Are we evaluating raw damage numbers on a practice dummy and then making a tier list off of it? Because if we're going to do that, why is MNK's Phoenix + Enlightenment + Stun + PR (this is not even the maximum possible damage) combo not immediately in S tier? Even after Pressure nerf the combo is easily pumping out 35k+ burst every 20s and we're evaluating on dummies... right?

The reality here is that damage is not on a linear scale whatsoever. A 16k GCD might be mathematically twice as strong as a 8k GCD, but in practice a 16k GCD should probably be evaluated at 3x or even 4x stronger. And the fact that WHM laser kill combos is so low is not only baffling it's nonsense.

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Mobility
Mobility will be graded based on distance (in yalms) available per minute, with a half value being applied on mobility that is only valid on one type of target (ally/enemy), and a double value being applied for mobility that requires no target.

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Putting RDM at a 2 in mobility is hilarious. You've put DRG at a 5 when DRG has 1 gap closer, and an untargeted backflip on a 20s cooldown. RDM has 2 gap closers, and 2 backflips for disengagements - any mathematical system to grade these two so drastically differently when in practice RDM is arguably the most mobile class in the game is blatantly flawed.

And while GNB may not be very mobile, somehow WHM, which only has Seraph Strike on a 20s CD, is more mobile than banking two charges of Rough Divide, on a 15s CD, with a speed buff tied to No Mercy?

Why are abilities that can disengage so undervalued? Do you not understand how good a disengagement is? Why is the ability to bank charges of mobility skills so undervalued?

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Crowd Control
Crowd control will be graded on seconds of available crowd control in one minute, with a half value applied for “soft” crowd control (defined as buttons other than Purify are still available), a double value applied for uncleansable crowd control, and a triple value applied for uncleansable and unblockable crowd control. Seconds of AoE crowd control will be counted on a nominal 3 targets affected. Knockback and draw-in effects will be converted on the basis of 5y per second.

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More nonsense here that might be fine on paper but an absolutely useless evaluation when in reality there's no way to quantify the value of any given crowd control except by evaluating the game state. Absolutely hilarious that you've put RPR and DNC at a 5 in CC when their non-LB kits have miserable and literally nonexistent CC respectively, and also ignore the fact that DNC LB is contingent on so many things going right - including but not limited to, DNC not getting CC'd in LB, DNC not dying in LB, enemies not just running away in the 2s it takes for DNC LB to go off... these ratings seem like it ignores the fact these jobs get absolutely neutered by any sort of enemy counter play.

Why is SAM at a 1 in CC despite having a stun and snares? You've put SAM on the same level as DRG which literally doesn't have a single CC button? The fact that the job even has a stun is an incredible boon to bursting, combos, burning purifies - and it's not reflected at all here.

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Defense
Defense will be graded based on total available shield value, total available healing, and/or best effective HP increase available within a single cooldown cycle. AoE mitigation/healing will be counted on a nominal 3 targets affected. Indeterminate/repeatable values and regens will be counted for a nominal 3 procs. Recuperate and Guard will not be counted.

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This defensive rating doesn't reflect actual class survivability in the slightest because it ignores a classes ability to survive burst, and even if it did it doesn't reflect realistic healing power.

For example, PLD and GNB (GNB has a 2 in DEF - are we pretending tank junction doesn't exist?) can roll defensive cooldowns and instantly reach 80k eHP that can proactively block damage. And this is already ignoring recuperate, which is absolutely core to the rules of eHP; the more raw healing you have, the more valuable mitigation becomes. If you throw out 60k worth of recups, then obviously external heals will have insane value according to your rubric - you've cut the health pool in half for the entire game.

And even then, it doesn't make any sense to put AST 2 entire tiers lower than WHM when DC Aspected Benefic is strictly better than Cure 2 (healing power, speed, mobility, flexibility), and Macrocosmos is an incredible cooldown both offensively and defensively. Is the claim that Aquaveil is single handedly carrying WHM 2 tiers above AST?

And even then, we're still ignoring the fact that Cover Pot exists - clearly the math is not accounting for the fact that cover pot is a full reset - easily 80k+ worth of HP every 30s. Add to this Hallowed Ground - why is PLD not at a 5?

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Fun fact--the math states that GNB actually has more effective health in Junction Healer than in Junction Tank.

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Which is why this statement is so egregiously wrong - or rather, it's ONLY correct if you throw away 60k+ healing from recuperate. With recups, healer junction maths out to about 61.5 <Base> + 1.2 <NM> * ((15 * 4) <Recup> + 9 <Gnashing> + 24 <Aurora>) = 173k eHP, and tank junction maths out to (61.5 <Base> + 1.2 <NM> * ((15 * 4) <Recup> + 15 <Gnashing>)) / 0.8 (Nebula) = 189k eHP. And of course, once you consider any practical gameplay the scales tilt even further in Tank junction's favor - because Nebula reduces incoming damage, it's easier for GNB to stay in the fight to get full value out of recup and finish the full gnashing combo - while healer junction will often struggle to even get full value out of the full 12s Aurora regen without keeling over and dying to burst. Top this off with the fact that any external healing the GNB gets is also amplified by Nebula - why is this class not the tankiest class in the game with Tank junction?


There's a really awkward attempt to quantify the value of any given cooldown based almost purely on numbers. And that's fine, except if you try to use this rubric to create a rating list and rate classes on that scale because it's nonsense that ends up putting classes with 0CC (DRG) on the same level as a class with a stun and a snare (SAM). And it's also fine except if your math literally doesn't work and claims that PLD has more burst than BRD. And it's also fine except if you fail to properly quantify how classes interact with both your teammates and the enemies, fail to properly quantify average case scenarios for a given game state, and fail to properly understand that value does not scale linearly with numbers. Which your tier list more or less fails to do in like half the jobs it grades.