Ranged DPS role is about to be excluded from all content

I really hope we get some information in the next live letter on the 15th because the last mention of ranged balance was from late Stormblood when SE finally buffed MCH and said that we should be ready for nerfs in Shadowbringers again. But it seems like they forgot in their haste to remove Disembowel and Refresh that they can't use the same balancing anymore. There's no utility that would guarantee our spot and no Disembowel synergy to save us. While they probably have their hands full with the NIN and SMN mess, ranged classes really deserve a band-aid potency patch like NIN and SAM.

At least a confirmation that they're aware of the imbalances would be nice. It's awful to be in the dark and not know if the feedback is reaching the devs.

We already lived that for the whole 4.x expansion Lynn, sadly, to the point where in 4.4 we were less useful than a sam in a pure meta comp, and even after the buffs in 4.5, I dont feel like we were needing that much nerf.

I really hope to see some infos on that ...

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Originally Posted by Kitfox

I really hope we get some information in the next live letter on the 15th because the last mention of ranged balance was from late Stormblood when SE finally buffed MCH and said that we should be ready for nerfs in Shadowbringers again. But it seems like they forgot in their haste to remove Disembowel and Refresh that they can't use the same balancing anymore. There's no utility that would guarantee our spot and no Disembowel synergy to save us. While they probably have their hands full with the NIN and SMN mess, ranged classes really deserve a band-aid potency patch like NIN and SAM.

At least a confirmation that they're aware of the imbalances would be nice. It's awful to be in the dark and not know if the feedback is reaching the devs.

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Well, do you remember when Yoshida said that they couldn't gli piercing res down to ranged dps because then they'd be "too op"? It all makes sense now...they probably never meant for ranged dps to be as strong as melee dps like they were in previous expansions.

Ranged DPS is so ridiculous right now, especially DNC.
Having multiple ranged makes that you are heavily punished if you make a mistake while it's supposed to be a "comfort" job, it actually puts more stress on the whole team.

The most hilarious case would be that we get no balance on ranged and a Ultimate with a tight DPS check.
If the DPS check is too tight, you might end up locking out SMN and RDM just to fit the DPS Pantheon.
Maybe even ranged just because a really average BLM will do the same job and I'm pretty sure Addle will work perfectly if not better than Tactician/Samba.
If the DPS check isn't tight enough, the MNK/DRG/BLM compositions will stomp the Ultimate.

They've been using the same balancing from Stormblood but without the same tools to support it. With the MNK, DRG and BLM overtuned we are paying for these mistakes, digging the gap by a 2k DPS difference.

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Originally Posted by Lastelli

Well, do you remember when Yoshida said that they couldn't gli piercing res down to ranged dps because then they'd be "too op"? It all makes sense now...they probably never meant for ranged dps to be as strong as melee dps like they were in previous expansions.

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In Stormblood context, giving ranged their own piercing would've been too powerful. That's because we had Refresh which was pretty much mandatory to have for any harder content and already guaranteed our party slot. We no longer have that utility so we need to have more dps in its place to justify our existance. We literally have to be as strong as the melee and casters, at least when role bonus is accounted for. Tactician, Troubadour and Shield Samba are no better than Addle and Feint so we bring nothing of value to the party besides our dps, so it needs to be higher.

Being weaker is all well and good, until we're so weak that literally every other job can do our job better. We simply can't use Stormblood balancing for Shadowbringers because we don't have the same utilities anymore.

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Originally Posted by Lastelli

Well, do you remember when Yoshida said that they couldn't gli piercing res down to ranged dps because then they'd be "too op"? It all makes sense now...they probably never meant for ranged dps to be as strong as melee dps like they were in previous expansions.

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I don’t think people are asking for the physical ranged to be as strong as a melee class in terms of personal damage. They’re just asking for them to not be as weak as they are. Right now, one could play one of the Big 3 (MNK, DRG, BLM) at an average level and still beat out playing a physical ranged at a high level.

Let me start my post by saying that it's pretty obvious that all ranged dps except for BLM currently need help.
I think everyone knows that at the heighest level BLM currently from all ranged jobs does by far the most damage.
My question(s) would be at which level should these jobs be balanced?

What I specifically mean with that is I checked E4S for the last week on FFlogs and looked at difference in DPS for the 10, 50, 95 and 100 percentile.
And DNC at 50% deals 9.36% less than a BLM at 50% but at 100% DNC deals a staggering 14.34% less.

I also looked at the DPS difference between 10% and 100% e.g.
BLM 11782 compared to 15815 (4033 difference or 34.23%)
DNC 11108 compared to 13547 (2439 difference or 21.96%)

or 50% and 95%
BLM 13194 compare to 14767 (1573 difference or 11.92%)
DNC 11959 compare to 12901 (942 difference or 7.88%)

It's a similiar case for the other jobs in the ranged role where no other jobs even reaches 25% difference in the 10-100 category or 10% difference in the 50-95 category.

It seems to be the case that while BLM on all levels deals more damage than the other ranged (even at 10%) it also scales better with player skill and/or gear.

If I manually adjust DNC dps at the 50 percentile to 13,194 which would be BLMs DPS at 50 percentile and add the same % increase DNC currently see going from 50-95% on FFlogs for this fight it would be at 14234 DPS for the 95% bracket and be 533 DPS (or 3.61%) behind BLM.
BTW I know that it would probably not play out like this entirely if SE buffs DNC or any other ranged dps.

If I do the same thing going for both jobs going from 50 percentile to 100 percentile
BLM 13194 -> 15815 (19.87% increase)
DNC 11959 -> 13547 (13.28% increase)
New DNC 13194 *1.1328 = 14946

DNC at 100% with parity on 50% on BLM would still be 869 dps (5.5%) behind BLM.

I don't try to justify BLMs DPS here I'm just genuinely interested what peoples thoughts are about this, how much influence on DPS should player skill and general job difficulty have.

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Originally Posted by Karja

I don't try to justify BLMs DPS here I'm just genuinely interested what peoples thoughts are about this, how much influence on DPS should player skill and general job difficulty have.

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General job difficulty can be split into two aspects - a skill floor and a skill ceiling. The skill floor should not have any bearing on the end balance of the job if the goal is for them to be theoretically balanced in such a way that job difficulty is included, since just because something is easy to start out with, does not mean it can't be equally difficult at the end level.

When it comes to the skill ceiling, if the balance of a job is skewed due to a higher intentional complexity in order to justify higher dps, then there should be an endgame imbalance. However, this would mean that the job is also not liable to receive QoL updates to decrease difficulty, something Level 80 Black Mages may note is exactly what Xenoglossy is. This difficulty must also be something that can be objectively perceived, not just something on a subjective level, since players may excel at different things, and to punish a player for being who they are (as a person) is something that shouldn't happen.

With player skill, well, this is where the skill floor shines. A job with a more lenient skill floor will have a shorter gap to cross by default. The end goal should still be noticable as a difference. The jobs can also be centered more around bringing something else to the table, allowing the jobs to effectively be weaker in damage but strong in their own right, which is what I believe FFXIV's current balancing tries to achieve, but fails because the tools are overtaxed.

The goal of this design is to make every job unique for their own tools, but strong enough to compete in their own right. Bringing an edge of extra damage can be considered the top jobs' edge, but just as a Machinist's tactician is on a 3 minute cooldown, so too must the edge of damage be minor enough that you can clearly say "RDM is slightly weaker, because it has the tool of a raise, but BLM brings damage which could prove useful to get through a difficult dps phase check".

I'd say that 543 DPS difference you picked out is actually a reasonable ballpark to hit for the dps difference between something that has the niche of just bringing more damage as opposed to having one or two tools at their disposal. It also simply plays well with how other jobs can reach their full rDPS potential by buffing said higher damage options, since a party composition with a BLM will be able to pad said BLM further increasing the party's overall numbers as opposed to the previously mentioned RDM.

As for what these options should be like, in the case of Phys. Range DPS, this is already more or less entirely in place save some problems with them being incredibly weak. With DNC being focused around 1 Party Member more than BRDs (previously) party-wide effects, where DNC gains such tools as Devilment on the Dance Partner while BRD has Battle Voice, and Curing Waltz being an instant option of HP as opposed to a timed heal up effect which relies on someone else to take use of it. This is how the classes can be varied while still being in the same role, and not eating each other alive. As for taxing movement on these, just... no. If they do that, then they have to stop designing fights around some jobs having movement options. Mostly every job with high movement capabilities already have supportive skills with limited range, and that is where movement tax is already apparent. Else I'm going to have to start advocating a gap closer on ranged...

and perhaps this would also make it fun to think about which sets of jobs work together best, though it'd be scary if something of the sort gets overtuned and makes the whole thing break down again, which is why aside from fixing the problems with support feeling stupidly weak on classes whose lore screams support, I'll advocate bandaid balancing via pdps first before they try and make everything work in a nicer way.

tl;dr, the way the game is currently being balanced is not properly in accordance with how the game is presented by the developers, where jobs should all be close to each other in terms of end result in order to prevent meta-based exclusion. In this current design ideology, no job should be so much weaker that it can be argued that bringing something else and foregoing a role bonus is a better dps option. varying skill floors will always exist, and skill ceilings will too, but only if the design of the game itself changed, should this be taken into account. Player skill should always be rewarded, but that is a given when designing jobs' endgame to be closer to each other.

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Originally Posted by Kitfox

I really hope we get some information in the next live letter on the 15th because the last mention of ranged balance was from late Stormblood when SE finally buffed MCH and said that we should be ready for nerfs in Shadowbringers again. But it seems like they forgot in their haste to remove Disembowel and Refresh that they can't use the same balancing anymore. There's no utility that would guarantee our spot and no Disembowel synergy to save us. While they probably have their hands full with the NIN and SMN mess, ranged classes really deserve a band-aid potency patch like NIN and SAM.

At least a confirmation that they're aware of the imbalances would be nice. It's awful to be in the dark and not know if the feedback is reaching the devs.

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5.1 will be rather telling. Despite many of our vocal complaints, I will give credit where credit is due. The dev team has responded much better to potential issues than they did in Stormblood. Ninja was borderline worthless because of how tight the competition for melee spots are, and Monk wasn't much better. Granted, they went a little overboard with regards to the latter but at least it's something. If they at least acknowledge the issue, that's a step. If we see the Dark Knight treatment where they'd dead silent, I actually hope Ultimate groups run double Black Mage if only shine a giant massive beckon on how bad things have gotten.

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Originally Posted by Karja

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i would say balance around the 90-95% range, balancing for a potential max is futile as at this point there come things like a bard that suddenly has a procc rate of 65% on his dots, blackmages that didn't move an inch from the pull whereas the group worked around them in a way you wouldn't try to please the lord himself if he came down to earth and groups literally waiting for an extra 5 seconds so classes can get in their big 1500+ potency finisher that just went ready. Balancing for the low end on the other hand may not have this inherit problem, however and that i feel is important, people can allways better themselves, i don't mean this in a "just try harder" way, but if classes are close enough at the lower brackets people can overcome this through simply being better (or more experienced) at certain classes, take mch and bard, they are so close (all the time btw) you literally cant go up a single bracket on fflogs (so 20->25->30->40->50.......) without the bard in the higher bracket beating out the mch in the lower one. Also ideally you take more than one fight, because obviously some fights favor certain classes more than others.

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Originally Posted by Akiudo

i would say balance around the 90-95% range.

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But what would that mean in RPDS?
If I apply BLMs RDPS at 95 percentile as RDPs for DNC and then use the same % decrease DNC currently has it would deal more RDPs than BLM at 50 percentile by nearly 500 dps.
Another point is how good must a player be to currently achive 50% in a fight like E4S? And must a player be as good to do it on another Job e.g. is 50% for a DNC equally demanding thant 50% on BLM?
Should this even matter?

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Originally Posted by kajv95

When it comes to the skill ceiling, if the balance of a job is skewed due to a higher intentional complexity in order to justify higher dps, then there should be an endgame imbalance. However, this would mean that the job is also not liable to receive QoL updates to decrease difficulty, something Level 80 Black Mages may note is exactly what Xenoglossy is. This difficulty must also be something that can be objectively perceived, not just something on a subjective level, since players may excel at different things, and to punish a player for being who they are (as a person) is something that shouldn't happen.

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The difficulty of BLM isn't alone that you are less mobile compared to a physical ranged (even with xenoglossy the mobility is nowhere near the same for BLM and ranged physical, DNC even has En Avant) but also the fact that skill weaving is significantly harder on BLM than on physical ranged since you have very few options for weaving.
And the lastly that your big DPS cooldown in Leyline forces you to stand in a small place for 30 seconds, I'm currently not aware of another DPS buff that has such a requirement.
There are certain DPS spells like salted earth though.

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Originally Posted by Akiudo

balancing for a potential max is futile as at this point there come things like a bard that suddenly has a procc rate of 65% on his dots

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This doesn’t happen anymore. Repertoire is fixed at a flat 40% now, so the proc rate never changes like it did in Stormblood.


Balance shouldn’t be done with lower percentiles in mind simply because of how they reflect below average, average, or slightly above average potential for jobs; and balancing around “just average” would spell even more problems and potentially create even larger disparities at higher percentiles due to skill level and players pushing a job’s higher potential versus its lower potential. Hence why you should balance not quite at peak performance (100th percentile or Max percentile), but at something slightly below but also really high (95th percentile).

EDIT because residual posting limit from yesterday still in effect:

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Originally Posted by Akiudo

you missed my point there, Reportoire is fixed, but its still random. was i hyperbolic with a 65% procc rate ? yes, if you can get that in a 10 minute fight you should really start playing the lottery, but there will still by trys where you in actuality have a 35% procc rate and fights where 45% of all dots procc, my argument was simply that taking the absolute maximum is bad because what the absolute maximum shows are statistical anomalys, thats the try where a 99% bard suddenly gets 45-50% reportoire proccs) and crits 70% of his apex arrows even though his crit rate is 40%

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Then I apologize, but your phrasing made it sound far more like the Repertoire/DoT proc rate was manipulatable, as it was in Stormblood; not that your DoTs were proc-ing 65% of the time in a fight, or that your skills were crit-ing at 60/65/70+% as opposed to a more “normal” rate.

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Originally Posted by Karja

But what would that mean in RPDS?
If I apply BLMs RDPS at 95 percentile as RDPs for DNC and then use the same % decrease DNC currently has it would deal more RDPs than BLM at 50 percentile by nearly 500 dps.
Another point is how good must a player be to currently achive 50% in a fight like E4S? And must a player be as good to do it on another Job e.g. is 50% for a DNC equally demanding thant 50% on BLM?
Should this even matter?

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which is a big reason why i said to use more than one fight and also said "balance around" not "make every class perfectly equal at" if we take an average fight, and on this average fight a dancer (with all contributions) at 50% is 300 dps above blackmage and at 95% is 200 below that is perfectly fine, that would mean in an extremly movement heavy fight dancer would probably even pull ahead, whereas if there's a fight with absolutely minimal movement the 50% blackmage would most likely equal the dancer whereas at the high percentile it would pull away by 500 instead of 200 dps. Also, people tend to throw together the skill ceiling with the skill floor, balance for the upper end, and if one class has to hard a falloff below a certain percentile then try to raise the floor for that class

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Originally Posted by HyoMinPark

This doesn’t happen anymore. Repertoire is fixed at a flat 40% now, so the proc rate never changes like it did in Stormblood.

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you missed my point there, Reportoire is fixed, but its still random. was i hyperbolic with a 65% procc rate ? yes, if you can get that in a 10 minute fight you should really start playing the lottery, but there will still by trys where you in actuality have a 35% procc rate and fights where 45% of all dots procc, my argument was simply that taking the absolute maximum is bad because what the absolute maximum shows are statistical anomalys, thats the try where a 99% bard suddenly gets 45-50% reportoire proccs and crits 70% of his apex arrows even though his crit rate is 40%

edit:

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Originally Posted by HyoMinPark

Then I apologize, but your phrasing made it sound far more like the Repertoire/DoT proc rate was manipulatable, as it was in Stormblood; not that your DoTs were proc-ing 65% of the time in a fight, or that your skills were crit-ing at 60/65/70+% as opposed to a more “normal” rate.

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letting my original clarification stay so it doesn't look like i talk to myself, but yea my wording was maybe not ideal, simply wanted to clarify that both "dumb luck" and "manipulation" (so the rest of the points i listed) are reasons why using the absolut max percentile is bad.

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Originally Posted by Karja

The difficulty of BLM isn't alone that you are less mobile compared to a physical ranged (even with xenoglossy the mobility is nowhere near the same for BLM and ranged physical, DNC even has En Avant) but also the fact that skill weaving is significantly harder on BLM than on physical ranged since you have very few options for weaving.
And the lastly that your big DPS cooldown in Leyline forces you to stand in a small place for 30 seconds, I'm currently not aware of another DPS buff that has such a requirement.
There are certain DPS spells like salted earth though.

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You're missing the point a little. The main takeaway is that jobs are designed to be interesting and different in their own right (though they do occasionally miss the mark) and don't really consider the difficulty in that sense, rather more that it's fun to play in it's own right. Aside from that, I can't consider weaving to be much more difficult than atleast BRD and MCH right now, and "we can't weave as well as you guys" is a non-argument when that is more or less exclusive to your job. At that point, you'd have to argue that BLM is the single most difficult job in the game, which no job really is.

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Originally Posted by Karja

And must a player be as good to do it on another Job e.g. is 50% for a DNC equally demanding thant 50% on BLM?
Should this even matter?

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I'm not sure if you know how percentiles work. If a 50% player is doing their best on a DNC and a 50% player is doing their best on BLM e.g. they are stagnant and aren't improving due to personal inability, then for those two people it is, in fact, equally demanding.

I like how some people here think mobility tax deserve to put ranged at this very low rdps , so low that the 1% main stat buff literally doesn't even put them ahead of triple melee and double blm comps
what's even the point of role stat buffs when it doesn't even guarantee a spot for any physical ranged? lmao

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Originally Posted by Karja

The difficulty of BLM isn't alone that you are less mobile compared to a physical ranged (even with xenoglossy the mobility is nowhere near the same for BLM and ranged physical, DNC even has En Avant) but also the fact that skill weaving is significantly harder on BLM than on physical ranged since you have very few options for weaving.
And the lastly that your big DPS cooldown in Leyline forces you to stand in a small place for 30 seconds, I'm currently not aware of another DPS buff that has such a requirement.
There are certain DPS spells like salted earth though.

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That is already included in the rDPS metric on fflogs.
It's expressed quite clearly in the delta between lower and upper quartile.
For a BLM that is generally quite a bit bigger than for other classes.

It doesn't disprove the claim BLM is a bit overtuned though.
Even the lower quartile (players that have a more difficult time with the movement issues) BLM does higher rDPS than any other ranged class.
Only at 10th percentile BLM rDPS starts dropping bellow other ranged classes.

I like how you say all content, and then proceed to only talk about raiding.

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I like how you say all content, and then proceed to only talk about raiding.

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Ah, you're laboring under the impression that pve content besides savage and ultimate matters at all from a tuning standpoint. An easy mistake to make, but I hope that clears it up for you.

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Originally Posted by SieyaM

I like how you say all content, and then proceed to only talk about raiding.

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Ho boi, poor choice of you to bring this up.
Dungeons and Normal Trials are irrelevant they are just one clear thing you queue for.
I won't talk about PVP but that's also queued and you won't be able to ban a job, plus it's a whole balance of its own.

Remains the EX trials, Savage content and Ultimate content which are "all" the end game content:

-EX is the easiest and let me tell you, back in SB Machinist was straight banned from PF party EX. Calling EX trial is very generous as those have very few mechanics. Yet EX content is also a content where the "mobility advantage" doesn't shine at all, all jobs are equally disadvantaged. Not only that but you can have HW - Zurvan like situation where you want as most DPS as possible to skip an annoying mechanic. Skip soar, kick the ranged they bring nothing to the group and they have the lowest damage. You start to see the scenario?

-Savage content is where the real shit starts, where DPS matters a lot. Often you will either run with a static or pugs. If your group has balls, they will run double ranged.

-Ultimate is the least cleared content where the tiniest number will matter. Sooo, you need balls of steel to run double ranged if SE won't overtune this fight.


Now among all these endgame content, which one is the most likely to be cleared and farmed by the community? That's right, EX content.
The same EX content where players actually lock out jobs and ask for big DPS.

In other words: The most played endgame content will lock out ranged as they have no advantages, the second most played won't desire a second ranged, the third most will rely on SE choice to either kill or give a big advantage to melee jobs.

I would say this savage is the only thing that matters mentality is why the levelling experience turns off new players and is so abysmal right now. No one wants to even consider how these jobs play before you get to savage or in any other content.

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Originally Posted by SieyaM

I would say this savage is the only thing that matters mentality is why the levelling experience turns off new players and is so abysmal right now. No one wants to even consider how these jobs play before you get to savage or in any other content.

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I’d say you’re incorrect. There have been a fair share of complaints on this forum about how awful the jobs feel at the lower levels due to skill pruning.

Pruning and restructuring that was done to accomodate Savage raiders

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Originally Posted by SieyaM

Pruning and restructuring that was done to accomodate Savage raiders

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I doubt that the massive amounts of skill pruning that was done for Stormblood’s launch was done for the raiders. But, by all means, quote me your source.

Speaking on the streamlining of some jobs going into Shadowbringers, I can say that they weren’t done for the sake of the raiders. Considering that things like BRD’s Straight Shot were removed due to difficulties players had with its upkeep (lol) and to close the gap between skilled and unskilled BRDs. But, as I said, feel free to quote your source that this was all done for the sake of Savage raiders.

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Originally Posted by HyoMinPark

I doubt that the massive amounts of skill pruning that was done for Stormblood’s launch was done for the raiders. But, by all means, quote me your source.

Speaking on the streamlining of some jobs going into Shadowbringers, I can say that they weren’t done for the sake of the raiders. Considering that things like BRD’s Straight Shot were removed due to difficulties players had with its upkeep (lol) and to close the gap between skilled and unskilled BRDs. But, as I said, feel free to quote your source that this was all done for the sake of Savage raiders.

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Then why are savage raiders always saying they direct the job changes and have so much influence for the direction of the game? Which is it, are you the most important group and have the most influence or are you just as helpless to dev changes as the rest of us? You can't sit here and tell us all how great you are and how you are doing the only content that affects change but then not be responsible for the ill effects of those changes.

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Originally Posted by SieyaM

Then why are savage raiders always saying they direct the job changes and have so much influence for the direction of the game? Which is it, are you the most important group and have the most influence or are you just as helpless to dev changes as the rest of us? You can't sit here and tell us all how great you are and how you are doing the only content that affects change but then not be responsible for the ill effects of those changes.

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Who said savage raiders direct job changes, or have any influence over them? Several people, myself included, believe jobs should be balanced for the upper end rather than the lower end, but that is not the same as saying that they are balanced that way.

But I don't know why I bother with any of it. You're right you are the most important group and the rest of us better just fall in line and abide by whatever Savage raiders want. The next expac should just be a vendor for gear and savage raids, don't even bother with the rest of the content. Could even cap your level when you log in for it.

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Originally Posted by SieyaM

But I don't know why I bother with any of it. You're right you are the most important group and the rest of us better just fall in line and abide by whatever Savage raiders want. The next expac should just be a vendor for gear and savage raids, don't even bother with the rest of the content. Could even cap your level when you log in for it.

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I never made any claim like that, but I appreciate you saying I'm important :)

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Originally Posted by SieyaM

But I don't know why I bother with any of it. You're right you are the most important group and the rest of us better just fall in line and abide by whatever Savage raiders want. The next expac should just be a vendor for gear and savage raids, don't even bother with the rest of the content. Could even cap your level when you log in for it.

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Dude you are just having a conversation with yourself at this point. Relax. The big bad savage players are not waiting outside to steal your lunch money. We are an actually pretty nice crowd.

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Originally Posted by Rika007

Dude you are just having a conversation with yourself at this point. Relax. The big bad savage players are not waiting outside to steal your lunch money. We are an actually pretty nice crowd.

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In party chat.

You should see us at our monitors.

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Originally Posted by SieyaM

I would say this savage is the only thing that matters mentality is why the levelling experience turns off new players and is so abysmal right now. No one wants to even consider how these jobs play before you get to savage or in any other content.

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Well do it then if it bothers you. Write an open letter to SE devs or whatever. Are you waiting for someone else to adress an issue that bothers you? Savage Raiders talk about Savage because they care about Savage. They're not the Amnesty International of FF14 that have to take care of issues that you have with class balance in low level content lol

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Originally Posted by SieyaM

I would say this savage is the only thing that matters mentality is why the levelling experience turns off new players and is so abysmal right now. No one wants to even consider how these jobs play before you get to savage or in any other content.

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I have everything at level 70 or higher (except the two new jobs that start at 60) so this is literally irrelevant to me right now. Savage actually matters to me so yeah that's what I care about. Although, what I will say is that the leveling experience would be a heck of a lot better if you could level a DPS without waiting 20-30 minutes in queue for every dungeon run.

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Originally Posted by SieyaM

But I don't know why I bother with any of it. You're right you are the most important group and the rest of us better just fall in line and abide by whatever Savage raiders want. The next expac should just be a vendor for gear and savage raids, don't even bother with the rest of the content. Could even cap your level when you log in for it.

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We didn't said "Make the gamer harder for new players".
We asked for "Raise the skill ceiling"

There is a huge difference in skill floor and skill ceiling.
Skill floor si the minimum required, in other words how a really bad Black Mage/Monk/Dragoon can pull 12k rDPS.
Skill ceiling is the maximum you can do, when there is no more or very few to learn, for example a ranged pulling 13.3k rDPS.

The gap between a good and a bad player is about 2 to 3k, about 15% to 20%. All we want is to increase that gap, increase the skill ceiling.
We don't want to touch the skill floor.

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Originally Posted by SieyaM

But I don't know why I bother with any of it. You're right you are the most important group and the rest of us better just fall in line and abide by whatever Savage raiders want. The next expac should just be a vendor for gear and savage raids, don't even bother with the rest of the content. Could even cap your level when you log in for it.

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You are very much missing the points..
Jobs should not be balanced or data obtained to do so from players that simply run normal dungeons.
If you do not see doing adjustments based off feedback from players that run Savage is more beneficial well idk what to say

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Originally Posted by SieyaM

But I don't know why I bother with any of it. You're right you are the most important group and the rest of us better just fall in line and abide by whatever Savage raiders want. The next expac should just be a vendor for gear and savage raids, don't even bother with the rest of the content. Could even cap your level when you log in for it.

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Nice strawman.

Care to explain why job balance should focus on low end content where only a fraction of the jobs overall potential will be tested? The reason people, even non-raiders, cite Savage and Ultimate as what should be the benchmark is due to that level of content pushing each job to display their capabilities. Incidentally, balance adjustments in this category also benefit players who don't raid whereas the same is not necessarily true, or may even prove detrimental. For example, Dancer is incredibly powerful in dungeons provided you pull large. Why? It has very high potency AoEs with minimal drop off penalties. Conversely, it's the weakest job in single target encounters by no small margin. Factoring dungeons into the equation could easily give you the wrong impression that Dancer isn't actually in need of some serious potency buffs.

That all being said, if raiders had any say on balance or skill adjustments. A lot of jobs would become more complex not less. In fact, just to grab some examples off the top of my head. Dragoon was changed from its Heavensward iteration purely to accommodate people who couldn't maintain BotD properly; Inner Release became the Fell Cleave meme because people whined it was too difficult when it used to simply cut your gauge cost in half. Neither of these changes came with raiders in mind.

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Originally Posted by SieyaM

But I don't know why I bother with any of it. You're right you are the most important group and the rest of us better just fall in line and abide by whatever Savage raiders want. The next expac should just be a vendor for gear and savage raids, don't even bother with the rest of the content. Could even cap your level when you log in for it.

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I think your anti-raider bias is showing.

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Originally Posted by ForteNightshade

That all being said, if raiders had any say on balance or skill adjustments. A lot of jobs would become more complex not less. In fact, just to grab some examples off the top of my head. Dragoon was changed from its Heavensward iteration purely to accommodate people who couldn't maintain BotD properly; Inner Release became the Fell Cleave meme because people whined it was too difficult when it used to simply cut your gauge cost in half. Neither of these changes came with raiders in mind.

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For real, one has to only just look at Bard compared from 4.0 to now to see that the devs are definitely not balancing or designing around raid players opinions.

Other than being in total agreement with the OP, I want to point a couple of things about DPS taxes (mainly, mobility and raise):

- OP explained perfectly why those advantages for ranged physical (raise support and/or mobility advantage) are already included in the rDPS charts.

- Live letter 36 (or 37 was it?), SE specifically answered to a Q&A that they stopped balancing job damage around their (very subjective) "difficulty". This was for the launch of Stormblood. Whether you agree or not with this, I do personally agree and for one main reason: difficulty is subjective and I don't see the problem with some jobs being easy of access while some others require more complexity to play. Everyone can find the thing they like the most in terms of accessibility, while still remaining competitive in rDPS.

- Job balance doesn't matter at low level or casual level. There is no DPS checks to meet, there is no hard requirements that makes being competitive an edge for your team.

- For the raise tax (SMN and especially RDM), you get a "raise tax" on your total DPS. I really find this silly and this for two reasons. First, raising with any of those jobs means wasting GCDs to raise people. This means a drop in damage already. And second, you can argue that having a job able to rez and save the day and allow the party to push on to completion nevertheless can be a thing, true, but in most progression based content the true penalty is when people die, period, and you can't meet the DPS checks anymore ANYWAY. Raising as a party utility is mostly, and has always been mostly universally seen as a progression tool, not a raid DPS clear too.

- For mobility tax, I guess since now we have party boni tied to every role, if we get ranged physical buffed enough, it could survive pretty well and stay in the course as long as its party bonus doesn't get offset hard. As OP said, it would require a significant buff though, not slight increases as promised in the live letter. Ranged physical would probably live decently even with a slight mobility tax penalty just due to the safety of that party bonus margin (which also buffs every personal parse of your party members, so people will want that). We'll still have a problem seeing parties with 2 ranged physical being rather suboptimal though. I would rather see SE give ranged physical actual hurdles of its own that aren't based on cast times / mobility or melee uptime. Just as a reminder, physical ranged damage has always been total garbo and it's nothing new, it was already the case in HW and SB, and the only way to offset it and make it actually either competitive or outright broken in the meta was that damn piercing debuff (10% then 5% !!), that got fortunately nuked out of the sky. Now it's gone, well, people can finally truly admire the true state of ranged physical DPS. And it's not pretty to look at

- Our role abilities and support as ranged physical is just not competitive anymore.

Well, those of you who watched the live letter today will have seen that they explicitly singled out ranged as a role to receive potency buffs, as well as mentioned melee might be a bit too strong. (No word about BLM though, perhaps we're getting away scot free)

Whatever the case, this should put to rest the debate over whether they deserve buffs or not, the only question is whether it will be enough or not.

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Originally Posted by Myon88

Whatever the case, this should put to rest the debate over whether they deserve buffs or not, the only question is whether it will be enough or not.

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A 5% buff overrall would settle the case.
We can always dream for that 500 dps difference (It's what you loose if you purposely misses all positionnals).
But if, let's say, melee overrall see their rDPS drops by 400-500, MNK with a bigger nerf and the ranged with a 200-300 DPS buff, we would be much closer.

They talked about balance overrall so we'll have to wait for it. In any case, the gap will be reduced from both ends and that's progress.

I do hope the rebalancing of jobs somehow touches BLM as well because it's not only the melee that we're competing with. Even though we need 5%, SE nerfing melee at the same time makes me think they're not going to brave enough to give a buff that large, which would still make BLM a problem.