Picto makes the game less fun

With that edgy jet black dyed BLM glam plate I hope

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Originally Posted by Gaiinahat

Like Dancer, to me Picto feels like a girly job. I'll be sticking with BLM.

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That's just a lack of imagination on your end, though. There is nothing inherently "girly" about art or dancing.

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Originally Posted by PercibelTheren

That's just a lack of imagination on your end, though. There is nothing inherently "girly" about art or dancing.

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I mean come on, if they truly hated girly jobs, they would play one of those manly guy with sword jobs, not a puny caster. You're being totally disingenuous. Nobody plays a caster like gaston after all.

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Originally Posted by Valence

I mean come on, if they truly hated girly jobs, they would play one of those manly guy with sword jobs, not a puny caster. You're being totally disingenuous. Nobody plays a caster like gaston after all.

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it was weird at first playing DNC I hope that we got reskin version of manly dances similar to SMN reskin to companion

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Originally Posted by Valence

Nobody plays a caster like gaston after all.

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I'll have you know I play Black Mage like a MANLY MAN I tank EVERY HIT I stand still NO MATTER WHAT and I always go my own MANLY WAY

On an unrelated note, would anyone be willing to prog with me? I've been blacklisted from every single party in NA, (Probably intimidated by my potent masculinity), and I wanna get past Mouser 1.

Dancer is fun, I enjoy it and the animations on my girly miqo'te who dresses like a punk rocker for DNC glam. And tbh, FFXIV has always had a feminine tilt about it anyway. I mean the reply about DNC girly is by a bunboy. Like they are masculine looking males right?

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Originally Posted by Valence

Nobody plays a caster like gaston after all.

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Nooo ooooneee... casts like Gaston,
No one nukes like Gaston,
No one's parse is as monstrously high as Gastons!
For there's no mage in town half as magey
Perfect, a pure paragon!
You can ask any Picto, Summ or Red Magey
And they'll tell you whose team they prefer to be on!

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Originally Posted by PercibelTheren

I agree with not changing motifs, that's way overboard. But people were responding like this to the mere suggestion of some number adjustments. Apparently the fun of a job comes from dealing big damage and nothing else to quite a lot of people.

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I think people need to get over themselves.
Nerfs are necessary sometimes, because if you keep buffing everything then you start to powercreep the content and you'll disfigure the class design.
Look no further than Warrior shitting out the highest heals and doing the same dps as phys range on ultimates because of endless waves of completely unnecessary buffs.
There can't be a job identity if jobs are made into unstoppable murder machines without any flaws.
All the tanks have become borderline immortal over the years, and we still have a discrepancy in their survivability and utility. Yet, people are STILL asking for buffs rather than nerfs.
I just don't see a way forward for tanks anymore which is why i've quit playing them.

I don't really see this happening any time soon within the dps role though, but i do think Picto and Viper were balanced pretty poorly in respect to the rest of their role.
I'd argue that Picto is the lesser evil here, mainly because it actually does not have a tool that is essential to half of it's role (res). And it is actually a fully designed job.
But it does have some other utility pieces. I'd argue it's on even grounds as a Reaper in terms of utility.
Viper just shits out damage, gets free uptime as a melee because of an overpowered ranged attack with multiple stacks, has no job mechanics or resources to manage, the dps rotation of a tank and is straight up the highest dps job in the game. You could play Vpr in the phys range spot in any fight just fine because of uncoiled. I'd say it's a complete mess of a job design, but there is hardly anything there. It utilises 12 buttons in it's dps rotation, which is the exact same as the tanks. Except you spend 80% of your time pressing the same 2 buttons and don't share any of their responsibilities.

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Originally Posted by GoatOfWar

Nerfs are necessary sometimes, because if you keep buffing everything then you start to powercreep the content and you'll disfigure the class design.
Look no further than Warrior shitting out the highest heals and doing the same dps as phys range on ultimates because of endless waves of completely unnecessary buffs.
There can't be a job identity if jobs are made into unstoppable murder machines without any flaws.

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Thank you. Exactly this.

In fact, nerfs should be the de-facto default choice. Because chances are if something is imbalanced, it's one job that is grossly imbalanced, not "all but one".

Picto for casters, Warrior for tanks, that kinda stuff. Those are easy, just nerf them. In particular because in both cases the problem is trivial to see:

* Warrior is insanely survivable while bringing the most group support of the tanks. Considering their job fantasy and the existence of Paladin this both feels weird, while the high damage would not necessarily be. Not a straightforward nerf, but removing group support in particular from a "Warrior" isn't exactly a big, we ain't GW2 Warrior here with their banner spec.
* Pictomancer is not a raw damage-only caster. It brings high personal mobility, a self-shield, optionally a group shield and a group damage buff. Just straight-up nerf the damage, logically it needs to be below the three damage-and-nothing else jobs Samurai, Viper and in particular the also-fairly-immobile Black Mage.

This is not rocket science. You can right a sinking ship by counterflooding, but eventually you run into a problem if you try to keep doing that and never go back and do actual repairs. Buffing ad nauseum can only prop up job balance so long, in particular because as the base average power level from continuing buffs increases, any future imbalance has bigger effects (as the underlying numbers all went up).

It doesn’t have to be PCT but the whole idea that only the three selfish jobs can ever be the highest rDPS dealers needs to die

If the only argument as to why they aren’t 1 2 and 3 is “well they only bring damage” then give them something else

Forcing domination of the selfish jobs is just boring, especially when VPR is fighting SMN for “playable by a braindead 4 year old” AND VPR also has the massive utility of being a melee you can play as a physical ranged

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Originally Posted by Supersnow845

It doesn’t have to be PCT but the whole idea that only the three selfish jobs can ever be the highest rDPS dealers needs to die

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They're balanced around doing the highest personal damage, which statistically shouldn't be rDPS, if using the specific metric. They should be ahead in nDPS and aDPS but never rDPS (BLM is an exception in some cases because of its specific damage profile).

I do agree with the sentiment though, "selfish" jobs appear to be "pampered" by SE sometimes.

Which of the following are the high aDPS/nDPS jobs? Which job actually has the highest burst in practice?

https://i.imgur.com/xOolW5l.jpeg

That's the downside of reducing everything to a single number.

Buff synergy depends entirely on your burst, but not all 'selfish DPS' are burst-focused. VPR and BLM rely on consistency and uptime to do their damage. Of course, you could have predicted this entirely by usage rates in Savage speedruns. Shorter clear times favor burst. (I'll also say, I think Criterion Savage is looking to be especially hilarious, as triple PCT is already the standard for dungeon speedruns given how motifs reset instantly between encounters).

I'm not entirely sure what the 'advantage' of being a 'selfish' DPS is. It's certainly not utility. It's not necessarily even burst. It's not even buff alignment, and if anything you have to be extra aware about how the rest of your teammates are setting up their burst to get the maximum advantage out of your own, especially if you're in PF. Perhaps a better term is 'commensal DPS'?

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Originally Posted by Lyth

That's the downside of reducing everything to a single number.

Buff synergy depends entirely on your burst, but not all 'selfish DPS' are burst-focused. VPR and BLM rely on consistency and uptime to do their damage. Of course, you could have predicted this entirely by usage rates in Savage speedruns. Shorter clear times favor burst. (I'll also say, I think Criterion Savage is looking to be especially hilarious, as triple PCT is already the standard for dungeon speedruns given how motifs reset instantly between encounters).

I'm not entirely sure what the 'advantage' of being a 'selfish' DPS is. It's certainly not utility. It's not necessarily even burst. It's not even buff alignment, and if anything you have to be extra aware about how the rest of your teammates are setting up their burst to get the maximum advantage out of your own, especially if you're in PF. Perhaps a better term is 'commensal DPS'?

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It's a bit reductive to claim that discussion focuses entirely on one number. Those metrics are one of the scarce tools we can work with when commenting job balance as long as we don't have access to the data that SE collects.

That the second picture is of a PCT burst peaks and troughs doesn't change the fact that it will have less personal damage than the "selfish" jobs over time, on average. In fact, I'd argue that it's positive that a non-selfish job can compete with SAM for highest 120s burst in the game, as NIN did in EW until SAM slightly surpassed it.

SAM, RPR and BLM are consistently the jobs at the top of the nDPS and aDPS metrics, with the difference being mainly how much they can abuse buffs.

The advantage of "selfish" jobs is that they don't depend on the party to deal their personal damage. The damage you deal to a dummy in Urqopacha will be the same that you will deal in your average encounter with a similar kill time. But it doesn't end there because they can further their damage by playing into others' buffs. This is why it's bad for game balance when "selfish" jobs have higher rDPS than buffing jobs, as SAM in ShB and BLM* in EW attest.

*BLM is a bit different, as its aDPS contribution tends to be lower, so the job having higher personal dummy damage than normal would be logical to account for it, as long as it doesn't become overtuned.

On the other hand, a buffing job not only has to do the above, but they also need to expect everyone else in the party to press their buttons properly and align their buffs. This means that it's entirely possible to lose hundreds or even thousands of DPS depending on how well or badly the other seven people in the party play. It will be precisely buffing jobs that will lose more on average in the PF environment that you're citing. For instance, players dying will have a big effect on the rDPS of a DNC or BRD.

Jobs like VPR can even choose to put extra damage like an odd minute Reawaken on a drifted or mistimed buff to get some benefit, unlike many other jobs that are not that free flowing.

"Selfish" jobs are not as affected by party size either. They are even more effective in 4-people content precisely because they don't care about the amount of jobs present that abuse their buffs.

It is interesting that you mention Criterion when in EW and right now, BLM remains the top job. PCT is not far behind though but that's to be expected. However, the current sample size is not that great. RPR was an excellent job in EW Criterion and is likely underrepresented at the moment, so its potential and likely that of other jobs will not show in the current statistics. Conversely, MCH is ahead of more than half the jobs in rDPS, something unthinkable in 8-people duties.

You're right that PCT is extremely strong in normal dungeon speeds and damage but VPR is also quite high and competitive, a fact that you have curiously omitted. Every other job is either absent, very low down the list or has at most one or two representatives in a sea of pink and green.

PCT being overtuned, particularly when downtime is involved, doesn't change the fact that rDPS and aDPS have always had an ideal inverse relationship. Jobs have been designed like that in this game for a while now, as otherwise buffing jobs would be at a (further) disadvantage. All the metrics we have now exist due to player request, and are precisely meant to reflect the state of the game's balance.

VPR or BLM having a flatter damage profile with lower buff contribution should be balanced by their filler. If it's not, then that's a balance problem. You've said it yourself: M2S current kill times at high end benefit VPR because the boss doesn't die after an even burst. Many encounters in PF or otherwise are not always going to end on such a burst for the average player, thus playing into VPR's strengths.

But yes, PCT's ability to benefit from downtime and deal extremely quick high bursts of single target and AoE damage in different types of content is something that we have already discussed in different threads. Whatever SE does or does not do about it is anyone's guess at the moment.

In the 100 dungeons, PCT and VPR murders everything way too fast. I don't like being another DPS in those because I can't even finish a burst rotation sometimes. I don't care about Savage numbers in a static memorized environment. But all that trickles down making normal content with those jobs (which everyone queues as) a miserably boring experience with powercreep no jobs should have. PCT and VPR need nerfs, or they need to fix power creep because it isn't fun playing with those jobs on your team. I think some of you forget how awful the savagw balancing makes normal content in a more random environment where you aren't queued in with your static measuring dps on a spreadsheet.

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Originally Posted by Grumblecakes

In the 100 dungeons, PCT and VPR murders everything way too fast. I don't like being another DPS in those because I can't even finish a burst rotation sometimes. I don't care about Savage numbers in a static memorized environment. But all that trickles down making normal content with those jobs (which everyone queues as) a miserably boring experience with powercreep no jobs should have. PCT and VPR need nerfs...

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Not even just in the 100 dungeons, I wrote a while back that I was doing a lv 65 dungeon and got paired with a PCT. While I don’t know the PCT kit at that level, the difference in kill speed between PCT and any other DPS I had been paired with til then was very noticeable, everything was dying so ridiculously fast that it made the dungeon a very boring experience for, and I generally really enjoy dungeons. Since then I’m glad I haven’t been paired with another, but from that experience, I totally agree that PCT needs to be nerfed.

If this weeks LiveLetter does not bring any good news about changes and buffs to BLM, I feel after 13+ years since 1.0, and never taken a single break from the game, to finally permanently retire my subscription :/ I dont wanna quit, but BLM is a HUGE reason I enjoy the game, but since DT and the changes has severely impacted that enjoyment. And its even made me hate the PCT Job due to how easy it is to play while being Overpowered and just removing every reason for BLMs to exist in the game sadly :/

Im praying for good news this weekend, but with how poorly the devs seem to have interacted with players this time around, I feel worried and dont expect anything good :(

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Originally Posted by Aco505

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It really comes down to your choice of metrics. Selfish DPS have been historically valued because of their burst potential, because they have bigger contributions under two minute raid buffs. SAM is the classical example. The problem is that aDPS and nDPS can't distinguish between burst and consistent DPS. PCT, SAM, BLM, and VPR all have solid aDPS/nDPS, but they achieve this in different ways. It's only when you look at the burst profiles that you get the real picture of what's under the hood.

Part of the problem is that aDPS and nDPS were introduced in Stormblood to combat single target buff padding that was rampant during Heavensward, causing players to dismiss performance metrics altogether. It was a reactive strategy for a service that survives on ad revenue. These parameters were then retroactively re-envisioned as 'measures of buff alignment', but there are much better ways of doing this. One way of doing this is just looking at the area under the DPS curve during your various potion bursts. It's pretty intuitive to interpret this visually, but it's much harder to extract that automatically from a data set. One issue is that a lot of resource-gated jobs (PCT excluded, due to motifs charging instantly outside of combat) tend to have asymmetric first and subsequent potion bursts. And then there are fight specific considerations, like M4S very deliberately destroying the platform right before the end of the six minute window.

It's correct to say that buff providers can have extremely competitive burst windows. That's why both DRG (31%) and NIN (22%) are much better performers in M1S speedruns than VPR, to the point that it's the least used melee in the fastest clears on that fight (1%). You have a short fight that ends on a potion burst. I think that having a trade-off between burst and consistent jobs is actually quite healthy for the game, so long as it doesn't become too one-sided. I also think that it's great to see burst and consistent DPS jobs trade-off across the weeks as clear times shrink and you alternate between ending on burst and ending between burst. The problem arises when you go over to the caster side, and you see PCT with 100% pick rate in M1S, M3S, and M4S speedruns. It's kind of funny that M2S is currently the one exception where you see BLM used, because I'm fairly sure that BLM is allergic to bees.

Legacy Criterion Savage is a bit of an odd one at the moment, because there's only a few hundred documented runs over the past three months, with many jobs having a single digit number of clears in individual instances. You'd be comparing 6 BLM performances vs. 60 PCT in some cases, resulting in an underpowered data set. Now that I think about it though, it's probably the byproduct of both the existing damage multipliers and synced power balance, so I suppose we'll have to see how it turns out in practice. I'd be curious to know what PCT's multiplier is, as I haven't looked at that chart since Endwalker.

This is just kinda the endgame of their current design. Burst is everything in this game because they made it this way, jobs that don’t burst well tend to require specifically unfavourable burst profiles of the kill time in a tier to be competitive with high bursting jobs because the goal is always to end with a burst and a potion. Pretty much all fights these days are specifically designed around the presence of the burst.

If they want to rebalance this problem they need to make more fights that specifically de-emphasise the burst or redo the way the burst works in its entirety

Even taking PCT out of the equation look at the overall contribution of the remaining 20 jobs as an aggregate across the tier, MNK and RPR have higher highs than VPR or SAM and AST and SCH have far higher highs than WHM and SGE

PCT plays to the burst better than any other job in the game (except maybe AST) but the problem is much more with the burst than PCT itself. If we remove and nerf PCT who is currently 5% above VPR on the gold parse is MNK being 4% above VPR on the gold parse acceptable

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Originally Posted by Altera

If this weeks LiveLetter does not bring any good news about changes and buffs to BLM, I feel after 13+ years since 1.0, and never taken a single break from the game, to finally permanently retire my subscription :/ I dont wanna quit, but BLM is a HUGE reason I enjoy the game, but since DT and the changes has severely impacted that enjoyment. And its even made me hate the PCT Job due to how easy it is to play while being Overpowered and just removing every reason for BLMs to exist in the game sadly :/

Im praying for good news this weekend, but with how poorly the devs seem to have interacted with players this time around, I feel worried and dont expect anything good :(

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Good luck in your endeavors. I personally can relate in how it feels as I've been left in the exact same state after the butchering of MCH in ShB. But by focusing on other things one may like it's possible to... cope with it and move on, as long as you can find some amount of fun in other parts of the game.

But it is true that seeing a job one clicked with in PVE (being the main activity of the game generally) getting that kind of treatment WILL leave a void that is hard to fill with anything else.

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Originally Posted by Valence

Good luck in your endeavors. I personally can relate in how it feels as I've been left in the exact same state after the butchering of MCH in ShB. But by focusing on other things one may like it's possible to... cope with it and move on, as long as you can find some amount of fun in other parts of the game.

But it is true that seeing a job one clicked with in PVE (being the main activity of the game generally) getting that kind of treatment WILL leave a void that is hard to fill with anything else.

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Yeah, it really doesn't feel good when a job you loved gets everything you enjoyed about it taken away. This happened to me with Astrologian when Dawntrail came out, causing me to completely retire from healing for the first time in my 15 or so years of playing MMOs. I've found enjoyment in playing physranged, but the void of not having a fun healer class to play is still there.

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Originally Posted by Supersnow845

It doesn’t have to be PCT but the whole idea that only the three selfish jobs can ever be the highest rDPS dealers needs to die

If the only argument as to why they aren’t 1 2 and 3 is “well they only bring damage” then give them something else

Forcing domination of the selfish jobs is just boring, especially when VPR is fighting SMN for “playable by a braindead 4 year old” AND VPR also has the massive utility of being a melee you can play as a physical ranged

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Deadass one of my friends played Vpr in the r2 slot for his static through the entire tier.
Vpr is a better selfish phys range than Machinist somehow.

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Originally Posted by GoatOfWar

Deadass one of my friends played Vpr in the r2 slot for his static through the entire tier.
Vpr is a better selfish phys range than Machinist somehow.

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Out of curiosity, how high were they able to go on the website that makes yoshida (and me) sad?

I've cleared the current savage tier on both BLM and PCT, so I guess I can posit some thoughts on caster balance between those two. I really don't think it is a problem for PCT to have higher rDPS, but only if they are in parties that perform well, as in no damage downs or resurrection sickness within the 2min burst; even with that I find that I perform nearly as well on BLM in most PF clears, while requiring a bit more effort(but that's what I like about BLM). Now, I don't personally care about my funny colored numbers, I do care about the other people I am playing with, and as it stands PCT can contribute almost double(with Crit luck) the output to party buffs during the 2min burst compared to BLM. I think instead of just buffing Enochian over and over they should instead find a way to improve BLMs burst window, something like having Manafont greatly empower your next Despair(or any fire spell) with addition potency while triggering the current Manafont effect after the empowered cast. I also think it would be nice if you could carry Astral Souls(Flare Star) into Umbral Ice as long as you don't drop Enochian, an example where this would be really helpful is after intermission in M4S where you are knocked to the new platform during a burst window where one is unlikely to fit two Flare Stars.

Besides balance in regards to just damage, I think there are some very clear discrepancies amongst DPS when it comes to mitigation and healing utility.. and this tier has made me rant about caster fragility, especially because there are so many physical raidwides. Why exactly do casters just have less HP? Why are we still using this archaic mitigation difference in armor sets? Why don't casters have some sort of Second Wind equivalent? Returning back to BLM and PCT, I think it would be really cute if BLM had some sort of Drain oGCD to bridge them a bit closer to the healing & mitigation difference.

You have a manaward, and the rest should sit on the shoulders of the team mitigating and shielding enough to protect the weakest members. Healers are also left in the same position with the same defense stats as well after all. If anything it's RDM that's left in the dust with nothing.

I like that kind of differences between roles and jobs actually. I'm not thrilled with the idea to make everyone the same when it comes to it and perhaps magical raid wides should hit non casters harder than they do (casters have more magical defense but less HP which ends up in similar results across all roles). The problem is that the current battle content doesn't take advantage of it.

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Originally Posted by Supersnow845

Forcing domination of the selfish jobs is just boring

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This idea that damage output is everything and hence the "pure" jobs are automatically "dominating" because they do more damage needs to die. To quote that right back at you.

The whole idea is that while damage ouput is measured as a number, non-damage output is not done so, but as it exists, it has to be taken into account into the whole package. As in, a Red Mage's rezzing and defensive ability are helping the raid, just not as a number you can later look at in a pretty chart. Does that personally upset you in some deeply emotional way?

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Originally Posted by Carighan

This idea that damage output is everything and hence the "pure" jobs are automatically "dominating" because they do more damage needs to die. To quote that right back at you.

The whole idea is that while damage ouput is measured as a number, non-damage output is not done so, but as it exists, it has to be taken into account into the whole package. As in, a Red Mage's rezzing and defensive ability are helping the raid, just not as a number you can later look at in a pretty chart. Does that personally upset you in some deeply emotional way?

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This would imply that the jobs are remotely balanced based on the actual contribution their non damage utility brings and not just have it haphazardly thrown into different classes balanced on the axis of damage only

If there was clearly defined paradigms of how much utility is “worth” and jobs were balanced relative to that that would be fine, but jobs are balanced purely on damage (except for rezz), everything else just sort of exists and doesn’t play into how they balance anything

And then there is the argument of what actually constitutes utility, does VPR’s insane disconnection ability count as utility? Should it be taxed for it? What about SAM’s less mobility compared to the other melee. The only paradigm they can seem to actually stick to is taxing rezz harshly

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Originally Posted by Valence

You have a manaward, and the rest should sit on the shoulders of the team mitigating and shielding enough to protect the weakest members. Healers are also left in the same position with the same defense stats as well after all. If anything it's RDM that's left in the dust with nothing.

I like that kind of differences between roles and jobs actually. I'm not thrilled with the idea to make everyone the same when it comes to it and perhaps magical raid wides should hit non casters harder than they do (casters have more magical defense but less HP which ends up in similar results across all roles). The problem is that the current battle content doesn't take advantage of it.

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I do love my Manaward and I wish RDM had something similar since Magick Barrier is nearly useless against physical raidwides, regardless many of the melee DPS not only have a personal & party mitigation tools but they also have Bloodbath and Second Wind.. Now clearing savage content in a static with consistent players can make this a non issue, but if you have cleared in PFs then you will experience inconsistency in both healing or mits. A lot of the strats also involve ranged DPS moving further out or not being in range of at least one of the healers(out spreads on m2s as a potential example), and I have straight up died on the phase transition Impact/Cannonbolt in m4s as a PCT because one of the healers were down.. and this was with Tempera Coat + Addle, mind you I was the only one that died from that raidwide while being at full HP.

The differences between roles and jobs should be rooted in how they play, what their rotation is like and ideally having some kind of player agency.. I just don't agree that having the fundamentals balanced across the board would somehow get in the way of that. Let's look at melee DPS for example, MNK and NIN have pretty close rDPS yet MNK has a follow up heal to their personal mitigation(Earth's Reply) and they also have Mantra; not only that, they can make better use of Bloodbath since a lot of NIN damage is unaspected or elemental. An even more egregious example would be to compare DRK to WAR or PLD, Dark Mind and Dark Missionary are not exciting differences between the other tanks, they are either useful or useless.

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Originally Posted by Supersnow845

If there was clearly defined paradigms of how much utility is “worth” and jobs were balanced relative to that that would be fine, but jobs are balanced purely on damage (except for rezz), everything else just sort of exists and doesn’t play into how they balance anything

And then there is the argument of what actually constitutes utility, does VPR’s insane disconnection ability count as utility? Should it be taxed for it? What about SAM’s less mobility compared to the other melee. The only paradigm they can seem to actually stick to is taxing rezz harshly

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If anything, Raise is probably the easiest of the "utilities" to assign a value. To start, the "official" definition of rDPS:

rDPS stands for "raid-contributing DPS", and it is measuring how much damage you actually brought to the raid. The formula for it is:

rDPS = DPS - (damage gained from others' external buffs) + (damage given to others by your own external buffs)

"We" simply need to recognize that "HP > 0" is itself a damage buff. After all, someone without it deals no damage.

The relative simplicity of Raise here is that it straight-up applies the buff if it has fallen off. It's likely a bit much to credit all of a newly-Raised player's damage to the one who cast the Raise, but surely some credit is deserved.

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Originally Posted by Carighan

This idea that damage output is everything and hence the "pure" jobs are automatically "dominating" because they do more damage needs to die. To quote that right back at you.

The whole idea is that while damage ouput is measured as a number, non-damage output is not done so, but as it exists, it has to be taken into account into the whole package. As in, a Red Mage's rezzing and defensive ability are helping the raid, just not as a number you can later look at in a pretty chart. Does that personally upset you in some deeply emotional way?

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to solve the issue of pure DPS jobs and utility jobs is to have main roles that is specialized in one thing only and each main role have jobs that perform the same thing but differently..

Pure DPS: should be a pure damage with no utility
Support DPS: should be less damage and have specific utility that Pure DPS won't have (rezz, buffs, debuffs)
Healers: the only job that should have heals that can keep people alive after raidwide attacks
Tanks: the only job that can mitigate high-damage attacks from boss.

I feel like we currently having tanks doing their work perfectly fine but it also do healers jobs too.
support dps jobs are doing same damage as pure DPS jobs and they also do some kind of replacement for healers along side tanks.

all tanks can mitigate tank busters but their doing mitigation should be different.
all pure dps should do high damage dps but how they do dps should be different
all supports should do same thing but different
all healers should heal and shield but they should do it differently

in this way I believe we can find a good balance to current design

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Originally Posted by Namir

Not even just in the 100 dungeons, I wrote a while back that I was doing a lv 65 dungeon and got paired with a PCT. While I don’t know the PCT kit at that level, the difference in kill speed between PCT and any other DPS I had been paired with til then was very noticeable, everything was dying so ridiculously fast that it made the dungeon a very boring experience for, and I generally really enjoy dungeons. Since then I’m glad I haven’t been paired with another, but from that experience, I totally agree that PCT needs to be nerfed.

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It's equally comical in the 90 Ultimates. My static just started going back to DSR and our Picto is several thousand DPS ahead despite everyone playing at a comparable level. It makes me laugh thinking people were actually defending Picto not needing to be scaled back prior to this Savage tier.

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Originally Posted by LysDusoir

I do love my Manaward and I wish RDM had something similar since Magick Barrier is nearly useless against physical raidwides, regardless many of the melee DPS not only have a personal & party mitigation tools but they also have Bloodbath and Second Wind.. Now clearing savage content in a static with consistent players can make this a non issue, but if you have cleared in PFs then you will experience inconsistency in both healing or mits. A lot of the strats also involve ranged DPS moving further out or not being in range of at least one of the healers(out spreads on m2s as a potential example), and I have straight up died on the phase transition Impact/Cannonbolt in m4s as a PCT because one of the healers were down.. and this was with Tempera Coat + Addle, mind you I was the only one that died from that raidwide while being at full HP.

The differences between roles and jobs should be rooted in how they play, what their rotation is like and ideally having some kind of player agency.. I just don't agree that having the fundamentals balanced across the board would somehow get in the way of that. Let's look at melee DPS for example, MNK and NIN have pretty close rDPS yet MNK has a follow up heal to their personal mitigation(Earth's Reply) and they also have Mantra; not only that, they can make better use of Bloodbath since a lot of NIN damage is unaspected or elemental. An even more egregious example would be to compare DRK to WAR or PLD, Dark Mind and Dark Missionary are not exciting differences between the other tanks, they are either useful or useless.

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It also happens in statics, I have been at the receiving end of it for various mechanics, notably EE2 in M4S when I'm long debuff and miss a heal (and that's why all those geniuses that tell you that rphys has FULL mobility are full of s*** when it has the lowest speed across the board except for DNC). I've even had crazier similar situations in other mechanics due to fairy's smaller range. I still do believe it's not on the job but on the healers and the party and that's a positioning, healing and coordination skill issue. They even buffed mitigation and healing ranges like crazy in Anabaseios and half the things now reach for 50 yalms (which was a terrible choice for skill expression btw)... I really do like that all those constraints and differences used to bring specific skills as a player to have, notably be sure to be positioned properly to be healed (less of a thing now with the crazy ranges for most heals and mits), having sometimes healers to actually use their single target heals as well to help the weakest members and adjust for discrepancies in health and do their actual job (forgive me but glare mages I swear...), and just the party actually talking to each other. I do not like where the battle content has been going over time and I do feel that making everything a non problem anymore is literally removing what I liked about it.

However on top of Maiming jobs having even higher physical defense than the rest, melee DPS have crazy self sustain tools that they do not need more than the rest of the DPS roster, and it's ironic in a way because in pvp it's actually warranted... But for pve melees, they do not take more damage on the frontlines at melee range than ranged players do. It's a bit sad that this specificity of them isn't actually put more to contribution by all the battle content.

Which actually makes me think, perhaps that's a start of a solution to design the differences between ranged and melees while giving them an identical/more balanced damage output in the process. Perhaps ranged jobs shouldn't be able to survive well at close range. Or perhaps that's a shit idea idk.

It may be why they gave AST & WHM another charge on their oGCD single target heal, but I agree that having the supports have more specific problems to take care of during mechanics is interesting. It still feels uncomfortable to essentially be at their mercy while it is not a problem at all if one is playing a melee. I've even seen melee eat a mechanic that would otherwise just kill a caster; I just don't understand why they even have those tools(Bloodbath, etc) when I can't recall a single raid that actually needed them.. and if casters had something similar to Second Wind then maybe they could actually design more mechanics that have intermittent damage going out. The prior raid tiers almost always had magical raidwides as you said, even though casters have more magical defense they still have less HP and HP is effectively mitigation. It honestly just seems like it is something nobody really cares about, much like the seemingly inconsistent support utility that all of the DPS have. Another funny situation I ran into on M3S was having both tanks die during a knock and then proceeding to get punched by brute bomber having it interrupt my cast, like why? Oops, don't be top aggro or just pop that Surecast I guess?

On supports having to take care of certain party members, I played tank during Abyssos savage and strangely enough one of the most enjoyable things to do was using my mitigation on the casters or ranged physical during certain mechanics, especially on DRK(hearing that TBN pop).. Yet, I can only recall one time so far this tier that a tank has been willing to do that(this is PF mind you), even if I kindly ask for a little love during things like EE2; I just don't think it is something that most tanks think about nor does the fight design explicitly ask them to manage that.

As a MCH main I kinda understand where you're coming from, this tier especially I've been told numerous times to switch off MCH to play DNC (never BRD mind you, which is the actual "meta" pick) both jokingly (which gets old and annoying) and in serious static situations. MCH isn't in a great place, neither is BLM. While BLM can deal damage tantamount to a melee even now, it's still not where it deserves to be.

Because of the complexity of the job I genuinely think BLM should be one of the highest damage dealers, and definitely far ahead of Picto who has oodles and oodles of party utility.

I think for the most part the balancing on this game is decent, for an MMO. But there are a few outliers that really need some love right about now... :c

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Originally Posted by Sol_Seppy

As a MCH main I kinda understand where you're coming from, this tier especially I've been told numerous times to switch off MCH to play DNC (never BRD mind you, which is the actual "meta" pick) both jokingly (which gets old and annoying) and in serious static situations. MCH isn't in a great place, neither is BLM. While BLM can deal damage tantamount to a melee even now, it's still not where it deserves to be.

Because of the complexity of the job I genuinely think BLM should be one of the highest damage dealers, and definitely far ahead of Picto who has oodles and oodles of party utility.

I think for the most part the balancing on this game is decent, for an MMO. But there are a few outliers that really need some love right about now... :c

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BRD isn't even in a good spot as a 'meta' pick. Its personal damage is unacceptably low -- even for a phys ranged with a raid buff, and it is plagued by janky timing issues as its GCDs, and oGCDs crash into each other at really any speed, and its probaly the most severely punished job for dying. These issues need to be fixed.

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Originally Posted by mallleable

BRD isn't even in a good spot as a 'meta' pick. Its personal damage is unacceptably low -- even for a phys ranged with a raid buff, and it is plagued by janky timing issues as its GCDs, and oGCDs crash into each other at really any speed, and its probaly the most severely punished job for dying. These issues need to be fixed.

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Idk, I just meant that generally in high end play BRD is more desirable because of its output + raidbuffs. Are any of the phys-range in a great place tho? No.

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Originally Posted by Sol_Seppy

Idk, I just meant that generally in high end play BRD is more desirable because of its output + raidbuffs. Are any of the phys-range in a great place tho? No.

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Huh, I've been told it's actually DNC that's desirable because it further boosts the already absolutely ridiculous VPR. Might be a DC/region meta difference, I guess.

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Originally Posted by PercibelTheren

Huh, I've been told it's actually DNC that's desirable because it further boosts the already absolutely ridiculous VPR. Might be a DC/region meta difference, I guess.

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BRD overtakes DNC when everyone gets gear because it’s buffs are AOE

DNC is better early in a tier when you feed gear to the designated dance partner

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Originally Posted by LysDusoir

It may be why they gave AST & WHM another charge on their oGCD single target heal, but I agree that having the supports have more specific problems to take care of during mechanics is interesting. It still feels uncomfortable to essentially be at their mercy while it is not a problem at all if one is playing a melee. I've even seen melee eat a mechanic that would otherwise just kill a caster; I just don't understand why they even have those tools(Bloodbath, etc) when I can't recall a single raid that actually needed them.. and if casters had something similar to Second Wind then maybe they could actually design more mechanics that have intermittent damage going out. The prior raid tiers almost always had magical raidwides as you said, even though casters have more magical defense they still have less HP and HP is effectively mitigation. It honestly just seems like it is something nobody really cares about, much like the seemingly inconsistent support utility that all of the DPS have. Another funny situation I ran into on M3S was having both tanks die during a knock and then proceeding to get punched by brute bomber having it interrupt my cast, like why? Oops, don't be top aggro or just pop that Surecast I guess?

On supports having to take care of certain party members, I played tank during Abyssos savage and strangely enough one of the most enjoyable things to do was using my mitigation on the casters or ranged physical during certain mechanics, especially on DRK(hearing that TBN pop).. Yet, I can only recall one time so far this tier that a tank has been willing to do that(this is PF mind you), even if I kindly ask for a little love during things like EE2; I just don't think it is something that most tanks think about nor does the fight design explicitly ask them to manage that.

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In my opinion it is precisely because we have asked the devs allowed the game to progressively lose team interplay and interdependence, that everybody just play selfish and doesn't give a crap tbh. If you die, not their problem. But when they die you can be sure they're gonna make it your problem one way or another.

Whoever was it that said that as soon as melee or caster players had to deal with the bullshit pranged has been dealing with for like 3 expansions now they would crumple and start crying about how awfull everything is was absolutely correct

Some free potency that could be nerfed on PCT could be like reducing the potency on Star Prism, and making it an oGCD.