Biggest problem in battle system since 6.0
Okay after P8S and TOP and lots of discussion about them I realise that the biggest problem of current battle system is, the huge dmg variance depending on crit RNGs while optimization of most jobs has only marginal gains. Tight dps check itself isn’t a big problem to me, but it can become terrible with bad job balance and huge dmg variance. Let’s say you’re progging in the first few days on P8S and the dps check is strict. The best practice to improve your group dmg is not to improve your rotation to a perfect one cuz there’s little difference in dmg between normal and perfect rotations, but to choose the strongest comps of that patch and then pray for good crits. That’s really awful.
I think there’re several reasons for this. First, many jobs get new big damage skills in 6.0, which makes the dmg variance bigger. Second, the unified 120s burst window enlarges dmg variance too. Third, the simplification of jobs leaves little improvement space for job rotations, let’s take SMN for example, which I regard as the most simple job in dps role or even all jobs. Some common techniques such as saving festers for searing light, using swiftcast to get slipstream covered by searing light and tincture, using titan first after Bahamut, etc. , can only gain 10-20 potency each. So as long as you’re doing the right rotation and keeping your GCD uptime(which is extremely easy for SMN), the dmg is basically depending on your crits. Other jobs are more complex and have more things to optimize, but overall the difference between basically correct rotations and perfect rotations cannot compare with variance in crits.
Moreover, the raid design just made it worser, like the double damage buff in late phase of P8S and short-time dps checks of a single phase in TOP.
As I see it, the job changes in the following patches should focus on reducing the significance of crits and make more space for job optimization. I hope Square Enix could realise this but I doubt if they are able to do so because they even failed to manage job balance many times before.