Patch 5.1, the good and the bad

This is just my opinion of course, but I would like to hear from others on what they think about the changes coming tomorrow.

DRG (4/10): DRG got some small damage buffs, and a nice QoL change with Blood of the Dragon. These changes feel a bit unnecessary to me, considering how strong DRG is right now anyways. I feel like DRG was probably the best balanced class of them all, but we'll see how everything balances out in the next couple weeks.

NIN (8/10): NIN is getting a massive rework, the class ping reliance seems to be dropping and the DPS gain from TA is getting nerfed, but the class looks to be getting some major personal DPS increases to compensate. This is probably the change I am the most excited about. My NIN is already at 80, and I'm looking forward to gearing it more.

MNK (2/10): MNK got a nerf to Mantra, which was definitely warranted, but then got an odd change to Anatman. I have toyed a bit with MNK, but will not likely be picking it up again for a while.

SAM: (7/10): SAM looks like it is finally getting the damage output it deserves, considering it has absolutely no utility. Looking forward to the changes and the new actions.

BRD: (5/10): Overall, I'm happy with the more party focused buffs that BRD is getting back. The class definitely does not feel like it has enough support; however, it is clear that Square is really scared to make it too strong, since they nerfed the personal damage to compensate.

MCN: (8/10): This is the second class I'm most excited about. The buffs the MCN look really good and are definitely needed so that it can take the high DPS, no support spot for ranged DPS

DNC: (9/10): A million people are leveling DNC right now in anticipation of the DPS buffs. They are getting massive buffs and it's a good thing too, because they were woefully underpowered. Get ready to see a lot of them in your parties.

SMN: No comment because I am not familiar enough with the class to make a judgement.

RDM: (7/10): This is another class that desperately needed some DPS buffs, and it looks like they are getting them. It's hard to tell if it will be enough, or if they will still be at the bottom of the barrel because of the utility tax that is always so heavy on the class.

BLM: (7/10): Nothing but a QoL increase here, and I like it. BLM is in arguably the best place it ever has been in the game's history. Don't mess up a good thing! I'm glad they didn't nerf BLM, and are choosing to elevate other DPS instead.


Patch Overall (7/10): I'm really pleased with the vast majority of the changes to DPS classes! Not everything is perfect and a couple of things are questionable, but I haven't been this excited about the game since 5.0 launched!

I'm very excited for NIN for the sole reason that it will finally become playable for me with the mudra changes! Horray... And Ten Chi Jin change is also pretty neat!

BRD... I'm very happy with buffs being brought back. There's one minor change I'm waiting for a - long - time though, and I keep thinking that is an issue just for me: Bloodletter animation is way too long, I know in numbers this doesn't mean anything, but visually it feels like you're lagging. They should speed up that a bunch.

Drg damage output isn't as high as you think MCH deals more damage up to 85% percentile and has half the skill ceiling. This isn't a huge potency increase these skills are once every 30 seconds to a minute whole all mchs buffs are 60 potency flat across their normal combo.

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Originally Posted by Renkei

Drg damage output isn't as high as you think MCH deals more damage up to 85% percentile and has half the skill ceiling. This isn't a huge potency increase these skills are once every 30 seconds to a minute whole all mchs buffs are 60 potency flat across their normal combo.

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Are you talking about rDPS or pDPS? Because I would expect that DRG rDPS is quite a bit better due to Dragon Sight and Battle Litany.

Speaking about the RDM changes, just the buffs to our Verspells, Jolt, and C6 alone basically halve the gap between us and BLM. Not to mention the rotational impact from the new Acceleration and the massive Reprise buff, which might be an even bigger boost.

The Anatman change is intended to prevent Monk from using it during the opener. Not only is it looking like it will be unsuccessful and only make its use in the opener clunkier but the change as intended basically leaves Anatman with no uses outside of extremely niche ones.

On a job that's already got a ton of skills that only have extreme niche uses it's pretty bad.

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Originally Posted by Renkei

Drg damage output isn't as high as you think MCH deals more damage up to 85% percentile and has half the skill ceiling. This isn't a huge potency increase these skills are once every 30 seconds to a minute whole all mchs buffs are 60 potency flat across their normal combo.

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I think you're misinformed. I just checked the site that shouldn't be named and DRG is infront of MCH by roughly 1000~ DPS. DRG raid contribution is around 500-600. Still putting it ahead of MCH.

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Originally Posted by SpeckledBurd

The Anatman change is intended to prevent Monk from using it during the opener. Not only is it looking like it will be unsuccessful and only make its use in the opener less but the change as intended basically leaves Anatman with no uses outside of extremely niche uses.

On a job that's already got a ton of skills that only have extreme niche uses it's pretty bad.

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It's a shame that monk isn't samurai... then when you get your one niche skill, everyone would whine to the point that Square completely changes it between the X.0 and the X.1 patch into something that's part of your normal damage rotation.... -_-

I'm not misinformed you purely are you need to look at all percentiles add them up and then you'll receive an average. With that average you'll see that up to 80 percentile drgs get out damaged. The skill ceiling for drg is about 3800 while the skill ceiling for mch is 2400. I've ran meta data in my old posts going through 1-99 percentile so don't start claiming I'm misinformed. You haven't even bothered to look at averages and instead just looked at the top. The differenc is 458 aDps and 542 rdps which ads up to 1k in total, that's hardly anything considering mch isn't ranged limited and doesn't have positional requirements. Mch is skill ceiling limited that isn't misinformation it's the truth, that's why their damage caps out you rangers need to stop picking on drg it doesn't even share gear with any other class. BRD and MCH are being power creeped hard by dancer. Drg isn't the problem here, and mch just got buffed so your adps will end up being the same anyways.

If you wanna out damage melee they should bring casting back to ranged DPS.

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Originally Posted by Renkei

If you wanna out damage melee they should bring casting back to ranged DPS.

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Sure. We can do that the moment they start reintroducing fights that actually force a Melee to struggle to keep up time and miss positionals. Except we know that was going to happen because melee players rightly voiced their concerns about it over and over again for the better part of 6 years. The idea that ranged have this massive advantage over melee in terms of uptime started falling apart in Stormblood, and has truly died in Shadowbringers. The only fight that even slightly punishes melee optimization is Eden prime, which is nothing to the insanity that Melee used to have to deal with in 2.X and 3.X.

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Originally Posted by Renkei

I'm not misinformed you purely are you need to look at all percentiles add them up and then you'll receive an average.

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Added them up from the current Titan savage parse rDPS rankings, here's what I got:
DRG/MCH
Total Parses: 10,334 / 5,095

Max: 14,455.74 / 13,326.50
UpQ: 13,948.63 / 12,958.20
Med: 13,433.82 / 12,530.70
LoQ: 12,805.13 / 11,941.67
Min: 12,131.46 / 11,309.80

Range: 2,324.28 / 2,016.7

Average: 13,354.954 / 12,413.37

Not sure how I glean from that that DRGs are outdamaged in any way (in fact I see the opposite: MCH is outclassed at every single percentile). When looking at averages, unsurprisingly the job with the higher parses in every single category has the higher average than its competitor, although I fail to see what else I could glean from here, I did it to humor you.

I also don't see what equations you had to use to calculate a skill ceiling. I'm not sure what metadata you're referencing; metadata on your Official Forum posts? Metadata on your FFLogs uploads? I'm not sure what information that would provide you either.

You're adding aDPS and rDPS together which itself makes no sense since one is pDPS+takeDPS-tetherDPS and the other is pDPS+giveDPS-takeDPS. Looking at the rDPS differentials, they range from ~1,100 at the top to ~800 at the bottom. This is rDPS by the way, or total party contribution: a Machinist is worth 800-1,100 less DPS to the party than a Dragoon. That's not insignificant, and it leads to issues of composition rigidity. There's almost no reason to ever veer away from 2m/1c/1r in the optimal composition in 5.05; in fact, the only reason there is would be 2m/2BLM, locking all of the other ranged DPS out.

You're going to have to lay out your math completely bare if you want to convince anyone of your position, because the statistics as I see them do not agree with you.

As a dragoon main I approve these messages :D

On the subject of Dragoon. I'll reiterate what I said in another thread. They were buffed for a single reason: SE doesn't want to nerf Monk.

The adjustments to both Samurai and Ninja likely took this into effect, thus Dragoon would be lagging behind in the melee category if it weren't pushed up slightly.

Nin feels so weird to me atm, this is going to take some time to adjust to :P.
It feels very slow to me atm.

Ten Chi Jin is a lot more pleasant to use now tho.

All ranged dps went from "Useless job" to "The 1% stats with a ranged slot filled is now worth it".

It was the bare minimum to not replace the ranged spot with a Black mage or simply lock out ranged due to their low dps.

Plus, MCH main issues are still here. Heat blast spam and weave, flamethrower is just to cheese 50 dps, wildfire is simply a "barely stronger hypercharge" every 120 seconds.
Good thing they reduced Tactician/Samba/Troubadour to 120s so our utility is not worse than Addle anymore.

The patch simply a bandaid fix around 4% DPS increase. It exists to keep the job alive, nothing more.

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Originally Posted by Kolsykol

Nin feels so weird to me atm, this is going to take some time to adjust to :P.
It feels very slow to me atm.

Ten Chi Jin is a lot more pleasant to use now tho.

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Oddly enough though, I don't mind it. It feels a bit slower, but more calculated since potencies have been increased.

The little bit I played was weird, but enjoyable.

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Originally Posted by ForteNightshade

On the subject of Dragoon. I'll reiterate what I said in another thread. They were buffed for a single reason: SE doesn't want to nerf Monk.

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Nerfing Monk would have fixed nothing that is/was/is still wrong with the other jobs in the game. Fixing mechanical deficiencies, or at least attempting to, was the right move across the board. Whether they actually succeeded, well, the patch came out yesterday. Everyone is going to have a better idea of where they stand soon enough.

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The Anatman change is flat out nonsense. If they didn't want it used during the opener, they wouldn't have left it working the way it does. Even if you miss the 'invisible' server tick (it STILL operates off that, what the heck there has got to be a better way), it still feels like its the fastest way to push into GL3-4 at the start of a fight. It'll keep getting used, only now it's clunky and even less fun to use then before, thanks to being on the weaponskill CD.

SE pretty much has no real gameplan when it comes to Monks, beyond just hammering the nails that stick out by making the job perform well in unexpected or unintended ways. They did it with the Tornado Kick rotation, and they've done it again here. I guess at this point the dart board they use for monk design has sticky notes all over it that say things like:

"keep elemental fists no matter what"
"tornado kick should stay worthless"
"nobody likes positionals, give monks buttons to ignore positionals"
"make sure the entire rotation is filled with positionals"

Somewhere in a nearby trashcan is another note, crumpled up, that reads "lol six sided star" or whatever the equivalent of that would be in Japanese.

For me, the ninja changes (except TCJ) are so bad that I no longer enjoy the class.

I picked Nin because of it's speed and variety. Now the optimal rotation will be something like:
Mostly 1-2-3 basic combo (waiting around doing nothing because almost no weaving except for bhava), a few ninjutsu after that and save everything else for the Trick Attack to burst.

I'm trying MCH but so far it suffers from this same burst cluttering.

Really hoping they move the mudra gcd to ninjutsus (keep speed and alleviate ping issues that way)
and restore shadowfang to how it was before in a future patch or I'll likely quit this game.

Some are happy they can add Nin to their repertoire of jobs they use, but to those of us that loved the previously fast Nin we are left with nothing.

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Originally Posted by wereotter

It's a shame that monk isn't samurai... then when you get your one niche skill, everyone would whine to the point that Square completely changes it between the X.0 and the X.1 patch into something that's part of your normal damage rotation.... -_-

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Samurai already had one niche skill in Meditate. Shoha gave us another. It'd be like you only being able to use Forbidden Chakra after Anatman finishes. Now it's more like your Deep Meditation trait where we gain stacks from certain attacks.

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Originally Posted by Rika007

Sure. We can do that the moment they start reintroducing fights that actually force a Melee to struggle to keep up time and miss positionals. Except we know that was going to happen because melee players rightly voiced their concerns about it over and over again for the better part of 6 years. The idea that ranged have this massive advantage over melee in terms of uptime started falling apart in Stormblood, and has truly died in Shadowbringers. The only fight that even slightly punishes melee optimization is Eden prime, which is nothing to the insanity that Melee used to have to deal with in 2.X and 3.X.

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After playing a bard and watching the pure insanity that a lot of melee had to go through for so long I really don't care if they do more damage. I'd rather be sitting WAY back and always be in the right position at the right time. It just makes it so much easier. They can have the damage while I'll keep my peace of mind lol. I tried playing melee back in the day and ran right back to my bard lol. It's probably much better now but I love my Bard so it's what I use in all raids/dungeons. I don't mind solo'ing melee classes but for party content I'll stick to my Bard.

It feels like they went in the complete opposite direction with SMN (from too fast-paced to too slow).

Now that the Egi Assault(s) are classified as spells (thus, subject to GCD), you can no longer "weave" them alongside Ruin III/Outburst.
Worse still, now there's no reason to stay in Dreadwyrm Trance for its full duration, making it redundant...

I'm still testing out SMN as best as I can, but despite it still being a bit odd I'm seeing some promising results as far as the damage goes. I feel mobility is probably improved, but I've been pretty much only working with dummies while I adjust to switching buttons around on my bars for my controller. Once I try out a couple more variations for the opener I'll try it out in actual combat. I also need to catch up gear-wise since I switched to and learned DRG partway through the last patch for raiding, but I don't think it'll take long to get back up to speed.

I'm far from the best DRG, but the buffs are somewhat nice, even if I don't see a significant difference personally. BotD being on a shorter cooldown is a bonus, even if it isn't vital.