[Megathread] What's wrong with 6.21, patch balance and nerfing p8s

I'm gonna keep it transparent and honest. I don't think Square ever cares about our opinion on jobs. Only a selected few individual believes it should remain as it is. I know the majority is pretty unhappy about how balance is and while it is great Paladin and Warrior got a small candy. I doubt anything has changed. Also, this is mainly a DPS focused thread but I'm also expecting some comments about Paladin and Warrior anyways~ They are welcome.

I will also update this thread upon people's opinion on the issue and what's needed to be address. I sorta wish to transport everyones feeling in 1 thread that Square will have to watch and care. We're all passionate about the main we play so let's try to be civil. There's a few I'd like to point out however; This isn't about disliking aspects of gameplay. I absolutely agree, Kaiten should have never been removed but it has no place to be talked here. I have my own personal and strong opinion on how SMN plays and I won't be saying it here.

Be mindful I'm not a robot, I'll update when I have time to read and when someone points out something and pretty much everyone agrees. I personally feel what I think is in accord with most people here but I don't play all job. Also, if you're this one guy who think we always complain when they make change and you think everything is fine. Like, it's not fine. The balancing of this game is not fine period and I will ignore you.

Also, it would be really great at one point to see an actual dev to reply to one of those thread because we do feel pretty ignored.

Facts from SE

• P8S was overtuned by 1%. It seems their test team performed better than the average player time around.
• Minor potency buffs on Paladin and Warrior translate as no other job needed an immediate buff.
• Crit and DH buff was a needed change.
• Auto-Crit and Auto-DH is the way to go.
• Roughly 8% to 10% difference between a melee DPS and a Ranged/Caster was needed.
• Nerfing a job isn't SE mentality, they will only buff.
• Fight designs have changed to prevent Melee DPS to lose any uptime.
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SE Facts versus what we are observing

• Unfortunately for SE, there are data available and we can see not every party comp had the same odds of clearing week 1 or week 2. Did SE made intensive tests only with 1 comp? Can SE be transparent and put more details on exactly how they perform their tests. Do they do them with multiple comps? If so, are doing trying double caster comps and double physical ranged comps? We are forced to play double melee comp and not every group likes to do that.
• We are observing a pure DPS job like Machinist is behind his other roles partners. Bard and Dancer. They are also about 10% behind a melee selfish DPS job.
• We are observing the ranged DPS tax is no longer needed. Because melee have full uptime and rarely lose a GCD. Sometimes they may lose positional but losing positional doesn't translate as needing. Here's the extend of the issue with this picture. It's a meme but it's pretty good because of how accurate it is.
  https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachmen...72/unknown.png
  The best Machinist on a fight can't beat 93% of the monks who cleared this fight. The higher and close you are to 100 percentile on fflogs, the more you are perfect and claim to be the strongest at the job you play. This means one worst monks are still more valuable than the best Machinist for the fight.
• We are observing the crit/DH change has buffed some jobs and done nothing for others. Monks are the biggest winner with Bootshine always being a crit. Jobs like Summoner, Reaper or Red Mage got absolutely nothing from it.
• We are observing 2 minutes burst windows don't always work. Certain jobs like SMN and PLD get their burst desync and get punished purely by fight design.

Wishlist

• Can we have more detail how you proceed with fight testing and are you trying to clear with a double caster comp and double ranged comp? Any comp should be able to clear. We have an hard time to understand what lead you to think the fight was fine and it leads us to think the fight was designed around 1 comp.
• Can we have potency buffs for jobs that need it. SMN, RDM, RPR, MCH.
• Melee DPS still need to deal the most damage due to positional. There should a much smaller difference between melees and Caster/ranged physical. 2% to 3% while selfish jobs like Machinist, Samurai and Black Mage should have their own category and do similar damage.
• Some believe auto DH/Crit is a flawed design. Either every job needs to embrace it or it shouldn't exist. In any case. Jobs who don't benefits need compensation.
• Design fights that allow proper burst windows or reconsider the two minute burst window.

Alright, if there's anything I missed. Let me know. I'm going to sleep right now. I'll update when points are coming in and make sense. I don't have the arrogance to believe I've thought of everything.

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Originally Posted by Aikaal

Wishlist

• Can we have more detail how you proceed with fight testing and are you trying to clear with a double caster comp and double ranged comp? Any comp should be able to clear. We have an hard time to understand what lead you to think the fight was fine and it leads us to think the fight was designed around 1 comp.
• Can we have potency buffs for jobs that need it. SMN, RDM, RPR, MCH.
• Melee DPS still need to deal the most damage due to positional. There should a much smaller difference between melees and Caster/ranged physical. 2% to 3% while selfish jobs like Machinist, Samurai and Black Mage should have their own category and do similar damage.
• Some believe auto DH/Crit is a flawed design. Either every job needs to embrace it or it shouldn't exist. In any case. Jobs who don't benefits need compensation.
• .

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RPR does not need buffs.

https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachmen...16/unknown.png

SE should get rid of the idea to give every class a 10-20 sec burst phase every two minutes.
There are just so few ways to make them interesting and not to similar to others.

Also, PLD as one of the last job's without a significant burst phase does only need potency adjustment.
He is good as he is now, easy to understand the basics and room to improve more.

They need to make reaper perform better. It was said in the LL to be a selfish DPS similar to Samurai. That is the comparison Yoshi P made and as such I expect it's damage to not be too far from one. Week one the diff between a rpr and sam was night and day, unacceptable.

They can remove the hot from arcane crest entirely if it makes them feel justified in buffing it idc. I want the high dps that was expected when they decide to compare it to a samurai. They meant for it to be high dps only on release it was too high. They buffed the rest too far above it and now it's just weak by comparison.

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Originally Posted by ZiraZ

RPR does not need buffs.

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I honestly don't understand how you can look at the DPS disparity between Reaper and the rest of the melee dps and say that with a straight face.

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Originally Posted by Serpent1ng

I honestly don't understand how you can look at the DPS disparity between Reaper and the rest of the melee dps and say that with a straight face.

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with my eyes

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Originally Posted by momokami

https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachmen...16/unknown.png

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Almost like Red mage has a battle raise, Yeah rdm should be a bit better then it is but BLM isn't even doing enough for what it is

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Originally Posted by Serpent1ng

I honestly don't understand how you can look at the DPS disparity between Reaper and the rest of the melee dps and say that with a straight face.

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Because it was a fact, that's why they posted it

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Originally Posted by Rithy255

Almost like Red mage has a battle raise

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That is irrelevant in regards to balance

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Originally Posted by Aikaal

Facts from SE

• P8S was overtuned by 1%. It seems their test team performed better than the average player time around.
• Minor potency buffs on Paladin and Warrior translate as no other job needed an immediate buff.
• Crit and DH buff was a needed change.
• Auto-Crit and Auto-DH is the way to go.
• Roughly 8% to 10% difference between a melee DPS and a Ranged/Caster was needed.
• Nerfing a job isn't SE mentality, they will only buff.
• Fight designs have changed to prevent Melee DPS to lose any uptime.
• .

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Fight designs are also not designed with 2minute burst in mind.

further reasoning to why 2minute burst rotations were a bad design idea

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Originally Posted by FireMage

That is irrelevant in regards to balance

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Ok rdm doing the same or near amount damage as a BLM isn't Irrelevant, their should be a Significant difference between BLM and other casters, I don't get comparing BLM to RDM dps.
It's Ignoring a major reason why you would bring a Red mage over a BLM which surprise people do, The DPS check was just extra hard this time why people wasn't playing RDM as much.

I'd argue really that RDM/SMN should be lower then Phys ranged. (All jobs should in general be closer to melee dps).
If you want RDM to have BLM dps then remove battle raise from both SMN/RDM if you want raise you shouldn't be near BLM, I'm sorry but giving people no reason to play Black Mage isn't the solution

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Originally Posted by FireMage

That is irrelevant in regards to balance

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RDM has a raid buff, constant access to an instant cast raise, and a button that both mitigates incoming raidwides and boosts healing. Its damage is fine when what the job brings to a raid is taken to account, and it should in no way be able to compete with BLM on raw damage. Stop talking.

You welcomed it so I will just say it here. There is one issue I have no seen anyone talking about yet in regards to WAR and current Savage design.

More HP sucks at dealing with DoTs. The 20% increased healing recieved is certainly useful but it doesn't make up for the higher DoT damage WAR recieves over other tanks. Equilibrium in most fights has too long of a CD to deal with every DoT (Degen + Regen is also a form of mitigation as long as the Degen doesnt kill you first), and you are strongarmed into using your Nascent abilities specifically for Tank Busters, and with the rate some of those come in some fights, you are severely limited in your window of opportunity to use that ability without causing yourself to take even stronger DoT damage from tank busters.

As for the DPS balancing... I kind of disagree with this Tank first stance. DPS damage disparity is FAR worse. I can live with -400-600 DPS because of Tank Comp. What I think is stupid is this Hierarchy. Its archaic. Its outdated. It needs to go. My personal belief is every job should be as close to same DPS as you can. No buffs for melee restriction, no buffs for difficulty (thats subjective anyway, I think AST is easy for instance). Balance damage to be the same and then work on fun factor.

What does this open up?
1. 1 melee, 1 caster, 1 phys ranged, 1 Flex of any kind. No longer are you restricted to 2 melee, you can have 2 casters, or you can have 2 phys ranged, and theres no longer that nagging feeling of "we could be doing better right now"
2. Jobs can have their focus shift from balance within a role on the "heirarchy", and just be worked on for their fun factor. As long as all jobs perform at a similar level, you are free to play what you think is most fun to you.
3. More engaging fight design. Or less... kind of depends on POV for this one. But some mechanics might be more fun if they stop designing everything around having 2 melee DPS. They can keep their giant hitboxes (RIP Neo Exdeath) and just work on mechanics that are more fun to engage with (hopefully with far less movement for our casters... P7S is pretty egregious in this regard, or at least, more spaced out movement)

The Hierarchy used to make sense. Mechanics in the past were almost exclusively designed to reduce melee uptime. They needed to do more damage because they attacked less often (but often there were melee uptime strats that negated that anyway, so I'd argue the Hierarchy has been dead for a long while now). Phys Ranged didn't deal with as many mechanics and had full uptime no matter what. Casters did more because they did have to move and movement availability before ShB for BLM and END for SMN (TBD for RDM) were far fewer, so uptime loss from movement could happen... tho not always. This is not the case anymore.

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Originally Posted by Naizakane

RDM has a raid buff, constant access to an instant cast raise, and a button that both mitigates incoming raidwides and boosts healing. Its damage is fine when what the job brings to a raid is taken to account, and it should in no way be able to compete with BLM on raw damage. Stop talking.

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That raid buff is factored into the dps calculation, it's called rDPS, but even when looking at those numbers it is still far behind BLM who brings 0 party buffs. All of these tools do not matter in the first place when the lack of dps on redmage prevents you from beating the enrage week 1. Meeting the dps check in minimum ilvl gear also assumes you have 0 deaths so the raise is entirely useless as well.

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Originally Posted by Rithy255

Ok rdm doing the same or near amount damage as a BLM isn't Irrelevant, their should be a Significant difference between BLM and other casters, I don't get comparing BLM to RDM dps.
It's Ignoring a major reason why you would bring a Red mage over a BLM which surprise people do, The DPS check was just extra hard this time why people wasn't playing RDM as much.

I'd argue really that RDM/SMN should be lower then Phys ranged. (All jobs should in general be closer to melee dps).
If you want RDM to have BLM dps then remove battle raise from both SMN/RDM if you want raise you shouldn't be near BLM, I'm sorry but giving people no reason to play Black Mage isn't the solution

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Strawman. I never said anything about RDM doing BLM damage. You had to invent that I did to have any ground to stand on. Also if you think that phys ranged should do more than RDM you are wrong

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Originally Posted by Naizakane

RDM has a raid buff, constant access to an instant cast raise, and a button that both mitigates incoming raidwides and boosts healing. Its damage is fine when what the job brings to a raid is taken to account, and it should in no way be able to compete with BLM on raw damage. Stop talking.

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You're also doing the same thing, strawman. Also Embolden is RDM damage, the raise is irrelevant in regards to damage, so that leaves only Barrier as actual utility. Meanwhile RDM has the worst caster movement and is harder to play than each phys ranged and SMN. Dismissed

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Originally Posted by FireMage

You're also doing the same thing, strawman. Also Embolden is RDM damage, the raise is irrelevant in regards to damage, so that leaves only Barrier as actual utility. Meanwhile RDM has the worst caster movement and is harder to play than each phys ranged and SMN. Dismissed

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Except the Raise isn't irrelevant when it comes to the actual party's damage, just the damage statistics on FFLogs. While the raise wasn't actually usable on p8s, since the dps check was so high that any deaths make the fight almost unclearable, it is impossible to make the argument that the raise doesn't provide utility in most fights if someone dies.

I agree that RDM has the worst mobility at this point, but I will disagree on the difficulty, which is ok. Class difficulty is incredibly subjective, as rotations that click easily for one person might not for somebody else.

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Originally Posted by Serpent1ng

Except the Raise isn't irrelevant when it comes to the actual party's damage, just the damage statistics on FFLogs. While the raise wasn't actually usable on p8s, since the dps check was so high that any deaths make the fight almost unclearable, it is impossible to make the argument that the raise doesn't provide utility in most fights if someone dies.

I agree that RDM has the worst mobility at this point, but I will disagree on the difficulty, which is ok. Class difficulty is incredibly subjective, as rotations that click easily for one person might not for somebody else.

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And the Raise itself is already costing hundreds of potency. That is tax enough. And you disagreeing doesn't stop it from being true

The idea of taxing classes because of utility skills is honestly an odd decision in the current state of FFXIV design. Every dps class has some kind of mitigation: feint, addle, phys range mit that all do the same thing but have different names. Every other utility skill is superfluous, since none of them provide a necessary benefit. The added healing from mantra, improvisation, curing waltz, and arcane crest are all honestly pretty unnoticeable in even savage content, and there are almost never things used need Warden's paean for in high end content. Same with stuns, sleeps, binds, or any other disabling ability.

At the end of the day, all that matters is bringing the bare minimum healing and mitigation required to keep people alive, something accomplished by just the healers and tanks alone practically, and everything else that matters is damage. This makes the DPS number disparity between roles, as well as classes in the same role, extremely problematic. If they are not going to design fights to require at least some utility skills, even at higher item levels, then they need to balance all classes into a similar spot DPS wise.

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Originally Posted by FireMage

Strawman. I never said anything about RDM doing BLM damage. You had to invent that I did to have any ground to stand on. Also if you think that phys ranged should do more than RDM you are wrong

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Not trying to Stawman you here so tell me if I'm wrong.
You said that RDM's raise is "irrelevant" regards to balance, on the same sentence I said RDM should be doing a bit better then it currently is right now but also BLM is doing too little. This implies to me that you think raise shouldn't matter to RDM's dps and should be near BLM, Now I could be wrong about that but you were pretty vague with your point, I don't know what you expected me to think when the meme was complaining that RDM doing less dps then blm by a lot, Not like I said RDM should be buffed by a bit (Spoiler alert I did say it should be buffed a bit), So maybe you can see why I came to that conclusion.

Raising is the most powerful utility in the game bar none, Having the mobility of range dps doesn't even compare to it.

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Originally Posted by Avenheit

Fight designs are also not designed with 2minute burst in mind.

further reasoning to why 2minute burst rotations were a bad design idea

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Square makes 2 min burst windows the new meta
Makes every fight drift 2 min raid buff windows
hmm

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Originally Posted by Naizakane

RDM has a raid buff, constant access to an instant cast raise, and a button that both mitigates incoming raidwides and boosts healing. Its damage is fine when what the job brings to a raid is taken to account, and it should in no way be able to compete with BLM on raw damage. Stop talking.

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Yes, it should not do the same dps as a blm
No, it should not be this wide of a gap. And telling people to stop talking is childish.

Alright, I'm gonna update from what I've seen. To the very least, it does make sense to say that 2 minutes burst windows causes issues if fight design doesn't work. A direct example is P8S on the second boss. You get a 15 second window before Ego Death. This completely misaligns Summoner burst during the last phase which has a 100% damage buff.

As for other claims. I do apology but Reaper does trail behind. Reaper is one job that got nothing from the crit/DH buff.

As for BLM, like SAM and MCH they are pure firepower. They should be closer to each other while RDM, for example, should be about 3% behind.

There is one truth regarding rDPS. It scales much better over time than selfish DPS. So we should see a bigger difference early on. That being said, there's a 8% to 10% difference at the patch 6.2. This is too big.

In situations like SMN/RDM. I would say they should do similar DPS but RDM should have a slight edge because of skill ceiling. Summoner requires no brain. The issues Summoner deal are purely fight designs.