Why give the ability to lockout classes for Raids?

[Eli85]

Phantom Train (99th): 2nd, under SMN (though SMN can pad on the adds in this fight easily)
Chadarnook (99th): 2nd, under MNK
Guardian (99th): 1st
Kefka (99th): 1st
God Kefka (99th): 1st

That being said, however, you’re looking at almost the absolute top, with the absolute best players. 99th percentile means they are better than 99% of players that upload to FFLogs. You cannot apply the play of 99th percentile to the average player, which goes back to what others are saying when they say BLMs have the potential (read that as personal potential, not job potential) to be the Top DPS. But not every BLM can live up to 99th percentile standards.

I'm going to respond to this and this alone. Others can read this and treat it as a reply as their quoted comments to me.

Choosing the 99th percentile was very intentional. The upper-tier echelon of parses will give you very definitive answers of what the job—not necessarily the average player playing the job—can accomplish. To talk about "well this job has the potential due to player skill" is entirely unhelpful. You can know, say, the best Red Mage ever—they may top your own static's damage metre, but to suggest that they are the top parsing DPS based on that is rather silly. It's the same thing here, when we talk about "well the player can be that, but anecdotally, so many players don't."

It's not helpful, at all. Mostly because your anecdotal evidence really doesn't mean anything.

Instead, when we look at statistical date, pull out the averages from the top-tier of players, it's much easier to say, "hey, BLM is the top parsing jobs when player skill is taken out of the equation." Sure, most players you run into won't be able to do 99th percentile parses, but instead of playing the "well in my experience jobs A B C are bad from puggers," we can instead talk about what the jobs, objectively, are capable of, rank them, and use that as a guideline.

Also, BLM is not hard to play effectively, and its lack of ability to perform well is very over stated. If someone plays BLM poorly, it's not because the job itself has problems, it's the players are, well, playing poorly. So we should be shaming poor play, not shaming any individual job.

[Ilyrian]

I'm going to respond to this and this alone. Others can read this and treat it as a reply as their quoted comments to me. Choosing the 99th percentile was very intentional. The upper-tier echelon of parses will give you very definitive answers of what the job—not necessarily the average player playing the job—can accomplish. To talk about "well this job has the potential due to player skill" is entirely unhelpful. You can know, say, the best Red Mage ever—they may top your own static's damage metre, but to suggest that they are the top parsing DPS based on that is rather silly. It's the same thing here, when we talk about "well the player can be that, but anecdotally, so many players don't."

It's not helpful, at all. Mostly because your anecdotal evidence really doesn't mean anything.

You are right about the validity, or lack thereof, of anecdotal evidence but when does anecdotal become reliable - if one person thinks it, or 2 , or three?
It seems that, even going by the small number of replies to you here, that people seem to generally agree that BLM is a challenging DPS role to play to its maximum capacity. Personally i think it's the most challenging given not just the timers and rotation but the fact that it is the job punished most by heavy movement.

If you are pugging an encounter - especially if you are progressing to a first kill, you want to increase the odds of a kill as best you can. Personally I have seen way, way more bad or just OK BLM than I have exceptional ones so I can see why people would rather take another job that even if they don't perform to the higher ends of the DPS spectrum would at least bring something else to the party e.g buffs/reses/raises etc.

I posted in another thread that I think BLM should remain a 'selfish' DPS but the damage potential should be buffed through the roof. Good BLM would be less punished by movement and exceptional BLM would continue to shine.

The problem with PuGing in this game is that without any actual evidence of a players skill readily available to everyone (e.g parsers) people can only build grps on anecdotal evidence and Ilevels.

[HyoMinPark]

Choosing the 99th percentile was very intentional. The upper-tier echelon of parses will give you very definitive answers of what the job—not necessarily the average player playing the job—can accomplish.

That’s fine; I never contested that 99th percentile wasn’t representative of the job’s capabilities. I was just saying that it’s not ideal to try and take 99th percentile logs/parses/play, and apply them to Party Finder, or to the general/average playerbase. 99th percentile is far from average. If we were to, strictly speaking, select a percentile to apply to PF, I would personally recommend 50th. It’s dead-center; average. Use that as a threshold for average play. And I only say that because I think it’s more representative of the types of players one is likely to meet in Party Finder, not because it’s representative of the job’s potential. Again, I think people are talking about player skill/the way they play the job, not the job itself, when they say “most do not have the potential”.

To talk about "well this job has the potential due to player skill" is entirely unhelpful. You can know, say, the best Red Mage ever—they may top your own static's damage metre, but to suggest that they are the top parsing DPS based on that is rather silly. It's the same thing here, when we talk about "well the player can be that, but anecdotally, so many players don't."

It’s still important to factor in personal skill, though. I don’t think anyone was saying that the job was limited in terms of what it can do, but what it can do (i.e., the DPS it can push out) is entirely dependent on several factors, one of the biggest, in my opinion, being the skill of the player behind the keyboard. In terms of anecdotes, well, I don’t really consider what I said about 99th percentile play to be anecdotal: being that there is a 99th percentile, it automatically means that 99% of players are below said percentile. In other words, 99% of players do not have that 99th percentile personal potential, but rather a lesser personal potential. I personally don’t think that “the average player” one would find in PF is likely to be a 99th percentile BLM. Sure, you may get some in there that join out of boredom, or just to practice more, but usually PF has more average players than top-tier.

It's not helpful, at all. Mostly because your anecdotal evidence really doesn't mean anything.

Again, percentiles aren’t really anecdotal. There being a 99th percentile means that the players in that percentile are better than 99% of the other players being ranked. That’s not anecdotal, it’s statistical. But, hopefully you were using the general “you”, because nowhere in any of my posts was I talking about my personal experiences with PF BLMs.

Instead, when we look at statistical date, pull out the averages from the top-tier of players, it's much easier to say, "hey, BLM is the top parsing jobs when player skill is taken out of the equation."

I don’t think anyone in this thread was really contesting that. They were talking about personal potential, not the job’s potential. (“Most BLMs cannot live up to the job’s potential.”). And, it’s the same for any job, really. 99th percentile BRDs are representative of what BRD can do as a job: how much support AND damage it can push out. But, most BRDs will not live up to that potential, be it because they don’t have the skill or just don’t care to. Or that they’re just flat-out bad.

Sure, most players you run into won't be able to do 99th percentile parses, but instead of playing the "well in my experience jobs A B C are bad from puggers," we can instead talk about what the jobs, objectively, are capable of, rank them, and use that as a guideline.

This is why I also said using 99th percentile as a appropriate expectation to Party Finder is wrong (the bolded part), because most players you meet in PF will not be top-tier in terms of skill. I also think it’s important to keep in mind that a lot of top parses are min-max optimized, as well as padded by use of things like Balance. Again, that’s not something you’re likely to find in Party Finder, but in statics. Which is why I said that using 99th percentile play, and trying to hold “the average Joe” to it, is bad practice.

EDIT: Ilyrian also brings up a good point in that a lot of people have no other reference, such as a parser or logs, to judge a job on, so they go by their own personal experiences with them. They are more than capable of educating themselves by look at FFLogs, sure, but the majority probably never do that.

Also, BLM is not hard to play effectively, and its lack of ability to perform well is very over stated. If someone plays BLM poorly, it's not because the job itself has problems, it's the players are, well, playing poorly. So we should be shaming poor play, not shaming any individual job.

I mean, I agree with you that we should be shaming the poor play rather than the job itself, and I don’t think BLM is in any sort of bad spot as it stands now. It’s pretty damn good from what I’ve seen, especially compared to 4.1 BLM. However, the entire point of my post was just to clarify that people were talking about player skill/personal potential, not the job’s potential. I only pointed that out because you seemed to think they meant the job itself wasn’t top DPS, as opposed to the average player in PF. I don’t think anyone in this thread was saying that BLM, as a job, was in a terrible place. Not from what I saw, anyways.


My original post in this thread still stands: it shitty that people choose to exclude jobs based on a misconception that they are bad. However, we don’t know if that’s what these people were actually doing. Maybe they just wanted a particular comp (example: the meta). We really don’t know. That being said, the party leader was more within their rights to pick whatever jobs they wanted for their party. They could have asked for a V5S clear with all BRDs as DPS, and that would have been fine. Their party, their rules.

People that are bothered by a PF excluding them have remedies for it: they can make their own. Or just find another one that doesn’t care to put up exclusions. For my personal experience with PF, I don’t really see a lot of learning/clear and even weekly groups that exclude jobs. There are some that are set to the meta, yes, but I don’t really think they’re the majority of the parties I click on. At least, not when I’m browsing Aether’s Party Finder.

[Kabooa]

Choosing the 99th percentile was very intentional.

95th is a better indicator of a Job's relative strength

99th tends to be about lucky crit strings, 100th/max tends to be both that and heavy stacking of single buffs and favorably mechanic RNG. Also abusing an encounters mechanics should such present itself.

[zuzu-bq]

Breaking from 95th to 99th have many many variables in it, ping and luck included. So analyzing 95th gives you a better range of what good players are performing in general. But it's important to look at the whole spectrum anyways.

[Karshan]

snip

Yes, BLM has the best theoretical DPS. By theoretical, I mean that given the same amount of (high) skill from the player, BLM pulls out the best numbers.

People don't disagree with that, and that's not what repels them. What repels them is that statistically, pugs will be bad to average, and a bad BLM is less useful than a bad DRG. So with that in mind, THAT's why they don't want the "best DPS class" in the group : cause it's only worth if the player is damn good. The motto is "if random guy is playing poorly, might as well take a class that can at least buff me a little and not just be a dead weight".

On the contrary, reasoning like "oh it's said to be the best DPS class, let's take it" is a bit basic imho. True only at high skill level (over 80%). Most High skill level people are in formal statics and don't progress via pug groups. So what would you guess is left in pug groups, statistically speaking ? You'll find some pearls but you don't expect them. Speaking as an average player myself but being realistic here.