Will ShadowBringers make tanks feel more unique?

[Shurrikhan]

If a hallmark of balance is that slight variations produce shifts in meta, then a stagnant meta is a sign of poor balance. It's fine if there's a different flavour of the month.

Time to change things up.

While I'd generally agree in this being a useful "at a glance" observation of balance, let's consider the definition you're implying here: If the wheel spins, it's balanced. I'd argue the wheel should spin somewhat, and a slight FotM is okay, but there's a lot more to it than just that. It's not our job to spin the wheel for the community, so long as anyone can reach the top themselves. What we need from balance is the ability to compete seriously using whatever we want to play.

Consider these two scenarios:

1. A single "gets slightly more value at the same effort dealt, or generates the same value with slightly less effort dealt" remains a standard option over many years, but literally all reasonable compositions fare within 1% of each other and even nonsensical ones still have a fair shot at completing all content.
   
   
2. In any given tier of content, there's an obvious, significant difference that would noticeably impact your chances of being able to complete that tier between the one or two best compositions and all others, but those lead compositions are swapped out by balancing changes or fight designs which disproportionately favor particular classes with each successive tier.

Which is balance to you?

I'd much rather have the first. I'd rather have a 'default' composition of no real advantage but where I can play whatever I want than punish anyone who hasn't the time to level, gear, and meld each candidate for the next FotM in preparation for the next tier. Were this game somehow suddenly able to hold compelling Esports, I might enjoy the variety brought on by the second, but it is not what I would balance a game around.

Balance is not just the number of parses across all 100 or the top 50 or 25 or 10 or 1 percent. If it possible to reach the same result, that is enough. We don't force a rotated experience upon the player population, forcing them into Paladin+1 one tier and Dark Knight+1 the next and Gunbreaker+(AnyoneButPaladin) the last.

Perfect balance is impossible and near-perfect balance still incredibly hard to come by, but we shouldn't be satisfied with simply rotating the victims and favorites.

[Lyth]

If you go back a couple of posts, Izsha makes the claim that a sign of balance is that little differences produce shifts in meta. I think that this is more accurately a sign of partial homogenisation, but I'll buy this for the moment.

I mean, we've seen this before. In Heavensward, fight-specific considerations often made you shift between DRK and PLD (so much so, that you were generally expected to main both). Likewise, there's always been a fair amount of overlap between the player pools of WHM and AST.

But there's a spanner in the works. WAR... well, WAR never changes. The same could be said of SCH. Both of these jobs have historically just watched from their respective thrones while the other two jobs duke it out over scraps. If balance represents a sort of "unstable equilibrium", then what gives these two jobs such a stable spot in the meta?

Even following Izsha's earlier claim to its logical conclusion, these jobs are not subject to the same set of rules as everyone else.

Evaluating player preferences isn't our responsibility, but I'd certainly expect it to be one for the development team. With Shadowbringers, there is going to be 17 (18) jobs sharing eight raid spots. It simply does not make sense for five of those to be perpetually locked down by ARR jobs. If they're fine with stagnant gameplay, they shouldn't bother introducing new jobs.

This wheel isn't spinning at all. It's stuck. I'm looking to aim just a touch higher than the lofty standards of party finder viability. No friend, I'm not content with scraps from your table. Balance is impossible, you say? That's fine, I'll settle for fairness instead. Let's spin that wheel. Perhaps this time, you won't be so keen to keep it where it ends up.

[Shurrikhan]

If you go back a couple of posts, Izsha makes the claim that a sign of balance is that little differences produce shifts in meta. I think that this is more accurately a sign of partial homogenisation, but I'll buy this for the moment.

I mean, we've seen this before. In Heavensward, fight-specific considerations often made you shift between DRK and PLD (so much so, that you were generally expected to main both). Likewise, there's always been a fair amount of overlap between the player pools of WHM and AST.

But there's a spanner in the works. WAR... well, WAR never changes. The same could be said of SCH. Both of these jobs have historically just watched from their respective thrones while the other two jobs duke it out over scraps. If balance represents a sort of "unstable equilibrium", then what gives these two jobs such a stable spot in the meta?

Even following Izsha's earlier claim to its logical conclusion, these jobs are not subject to the same set of rules as everyone else.

Evaluating player preferences isn't our responsibility, but I'd certainly expect it to be one for the development team. With Shadowbringers, there is going to be 17 (18) jobs sharing eight raid spots. It simply does not make sense for five of those to be perpetually locked down by ARR jobs. If they're fine with stagnant gameplay, they shouldn't bother introducing new jobs.

This wheel isn't spinning at all. It's stuck. I'm looking to aim just a touch higher than the lofty standards of party finder viability. No friend, I'm not content with scraps from your table. Balance is impossible, you say? That's fine, I'll settle for fairness instead. Let's spin that wheel. Perhaps this time, you won't be so keen to keep it where it ends up.

First, neither of us made as central points that -- at or to any reasonable, noticeable degree -- balance is impossible. We each mentioned that while perfect balance is impossible, it is also unnecessary; a 1% change in performance is already close enough since

that is still incredibly close to perfection and a sign the balance team has done an incredible job [as,] if the only difference between meta (read optimal) and suboptimal is a "minuscule difference" as you put it, [] all jobs are viable.

I myself pointed out only that perfect balance being impossible should not be taken as an excuse to simply rotate who loses and who wins in a given state of "inevitable" imbalance. Harking that perfect balance is impossible, alone, is the exact opposite of the point I made.

Warp my words for your rubble-heap rebel rhetoric all you like, but "Balance is impossible" has scarcely to do with the intent of either of the posts you're responding to. Neither of us are denying you "fairness". I've literally only stuck with MNK, SAM, DRK, WHM, and a bit of BLM; I'm not the guy you're going to 'stick it to' by changing the meta... except in that arbitrary shifts -- shifts for shifts' sake, especially if increasing the severity between the new optimal and new non-optimal choices -- are just going to leave me feeling even more exasperated with any lack of real balance.

As for the rest:

I don't disagree that experimenting with patches that risk or even intentionally imbalance classes slightly in the contexts of their respective tiers as necessary to break the inertia or prejudice that's build up in community opinions can be a good thing. I just think the spinning the wheel for our players, if/when necessary, ought to be a means to achieve balance (where community inertia would otherwise keep wholly competitive choices down), not the goal in itself.

Balance is the available variety of competitive choices at any given time (the breadth of any period's "meta" or the severity of its advantage), not just the total number of metas seen over the life of a game (where that breadth could still be all of exactly one composition wide). Just taking Warrior and Scholar off the top of their respective roles does not, in itself, achieve balance.

Or, more simply said:

Balance is... the difference between optimal and sub optimal....

[Izsha]

Somehow the idea that the performance gap should be very small =balance STILL gets warped I to "war man bayad". There is no hope.

If the difference between drk/pld/war/gun is 1% you can have drk on top like youve always wanted for all I care because with narrow margins like that the game is balanced and we can ALL play the job you want. If being the bottom of the pile is 99% as good as being the top of the pile, the pile is irrelevant. A single crit in a 10 minute fight is ebough statistical noise to bridge that gap.

The closer the jobs differ in performance the less the ranking of the jobs matters. If performance differences are severe then so is ostracism and general butthurt. Wanting to close that gap has nothing to do with war. That's the solution to your war complaints. Just making drk king and war popper is just spinning the meta wheel out of petty vengence. If that's what you want, fine just say so but stop veiling it as some altruistic balance.

[Lyth]

It seems like we're discussing different points.

You seem to be arguing that, because the jobs are capable of producing dps numbers that are within whatever arbitrary tolerance you decide on of each other (1%, 5%, 10%, whatever integer that you like), the jobs are "balanced enough". It doesn't matter what jobs people are actually playing, as long as they satisfy some theoretical balance parameter of your choosing.

My point has nothing to do with the numerical difference. It has everything to do with which jobs people are actually playing, and which jobs are dominant picks. In other competitive games, people start getting visibly annoyed if metas stick around for six months, let alone six years. It's bad for the game, and it drives players away. I don't care if there's a 1% difference or a 0.1% difference. Make it a PLD/GUN meta if you like. I would just like a break from WAR, SCH, and BRD. Thank you.

[aqskerorokero]

Make tanks actual meat wall, not blue icon damage dealer.

[Izsha]

1st iff Comparing a coop mmo to a stale meta in a competative game is hardly the same. There is no esports viewership to account for. There are not pro players making a living off of the balance of a character. There are just monsters and if you can reasonably kill them with different sets of job classes. That requires a far lower level of balance to function and does not require constant meta shifts to keep players and viewers interested. Instead they change the monsters you fight every few months as what you fight matters more in an mmo than who's fighting the monster. What matters is you can play what YOU want and kill the monster.

2nd. So yes. As long as war isnt on top thats all that matters. It doesnt matter how well balanced the game is, how virtually even and competative every job. It all comes 2nd to knocking down war. Gotcha. I'm glad after all these years you finally just came out and said it instead of just filling every thread with barely veiled war hate.

[shao32]

I hardly disagree, killing the monster and have everyone viable to do that it's the basic requirement of quality every mmo should have but that doesn't mean we should ignore balance BCS of this, balance between jobs still matters a lot specially if everyone is viable everyone should be equally competitive and that's what's matters when viability it's just the standard.

By that logic we should just stay at 4.0 original balance since everyone it's viable and can take down everything, but I guess it's more easy keep that point of view after you fav job being reworked mid expansion and get cemented to the meta again.

Balance it's not perfect but if you keep the same jobs being weak and the same jobs being strong forever bcs favouritism and double standards then ppl get annoying specially after 6 years of the same nonsense.

[Izsha]

Shao, if you read the last page you would have the context. I am entirely pro balance. Balance should he the #1 priority because without that you have severely negative player experience. Someone saw the shadow bringer trailer and thought "I wanna play the BAMF a sword and purple flames I just saw" and bought ffxiv. So they buy the game and level drk.

1. Bare minimum goal: player chose drk. Can they beat all the content on it? If no, dev fix it. If yes go to next.

2. Will they be excluded from content by players due to job weakness? Ie locked out of pfs etc. (War in 2.0 dungeons. Drk on rathalos a year ago,. Pld during HW, etc). Is the job so woefully behind that players actively exclude it. If no dev fix. If yes go to next.

3. Here we finally get to aiming at closer numerical balance. No job is bad enough to be hard locked out of content, but the gap may still be to big in some aspects. We are currently somewhere around here. All tanks can clear everything. Check. No one locks out specific tanks from PFs with any regularity right now, but there are still some performance gaps between the tanks, so now we can address those.

Successfully getting to that stage no one is punished for playing the job of their choice. No one has a terrible game experience.

Just like writing a pathing AI in a rts game (hundreds or thousands of units running around logically), instead of trying to make it perfect (extremely hard to do), you just make it 'less bad'. The realistic goal isnt yo kake every unit always do exactly what the controller wants taking the path they want. It's far more practical to make sure units dont fo anything really stupid that will piss off the controlling player. The player wont mind minor bumps (he went up the left ramp to go around instead of the right that was 1% closer) but it will ruin the experience if they run around the edge of the map instead of a mostly straight line.

The realistic goal is to make jobs good enough that you dont have a negative player experience. "This jobs CANT beat this content.". "Other players actively EXCLUDE me because of job choice." These are subscription ending experiences. If all jobs are within spitting distance of one another, you remove the negative player experience. You remove the stupid from the AI script. It will never be perfect but you can remove the worst negative experience offenders one at a time, in priority order. Shifting the meta is the last item on the list. It is still on the list, but it is miles behind getting them close enough to prevent active ostracism and that is miles behind actual ability to clear content. Putting the meta cart in front of functionality and balance is horrifying. The meta cart is pulled forward by the functionality and balance. Those must always come 1st until it the gap is small. Then after all that you worry about arbitrary changes actively designed to target a stale meta. The meta seems like the most important thing, but that is only because it is a culmination of the functionality and balance of the game. It is the symptom, not the disease. Dont give a dying man aspirin to feel better. Cure his disease and the pain will go away. If the meta is hard locked for so long it is because the gap between top and bottom is to far to be bridged by players. Close the gap, dont just crusade to dumpster war. You still have to close the gap between (now 4) tanks. Rotating the victor doesnt fix a broken system.

[shao32]

I know what you want to say but there is no doubt WAR always take advantage over the rest of the tanks no matter what, every single time without exceptions same with BRD and same with SCH, and this was never fixed, no matter what balance choice you made in order to bring other jobs up the same jobs will always break/trivialise content or have some kind of sinergy mandatory and all of this bcs the just buff and don't nerf my fav job.

I'm up for balance and I will love WAR for once don't just roll over the rest and get his favouritism armour they have in order to bring fairness to the tank balance, it's not fair keep the meta of the holy trio over 6 years either and for my personal opinion it's worse.