Enrage timer raid design is causing all the problems

[BarretOblivion]

I would just like to share an insight coming from WOW why I think the tight FFXIV enrage timer is causing all these issues. In WOW, while all "savage" bosses have hard enrage timers, only some of them are very strict DPS checks. Majority depends on coordination and a team's own strategy to beat the boss mechanics.

I find that FFXIV raid design is too dependent on "death avoiding" and "DPS as much as you can", for almost all bosses. In WOW, there are some fights which are tank centric (multiple adds, tank swap/stack, multiple positioning (like brayflox normal poison dragon)), and some are healer centric (heavy sustained dmg on random single targets, raid wide DOTs, debuffs that need healing or esuna), even the DPS fights have variants for many adds (AOE burst), multiple bosses (allowing for dot classes to shine), or short bursts dependent on ranged classes (gaols), etc.

My point is, yes it's true there will always be some classes doing more dps than others, and there are times there are "meta" and "better jobs", but I think if the DPS checks are more forgiving and raid design add in more elements than just "death avoiding", and engage the different roles of the classes: more stuff to tank, more stuff to heal, more stuff to kill, then many of the issues surrounding "DPS is nothing more than total pDPS + rDPS", as well as DPS of tanks and healers being so impt that their other aspects (surviving and healing) are almost ignored in class balance, will naturally be addressed through raid design philosophy.

TL,DR: FFXIV need to balance jobs design around raid designs, rather than hammer their heads on balancing DPS of ALL jobs including tank and healers, they need to relook at current raid design philosophies.

Its because right now everyone is basically at 'minimum' item level for most of the savage encounters. Once we have weeks pass for people to buy tome gear you get alot more wiggle room and can afford deaths here and there.
FFXIV raid design has worked after they figured it out back in HW for the last tier of Alexander. We aren't WoW, I understand you want to use WoW to inspire FFXIV raid design but that's not how the devs have decided to design the raids. This DPS problem happens when Stormblood came out for Halicarnassus (Delta 3) with a good chunk of jobs being under tuned and people getting to that fight much faster than even this tier. The third fight is a brick wall for 90% of the raid community, its called the "static breaker" for a reason.

[geekgirl101]

Its because right now everyone is basically at 'minimum' item level for most of the savage encounters. Once we have weeks pass for people to buy tome gear you get alot more wiggle room and can afford deaths here and there.
FFXIV raid design has worked after they figured it out back in HW for the last tier of Alexander. We aren't WoW, I understand you want to use WoW to inspire FFXIV raid design but that's not how the devs have decided to design the raids. This DPS problem happens when Stormblood came out for Halicarnassus (Delta 3) with a good chunk of jobs being under tuned and people getting to that fight much faster than even this tier. The third fight is a brick wall for 90% of the raid community, its called the "static breaker" for a reason.

Not really. I'm in some pretty shiny 450/460 gear. Ok it's missing some materia, but my damage is being slaughtered by people in 440 gear. It's nothing to do with minimum item level, it's because RDM damage got ignored whilst everyone else got buffed so our damage is the weakest of the lot. It's horribly lazy because I am pushing all I got and doing the very best I can whilst people who are insanely overpowered can out-DPS me without even trying.

Let's not forget this important bullet point of the Shadowbringers live letter:

Which isn't entirely true. You can cheese mechanics as BLM and remain on top. You can push hard like a pregnant hippo and still fail to match the rest of the DPS as any of the other weaker jobs. It's basically this - you come as RDM, SMN, DNC or NIN and it doesn't matter how good you play your role and how skilled you are you will still get benched once progress is done and everyone else has stopped dying to mistakes and relying on you as their res-bot. This expansion has introduced meta classes, something FFXIV was originally trying to avoid.

[KageTokage]

Which isn't entirely true. You can cheese mechanics as BLM and remain on top. You can push hard like a pregnant hippo and still fail to match the rest of the DPS as any of the other weaker jobs. It's basically this - you come as RDM, SMN, DNC or NIN and it doesn't matter how good you play your role and how skilled you are you will still get benched once progress is done and everyone else has stopped dying to mistakes and relying on you as their res-bot.

Pretty much this.

Almost all of the clear groups for ES4 I've seen are excluding RDM, DNC, and NIN because they don't want to have worry about the DPS check when they can get a mediocre DRG/MNK and still beat it while they need top of the line players for the non-meta classes to not have a rough time.