Can we talk about how mnk, drg, and blm are blatantly overpowered right now?

[Misutoraru]

As much as I want to see the gap between all dps get closer.
I have to disagree strongly for taking job difficulty into balance. Not only difficult is very subjective, even if there is a measure of job difficulty, it vary from fight to fight and player to player. All job balance should be consider at the class is being use at it maximum optimisation.

[Wayfinder3]

As much as I want to see the gap between all dps get closer.
I have to disagree strongly for taking job difficulty into balance. Not only difficult is very subjective, even if there is a measure of job difficulty, it vary from fight to fight and player to player. All job balance should be consider at the class is being use at it maximum optimisation.

I agree to an extent but, Since SE refuses to change the AST card system and the problems that come with it, I don't think it's fair for WHM to be better in rdps contribution than AST who has to work signifigantly harder to come close. playing AST on controller now is actually a chore, you spend most of you opener burst windows making sure your card macros go off because of the delay and thats something WHM doesn't have to deal with. difficulty is subjective but thats not 100% accurate, there are somethings that are objectively more taxing than others and AST card system vs WHMs lilies is probably the most obvious. At least NIN/SMN are getting redone so it's not really an argument for them, but AST have been told their job will stay the way it is.

[kajv95]

I agree to an extent but, Since SE refuses to change the AST card system and the problems that come with it, I don't think it's fair for WHM to be better in rdps contribution than AST who has to work signifigantly harder to come close. playing AST on controller now is actually a chore, you spend most of you opener burst windows making sure your card macros go off because of the delay and thats something WHM doesn't have to deal with. difficulty is subjective but thats not 100% accurate, there are somethings that are objectively more taxing than others and AST card system vs WHMs lilies is probably the most obvious. At least NIN/SMN are getting redone so it's not really an argument for them, but AST have been told their job will stay the way it is.

Kinda all hammers back to the fact that currently any offensive support can only bring a job to the level of another job instead of a good party performance with said support outperforming a pure selfish party, nay? Let's roll ourselves back to the DPS conversation at hand.

A party that is working together should outperform a party that is mainly selfishes, but the selfishes need to stay ahead in the personal dps race by a distinctly fair margin. For this reason it was important that the synergizing abilities were removed, as that was a large part of the meta culture at the time.

What I mainly want to see on these "lower" classes is more added raid contribution, if anything. Make it so that the contributing classes benefit greatly from bringing that black mage, monk, dragoon or (hopefully 5.08) samurai.

For ranged, move machinist up to selfish level, or 5.05 samurai level if you truly believe movement tax should be a thing (Though I will tell you, Machinist players will never be happy if you do), destroy Tactician if that's what you need to make it happen. Add more raid damage to Bard and Dancer, shore up the remaining "max potential" gap with some personal dps if you can't get the numbers properly right. Do not worry about them filling a same role, as long as they deal roughly the same amount of damage (consistently), one will not be taken over the other.

For Ninja, there's a myriad of things with the job right now, but more personal dps and possibly a prod towards Trick Attack's value would do in its current design and party role. Atleast until Ninja gets some proper fixing done to it.

For casters, a.k.a one of the main points of debate, I admit it's iffy due to raise concerns, but I believe a dps job should not have their main party role, bringing damage, be punished for simply having it. Raise tax will likely continue to exist, but atleast I'd prefer seeing a world where it's not by over 1k. Do *not* buff their offensive raid contribution overall, mainly shore these up with personal dps increases and certain quality of life improvements. If you buff up caster offensive raid contribution while also buffing ranged dps' contribution, you will inadvertently create too many buff stacks which will reroute the problem back towards Black Mages since they can't play along with that.

All the Melees have their ways to join in on the buffstacks except for Samurai becoming an outlier in the design of the Melee DPS role, focusing primarily on damage, so let them be personal dps king.

Casters won't be allowed to play along with stacking their own buffs, which will keep BLM relevant. The other 2 casters will be relevant for their good utility but not so irrelevant that BLM is the only viable one. The only Melee who would pose a problem with this would be SAM, but due to the nature of most "stacked buffs" of the other melees, should still be fine if just made the king of personal dps like BLM is for casters. The other currently good Melees would be fine for the most part (perhaps tone down Monk ever so slightly.) since they will see an increase in a properly built party alongside everyone else. Machinist needs to be able to take the Samurai's spot in it's niche (again, movement tax if deemed necessary. Don't break it, though...) and both BRD and DNC will have a chance to shine.

The lack of truly synergizing job abilities have the potential to push the game into a direction where everything is viable and good gameplay from the entire party is rewarded. My main issue with the current job ranking is just that certain classes will, in no possible way, reach the same level as others for no good reason. Currently, everything is viable at "perfect play", but not everything is viable at "slightly above average" play, which would be fine if it was shared among all jobs, but it isn't.

And don't bother tuning things for Alliance Raids / Light Party content. In Light Party, content is extremely undertuned anyway, and in Alliance Raid, nobody cried because Bard could literally buff 23 other people with Foe Requiem.

[ShaneDawn]

All ranged jobs are in a very awkward spot at the moment. Right now, a double Black Mage composition is actually threatening to drop the ranged slot completely from a damage meta composition. Further promised buffs to other jobs are quite possibly making even triple melee superior over taking a ranged as long as the fight mechanics allow for it. All of this seems very counter-productive with the fact that teams are encouraged to include one of each role by giving the party an increased main stat bonus for each unique job in the party. That 1% is barely enough to keep the ranged relevant right now, and if we are not adjusted in tandem with the other jobs, it would only make the situation worse for us.

Ranged should definitely get a minor decrease in dps compared to casters and melees due to the fact, that they are free to move and including them in the party can potentially give other jobs more uptime to use their GCDs. As it is now, however, we're being "taxed" approximately 10-15% in rdps contribution simply for being ranged [reference]. That is a big f meme considering that any half-decent melee players can hold 95-100% uptime on all Savage fights in this tier. It almost feels like our dps has been balanced around mediocre melees/casters and having faith that the 1% party buff is enough to keep us relevant. SE needs to either buff ranged rdps contribution slightly or increase the significance of role buff to keep all role archetypes relevant in the ups and downs of job balance cycles. Improving our support kit with more high-impact options could also be seen as a solution.

Advocating for current job balance due to perceived job difficulty is just being conceited or ignorant. Job difficulty is largely subjective and a lot of people seem to not realize skill floor and ceilings are two vastly different things. Jobs with low skill-floor can have high-skill ceiling, and the opposite can also be true. Although in the end it would be very conceited to think playing any job to a high-level is a walk in the park. A very relevant example is people chirping BLM as some sort of Apex of job skill ceiling and justifying it performing so well as a result, when ironically SMN is in fact considered more difficult to play well with right now. Or Dancer being cited as an easy job to play, when optimizing Dancer's kit in a speedkill setting is probably among the most intricate things any DPS job can do altogether.

[Crushnight]

Considering mnk is so close to blm and provides utility with mantra and brotherhood i say mnk is probably going to receive some tweaks to lower it's output a bit (hopefully buff sam up to where mnk currently is) and nin be brought much closer to the other melees. physical range will need buffs in tandem with magical range to avoid irrelevancy

[Straynge]

You can't judge everything off of raids. I am surprised about all the chatter on how low dps a Red Mage is right now. Of course I don't raid with my Red Mage so that's probably why I haven't noticed. I can solo clear content with the Red Mage that I couldn't even think about approaching with my monk. Red Mage has little trouble solo'ing a good number of lv. 70 dungeons right now as well as a lot of Extreme trials. On the other hand they have very low dps in a raid. Go figure. Just trying to point out that dps numbers in a raid don't tell a full story and if they based dps based soley on raids it would probably hurt other aspects of the game. Buff the Red Mage and suddenly they can clear solo content that should even be attempted. Take away from a Monk and you might find them unable to progress on their own story wise. I'm sure a lot of things goes into balancing all the aspects of play.

And yeah, I notice Black Mages do die quite often in Eden: Titan compared to the rest. There's always a payoff for those big dps numbers. Black mage - Looooonng cast times. Monk = no dps when out of range and avoiding aoe's. Red Mage = low dps but decent manueverability and rezzes. Bards just have it easy lol. Love my bard. Never going to put up big dps numbers but my dps never stops, not even for a second. It's a huge balancing act.

[RadicalPesto]

You can't judge everything off of raids. I am surprised about all the chatter on how low dps a Red Mage is right now. Of course I don't raid with my Red Mage so that's probably why I haven't noticed. I can solo clear content with the Red Mage that I couldn't even think about approaching with my monk. Red Mage has little trouble solo'ing a good number of lv. 70 dungeons right now as well as a lot of Extreme trials. On the other hand they have very low dps in a raid. Go figure. Just trying to point out that dps numbers in a raid don't tell a full story and if they based dps based soley on raids it would probably hurt other aspects of the game. Buff the Red Mage and suddenly they can clear solo content that should even be attempted. Take away from a Monk and you might find them unable to progress on their own story wise. I'm sure a lot of things goes into balancing all the aspects of play.

Red Mage was perfectly fine and not broken last expansion with a much smaller rdps gap between it and the highest dps caster. Red Mage wasn't breaking any part of the game with its solo capacity, it wouldn't now either, and solo content is generally not considered relevant for balance anyway.

[ShaneDawn]

And yeah, I notice Black Mages do die quite often in Eden: Titan compared to the rest. There's always a payoff for those big dps numbers. Black mage - Looooonng cast times. Monk = no dps when out of range and avoiding aoe's. Red Mage = low dps but decent manueverability and rezzes. Bards just have it easy lol. Love my bard. Never going to put up big dps numbers but my dps never stops, not even for a second. It's a huge balancing act.

Kinda wild, how BLMs are still 1,4k above RDM on average rdps contribution, even when they supposedly die so much more on the fight [reference]. Imagine how good the average rdps for that job would be, if they didn't die as much due to having to deal with their very difficult job mechanics. :^)

[MaelleRiou]

Well, looks like physical ranged, red mage, and summoner are the poop jobs until 5.1 at earliest.

[Yandere-chan]

As much as I want to see the gap between all dps get closer.
I have to disagree strongly for taking job difficulty into balance. Not only difficult is very subjective, even if there is a measure of job difficulty, it vary from fight to fight and player to player. All job balance should be consider at the class is being use at it maximum optimisation.

Then I have to disagree strongly with you. There are some things that are just obviously more skillful to do vs. other things. Saying it's subjective is an hollow observation. Yes, everyone is skilled differently at the game to some extent, and some people are more gifted at doing things most people find very tedious than others, and to that, they will be advantaged in life by it. Life isn't fair, some people's experiences/genetics are going to make them succeed better at certain difficult things. That doesn't mean you discard the importance of taking in consideration the difficulty a class possesses when determining balance.

Requiring say one class to do 20 extra button presses with very unforgiving restrictions on half of them compared to another of the same role and balancing them around only ever being played at 100% optimization is not balanced at all. You can't just make a class clearly more tedious and complicated and vulnerable to error, especially under pressure, and not consider their balance vs. a class which has extremely less to do with less restrictions to have optimal output. The argument of subjectivity in difficulty only goes so far when you are talking about how many actual buttons and restrictions a player has to play around vs. another. It's illogical to suggest that a class that has more red tape to get over and more buttons to sequence in perfect execution without dying to end game mechanics is of negligible difference to one that doesn't. That there is someone out there who can potentially do all those things without error most of the time doesn't change that. Good for that person, they deserve to do a bit better by taking on a more challenging class regardless if it's due to innate abilities or not. Even among the skilled though, humans aren't computers, sometimes they just make honest mistakes, and classes with more to do are by nature more prone to such human errors, however seldom.

So, yeah, if you just aren't as good at the game but want to still do all the content in the game, there should be classes that trade a bit of ceiling for a much higher intermediate floor in what they have to offer in performance. Or, perhaps you just want the consistency of a less complicated class. It's a fairly common preference.

Bottomline though, demand vs. performance ratios vs. ceilings vs. floors are valid considerations in class balance for ffxiv. Lower demand high performance kits are going to be more appealing than high demand, higher performance kits for most people in heavy mechanic fights or just casual players. Even for very skilled players, maybe you want to trade the potential to do 3% or so extra dmg over your rivals to just make sure you experience less potential wipes with a particular group via a less complicated class. Such options existing is a good thing for the game in my opinion.