5.08 Patch - DPS still not balanced.

[Taranok]

Tax Tax Tax...
What PPL forget: Tax applies to raw DPS. So raw DPS of a range should be lower because he can compensate by movement in an actual encounter.
But the numbers we discuss are not raw DPS. The numbers are logs of the current RAID content and if any DPS is so far behind like now then the tax is too high.

And what people also forget is that the devs don't like doing major shifts in balance. They don't want a class to go from trash tier to top tier in a single patch. BLM was literally being buffed all throughout SB to get it to where it needed to be. First a cooldown reduction to Triplecast and a cast time reduction to fire 4 (and bliz 4 I think) of 3 to 2.8s. Then they buffed F4 from 260 to 280. Then 280 to 300. It took them all the way to patch 4.4 to finally get BLM to that state.

The fastest changes to classes I've seen are AST in 5.05, and SMN in 4.1. AST because the class was so awful that no one was touching it and it needed emergency fixes, SMN because that class was also so awful and needed emergency fixes back in SB. And this was at a time when MCH also needed emergency fixes but the devs instead focused on flat out redesigning the class from the ground up instead while giving it bandaids to limp it along. The devs don't want a repeat of what happened in 5.1 when Summoner was catapulted from one of the worst DPS classes to one of the best, admittedly a problem caused by a poorly designed ability (Wyrmwave copying oGCDs and GCDs, which was never documented, displayed in tooltips, yet worked anyways). You can see this because Wyrmwave was buffed initially, then nerfed to below the pre-buff levels.

The devs don't want 100% perfection, they want classes to be viable. After that they will slowly, and I do mean slowly, tweak every class to get it to where they want it to be. And if it's like BLM from SB, once the classes are about where they want them to be, provided there's not a major rework of the class, then the class won't need much major tweaking going forward, just tweaking of anything new added to the class.

[ForteNightshade]

The devs don't want 100% perfection, they want classes to be viable. After that they will slowly, and I do mean slowly, tweak every class to get it to where they want it to be. And if it's like BLM from SB, once the classes are about where they want them to be, provided there's not a major rework of the class, then the class won't need much major tweaking going forward, just tweaking of anything new added to the class.

People are very much aware of this terrible practice, which is why they've straight up let jobs die. Monk and Ninja were the least played jobs by a mile prior to their respective buffs. Red Mage is already getting tossed in the grave. Frankly, I find it a little embarrassing players feel the need to stop playing their preferred jobs because the dev team ignores feedback.

[Taranok]

People are very much aware of this terrible practice, which is why they've straight up let jobs die. Monk and Ninja were the least played jobs by a mile prior to their respective buffs. Red Mage is already getting tossed in the grave. Frankly, I find it a little embarrassing players feel the need to stop playing their preferred jobs because the dev team ignores feedback.

Pick your poison. You either have a slow balancing process to tweak everything into position, or you have massive swings in DPS with FotM classes as the devs fumble about trying to balance classes that don't get balanced.

The only thing that could actually speed up this process without breaking everything would be to open up test servers for the patches ahead of time. Period. End of story. What the devs are doing is frustrating, but in terms of game theory, it is the best possible approach without opening up the floodgates to let in more data faster and allow them to balance with a wider assortment of data.

And the devs, as much as it sucks to hear this, should take player feedback, but largely ignore it outside of the most general and widespread feelings. Pleasing the playerbase will ruin the game faster than anything else, whereas taking the feedback and then working it into their vision will always be the best approach, if the feedback fits their vision.

And stop exaggerating. I'm in a group that runs with the 2 worst DPS right now, RDM and DNC, and we're doing just fine. The classes are viable, which is a hell of a lot better than how MCH launched at the start of SB, or AST during the literal entirety of HW. Slow and steady is best for the game, but nothing will stop the playerbase from acting irrationally to every tiny little thing.

[ForteNightshade]

Pick your poison. You either have a slow balancing process to tweak everything into position, or you have massive swings in DPS with FotM classes as the devs fumble about trying to balance classes that don't get balanced.

Why is it a dichotomy when players have already provided numerous ways of fixing this problem? Unlike Stormblood Machinist or Dark Knight. None of the weaker jobs need massive overhauls except Ninja and maybe Summoner. All they need is potency. How is it difficult to buff say, Burst Shot, Apex Arrow and Refulgent just to grab some random abilities? Seriously. It doesn't even matter what they buff at this point, it just needs to bring the Range and Casters within striking distance of the melee and Black Mage.

The fact it took them 16 months to do anything for Machinist is downright embarrassing. What this boils down to is if you're a Red Mage, go on strike for the next two months because that's the only chance you have of the devs panic buffing you. I really want to believe that isn't necessary because what an awful feeling it would be.

[etch666]

FFlogs will be the downfall of this game. My apple at the 95% percentile is less tasty than my orange at the 70% percentile...call this balance??

[MaelleRiou]

FFlogs will be the downfall of this game. My apple at the 95% percentile is less tasty than my orange at the 70% percentile...call this balance??

There's a simple solution for Square-Enix: Don't make every fight have an enrage timer. Enrage timers force the player base, particularly the part that does PUG raids, to care more about DPS than utility.

[ForteNightshade]

There's a simple solution for Square-Enix: Don't make every fight have an enrage timer. Enrage timers force the player base, particularly the part that does PUG raids, to care more about DPS than utility.

If they took away enrage timers, you'd have Savage simply turn into a war of attrition. Just bring all three healers and make sure one of them stays alive. You'll eventually win since you can just keep raising people.

[IruruCece]

FFlogs will be the downfall of this game. My apple at the 95% percentile is less tasty than my orange at the 70% percentile...call this balance??

get better taste buds, oranges are inferior to apples

It's a liiiiiiiittle early to start seeing threads complaining about classes not yet being perfectly balanced as all things should be when I don't think there's been a time where that has ever been the case, not to mention only days after a relatively minor set of QoL changes. But we are already seeing threads about how ranged DPS roles are going to be TOTALLY EXCLUDED from ALL CONTENT FOREVER (until the next patch maybe) so I don't think waiting and seeing is the strong suit of some folks.

[HyoMinPark]

It's a liiiiiiiittle early to start seeing threads complaining about classes not yet being perfectly balanced as all things should be when I don't think there's been a time where that has ever been the case, not to mention only days after a relatively minor set of QoL changes. But we are already seeing threads about how ranged DPS roles are going to be TOTALLY EXCLUDED from ALL CONTENT FOREVER (until the next patch maybe) so I don't think waiting and seeing is the strong suit of some folks.

While jobs may have still had imbalances in the past, they are nothing like the current imbalances between the top 3 damage dealers (MNK, BLM, DRG), and the ones at the bottom (SMN, RDM, DNC, BRD, MCH). There are anywhere from 1,000 rDPS to 2,000 rDPS differences between the jobs with very little reason for such a large gap to exist. The balance could definitely be much better, and the only way to draw attention to it—short of simply boycotting the jobs as players did with MNK and NIN—is to make threads about it, and then hope the developers read them and take them seriously. This isn’t even to mention how SAM still deals less in terms of rDPS compared to a melee that has utility (MNK).

As for the physical ranged thread, I don’t recall anywhere in the opening post of that thread that states that the role would be “EXCLUDED from ALL CONTENT FOREVER”—just that they will start seeing exclusions in more than just Savage via the trickle down effect metas tend to have. Some of the physical ranged have already been excluded from Savage since the tier dropped—DNC being one of them. They were locked out of early Titan progression and clear runs due to their lower damage leaving less room for error in an already minimum item level setting.

With regards to “waiting and seeing”, both MCH and DRK waited the entirety of Stormblood to see changes. RDM waited until Patch 4.4 to see buffs to its potencies. WHM dealt with the defunct 4.0 Lily system the entire expansion, despite the 100+ page threads on here warning the developers that it was a poor mechanic since the Stormblood media tour. Given these precedents, simply “waiting and seeing” doesn’t always seem to work.

[SaitoHikari]

FFlogs will be the downfall of this game. My apple at the 95% percentile is less tasty than my orange at the 70% percentile...call this balance??

I know this comes as a shock, but FFlogs actually isn't to blame for this perceived imbalance this time around. Maybe because this imbalance is actually REAL this time and the site is showing us hard data about how bad it is, and not a community created concept that excluded certain classes lacking party buffs in the past for the sake of a personal ranking. The website suddenly not existing isn't going to change the fact that there's a huge gap between the top and the bottom DPS, something that has never existed to this level before.

Again, a member of the top DPS dying will usually still contribute more than a member of the bottom DPS performing at a high level without dying. That is a fundamental problem that should never exist, because it means certain party comps can easily afford to make mistakes while others cannot. The uproar is louder this time around because for the first time ever, we are starting to see a situation where most parties may consider class to be a greater factor over the player's skill if this gets any worse, and they probably wouldn't be objectively wrong for doing so depending on how the fights are tuned. And with how historically slow the developers have been at addressing these issues, we absolutely need to light a fire under their asses preferably before the first Ultimate or the next raid tier this expansion.

The raise tax for RDM/SMN being that much is absolutely bonkers too, considering the skill itself won't really help in the majority of raid situations where a death or two may already spiral into not beating enrage. It becomes an oxymoron at that point.

EDIT: I decided to take a stroll around the JP forums to see what they had to say about the situation, and it seems they have the same thoughts as we do. Except it's even more unanimous over there, it seems. Seems like only on the English forums do we have people arguing that the current situation is fine.

I even saw a post where someone suggested increasing the role buff effect from 1% stat boost to 3-4%, but quickly retracted that as soon as they realized that it'd basically wreck pug parties and fights would be tuned around its existence, making it a band-aid solution at best.