5.08 Patch - DPS still not balanced.

[Katie_Kitty]

BLM doesn't need a nerf. It needs competency training. In inexperienced hands its a mediocre class--only in experienced hands does it shine and not any brighter than it should.

The numbers don't actually back this up. The simple fact of the matter is that, as it stands now, a barely average BLM will contribute equal or more rDPS to the party than a BRD or RDM that plays well enough to finish in the top 5% of their class. If your BLM is a little above average, then they can reach numbers no RDM or BRD could even dream of hitting. Similarly, the same holds true at lower levels - An awful BLM will also beat an awful RDM (admittedly by a smaller margin from what I've seen). It's true that the gap closes a bit when the players are both bad, but if BLM was as difficult a job as the people who play it like to suggest, then at some point you would see that difficulty shine through in the hands of bad players. I'm not really seeing that, what I'm seeing is that they hold their own just fine against other jobs even when the person playing them is doing a poor job.

[Kabooa]

Yes. Re-read what you said. Repeatedly.

The context is that your party comp afforded you more mistakes. That's one of the biggest arguments in favor of this thread's existence.

More mistakes than who?

If we had a different party comp, would we have made those mistakes?

Does gear not also cover mistakes?

What's the arbitrary amount of mistakes a party should be allowed to recover from, regardless of composition or performance?

Are certain jobs more prone to mistakes than others?

Are we to balance jobs around how many mistakes they should be able to make?

Is a mistake only death?

How much should each job be able to contribute in recovering from the mistake?

[CKNovel]

And if we did have those lower jobs, -but no one died- we probably would have killed it too.

Which basically explained the whole problem and why the disparity needs to be smaller.
Because your comp has more of the DPS Pantheon you are allowed to make more mistake. Our group grabbed the 470 weapons, allowing us to make more mistake because we got a dps upgrade.

It's actually the perfect example, the more DPS your team has, the more mistakes you are allowed.

Because our comp only have 1 Melee, we are punished simply because someone wants to play the job they wants.
Also that having ranged is a heavy disadvantage despite the "mobility advantage".

EDIT:Mistakes means both death and damage debuff

[SaitoHikari]

I'm pretty sure you're intelligent enough to know how irrelevant those questions are. Really, a poor attempt at deflection.

Assuming the same amount of mistakes, the same amount of gear, the same amount of, well, everything... What we're trying to get through to you is that in a direct comparison, the class balance is at a point where, again, assuming every other factor is the same... You could swap ONE class from the top 5 to one of the bottom 5 in a lot of clears, with percentile performance being exactly the same (or even +30-40 percentile), and you'd end up with an enrage wipe instead.

Understand that I did not set out to attack you personally, for all of this is a commentary on the current state of the balance. But when you went out of your way with your only real message being to tell everyone else here to get gud and ignore all the very glaring and very obvious problems, and even tried to explain away how much of a difference 16 seconds makes in the grand scheme of things, it was worth stepping in to show how much that actually helped you for one of your clears.

[ForteNightshade]

And judging only the higher end parses of groups which have been collecting gear and optimizing over the last 6 weeks, compared to the more casual base which doesn't care about "the meta" is indicative of.. what exactly?

What each job is capable of when pushed to its near full potential. How is this so difficult to understand? Those optimized runs are precisely the data you want because it's the most accurate representation of the jobs' performance. For argument's sake, let's pretend Black Mage's max potential is 17,000 and Red Mage is 15,000. If you balance around these figures, the bottom inevitably increases for Red Mage, thus both the lower tier and higher tier benefit. Conversely, if you consider the lower tier where several mistakes and other outside variables occur, you can get a clouded picture—like Black Mage may be underpowered because at 30% Dragoon pulls ahead. This approach leads to issue like we've seen in the past with how insanely overpowered Warrior, Bard and Summoner all were at one point or another. Or asinine remarks like "we don't consider Dragoon when balancing Bard and Machinist damage."

Bottom line is this. If you're a good player than it doesn't really matter what job you play, you can find a group and clear the content. Short of that all you're doing is looking for an excuse to justify either your lack of ability, the lack of ability of your group, or anything else in between - rather than looking at yourself. That doesn't mean SE shouldn't do anything, as I've stated repeatedly in my posts, but there are 2 sides to every story. If you can't complete the content it's not your job, or combination of jobs in your group. It's you.

The "bottom line" is you need to stop strawmanning. No one is saying you can't clear content. We're talking about how certain jobs are widely inferior to others, thus demanding more effort from specific comps not due to the content challenging them but their preferred job simply being weak. There isn't two sides to this story because it's a dichotomy. Either the jobs are balanced or they aren't.

[whiskeybravo]

But that's probably the big difference between you and me. My interest in this argument is from the standpoint of a designer. Your posts here so far mostly just consist of poking the beehive.

This wasn't directed at me, but I feel like I've been poking that beehive too. Good thing I'm not allergic to bees.

The context is that your party comp afforded you more mistakes. That's one of the biggest arguments in favor of this thread's existence.

Gear affords you more mistakes as well, yet no one is arguing to nerf or buff gear acquisition. If all you can think of is buffing the lower dps, what actually happens? If you don't buff them enough then nothing really changes (except people get free margin for error), and if you buff too much it simply replaces whoever is on top now. More or less a zero sum game, so there has to be more to the equation.

I think one of the major draws to this game's endgame before was that numbers were so crunched down and classes were so finely balanced that people could absolutely argue skill level was a bigger factor over class composition in determining clear rates. The uproar is so loud now because the balance has tipped to a point where for the first time in a long while, we can no longer definitively say that.

Kinda funny considering how there was nearly unanimous consent early on that SHB has brought the best balancing the game has ever had thus far.

The current state of the balance has shifted in favor of class composition, a problem that plagues many other MMOs that a good number of people in this thread likely migrated from. Even though skill level is still more important, the very threat of class composition overtaking personal skill level scares people, and most people obviously don't want this spiral out of control when there's absolutely nothing good about it for the long term health of the game.

This has literally always been the case. It's also always proven over and over again how that it only ever really matters to those obsessed with rankings.

Do people here want another story? One of my static members played Dancer throughout this raid tier, but switched to a minimum ilvl Monk for E4S. So he's got a wall of 85-95 percentiles from 1-3 on Dancer, and then an 8 for Monk in E4S. He tells the rest of us that his Monk still consistently did an average of 200 more rdps than his geared Dancer at each major checkpoint during the fight (and the gap I imagine is only going to increase, as the monk fists dropped last week).

Why don't you take a second to imagine what would happen if DNC did as much damage as MNK.

On a side note, I don't extensively play caster, but I'm still of the opinion that the raise tax on RDM and SMN is a slightly bigger problem than the situation with the three ranged classes. Of course, all these issues should be addressed at once, but the raise tax is more problematic from a design standpoint because - as I've said elsewhere - the whole party already gets taxed from someone dying in the first place, placing such a heavy tax on the two casters for simply possessing a skill (that's usually used by the healers first) that might reverse one wipe into a clear out of many dozens of failed pulls is absurd from a logic standpoint. There should still be a tax, or else who would take BLM - but it should not be as wide as a 1k DPS difference.

They're taxed for more than just having a raise, but I suppose that's a nice simplification.

What each job is capable of when pushed to its near full potential. How is this so difficult to understand? Those optimized runs are precisely the data you want because it's the most accurate representation of the jobs' performance.

Exactly. The optimized groups are taking the optimal jobs. Are you really going to claim that there is 0 influence on BLM/MNK/DRG numbers when EVERY SINGLE SPEEDKILL COMP USES THEM?

We're talking about how certain jobs are widely inferior to others, thus demanding more effort from specific comps not due to the content challenging them but their preferred job simply being weak. There isn't two sides to this story because it's a dichotomy. Either the jobs are balanced or they aren't.

Is that before or after you inflate the difference by 20 to 50%?

[ForteNightshade]

Is that before or after you inflate the difference by 20 to 50%?

... Are you being willfully obtuse now or did you just not bother to actually read my post? The lower tier is irrelevant because the data provided isn't an accurate representation of the jobs' performance. You don't balance around a 20% or 50% Black Mage because that percentile range means they have made several mistakes either rotationally or mechanically. You balance at the top to remove such variables as it paints a more accurate picture. I really don't know how to dumb this down further for you.

Exactly. The optimized groups are taking the optimal jobs. Are you really going to claim that there is 0 influence on BLM/MNK/DRG numbers when EVERY SINGLE SPEEDKILL COMP USES THEM?

And why are they taking them? Because evidence shows they are far superior to their counterparts. Optimized groups didn't pick those jobs out of a hat and decide to only play them. They test which jobs perform the best and adjust accordingly. You're essentially saying the current big three are only strong because speed killers run with them. That's putting the cart before the horse since it ignores why they chose those jobs.

[SaitoHikari]

Gear affords you more mistakes as well, yet no one is arguing to nerf or buff gear acquisition. If all you can think of is buffing the lower dps, what actually happens? If you don't buff them enough then nothing really changes (except people get free margin for error), and if you buff too much it simply replaces whoever is on top now. More or less a zero sum game, so there has to be more to the equation.

Kinda funny considering how there was nearly unanimous consent early on that SHB has brought the best balancing the game has ever had thus far.

This has literally always been the case. It's also always proven over and over again how that it only ever really matters to those obsessed with rankings.

Why don't you take a second to imagine what would happen if DNC did as much damage as MNK.

They're taxed for more than just having a raise, but I suppose that's a nice simplification.

1) Gear affords you more mistakes because that's the entire freaking point of getting more gear in the first place. If they didn't, WHY would you even bother chasing after gear? Another irrelevant attempt at deflection.

2) Perception changes throughout an expansion. ShB looked more balanced at the start, but that was before people got comfortable with their new skills, the raid tier hit with actual enrage timers, FFLogs switched to rdps display, and people started to realize that what the developers were saying about balancing selfish DPS with party utility was actually a misleading statement at best.

3) And I'm saying that it's different this time because the disparity is now noticeably wide enough that you don't even need all this data to recognize that a problem exists.

4) No one is arguing for Dancer to match Monk damage. What we're arguing is that it's absolutely screwed up that, for all the party buffs they bring to the table, someone could actually just bring a Red Mage and (assuming both are roughly equal in percentiles) likely still have more total DPS contribution than the Dancer. Or bring one of the top five and still offer more contribution than the Dancer's party buffs (even with drastically lower percentile). That's two problems in one.

(Although I'm of the opinion that Dancer is probably one of the worst designed concepts for a MMO class I've ever seen, at least in terms of class balance. If they underperform as they are now, they'd be seen as a gimmick class that only looks good on paper. Bring them to the middle of the pack, and everyone below them will look even worse by comparison. And I cannot even think of an answer to this dilemma.)

5) I mean, they are taxed for more than having a raise, but what's your justification for keeping the gap as wide as it is? Seriously, I'd love to hear your thoughts on this.

So perhaps I should explain my actual stance in this thread: All I actually want is for the gap between the top 5 DPS classes and the bottom 5 DPS classes to be broken down, because no designer can really see that and say 'this is fine' with a straight face. This is either done by crunching the 1.7k gap (assuming 95th percentile) between Monk and Dancer towards something more reasonable like 1k-1.2k, and/or buffing the bottom 5 to close the gap between #5 Ninja and #6 Summoner from being a literal 600-700 difference to being a more reasonable 200-250. (That said, the developers did a good job with bringing up Ninja to help close that gap, that used to be 700-800 between Samurai and Summoner before.)

And those are lenient numbers - many others in this thread would argue for those gaps to be crunched down even harder. The numbers I stated are, IMO, enough for skill level to undoubtedly become the biggest factor once more. As it is now, a party consisting of 2/2 or even 3/1 of the bottom five classes need to collectively perform so much better percentile-wise to achieve similar results compared to a 1/3 party (or even to beat enrage in some cases), to the point where one cannot fault them for seeing how the relationship between skill level vs class composition has tipped. (And that's not including 4/0 or 0/4 parties, since the former would be a pure caster/ranged party, and the latter will only really happen if you bring two Black Mages or go triple melee, both of which won't really happen in a practical setting).

[AikenDrum]

Can i get free margin for error if it's nothing?

Also if dnc would be doing same damage as mnk obviously the game would become unplayable, exhibit a: brd, smn and mch - neither of them can actually play the game. true story.

[Karshan]

I don't really understand why so many pages.

Currently on E2S, a 95% blm does 12% more DPS than a 95% SMN all things considered (and most likely a 95% never had to raise in the fight) -> not balanced
Currently on E2S, you just need to be a 70% BLM to equate a 95% SMN, there again, all things considered (raise, difficulty to maintain rotation, etc...) -> not balanced.

There is not much room for debate don't you think ?

https://fr.fflogs.com/zone/statistics/29#boss=66
As long as the gray traits in the middle of these bars are not all roughly within a 300-400 range, there is no balance. May I remind you it's raid DPS metric, and date from fights so taking into account job disparity, specificities for uptime, etc...