5.08 Patch - DPS still not balanced.

[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%?