Suggestion for: RDM improvements

[Mhaeric]

Upper right number seems confused.

It's less than 20 difference between Max and Min on Red mage, about the same as Dragoon, and only 1 less than Ninja.

In other words, you got differences of 19.x, 20.x, and 21.x.

No one in their right mind would say "Dragoon is only slightly easier than Ninja" or "Red mage is just as difficult as Ninja", or "Paladin is harder than all of them."

To clear up what that number in the chart is: Its the percent difference of the minium value from the maximum value, rather than the raw difference between min and max. I.e. (max-min)/max. (There's 2 typos in the chart: either Monk should be 20.2 and Dancer should be 19.0 or one or both of their min/max values has the typo)

DISCLAIMER! Everything from this point on in my post is just some math stuff I did for fun rather than actually making an argument for anything. There are way too many factors to be able to represent how hard a job is with a single number.

That number in their chart is meant to represent the skill gap and how wide of a dps gap there is between different skill levels. I think a better gauge to the above calculation would be comparing the percent difference of the minimum compared to the median to the percent difference of the maximum compared to the median since that would give you the relative difficulty of reaching median level compared to the relative difficulty of reaching the maximum. Just for funsies I did just that! The numbers in a list below are just the final relative differences, but before that I've listed Monk's calculation in full to show how I arrived at them.

Monk:
(Max-Median)/Median = (99.4-88.65)/88.65 = 12.1
(Median-Minimum)/Median = (88.65-79.28)/88.65 = 10.6
Difference = 12.1 - 10.6 = 1.5
This result indicates it is harder to reach skill cap than it is to reach the median but needs to be compared to the other jobs first.

Now for the full calculations in order from "hardest" to "easiest":

Ninja 3.9
Samurai 2.6
Dancer 2.5
Black Mage 2.4
Summoner 2.0
Red Mage 2.0
Dragoon 1.7
Monk 1.5
Bard 1.3
Machinist 0.6

Edit: Adding tanks:
Gunbreaker 2.7
Dark Knight 1.9
Warrior 1.2
Paladin -0.7 (Yes, Paladins are apparently so easy that they ended up with a negative number)

[Kabooa]

Now for the full calculations in order from "hardest" to "easiest":

Ninja 3.9
Samurai 2.6
Dancer 2.5
Black Mage 2.4
Summoner 2.0
Red Mage 2.0
Dragoon 1.7
Monk 1.5
Bard 1.3
Machinist 0.6

This can only inspire the most rational of responses.

Jesting aside, I'm going to come out and say that difficulty should never be a significant impact on Job performance if we want to talk about balance. All that does is create a timeline until the "easier" job is obsolete. There's a reason characters in Moba-types that have more value while being more 'skill based' (RE: Not point and click) get constantly adjusted down to a normalized value.

The skill floor (and ceiling) will eventually be surmounted and reached, thus ensuring every other option is just a weaker option.

Now - If -every- option had a 'harder' variant of itself that lead to higher performance (RE: Monk Tornado Kick), then I think that's fine, if we're talking values in the 5-10% range, but the punishment for doing it wrong should also be equally lower.

The fun in having more demanding options is the demand itself. Having a suitable, stable and simple 90%, but with the option to attempt a more volatile 80-100% range, and having that for every job, might seem antithetical to what I just said, but the key is that the option exists for every job, instead of just some jobs.

I think players should have the opportunity to excel, but the prestige should primarily be the playing itself, not the end result. Having a 'more than enough' simpler path but also a challenging 'it's worth it if you can do it right' path would be ideal.