Summoner is doing too much in 5.10

[Kabooa]

I do not understand why magical caster DD's always have to do less damage than melee DPS. This is a community meta restriction we place upon ourselves. The game encourages to fill out the party for the 1% buff up to 5%. That means melee DD, magical caster DD, physical ranger DD, and an optional DD of your choice.

This is a giant overreaching concept that can't really be summarized in a single post.

The short version is still rather lengthy, so bear with me.

When it comes to balancing classes in a Trinity game, the hard math that comes from theorcrafting and practical application comes down to the right tool for the right job. The 'strongest' jobs aren't necessarily those with the most damage, but those who deal with the most mechanics / reduce the overall strength and difficulty of the encounter.

The reason that FF14 values damage so much is that the player's ability to influence the encounter is generally limited to some hard binaries, with DPS being the only scaling adjustment. ("Skip soar or disband"). The hard binaries are generally tank busters and healing requirements via the raid busters. The hard enrage, while adding a suitable layer of tension, also removes some ability to compensate. Being 'less efficient, more consistent' is generally the motto when it comes to encounter puzzles in other games, and really only applies in FF14 as gear scales the player up, allowing the 'less efficient' to clear the same hurdle.

"DPS is king" because it's the only real agency the player has in influencing the encounter.

So who gets the most DPS?

Generally speaking, it's usually those who bring the least supplemental tools.

One would expect this means Black Mage, Samurai, and Machinist.

As a secondary property, it's also those who have the most constraints. The Samurai must be in melee and must hit positionals to maximize damage. The Black mage must complete a cast in order to deal damage, but does so from any range. The Machinist has none of those constraints.

So your expectation is that these three jobs deal the most damage, but the order of their ranking should be Samurai >= Black Mage > Machinist. The thresh hold and difference between them is generally where the contest is, but the idea is that encounter design varies enough, and player capability matters enough, that the three can leap frog around these on-paper rankings.

Almost done.

But we also run into the problem where each of those jobs also have 2-3 other jobs who fall into the same category, who bring a variety of non-damage oriented tools along with varying effective raid damage increases.

So we have some things we have to consider.
1. The jobs who bring extras cannot deal equal or greater damage. That is immutable, or the jobs who bring nothing else are obsolete. "Extras" are non-damage oriented tools or capabilities.
2. There are four slots for them. At a bare minimum the value of a given role must at least be the equivalent of going from 105% stats to 104%.
3. A job's given strength should be assumed over a variety of encounters, not just ones tailored for it. A tailored encounter should be its chance to excel, not its chance to be passable.

With this in mind, lets start with 1.

The Samurai cannot be outclassed by Monk or Dragoon. The Ninja's supplemental tools have largely been removed, with Trick Attack mostly just being lip service. That said, compared to the other jobs, Ninjutsu affords it more robust capability from out of melee range, so in fights without 100% uptime, the ninja maintains some capability of maintaining meaningful uptime if disengaging from the boss for a few gcds. Mantra has been mostly rendered a moot point, though it still has use. The melee's current design (not tuning) would lead one to assume the following hierarchy.

Ranking

1. Samurai
2. Monk, Dragoon
3. Ninja

With that in mind, Black Mage would slot in at 2x or 3 spot - They have a fair amount of tools to deal with forced movement and mainly suffer in heavily extended periods, but they aren't too dissimilar from Red Mages in that regard. The current patch makes VerScathe less awful but likely still undesirable. Summoners maintain the most on demand mobility, though improper play leverages a tax for each step.

And the problem comes back again to Raise, as without them, Red Mage and Summoner are perfectly fine on the same rung of 2 / 3. The value Raise has fluctuates, but the end result comes back to consideration 1: The jobs who bring extras cannot deal equal or greater damage.

1. Samurai
2. Monk, Dragoon, Ninja
2/3. Ninja, Black Mage
4. Red Mage, Summoner

Ranged plain and simple have to come in last in their current iteration. The gap is what's debatable. This comes into consideration 3: A job's given strength should be assumed over a variety of encounters, not just ones tailored for it. A tailored encounter should be its chance to excel, not its chance to be passable.

What encounter 'tailors' to the Ranged? Effectively any encounter that doesn't tailor to Melee or Casters. Machinist has nothing that the other ranged do not, and therefore it is relatively easy to place this. The Machinist should do less damage than a Black mage, but more damage than any equally mobile jobs who bring extras.

Our final ranking looks like this.

1. Samurai
2. Monk, Dragoon, Ninja
2/3. Black Mage
4. Red Mage, Machinist
5. Summoner, Bard, Dancer

Now that brings consideration 2 into play. Why not just bring 4 melee if you can? While in an ideal world, encounter design would A) Potentially allow this at times but also B) It's still way better to bring a variety of jobs, for the sake of our concerns, it effectively means that the Highest performing of one role and the lowest performing of another role do not differ by more than about .96-1% of a raid's total damage at equal skill levels.

This means if your team clocks in at 90,000, the Samurai is not higher than 900 over a Summoner, or Bard/Dancer. Using some arbitrary numbers...

1. Samurai - 16,000
2. Monk, Dragoon, Ninja
2/3. Ninja, Black Mage
4. Red Mage, Machinist
5. Summoner, Bard, Dancer - 15,100

Ok I lied, we weren't almost done back there.

Now I doubt that's a universally accepted list (I often jest on the ones that do show up), but it's worth noting that this is assuming jobs in their tailored encounters.

The Samurai / melee fluctuate down as melee uptime is denied. The casters fluctuate down as more movement is demanded.

TLDR: "It's a tier list! We aren't sick of these yet!"

[wereotter]

<ranking explained>
TLDR: "It's a tier list! We aren't sick of these yet!"

I don't 100% agree with your final conclusion, but agree with your logic, and appreciate you explaining it for others. I think that jobs that natively need to stay still partially or fully to do their skills should have a higher DPS potential than jobs that have no such restriction. And as such, the DPS potential for RDM and SMN should always be higher than the potential for any of the ranged physical jobs. Like you said that fights that are movement intensive, especially with mechanics that have a point-blank range from the boss that require both melee and casters to disengage should be those fights where ranged physical shine. But those roles should, in a fight with no movement required, have lower DPS potential than both melee and casting roles.

Though in the end, I do think that the differential between these types of jobs, especially when adjusting for raid contribution, should be minimal. Ideally non-existent, but I realize that would be an impossibility, so looking for very minor differences between job choices should be the goal. Every job should be viable for all content, and I would say that's most likely true. In the end, unless a job is just performing well outside that range of balance, the differences people complain about are pretty minor.

[Akiudo]

I don't 100% agree with your final conclusion, but agree with your logic, and appreciate you explaining it for others. I think that jobs that natively need to stay still partially or fully to do their skills should have a higher DPS potential than jobs that have no such restriction. And as such, the DPS potential for RDM and SMN should always be higher than the potential for any of the ranged physical jobs. Like you said that fights that are movement intensive, especially with mechanics that have a point-blank range from the boss that require both melee and casters to disengage should be those fights where ranged physical shine. But those roles should, in a fight with no movement required, have lower DPS potential than both melee and casting roles.

Though in the end, I do think that the differential between these types of jobs, especially when adjusting for raid contribution, should be minimal. Ideally non-existent, but I realize that would be an impossibility, so looking for very minor differences between job choices should be the goal. Every job should be viable for all content, and I would say that's most likely true. In the end, unless a job is just performing well outside that range of balance, the differences people complain about are pretty minor.

to add to this, the problem at least with the physical ranged role as is is that even in those "heavy movement fights" they don't shine, they just look a little less like a turd then everywhere else

[wereotter]

to add to this, the problem at least with the physical ranged role as is is that even in thos "hey movement fights" they don't shine, they just look a little less like a turd then everywhere else

That's fair, and also why I don't think the differential should be massive. Also, though, now bard and dancer both have 100% up time on raid buffs which is another reason that they might be lower, but also I can agree that given players ability to minimize caster movement and work around mechanics, the difference doesn't need to be huge, but it needs to be enough to justify having a caster else raid groups will just say "if we don't' have to plan movement around the caster and can get the same benefit from taking two ranged physical, why shouldn't we just do that?"

[Akiudo]

That's fair, and also why I don't think the differential should be massive. Also, though, now bard and dancer both have 100% up time on raid buffs which is another reason that they might be lower, but also I can agree that given players ability to minimize caster movement and work around mechanics, the difference doesn't need to be huge, but it needs to be enough to justify having a caster else raid groups will just say "if we don't' have to plan movement around the caster and can get the same benefit from taking two ranged physical, why shouldn't we just do that?"

as i really don't get the sentiment, and i'm not trying to start an argument but why do you (its mostly a general question, but you seem to at least try to see the other site which is something a large part of the forum sadly fails at) believe having strong (or in this case allways active) raid buffs should mean lower dps ? i mean lower personal dps of course, thats not a question, but why lower raid dps ? what USE is having a 100% uptime group buff if the buff gives 1000 raid dps if in exchange squares takes 1100 personal dps from me ?

[Kabooa]

as i really don't get the sentiment, and i'm not trying to start an argument but why do you (its mostly a general question, but you seem to at least try to see the other site which is something a large part of the forum sadly fails at) think believe having strong (or in this case allways active) raid buffs should mean lower dps ? i mean lower personal dps of course, thats not a question, but why lower raid dps ? what USE is having a 100% uptime group buff if the buff gives 1000 raid dps if in exchange squares takes 1100 personal dps from me ?

To me, raid buffs aren't the reason for Personal DPS being lower.

Non-combat utility is, and raid buffs ease up the loss taken away there.

The problem we run into is either the utility has been removed and not subsequently compensated for, or the utility in question is never useful, so it taking up any of the stat budget just leaves a sour taste. And the problem with that problem is the inherent value to the utility, when it cannot be quantified, is subjective.

[wereotter]

as i really don't get the sentiment, and i'm not trying to start an argument but why do you (its mostly a general question, but you seem to at least try to see the other site which is something a large part of the forum sadly fails at) believe having strong (or in this case allways active) raid buffs should mean lower dps ? i mean lower personal dps of course, thats not a question, but why lower raid dps ? what USE is having a 100% uptime group buff if the buff gives 1000 raid dps if in exchange squares takes 1100 personal dps from me ?

The balance might not be right across roles, but within your role, say you bring 15,000 DPS as a bard (just throwing a number out there, I'm not sure what people should actually expect of bards) and you bring your song buffs that were just added, your mobility, nature's minne, etc. And then say a machinist also does 15,000 DPS but has none of those tools. Then in that case the obvious choice for any forming raid team is to bring the bard and not the machinist. That means they need to calculate in an 8-man group how much extra damage a bard is bringing to the table over that machinist and adjust the numbers accordingly.

So let's say over the course of a fight that bard is boosting everyone else's damage by about 1%, and for the same of making the math easy on myself rather than calculate for every role, let's say the other three DPS do 15,000, tanks do 10,000 and healers do 8,000.

In this scenario, you're adding:
150 DPS to the other three DPS jobs for a total of 450
100 DPS to both tanks for a total of 200
80 DPS for both healers for a total of 160

That means, in this situation, for a bard to break even with that machinist, your DPS should be 14,370 instead of 15,000. If your'e higher than that, you've made another job useless. This is a balance that's hard for the developers to create and maintain, especially once they realize that a design for one job has failed making it do more or less damage than they expected it should. Then once they add those buffs to underperforming jobs it can further throw off the balance they're trying to maintain. So in your example, adding 1,000 raid increase while losing 1,100 personal might have just been the best they could do at the time to try to maintain balance, especially considering how the crit buff will scale exponentially to be more powerful over the course of the expansion.

Across roles it becomes more subjective, like I think casters should be able to output higher DPS than ranged physical if the right doesn't require a lot of movement, but that there should be encounters where ranged physical does more because they're more movement intensive. Also it becomes a point of contention like we've seen in the caster DPS community when it comes to questions like how much DPS is a raise worth? Doubly so in fights where that caster never had to use that raise, but still was penalized for having it in their pocket.

Short answer, they have to make jobs that increase the DPS of other party members weaker than those who don't bring those skills otherwise there would be no point to running the ones without. And if they made everyone have access to the same utility, people would complain about jobs all being the same.

[Akiudo]

snip

shortening your text not to be disrespectful but i think i would quote twice as much as i say myself otherwise and that feels kinda bad so well...

lets for a moment forget about utility buffs, natures minne and things like that obviously need some weighting to a class performance but thats not what i meant, i literally mean nothing but the dps buff

why do you think it is worse if the raid dps is 100 higher with bard than mch because of the raidbuff compared to the other way around ? thats the point i can't see, why would a theoretical bard without natures minne/wardens paen being 100 raid dps above mch make mch obsolete, yet a mch being 100 dps above bard doesn't do the same to bard ? the argument people generally make implies the pure damage buff itself should carry a penalty higher than the buff it offers, therefore the question. obviously one way or another its impossible to get the balance absolutely perfectly on point, but as we are talking design goals here i think the question is fair.


the crit buff in particular scaling exponentionally while true i still believe is a bad argument to overcompensate because that would mean you balance a class right now as being too weak because "in 3 patches when everyone has another 60 item levels it will sort itself out" can you balance like that ? sure, but should you really ? especially as thats not even necessarely happening as it says nothing about how the class itself scales