Summoner is doing too much in 5.10

[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]

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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

[wereotter]

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I have to say I'm not terribly knowledgable regarding the discrepancies of the output on the physical ranged jobs.... so I'm going to go at your example and say that if the difference between a bard and a machinist playing at equal skill levels is 100 DPS then that's a difference that regardless of which way it leaned in favor of, I'd be okay with. The jobs are never exactly balanced 100% so we just kind of have to accept that there will be some jobs that do slightly more and some that do slightly less.

It definitely feels bad to be the one doing less. I saw that as someone who was playing red mage for raid this expansion up till this patch. So I really do understand the feel bad when you look at the others in your role outperforming you. If the discrepancy is large, then definitely it's something that should be fixed. If it's small, then I would just say to roll with it. Sometimes some jobs in a role do slightly better than the others, sometimes they do slightly worse, and the best we can hope for is to be close to the same once party buffs are taken into consideration.

Though there will be people who want to squeeze out every last point of DPS from the team as possible, and will refuse entry for certain jobs, most players will look at such a minor discrepancy and roll with it. In fact sometimes even if the bard is slightly lower, some players will look at it and think "yeah, but they're raising MY DPS" and insist on the bard anyway.

As far as the crit buff, I only say that it will even out in the long term because nerfing jobs has been notoriously unpopular and Square tends to save those changes for the major expansions. Giving a job a buff that's balanced now but is over powered in a year or two will only cause more problems down the line, which is probably why the developers were cautious about it right now. Bard song buffs were really strong in Stormblood, and they don't want to go down that rabbit hole again. Easier to buff bard more in the future than over adjust it now and have to justify nerfing it.

That said, if your job is suffering being too far behind machinist, I do hope for you and all people who main it that the discrepancy is adjusted sooner than later.