Dancer Flourish is badly designed and not actually enjoyable to use

[ForteNightshade]

As for who the job flow should be balanced around, certainly not the top 5%. Job changes in SHB have been pushing jobs toward more general usability and a lower gap between the skill floor and skill ceiling. If forced to choose, SE very intentionally balances toward the middle of the pack, and this has clearly been their philosophy since late HW when they admitted their AST changes would make the job OP in the hands of a highly skilled player before going on to specify that the average player who played whatever card they got, not the top end who painstakingly fished for Balance between pulls, was their balance target.

Uh... citation needed? To my knowledge they never once mentioned intentionally making Astro OP. The community more or less assumed 3.4 Astro was a desperate plea from the dev team to give the job a chance because it had been DoA for over a year by that point.

Balancing around the average player is pointless. They aren't going to push the jobs to its limits, therefore it won't provide an accurate assessment of their potential. The average player will consistently die, mess up their rotation or some other valuable that will not be consistent; making the data useless. Case in point, at the 50% margin Black Mage is pulling lower numbers than all four melee and Summoner by no small amount. This would suggest a serious buff is needed, yet if you look at the 95% range, Black Mage is beating out Dragoon and Ninja while only lagging slightly behind Summoner. Had they buffed Black Mage based on the average player... it'd be hilariously overpowered to the point you may drop the melee entirely.

Simply put, the data will never be consistent enough to make it useful.

[Harmonea]

Uh... citation needed? To my knowledge they never once mentioned intentionally making Astro OP. The community more or less assumed 3.4 Astro was a desperate plea from the dev team to give the job a chance because it had been DoA for over a year by that point.

Balancing around the average player is pointless. They aren't going to push the jobs to its limits, therefore it won't provide an accurate assessment of their potential. The average player will consistently die, mess up their rotation or some other valuable that will not be consistent; making the data useless. Case in point, at the 50% margin Black Mage is pulling lower numbers than all four melee and Summoner by no small amount. This would suggest a serious buff is needed, yet if you look at the 95% range, Black Mage is beating out Dragoon and Ninja while only lagging slightly behind Summoner. Had they buffed Black Mage based on the average player... it'd be hilariously overpowered to the point you may drop the melee entirely.

Simply put, the data will never be consistent enough to make it useful.

You've got an incredible talent for multitasking; you're both misrepresenting my position (by saying BLM must need potency buffs if it's below melee at 50%) and further derailing the thread.

AGAIN: Like it or not, balancing around the average player is not pointless. No, they're not going to give BLM a potency buff, but why exactly do you think changes like drastically lowered cooldowns on abilities like transpose, aetherial manipulation, and between the lines happened? It wasn't so the top 5% could uptime more gooder, it was so the average player didn't feel awful every time they had to move and lost a load of DPS as a result. Why do you think ice spells now have zero cost in fire? After all, GOOD players knew how much they needed to cast a Blizz3 and didn't let themselves fall under that number. Now they've made it so not only is it not punishing to drive yourself to zero MP, it's the entire point to end your fire phase with Despair.

Why do you think blood of the dragon now has a self-sustaining effect in that its CD is lower than its duration? Why do you think Anatman is a thing? Losing your main buff and having to do the ramp-up all over again feels punishing. Top end players don't have to deal with that on the regular, but they got added regardless. Why do you think tank stances had their DPS penalties removed? Top end tanks were proficient at stance dancing and knew exactly how much hate they needed to get before they could turn it off, and some burden of responsibility was shifted onto the DPS and healers, which again, top end players had no issue executing, but those all got nixed, too.

Notice I didn't point out a single potency buff? These are all about job QoL and flow. When an ability feels clunky for a large enough portion of the playerbase, SE is going to take a look at how it fundamentally works, regardless of whether the top 5% think it's perfectly fine.

Which is the entire premise of this thread, so can we get back on topic? Dancer? Flourish?

As for a source on the AST thing, it was in the Q&As surrounding the Vegas Fanfest in Oct 2016, which were about a month after 3.4 and the AST buffs. That Fanfest footage is trapped in the awful paid streaming service they used that year, so it's not feasible for me to find at work, but that should be enough for you to get looking... if you're actually interested.

Is it possible that we’re arguing two separate things, then? I’m arguing job potency—how strong they are, and why they should be balanced around higher play to prevent balancing issues in strength. You seem to be arguing job design.

The premise of this thread literally is job design so.... Yeah, obviously that's what I'm discussing.

[ForteNightshade]

snip

Ironically, you have misrepresented mine and fail to understand how balancing works.

What you're describing is job design and quality of life not balance. Not one of your examples has anything remotely to do with job balance sine they aren't providing a numerical advantage but merely making the job easier or more comfortable to play. Once again, that is not job balance but simple quality of life. They are not the same thing, which is why we're essentially arguing pass one another. You're using the wrong terminology.

As for thread derailment. It veered off into job balance before you came hence multiple people aren't simply talking about Dancer now. So there was no derailment, especially seeing the OP's original complaints were either disagreed with or outright disproven several pages ago.

As for a source on the AST thing, it was in the Q&As surrounding the Vegas Fanfest in Oct 2016, which were about a month after 3.4 and the AST buffs. That Fanfest footage is trapped in the awful paid streaming service they used that year, so it's not feasible for me to find at work, but that should be enough for you to get looking... if you're actually interested.

I watched that stream. They never mentioned Astro intentionally being overpowered. It would be a horrible thing to openly acknowledge for any developer anyway, especially because it rendered White Mage entirely obsolete for the last tier.

....

No words

You actually think you know balance and what's good for the game better than the actual guy that directs the game, plays his own game and regularly hangs with the community.

I'm done with this thread, that's Nth level delusion you got there buddy.
Just remember its a game, we all want to have fun/enjoy the content.

Peace out.

When it comes to optimization, the higher end players often know more than the developers because they min/max everything. Which the dev team simply don't have time for. A prime example of this disconnect was the Piercing debuff. They outright acknowledged not balancing Bard and Machinist around Dragoon... which led to the former being seriously overpowered for four tiers.