Quote Originally Posted by Harmonea View Post
Alright Hyo, if you insist, have your little hissy fit about your respective parse percentiles, I won't stop you. Just let me pop some popcorn before you keep going though, alright?
Pardon, but when someone starts questioning whether or not I actually play my job simply because I keep countering their arguments, I’m going to defend myself. I’m terribly sorry if that offends you.

Anyway, you can say they shouldn't balance around average play all day long, but that is absolutely their design philosophy, like it or not. I edited an example into my post there just before you responded. And I get it; from a development perspective, a job that only works well for 5% of your playerbase is a job that doesn't work well for 95% of your playerbase, and that means it simply isn't working. I find it interesting, though, that you ignored that there's a third option, in which design changes bring a job back in line for players of all skill levels.
Can you provide citation to support your AST example? I’m very curious to see where you got it from.

In terms of damage and job potential, you should always consider the highest for each job. You should never balance around average play because then you could end up with scenarios where the same job is broken at the higher levels of play. If, for example, they balanced BLM around 50th percentile: currently, BLM is being outdone by all 4 melee DPS and SMN. If their design philosophy was that BLM should be on top because if its nature as a selfish DPS job, they might opt to buff it. But then we run into issues at 95th percentile play, where BLM is below SMN and tied with MNK and SAM in E4S. Imagine buffing the job and what it would do to the job at a 95th level of play: it would now be busted. That’s why you cannot consider the middle in terms of job potential and balance.

I'm not arguing aDPS is king or anything absurd like that, but there ARE some design flaws.
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.