Quote Originally Posted by Myon88 View Post
See you next time. And no that wasn't an 'ad hominem' attack on you, It was a simple statement of fact that the dragoon rotation is just as easy as the summoner one. If you don't think they deserve their damage for that reason, neither do any of the melee jobs.
I mean, does anybody?

You get relatively good results for relatively little effort. Adhere to some basics, keep the uptime, and you're generally at the 80-85% of a character's max potential in their gearset, and that's a pretty low bar to set.

If the barometer is balance at perfect play, then at perfect play there is little reason that the jobs shouldn't just have an equivocal or at least close to, contribution to damage with theoretically equivalent supplemental tools. In this viewpoint, the complexity of a job is just a learning curve (And that's pretty much the same angle competitive arena games come from) and, eventually, you're going to have a comparable pool of players across any job that finish the climb.

But then we run into the issue with the ranged. By establishing that balance at perfect play is the goal, then the ranged need to be significantly higher - Not because they're difficult, but because they don't have the secondary tools to justify the deficit.

But, as someone who likes to pick up the shooty shooty root and tooty, I can't justify that from a design perspective. I'm not near perfect play, but the deficit between me and a comparably geared Machinist who was at, if not perfect than much closer than I, was around 500.

Taking my own Gun Ramuh, which needs work, compared to an average 99th, who is likely close to if not BiS, and applying a gear upgrade, puts me at about 4-500 within that mark. Small sample size but I'm busy slamming my head into the Shiva wall.

Now apply a raw increase to match the 99ths to 99ths, and scale me applicably, and I end up at around 18,500, plus or minus for RNG and damage ranges. I'm not a great machinist, but I can pretty much guarantee the potency I'll be spitting out at any given time at any point in any place unless someone decides to murder me. It's probably the most stress free job I've played, Stormblood variant included.

I'm curious on your thoughts, because in the perfect play viewpoint, all jobs should have the same ending point at perfect play (or have something to compensate the line being lower), and the path along the way ultimately doesn't matter so long as the finish line is in the same spot, but this would be like having the track lanes be made of different materials - sand in one, pits in another, and the last being just smooth asphalt.