The potential problem with low level Roulettes in 6.0

[Seraphor]

That's not necessarily the case. The primary imbalancing factor is stats and not skills. Level 15 skills at level 80 stats are stronger than level 80 skills at level 15 stats.

It absolutely is the case.
Not only do jobs gain access to more potent skills at higher levels, but they also gain more oGCDs to weave between their GCDs, increasing their APM ad overall DPS, plus they gain extra potency by way of traits like Main and Mend.

Taking Monk and it's AoE rotation as an example for DPS against 3 targets. And lets completely ignore Traits in this example as well, because I suppose you could say "don't sync traits"

Level 15: you have no AoE, your DPS is limited to your basic single target rotation. [Avg potency 206 per GCD]
Level 18: you gain a skill that gives you a 10% damage buff that should ideally be up constantly. [227 per GCD]
Level 26: your first AoE move [297]
Level 30: your second AoE move [341]
Level 35: you get an oGCD in Shoulder tackle that adds to your DPS [365]
Level 40: Fists of Fire, another permanent 10% damage buff [398]
Level 45: you final AoE skill [446]
Level 50: Perfect Balance (I'm not entirely sure how impactful this will be to the AoE rotation, but at the very least it gives an extra 30 potency each time you substitute Arm of the Destroyer, but I won't add this because it's not that big, maybe increases these numbers by 5?)
Level 56: Elixer Field, this oGCD makes a big difference. [526]
Level 68: Riddle of Fire, 25% buff that's up 22% of the time, slightly more than a permanent 5% damage buff. [548]
Level 70 + 74: Brotherhood and Enlightenment, I include these together because Brotherhood is what makes Enlightenment a reliable oGCD to use in the rotation. A little RNG here so this will have to be a rough guess, but typically you get to use it at least twice in each Brotherhood cycle so... [avg potency per GCD 579]

A level 15 Monk rotation is doing only a third of the potency of a level 80 Monk rotation, without taking any stat differences or traits into account. This could be exactly the same person, simply playing differently, using only their level 15 skills or their full level 80 kit.

(Also, this was using very rough 'per GCD' calculations, basically 'per 2.5-3 seconds'. If I were to do this properly and work out per second potencies, I'd also have to factor in Greased Lightning, which would create an even bigger disparity as it was skew it from ~3s to ~2s as more GL stacks become available)

[PyurBlue]

It absolutely is the case.
Not only do jobs gain access to more potent skills at higher levels, but they also gain more oGCDs to weave between their GCDs, increasing their APM ad overall DPS, plus they gain extra potency by way of traits like Main and Mend.

Yes, but stats matter a lot more. I didn't say that skill don't matter at all, but they are far less significant than stats.

A level 15 Monk rotation is doing only a third of the potency of a level 80 Monk rotation, without taking any stat differences or traits into account. This could be exactly the same person, simply playing differently, using only their level 15 skills or their full level 80 kit.

This is why a damage multiplier is needed. To validate what I said about stats mattering a lot more though, a level 15 class will do around 100 damage per hit (I don't have an exact number). A Level 80 MNK will auto attack for something like 8000 on average according to fflogs. Using your estimate, let's multiply the level 15 MNK attack by 5 (a big over estimate) to make up for the difference in potency. You only get 500. Stats matter more than skills. To fix this, we just need to multiply the level 80 MNK's overall DPS by some number to bring it in line with the level 15's. OGCD's and average potency don't cause any issues.

[Seraphor]

Yes, but stats matter a lot more. I didn't say that skill don't matter at all, but they are far less significant than stats.


This is why a damage multiplier is needed. To validate what I said about stats mattering a lot more though, a level 15 class will do around 100 damage per hit (I don't have an exact number). A Level 80 MNK will auto attack for something like 8000 on average according to fflogs. Using your estimate, let's multiply the level 15 MNK attack by 5 (a big over estimate) to make up for the difference in potency. You only get 500. Stats matter more than skills. To fix this, we just need to multiply the level 80 MNK's overall DPS by some number to bring it in line with the level 15's. OGCD's and average potency don't cause any issues.

The point is your "you just need to multiply..." misses the point.
Even if you did this, a level 80 rotation would still do three times the damage of a level 15 rotation, which is still way too much.
You can't just add another x0.33 multiplier to make up for this as:
A. Not all jobs rotations will have the same disparity, so that extra multiplier will not fit all.
B. We then get the problem of a level 80 character needing to pull off a level 80 rotation flawlessly in order to keep up with the single button spam of a level 15 character.

[PyurBlue]

The point is your "you just need to multiply..." misses the point.
Even if you did this, a level 80 rotation would still do three times the damage of a level 15 rotation, which is still way too much.

That doesn't make any sense. Each level's DPS value is a number. Compare those numbers and you get a ratio. It's pretty easy to make them equivalent. If you multiply the level 80 rotation by 0, the level 15 rotation is a lot stronger. No matter how big the high level DPS value is, it can always be made equal to or less than the low level one.

You can't just add another x0.33 multiplier to make up for this as:
A. Not all jobs rotations will have the same disparity, so that extra multiplier will not fit all.

Will all jobs have the exact same multiplier? No, but using the same one for all jobs in a role is pretty reasonable. If that didn't work it would mean that classes were very imbalanced. Also keep in mind that in leveling content perfect equality isn't a requirement. As things are now, in a given dungeon one class might have AoE while another doesn't. One player might have role skills while another doesn't as these don't get synced. A common multiplier for all DPS, all healer, and all tanks is perfectly reasonable.

B. We then get the problem of a level 80 character needing to pull off a level 80 rotation flawlessly in order to keep up with the single button spam of a level 15 character.

Level 15 rotations aren't foolproof. An ice mage does about 50% of the damage a proper BLM would do. If someone at level 15 just mindlessly mashed their ranged attack as a melee (which has happened) they are also going to do about half of their damage. You see something similar when a class is low enough to lose their AoE. And of course whether you level sync or keep skills could be a toggle. Lazy players, which are rare enough, won't be a bigger problem in a dungeon with stat sync vs level sync. Poor or new players might actually perform better since they won't have to deal with constantly losing out on new skills and be able to practice with their full ability set every time they enter a dungeon.

[Seraphor]

Will all jobs have the exact same multiplier? No, but using the same one for all jobs in a role is pretty reasonable. If that didn't work it would mean that classes were very imbalanced.

Jobs at lower levels ARE very imbalanced. the Monk example might be a 3 fold increase, but something like Dancer or Red Mage is much, much less. So applying the same ratio to all jobs would make those jobs pretty much useless.

[MariaArvana]

Will all jobs have the exact same multiplier? No, but using the same one for all jobs in a role is pretty reasonable. If that didn't work it would mean that classes were very imbalanced. Also keep in mind that in leveling content perfect equality isn't a requirement. As things are now, in a given dungeon one class might have AoE while another doesn't. One player might have role skills while another doesn't as these don't get synced. A common multiplier for all DPS, all healer, and all tanks is perfectly reasonable.

Using his MNK example, what if the MNK in question is only 40? Applying a universal multiplier to bring down a level 80 MNK would make a level 40 MNK deal close to half the damage of a level 15 MNK, even playing absolutely flawlessly. "nerfing damage" is far from a simple concept, as it requires a huge amount of balancing, analysis of toolkits at literally every level that a job gains a new part of its toolkit, and would be a logistical balancing nightmare; you'd literally be getting weaker in older dungeons as you leveled up then when you were at that level, quite the oxymoron.

Unless they go dungeon by dungeon, job by job, meticulously nerfing damage by EXACT amounts for EACH instance in the game, damage nerfs will always either:

1) cause the 80's to still be overpowered if they balance around the 80 not doing an optimal rotation, meaning any 80 doing an optimal rotation will still utterly shatter any level 15 out of the park.
2) cause the 80's to have to perform flawlessly to match the limited toolkit of a level 15 if they balance around performing a near optimal rotation to keep up, meaning by far and large with the skillbase of FF14's players, instances will become longer/harder for basically no reason.

And how do you balance tanks and healers? Think About it. a lvl 29 GLD will never have Hallowed Ground from a level 80 synced PLD. a 22 MRD won't have the lifesteal of a level 80 WAR with Nascent Flash. A level 80 synced WHM would have benediction; where the 43 WHM wouldn't. You think they're going to spend and take the time editing & balancing ALL those skills at EVERY level too?

And if you'd have to do ridiculous changes to these abilities to the point they're no longer the same ability (Like doing something absurd like turning Hallowed Ground into 1% mitigation, or Benediction into 10% heal), then...what was the point?. If you have to utterly gut these abilities to make sure balance is upheld to the point they may as well not exist or no longer resemble the real ability, then it's not the same toolkit anymore, and completely invalidates the point of trying to create a system that lets you use all your fancy new abilities at lower levels.

There are far too many variables, far too many things to keep track of for any 'simple' nerfing solution to work if they want to maintain balance. Heck, some jobs simply won't even have AOE at level 20 whereas the same jobs synced down from 80 would, meaning your dungeon literally takes longer because you had a low level character in your group.

Oh, and the fact that each expansion basically invalidates all this balancing meaning they'd have to do it AGAIN for every expansion. Yeah, I can only imagine how wonderful that sounds to the devs.

There's simply no chance they're going to allow skills while synced, since they've made it clear they want every 22 GLD to be on the same footing as every other 22 GLD, skill wise. An actual realistic scenario is an ability level squish, pushing more of the later abilities into lower level ranges. That way every player of the same job has equal access to the same skills, the amount of skills at lower level and thus the speed of combat is increased, only without an absurd logistical nightmare of balancing issues plaguing it.

[PyurBlue]

Jobs at lower levels ARE very imbalanced. the Monk example might be a 3 fold increase, but something like Dancer or Red Mage is much, much less. So applying the same ratio to all jobs would make those jobs pretty much useless.

Very imbalanced in this case would mean that some party compositions would struggle with content. That's not the case, so they aren't very imbalanced. Additionally, with scaling based on level 80, low level balance wouldn't be any worse than balance at the end game.

3 wouldn't be the scaling factor for any of the examples brought up prior to your post, so I think you're misunderstanding what's actually being suggested. 3 is the ratio of average potency between the two levels, which is not DPS. A realistic factor for level 80 scaling to level 15 is 0.001. The goal is to scale 20,000 DPS down to something around 20 in this case. The scale factor would raise from that to 1 as you go up to level 80 content like I said in my first post and it would apply equally well to all jobs, at least in a given role, since they all have fairly close damage. You wouldn't be able to tell by feel whether you had a stat synced party of level synced party.

Using his MNK example, what if the MNK in question is only 40? Applying a universal multiplier to bring down a level 80 MNK would make a level 40 MNK deal close to half the damage of a level 15 MNK, even playing absolutely flawlessly. "nerfing damage" is far from a simple concept, as it requires a huge amount of balancing, analysis of toolkits at literally every level that a job gains a new part of its toolkit, and would be a logistical balancing nightmare; you'd literally be getting weaker in older dungeons as you leveled up then when you were at that level, quite the oxymoron.

A single value for the multiplier obviously won't work, which is why I suggested something different in the very first post that I made. Bosses are roughly the same difficulty through the leveling process with the exception of the first few that tend to die a little faster. If you graph boss health vs level you end up with a general idea of the what the multiplier has to be for any combination of true level and dungeon level. This isn't enough to perfectly match one level to another, but thankfully there is no reason to try to be that precise because level sync as it is now allows for a fair amount of variation in DPS (not to mention that there are factors that you can't control like player ability).

Unless they go dungeon by dungeon, job by job, meticulously nerfing damage by EXACT amounts for EACH instance in the game, damage nerfs will always either:

There is no need for that unless they're going to try to balance Ultimates (and not even that is true since Ultimate balance isn't that tight, some of the changes in Shadowbringers are pretty nice buffs in Ultimate). The goal with syncing for dungeons is just to make sure that ~20 minute content takes around 20 minutes.

1) cause the 80's to still be overpowered if they balance around the 80 not doing perfect rotation, meaning any 80 doing a perfect rotation will still utterly shatter any level 15 out of the park.

This is specifically what is trying to be avoided though, so if done correctly, this won't happen. Perfection isn't an issue, we're not dealing with tight tolerances.

2) cause the 80's to have to perform flawlessly to match the limited toolkit of a level 15 if they balance around performing a near optimal rotation to keep up, meaning by far and large with the skillbase of FF14's players, instances will become longer/harder for basically no reason.

Even if this was the case, I find it preferable. My current preference when it comes to level sync is to not even play the content. However, saying that a level 80 rotation needs to be played flawlessly is a significant exaggeration. Low level rotations aren't foolproof, like I mentioned earlier. The average potency for the low level GLA 1-2 combo is 250. Breaking that combo is at best 200 potency and at worst 100 potency. That's a possible 2.5 times penalty for messing up your Satasha rotation. That's equivalent to the difference between 10th percentile and 99th DPS percentile on fflogs in Copied Factory. The 50%-70% percentiles aren't flawless but they're much closer to perfect than the no combo GLA I mentioned.

And how do you balance tanks and healers? Think About it. a lvl 29 GLD will never have Hallowed Ground from a level 80 synced PLD. a 22 MRD won't have the lifesteal of a level 80 WAR with Nascent Flash. A level 80 synced WHM would have benediction; where the 43 WHM wouldn't. You think they're going to spend and take the time editing & balancing ALL those skills at EVERY level too? There are far too many variables, far too many things to keep track of for any 'simple' solution to work if they want to maintain balance. Heck, some jobs simply won't even have AOE at level 20 whereas the same jobs synced down from 80 would, meaning your dungeon literally takes longer because you had a low level character in your group.

Hallowed Ground lasts 10 seconds and you get to use it at most twice per dungeon. Sure it's huge mitigation but in the grand scheme of things it doesn't make much difference because most low level content doesn't need 100% damage reduction. The role skills that low level tanks give up (reprisal and arms lengths) in the current system are arguably worth more in the lower level dungeons in terms of overall mitigation because they have more uptime. The level 80 WHM's Benediction is weaker than the level 30 AST's ED which is a full heal up to about level 25-30 on a much shorter CD. Still I addressed these skills before, if they're going to be a problem they can be changed slightly with traits or something along those lines, like becoming 50% mitigation and 50% healing respectively. You'd be trying to match overall MPS (mitigation per second) and HPS in these cases, along with DPS.

Oh, and the fact that each expansion basically invalidates all this balancing meaning they'd have to do it AGAIN for every expansion. Yeah, I can only imagine how wonderful that sounds to the devs.

They already did it for Shadowbringers if I recall due to the tank stance change. Developing a game takes work, and I thank the devs for their efforts. Making this change won't be free but it also doesn't appear to be anymore costly than other changes made in the past.

There's simply no chance they're going to allow skills while synced, since they've made it clear they want every 22 GLD to be on the same footing as every other 22 GLD, skill wise.

Not all level 22 GLA's are equal though. Syncing ignores roll skills and some job skills are locked behind more than level. 22 GLA's also have to compete with 22 (synced) PLD's which can wear better gear and gain stats from the job stone. We can also go back to when cross class existed for even more variation in same level skills, but that's been removed from the game so I can understand why that point would be discarded.

An actual realistic scenario is an ability level squish, pushing more of the later abilities into lower level ranges. That way every player of the same job has equal access to the same skills, the amount of skills at lower level and thus the speed of combat is increased, only without an absurd logistical nightmare of balancing issues plaguing it.

That's certainly an alternative, and it would be better than what we have now, but it's not my preference. Conceptually there isn't much to just bringing down damage, there may be practical challenges depending on how FF14 is coded, but that's not something visible to the playerbase to bring up as more than a hypothetical. For the sake of simplicity I'm assuming that the scaling factor is all that matters and that ilvl sync is ignored. I don't know if those two things can work together. If they do it slightly changes the graph for mapping levels. You'd need to graph the DPS graph and the ilvl graph and then divide the DPS graph by the ilvl graph to get an effective potency graph which would be used for scaling. Alternatively SE could just work out rotation potencies at a few select levels to work out that graph directly. That's also not hard, just look at The Balance guides.

[MariaArvana]

A single value for the multiplier obviously won't work, which is why I suggested something different in the very first post that I made. Bosses are roughly the same difficulty through the leveling process with the exception of the first few that tend to die a little faster. If you graph boss health vs level you end up with a general idea of the what the multiplier has to be for any combination of true level and dungeon level. This isn't enough to perfectly match one level to another, but thankfully there is no reason to try to be that precise because level sync as it is now allows for a fair amount of variation in DPS (not to mention that there are factors that you can't control like player ability).

-But you know, it's less precise than what they have now so...why would they intentionally make it wonkier and place much heavier work on themselves when the system they have now functions perfectly fine for them? or an alternate system like the one I suggested that is basically their exact same system with only a few levels changed around? You severely underestimate how much devs love shortcuts and using Occam's Razor; it's how they meet deadlines, especially ones as tight as FF14's patch cycle.

Even if this was the case, I find it preferable. My current preference when it comes to level sync is to not even play the content. However, saying that a level 80 rotation needs to be played flawlessly is a significant exaggeration. Low level rotations aren't foolproof, like I mentioned earlier. The average potency for the low level GLA 1-2 combo is 250. Breaking that combo is at best 200 potency and at worst 100 potency. That's a possible 2.5 times penalty for messing up your Satasha rotation. That's equivalent to the difference between 10th percentile and 99th DPS percentile on fflogs in Copied Factory. The 50%-70% percentiles aren't flawless but they're much closer to perfect than the no combo GLA I mentioned.

-The thing about balancing in game design, especially in MMOs, is that you have to account for the extreme ends when designing systems, or you'll find your player base abusing and/or exploiting your system, or the system not acting the way you want it to (See: pretty much everything they've implemented, ESPECIALLY diadem & Eureka Anemos.) If they want to balance a system tightly (which should be extremely apparent is their intent in leveling dungeons), they have to take into account the highest echelons of player skill into these systems. If they keep the system too light in its adjustments, Actual good players will completely wreck and annihilate the balance of the lower dungeons, which is something they want to avoid.

Hence, they are forced to account for those skilled players and make the check much tighter when balancing it, leading to what I mentioned. It's a catch 22; no matter how they design it, it'll fall apart in a way they didn't want.

They already did it for Shadowbringers if I recall due to the tank stance change. Developing a game takes work, and I thank the devs for their efforts. Making this change won't be free but it also doesn't appear to be anymore costly than other changes made in the past.

-There was no 'change' to the actual content in regards to tank mastery & tank stance. The only thing they did was make the STR stats on Fending accessories equal to Striking/Maiming, which cancelled out the damage loss for 70 & below; Literally copy-pasting the formula for STR on Striking gear onto Fending gear. Done, took all of about 20s. For tank stance, backspace all the lines of code not relating to enmity, then change the enmity multiplier to 10, done, super simple. Again, see how much they love shortcuts?

They have however occasionally nerfed leveling dungeons, but those were always by global variables like 10%, which is also super easy. Change the variable in the enemy HP generator formula from 1.0 to 0.9; took all of 5s, and maybe in the enemy potency formula as well if they wanted to reduce damage.

Hallowed Ground lasts 10 seconds and you get to use it at most twice per dungeon. Sure it's huge mitigation but in the grand scheme of things it doesn't make much difference because most low level content doesn't need 100% damage reduction. The role skills that low level tanks give up (reprisal and arms lengths) in the current system are arguably worth more in the lower level dungeons in terms of overall mitigation because they have more uptime. The level 80 WHM's Benediction is weaker than the level 30 AST's ED which is a full heal up to about level 25-30 on a much shorter CD. Still I addressed these skills before, if they're going to be a problem they can be changed slightly with traits or something along those lines, like becoming 50% mitigation and 50% healing respectively. You'd be trying to match overall MPS (mitigation per second) and HPS in these cases, along with DPS.

-You realize the huge pulls a PLD could pull off with it due to how squishy lower level dungeon mob HP is? I could think of at least one pull per dungeon where you'd be able to annihilate 3-5 packs in the time it'd take to annihilate 1, saving multiple minutes off the run. 10s doesn't look like a lot of time, but it's HUGE for the healer to get those extra AOEs in to help melt the pack before damage is ever an issue. Especially in a system where synced from high players have access to their full AoE toolkits to melt said packs. The difference between a low level party and a synced one would be titanic in terms of potential kill-time efficiency. Take a look at the first mega pull of Mt Gulg vs the 5 separate pulls of the first leg of Mt Gulg to see just how broken a tank having all these CDs would look like in lower level dungeons, where the low level tank wouldn't stand even a slight chance at attempting the same.

Beyond that, again, there's simple things a 20 GLD would never be able to match, no matter what that would prevent the MPS & HPS from ever being even remotely equal without nullifying half of the PLD's toolkit to do so.

A 20 GLD has: Rampart, passive block.
A 80 synced PLD has: Rampart, Sentinel, Hallowed Ground, repriesal, passive block, shelltron, Clemency, Arm's length. Literally 5 more buffs & 1 super self heal tool more than the GLD. Unless you nullify all the others and make them 0% (which again, why bother in the first place then? Since that's literally contradicting the purpose of keeping your skills; there's no point if they don't exist or are so weak they may as well not exist.), that low level GLD will NEVER have even close to the same MPS as a synced 80 PLD, which could bust open low level dungeons and make super pulls utterly trivial.

Oh, and any < 76 WAR will NEVER have any lifesteal besides Storm's Path, while a synced 80 WAR could lifesteal for days with NF. Unless you want to nerf that down to 0% to make the HPS equal; which again, why bother in the first place if it contradicts the point of your system? Especially since NF is a crucial integral part of the job's identity at level 80 in how it handles pulls.

And what's your plan for raid buffs? Do the devs also have to account for the levels of everyone else in the party to make sure the extra % they give won't completely blow away packs in dungeons like a hot knife through butter?

Just showing that syncing is far from ideal; When you have to go and either nullify half of a job's kit to make its HPS/MPs equal, or add in 50 different traits, you've long since gone into the 'why are we even doing this when simpler options exist' territory.

And if they're going to be making abilities tiered with traits, why even bother with all that nonsense (especially since making them tiered with traits means they have to learnt the skills earlier anyway, basically just using my pitched system anyway but adding far more complexity to it.) when making them available earlier is an infinitely easier thing to program than spending time fine-tuning all these small gears and bobs, only for it to get completely broken each expansion and spend all that dev time doing it again? History of their development and their methods has shown time and again they're not going to do drastic overhauls unless they perceive some issue, then they go to the easiest solutions. Your syncing system has way too many moving gears and points to balance it's a logistical nightmare; there's zero chance they'll opt for it over simply moving skills back in level (or simply doing nothing, which is quite frankly the most realistic case) and spending that dev time on more important things. It's just being realistic.