Quote Originally Posted by MariaArvana View Post
-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?
It's within the tolerance we have now, it's not less precise, that's one of the reasons why I'm supporting this idea.

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.
Everyone loves shortcuts, but ultimately the devs aren't there to not develop a game. Just because making changes will take work doesn't mean those changes aren't feasible.



-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.
So they should never do anything? Absolute statements aren't true by default. Attempting to change the level sync system isn't doomed before it begins.

When it comes to player skills, I'm not seeing the difference between sync methods. Good players are going do more damage no matter what. That won't change with the sync system unless it removes the player from the process entirely, which defeats the point of the game. If you're worried that unexpected consequences will arise that will somehow let synced jobs with high level skills completely outpace lower level job, that's what and planning and testing are for. The new sync system doesn't even have to introduced directly into the dungeons, it could be added first as an unsync option intended for PF instead where players would be able to use it and attempt to break it in order to assist the devs in tuning the system. When everything is worked out in the end, add it as a DF option that works with roulettes.


-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?
I was referring to a blanket adjustment to all pre 5.0 content but I'm not able to find the source for that and might be misremembering, so feel free to ignore that point.

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.
Right, which is what I would expect when we're not dealing with tight balancing tolerances. Just shave off a nice round number because going up to 15% or down to 5% wouldn't make a noticeable difference. The same goes with the idea of scaling damage.



-You realize the huge pulls a PLD could pull off with it due to how squishy lower level dungeon mob HP is?
At the lowest levels, like 20 or less, it's no more than a GLA could do. Mobs are that weak. HG would start to become significant somewhere in the 30-50 range (obviously not after 50 since it's a 50 skill), but what exactly are you worried about? Parties will kick and hope for a replacement for the most scarce role in the game with the correct skills to show up? Unlikely. Right now DPS is at the biggest risk for that since they are fast to replace and can have a wide range of DPS outputs due to AoE skill levels and it still doesn't happen. HG isn't going to make dungeons take half as much time to clear. Come to think of it how many tanks even use it regularly as a CD in DF? Some people won't touch it unless the healer is dead.

All of this isn't even taking into account the possibility of balancing HG below level 50, like the previously mentioned reduction to 50% mitigation. Nor does it take into account that there are other mitigation tools. 10 seconds doesn't necessarily cover an entire pull and if the tank is weaker outside of the 10 seconds of invincibility, then it's not clear that there is an advantage gained.

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.
I'm trying to think of dungeons where I don't just pull everything. It's not a long list. HG would just be another cooldown. I suppose if you planned out your dungeon pull with your party you could optimize the run a bit but that's probably not going to happen in DF.

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.
What is the baseline we're comparing to though? It's not a healer spending 100% up time healer, or at least it doesn't have to be. AST from Sastash can heal while keeping 100% DPS uptime theoretically. Realistically it will take some damage mitigation on the part of the tank, but that mitigation doesn't have to be 100%. If pulls are long SCH might pull ahead due to fairly healing. It's really only WHM that causes issues because you have to choose between healing or attacking at low level. But again no one is kicking WHM's so it doesn't seem like this is any kind of real problem.

Especially in a system where synced from high players have access to their full AoE toolkits to melt said packs.
They aren't going to do any more damage because those tool kits will be scaled down in damage.

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.
But this is just bypassing the entire solution. The point is to balance the two. Yes if you did nothing the level 80 skill would clearly be better, so you weaken them.

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.
Reprisal and Arm's Lengths are already "issues" in the current level sync so they don't count. Clemency is a DPS loss so you wouldn't want to use it anyway. That leaves 3 skills. Halve or third the mitigation values on them, problem solved. The PLD has lower mitigation for a longer duration. Overall they have about the same mitigation.

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.
If this was a problem WAR would have gained skills at 75 and not 76. As it stands now, the 75 dungeon syncs at 76 so 75 WAR's already compete with 76 WAR's under level sync. If that still bothers you, quarter the healing under level 76.

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?
The devs weren't bothered by some parties having AoE and some not, so raid buffs are a non issue.

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.
I don't agree. Your points are built on chasing an extremely tight balance tolerance for no reason that I can see. Not many people care to optimize outside for Extreme and Savage for a good reason, that being it doesn't make much difference. Leveling content isn't tuned to be hard and as a result doesn't require extreme precision.

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.
OK fair enough. But if there is some issue that makes the devs completely unwilling to look at the idea, there is no way of knowing without asking them. What you say, and what I say for that matter, is not indicative of what matters to the devs. You can speculate if you want, but that's pretty easy to dismiss.

I also don't mind you having an opinion different from mine, but I think it's reason for the reverse to be true. Changing level sync is one of the more important things the devs to spend time on in my opinion. Roulettes are part of the game and I'd also like a system that didn't just toss old content aside as the game ages.

Quote Originally Posted by Peace-Division View Post
There is also a negative effect by over limiting skills available for 30+ levels. Ingrained muscle memory of only a portion of the rotation.
Very true. Level sync was a very negative experience as a new player and the effects of it followed me all the way to the level cap. I'm fairly certain that being offered nothing but GCD heals early on contributes to poorly managing OGCD resources.