The potential problem with low level Roulettes in 6.0

[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.

[Ultimatecalibur]

Specifically, my understanding—and someone please correct me if I'm wrong here—is that a given piece of gear which exceeds the ilevel maximum will be individually synched to that ilevel by removing all materia bonuses (i.e., taking only the base stats of the gear), then scaling down by an amount based on the difference in ilevels. But because stats have gone up from expansion to expansion at a higher rate than the ilevel has, synching ilevel 500 gear to ilevel 100 will give you gear with considerably better stats than any actual ilevel 100 gear has.

Please note that I do agree with you just correcting the minor errors in your explanation.

The ilevel sync works by first removing materia bonuses (as you said), but then lowers each synced gearpiece's stats to the gear types primary and secondary stat caps of that ilevel. What causes this to be problematic when syncing is that non-pink gear is itemized to have one secondary at cap and one secondary at 70% of cap. What ends up happing is that high enough ilevel gear will sync so that both secondary stats are at cap.

And since potency -> damage/healing power is based on those stats, that "better than actual gear of this level" situation means the damage/healing output will also be higher than you could actually get at that level, contributing to the "even synched to level 50, we can faceroll Crystal Tower raids" scenario; even with abilities and traits from later levels missing, the base stats that go into those calculations are still a lot higher than they would actually be at level 50 in level 50 gear.

The Crystal Tower raid problem is that the first two were tuned for i90 and i110 max but sync to i130 and that Accuracy (a damage loss prevention stat) was turned into Direct Hit (a damage boosting stat). The Accuracy to Direct Hit change actually effected most of ARR's and HW's content.

[Peace-Division]

Regardless of where they go, FFXIV is way too timid with giving beginners new buttons. I get they are worried about intimidating new players, but at a 2.5 sec GCD I think people can handle 3-piece combos by 20.

There is also a negative effect by over limiting skills available for 30+ levels. Ingrained muscle memory of only a portion of the rotation.

I was once a lowbie CNJ/WHM. The amount of spamming a few hard casts available built muscle memory in so hard, it really took me a while to pay attention to the level 50+ era of skills where the WHM (and many other classes ) begin to bloom. I was so used to regen,cure 2, medica/2 usage it took me a while to get the newer sill sets into my brain/muscle memory so i wasnt an effective healer in my early HW runs. The new skills are soo much better than the old but i suddenly felt pushed out of my comfort zone to use the newer and (unkown to me at the time) better oGcds because i had for 51 levels been a hard casting regen/cure bot.

I feel thats an issue across the job base. I hear that DRK doesnt really shine and show its better potential until lvl 70. Thats insane. A tank role shouldn't be that late at getting to its best through no fault of the player. Thats madness that they think that is an OK progression path.

The legacy DPS classes too are pitiful when they are their starting job phases (LNC, ARC etc) . Ive never come across some one overwhelmed by a 5-6 button usage rotation in any MMO ( a typical amount for the first 30 or so levels) so why do they think its OK to force us to be limited by 2-4 tops for 30 levels?

So weird

[PyurBlue]

-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.

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.

[Berethos]

So basically beeing able to use your fundamental Tool-Kit at 50 or 60 and adding the subtleties after that?

An FC friend and I were discussing a similar issue and basically arrived at a similar conclusion as this, where like if you took Red Mage and moved all of the main abilities and spaced them appropriately leading up to 50, with the exception of Manafication at 60, Verholy at 70 (you'd have Verflare before or at 50, to get a taste of the melee finisher), and Scorch at 80. Traits could even stay the same.

You'd be trading the feeling of "Oh nice ability/change" in the 60s or 70s level range (which, having leveled a good chunk of them to 80 recently, is very much a thing) for feeling like the job was basically just about feature complete at 50 and more importantly feels better to play in the 1-50 range, which is definitely important for new players (and given the continued support and encouragement for players to revisit 50 and below content, important for veterans as well)...and still achieve the same result we have now with the same amount of abilities at level-cap.

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.

I assume this would be via some sort of tiered change that kicks in at certain levels but doesn't apply past that? Having 10%, 15%, and 10% again at end-game just to have them last longer would necessitate quite a bit more rebalancing of content past when Gladiator is relevant.

Which, in trying to solve one issue you've introduced another, in that now the person who levels Gladiator has to remember that the same abilities that did 20% for 20 seconds, etc., now do half that for double the duration (questionable use at that level, not sure when you'd need cool downs that last that long, 10% or otherwise) but only in a certain level range, and potentially adjust accordingly, introducing a wrinkle into learning their job that only exists in a specific scenario that isn't even relevant to end-game?

Sure, the numbers look like they work on paper. Consider how that would feel to actually play - not so simple to solve, now is it?

[Khalithar]

A higher potency weapon skill to replace fast blade. I really don't want to be using that for another 10 levels.

[PyurBlue]

[QUOTE=Berethos;5372948]I assume this would be via some sort of tiered change that kicks in at certain levels but doesn't apply past that?[quote]
It could be tiered or extrapolated at each level for a more continuous change. It depends partially on what's easier to code, which only SE knows.

Having 10%, 15%, and 10% again at end-game just to have them last longer would necessitate quite a bit more rebalancing of content past when Gladiator is relevant.

I don't think I understand what you're saying here. Values should only increase with level, not jump back and forth.

Which, in trying to solve one issue you've introduced another, in that now the person who levels Gladiator has to remember that the same abilities that did 20% for 20 seconds, etc., now do half that for double the duration (questionable use at that level, not sure when you'd need cool downs that last that long, 10% or otherwise) but only in a certain level range, and potentially adjust accordingly, introducing a wrinkle into learning their job that only exists in a specific scenario that isn't even relevant to end-game?

Skill durations aren't changing, the longer duration comes from the PLD having more defense skills than GLA. PLD with halved or thirded effectiveness Rampart, Sentinel, Sheltron vs GLA with normal Rampart for example.

Sure, the numbers look like they work on paper. Consider how that would feel to actually play - not so simple to solve, now is it?

That's why I didn't change duration. It's harder to feel the reduced effectiveness of the mitigation skills than a change in effect length, especially if those reductions are only imposed in specific content. A PLD with reduced skill effectiveness would just play normally.

[Raltar]

If they don't let us keep our entire skillset, I would at least like to see every single class get a spamable AOE before level 16 when roulettes start. It is incredibly painful to run low level dungeons when you have a rogue and lancer, for example, as your DPS because they don't get their AOEs until mid 30s for rogue/ninja and level god damn 40 for lancer/dragoon. This should have been fixed a long time ago. Everyone should get an AOE the same level tanks get theirs. Even healers. Just take the stun off Holy and have an upgrade given at 46 if you feel like holy spam would be too powerful at low levels with the stun.

[MariaArvana]

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 is, time is their mortal enemy. So regardless of the feasibility of things, they have quotas to meet and they will do that which they perceive will help the health of the game more and weigh the development costs & time spent vs projected gains. They're developing the game all the time, just not in the way you 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.

Of course it's not. But again, they've made it clear time and again that they desire balance in their level sync system, and so they're not going to do anything until they have a system that works exactly the way they want while making sure there's no issues, weighing all the cons & pros, all the things that would need balancing, create expected deadlines & time spent vs projected gain numbers. If I, a simple player that has only taken a couple courses on rudimentary software design because she was bored outside her normal courses in university, can point out all the glaring flaws and the sheer amount of things they'd need to modify/change/edit/add/remove/etc in your system just to make it work compared to their current extremely simple system, their actual experienced game designers will have long since either tossed it out, or be looking elsewhere for a simpler idea.

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.

Except that simply divides the queues; which need I remind you, are designed to fill parties as fast as possible; another reason why it'd never see DF use without being mandatory. And I seriously doubt they'd ever do such a giant overhaul in the first place just to make it a PF only option. As far as the first bit, again; I'm simply pointing out every possibility, which by their job, a game design has to account for. There's a reason the #1 rule in software design is "plan assuming your end user will do anything and everything to break you system, whether through ingenuity or ignorance." Without taking in EVERY factor, EVERY possible outcome, any system they implement will just as easily crash down on them.

At least in their current system, High level player's skill is kept in check by the limited toolkits.

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.

Which again, comes back to the MNK scenario; Given that jobs learn different parts of their toolkit at drastically different levels, you're essentially asking for them to go through every job at every level to determine what part of their toolkit they have access to, and then hit them with % reduction based on that. Since -20% on a BRD, who barely gets anything pre-50 will be vastly different than applying that same -20% to a SAM who gets a lot of powerful potency attacks at the same level.

If your solution can't be solved with a universal multiplier for every job at every level to create the same balance as currently, it's already less precise and far more complicated than what they have now.

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.

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.

Go pull every pack up to the first boss of Tam-Tara with 5 completely random healers without dying once, take vids, compare that to pulling 5 packs in Mt Gulg and then tell me it's "no more than a GLD could do." Or every single mob up to the first boss of Halatali with the same requirements.
Also people kick for even less reasons than that. I've seen tanks get kicked for single pulling, you really think people aren't above the possibility of kicking for a better tank? Plus, unless you're queuing in off hours, tanks/healers almost always get insta-refreshed anyway. (I've personally never waited longer than 20s for a tank to come in during the couple of times a tank was kicked in my party.)

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.

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 just to maintain balance, you've long since gone into the 'why are we even doing this when simpler options exist' territory.

^

Also, You chain CDs. Once the tank leaves Hallowed, he should have a 30% rolling on up so that he stays buff and not just instantly drop dead or becoming weaker. 10s of 0 damage is a huge advantage gained, because it gives the healer 100% uptime during the 10s; 10s of knowing that whatever the healer does, you will not drop dead.

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.

The average mob does about ~28 damage in Sastasha out of a tank's ~450 health. In our current system (or about 84 damage per pack of 3), an AST can get that much uptime due to their OGCD alone and because most tanks don't pull much more than 2 packs in most cases. An AST isn't keeping anywhere close to 100% uptime in sastasha when the tank is losing 1/3rd-1/2 their health every GCD going past the 2-pack mark with their OGCD on a 30s timer.

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.

Which again, requires way more investment than you realize, as from a pure math standpoint, is extreme more effort than other solutions which require immensely less effort.

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.

But a 20 GLD can't use either, so they do count against it, you can't simply ignore that mitigation difference when it is in fact a + to the PLD's toolkit. Clemency may be a DPS loss, but if it saves the pull, its a dps gain, hence why its a tool for the PLD. (Such as saving yourself on the Mt Gulg mega pulls if the healer falls behind a bit - staying alive and losing a GCD of damage is infinitely less valuable than staying alive to complete the mega pull which saves literal minutes.)

As for the last point, then, again: what is the point of halving/quartering/whatever these skills down and butchering them, when the whole purpose of your system is to allow 80's to use their full toolkits? If you have to edit and butcher skills just to give you system even the slimmest chance of maintaining balance, you're no longer playing the exact job you had at 80, merely a gutted version of it. I really can't explain this any clearer.

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.

The major difference here being that a 75 & 76 WAR have access to 99% of the same toolkit as each other, so the disparity is far, FAR less than a 20 MRD who not only has 6 less CDs than a 76 WAR, but also 0 lifesteal. And I could repeat myself on the 2nd part, but really. Even if you were to quarter the healing of it, it's still > 0, meaning the 80 WAR would still have literally infinitely times higher HPS than a 20 MRD...or any <76 WAR in AOE, for that matter. Also again, having to butcher a job's identity just to give your system an even slim hope of being balanced.

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

Because they never had to factor them in early dungeons when designing them? Literally the earliest non-trick attack Raid buffs are at 50 (Divination, Battle Voice). All of a sudden in your system though, you've got 80's hopping in with all their raid buffs. let me tell ya how fast you can annihilate packs with BV + Litany + Divination. In your system, they are now an issue that has to be factored in.

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.

For no reason? Because its literally the design the devs have been wanting to achieve with their sync system. you can't get much tighter than "everyone has access to the same skills outside of some scenarios in the early levels, which only really apply to tanks because healer & dps role actions are just fluff and not giving extra power to the healer's healing or dps's damage." With their system, a Dev can reasonably know that a group in halatali isn't going to be super mitigating enemy damage, throwing out raid buffs or massive swathes of multiple AOE GCDs & OGCDs to melt packs, or commit 100% of their healing to regens & OGCDs. In their current system, player skill variance is the only thing they can't account for; an issue that is magnified and needs to be much more directly addressed in your theoretical system due to the plethora of unexpected variance it can cause.

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.

Let me answer that for you. "Server Limitations." "next!" Yoshi-P has long since realized making promises in public often ends in backlash, so pretty much any feature they're not personally doing will be met with a PR-friendly/neutral response; hence why it's easy to use past development cycles and their general response to suggested things to quickly answer your own question.

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.

You can have your opinions, but observations of their dev cycle and implementations give pretty good concrete facts about how likely a potential idea would be accepted. Just from my courses in software design and general observation, I'm giving an observed opinion based on those realistic facts. They have a very 'forward looking; only fix the old when necessary.' Approach to their game design.

It took them literally 6 years to fix ARR and they still have Hrothgar/Viera to deal with, along with designing all the usual content each patch, especially now with an impacted dev cycle due to COVID. The odds of them doing anything to the level syncing that isn't as simple as 'shift a single variable on the skills' is basically null.