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.
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).
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.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:
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.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.
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.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.
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.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.
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.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.
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.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.
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.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.