Yoshi-P Sanpo comments re: Bard

[Rai_Takara]

I don't have that experience myself. I find Samurai easier to play than Bard. The moments where you have to step away from the boss entirely are extremely rare and I get Mediate, enhanced enpi and a gap closer to mitigate that. I'd see melee as being almost as mobile. The rotation isn't particularly complex, while Bard is fairly high APM and has all sorts of opportunities to leak damage. Not to mention I can play my Sam badly and smash my Bard on dps even if played well. That makes it a very easy class to provide good contribution with, while I'd struggle as Bard.

There also seems to be a misconception that ranged phys dps can chill somewhere off in Narnia and run laps of the arena where no mechanic will ever touch them. Fights don't work that way, both ranged and melee have responsibility when it comes to mechanics. If you're sitting miles away in the corner as Bard, you're losing rdps because you aren't keeping everyone in song radius and you can miss people with Battle Voice.
The ranged tax feels far too high for what amounts to a fairly minor benefit.

You used Bard as an example on e7s, while it's in the bottom 3 and about 1500 rdps behind Sam even at high tiers where the Bard is multi-dotting adds and taking full advantage.

The difficulty in melee is always optimization. No job is hard when you're not optimizing it to the fullest and that's by design, following something akin to the 80-20 rule where 20% of the effort gets you 80% of the result. SAM, funnily enough since you mentioned it, is the hardest melee to optimize right now around buffs because it's the most inflexible melee with a very strict rotation. However, if you play SAM and don't try to align with buffs, then of course it'll be easier. Same can be said on Dancer whether having a NIN or not makes Dancer boring or engaging. One might say that's just the top end players and not the majority and that's correct, but balance must always come down from the top end.

Not being glued to melee range is a tremendous advantage. Of course you don't have to be in Narnia, but being able to resolve any mechanic with 100% uptime is not something you can dismiss. Ranged tax is a thing for good reason. Groups are able to leverage mobility with bad, easy strats to get through mechanics but still have enough DPS to meet checks.

As for the Bard example, look at the 95th/99th (where parties can utilize BRDs buff the most). At max BRD gets edged out by dancer but we all know dancer has the highest max potential thanks to RNG so all it takes is to get a good run a long with your team/partner to do that.

[Akiudo]

One might say that's just the top end players and not the majority and that's correct, but balance must always come down from the top end.

your "balance coming from the top end" left us with mch outperforming not just bard but dancer aswell up to the 90% percentile to a quite ridiculous degree as not even curing waltz is worth nearly the dps a dancer at that level does less than a mch making it just go even worse for bard, and it only gets worse from there going down, and what for ?

100% of the top 50 speedruns on ramuh and ifrit/garuda include dancer, 88% and 84% for idol and shiva respectively,lets not even talk about the near non existence of warrior and scholar at top speedrun level. monk you could potentially handwave with simply being a not very liked class right now, but other classes? you are quite literally fucking over 90%+ of the raiding playerbase (yes, i included the groups that have to drag their sorry ass bard with them instead of the vastly superior mch) to have "balance" at the top, except you still don't have any balance there because at this point even being just 1% better is enough to make you unquestionably the best.



if we actually do balance around the top, why is dancer allowed to be so much stronger than mch ? clearly superior utility and a very clear damage lead can't be balanced at once. oh wait, its because dancer damage is more up to rng, funny how if we look at "max" its suddenly fine to be clearly better, i thought we balance around the top ? or is it suddenly the top 1% that counts ? maybe top 2% would be better? or do we prefer top 0,5%?

keeping down a class for literally everyone so the top 1% of groups can't find a way to abuse a class to an overpowered degree is absolutely pointless, these groups will clear the content either way, these groups will use what is best either way, so fucking over literally everyone else, so that people that for all intents and purposes are looking for every little way to positively break the game and split it in 2 accomplishes absolutely nothing. no normal person would exclude a 90% mch when it would only do 200 dps more than a 90% dancer because a 99% dancer was suddenly 600 dps ahead instead of 400. the ones that actually do that are the ones that (surprise) allready exclude both bard and mch for dancer because if you are going for world record you go for the god run either way.

Not being glued to melee range is a tremendous advantage. Of course you don't have to be in Narnia, but being able to resolve any mechanic with 100% uptime is not something you can dismiss. Ranged tax is a thing for good reason. Groups are able to leverage mobility with bad, easy strats to get through mechanics but still have enough DPS to meet checks.

yes, you can use easier tactics with more ranged, have fun losing out on the 1% stat buff if you go all ranged aswell fucking over your tanks completly if you just go for "easy"... (and if you do take a melee than whatever tactic you use allready includes 2 tanks+1melee, so it will at worst be "mostly identical", because funnily enough, the people that go for some crazy "if we do it like this and than we can do that and that, but only with exactly 1 melee...." tactic are again the very very top of the very top).

an average group (that would by definition of the word mean 50% percentile, and thats actually allready being nice because it excludes all the groups are simply unable to handle any given fight) will totally have room to spare if they lose 1000 dps do to no melee 1%, another 1000 do to having to use a multi target lb on a single target and say 500 because their new "easier tactic" bends over their tanks uptime so bad at least this much loss is inevitable. or wait no, they won't. maybe they would make it, but thats a big maybe

As for the Bard example, look at the 95th/99th (where parties can utilize BRDs buff the most). At max BRD gets edged out by dancer but we all know dancer has the highest max potential thanks to RNG so all it takes is to get a good run a long with your team/partner to do that.

looking at the 95th percentile bard is BARELY above mch while offering utility on a level that could best be described as "sick joke" , surely if bard would actually outperform mch , like really outperform on a single fight while being say 200 below on average (so across percentiles) on the other fights instead of the current "hey, if you are in a top group your bard is only 300 dps worse instead of 700" situation would make the sky fall and lead to mass deletion of mch

90% of groups are in no position to change their lineup for every single fight, so a certain class (or to come back to "but melees...." a certain role,)being clearly superior in fight a) while being slightly worse in fights b),c),d) would be perfetly balanced, and when it comes to people going for world first/top speedrun times ?

Stop acting like the top 1% of raiders would suddenly all ditch both melees to go for "easy mode strats", there is need for an incentive to use harder strats, yes, but that need is not nearly as big as the current dps gap, if it where people would allready ditch melees completly for casters.

[Rai_Takara]

...

Honestly I'm not sure what you're trying to get at. If you want BRD to do more damage (which it should) then it needs to also be homogenized further and avoid situations where they are superior due to multi-dotting and be more in line with the other ranged. I just hope SE considers this otherwise they won't be able to buff BRD like how they can't really buff RDM because it has insane raise potential.

In ShB, they've decided to stop this frankly-dumb design of forcing people to bring a weaker role just to be able to operate resource-wise. Instead they've changed the party bonus to this 1% per role, which is kind of just as dumb but at least it's transparent, and doesn't open the door to healers getting screwed by bad ranged who don't press Refresh.

To be fair that's be design as nobody wants to go back to the time when double ranged was meta. Even the double caster meta is dumb, but hopefully SE will bring the nerf hammer for SMN.

[Akiudo]

snip

why is bard being superior in multi target situations a problem ? it would be a problem if bard was perfectly equal single target compared to the competition and clearly better at multi target situations i'll give you that, but theres zero reason why bard only falling half as far behind compared to mch as it does now while in fact being clearly superior in a fight with more multi target chances would be gamebreaking unless you want to imply groups will just change their physical ranged on a per fight basis, which is completly unrealistic for most groups, and for the groups that would do that ? lets be honest here, more power to them.

there'll allways be a best class/composition, if say on e7 bard had another 500 dps so what ?.

also about no one wanting back double ranged, and double caster being just as dumb, you made clear what you want, and of course you are free to do so and entitled to your opinion, but don't speak for everyone.no, i dont WANT a double ranged/caster meta, i also don't give a flying .... for a double melee meta, meta in the purest sense of the word will allways exist, therefore i can honestly say whatever. preventing a certain kind of meta for whatever reason<fucking over classes for the general (90% or more) of the playerbase.

just look at tanks and healers, there are clearly superior choices at the absolute top, the tank/healer distribution at the top end is no more equal than the dps distribution, in a lot of ways i would argue its worse, and i couldn't care one bit about that, as a group going for world records, be that fastest run or world firsts will use what suits their needs best either way, doesn't matter what exactly these class(es) is/are, they take what works best, and something will allways be best, its impossible for there not to be. so making sure everything else works about equally well for the general player base has actual use, namely enabling people to play what they want without overly punishing groups, whereas aiming for "perfect balance" at the absolute top 1% level no matter how much that hurts everybody else in practice has no balancing effect at all, 1/3->1/2 the classes will get left in the dust either way, something one can clearly see looking at the class distributions for top 50 speedruns.

[Liam_Harper]

As for the Bard example, look at the 95th/99th (where parties can utilize BRDs buff the most). At max BRD gets edged out by dancer but we all know dancer has the highest max potential thanks to RNG so all it takes is to get a good run a long with your team/partner to do that.

I am. I see Bard third from the bottom despite a near-perfect situation to multi-dot and benefit. A blue 60th percentile SAM would still beat that 95th percentile Bard and that's a significant gap.

SAM is a hard job to optimize, but Bard really isn't far off. Like I said, it's incredibly easy to leak damage as a Bard. Where SAM is well designed is that you can contribute reasonable numbers even if you aren't on a perfect rotational loop and optimizing Meditate/Seigan, but amazing numbers if you do. So it's easy to pick up and do fine with and very rewarding to master.
A class like Bard is absolutely rubbish played badly and can scrape low tier damage played flawlessly. That's not rewarding. You are getting far too little for the tax you pay.

[Rai_Takara]

good thing i adressed exactly that both in my original post aswell as in the next paragraph following the one you quoted than. while were at it, can you please crusade against dancer being the obvious pick for speedruns ? i mean you seem to have a problem with a class being clearly superior, even if its just under specific circumstances and potentially for a single fight, so one out of 3 physical ranged being in 93% of top 50 groups among the whole raidtier surely is terrible and fail design. btw while we're at it, on average only around 13% of these groups used scholars, and lets not even talk about warriors. but i guess these things are fine because whatever.

so again, i know i'm repeating myself but it matters jack if one class is clearly superior in a single fight or whatever, the vast majority of groups can't and won't change their lineup on a per fight basis, and if you're part of a group that would do so than so be it, groups that would make their dancer/mch go bard because he brings 0,5% more group dps on one out of 4 fights are exactly the kind of groups that got dancer up to a 93% participation rate for the top 50 speedruns among all fights in the current raid tier, so please don't act like the current "balance" offers these groups any kind of choice.

I mean I agree to a certain extent, but keep in mind that DNC suffers the same thing that SB AST did. The problem with DNC is that it's a heavily RNG based class. This means it is tuned for its average contribution but when the stars align and RNG is in your favor after numerous runs, it'll be stronger. Which is also why it's used in speeds because it becomes a numbers game and aside from speeds, you see MCH is actually stronger, which is pretty much 99% of raiding. I'd reduce dancers RNG spread a bit like they did with AST and balance accordingly.

Except SE isn't encouraging double Melee comps, if anything they are considering double whatever you want as anything that enforces four people close to the boss (like light rampant) is absolutely random about who it chooses. And almost nothing about raid design has taken into effect ranges mobility and used it as an advantage. They haven't done it in years. Nothing about double ranged or caster is inherently blocking SE from making better raids. If anything they have proven that last spot is as flexible as a team wants it to be.

They have been by damage. If you look at previous tiers, it has always been double melee or even triple melee as an optimal comp. SE has compromised by encouraging double melee but still not punishing you for any other comp aside from damage to the point that you can't clear fights.

I am. I see Bard third from the bottom despite a near-perfect situation to multi-dot and benefit. A blue 60th percentile SAM would still beat that 95th percentile Bard and that's a significant gap.

SAM is a hard job to optimize, but Bard really isn't far off. Like I said, it's incredibly easy to leak damage as a Bard. Where SAM is well designed is that you can contribute reasonable numbers even if you aren't on a perfect rotational loop and optimizing Meditate/Seigan, but amazing numbers if you do. So it's easy to pick up and do fine with and very rewarding to master.
A class like Bard is absolutely rubbish played badly and can scrape low tier damage played flawlessly. That's not rewarding. You are getting far too little for the tax you pay.

When it comes to your damage, you should be looking at it relatively. You shouldn't care what a caster or melee is doing. If anything you should only look at your job and the other ranged. In addition, should decouple difficulty and reward. I don't think it's feasible to expect a hard class to pay well. SAM being hard but also rewarding isn't by design, that's an accident, for example. If as a BRD, you're being out done by your peers, something is up, hence why BRD is getting buffed. My only hope is they take it slow and address the actual issues without creating another balance issue. People aren't not taking bards. Heck even world first shiva had a bard.