Job Balancing 6.08 (still needs work)

[Xander_Diabolos]

Right now I feel if you do not play Reaper you aren't doing decent damage in comparison. Ranged makes sense to do a little less damage since you have a lot more freedom, but other melee shouldn't be this weak in comparison.

Dragoon:
Raiden Thrust > Vorpal Thrust > Heaven Thrust > Fang and Claw > Wheeling Thrust
280 > 280 > 480 > 300 > 300 potency means an average 328 potency per weapon skill

Samurai:
Hakaze > Jinpu/Shifu/Yukikaze > Gekko/Kasha
180 > 280 > 370 (over 8 weapon skill is 2120 / 8 = 265 average potency), but due to passive 13% shifu/jinpu speed/damage and able to skip to last weapon skill with Meikyo Shisui is actually closest to on par with Reaper.

Ninja:
Spinning Edge > Gust Slash > Aeolian Edge
210 > 320 > 420 potency means an average of 316 potency per weapon skill (371 effectively with passive skill speed huton provides)

Reaper:
Slice > Waxing Slice > Infernal Slice
300 > 380 > 460 potency means an average of 380 potency per weapon skill (418 effectively with Death's design). This doesn't include the use of off global cooldown Blood Stalk/Gibbet/Gallows and Enshroud when they can do 520 potency every 1.5 seconds for 15 seconds.

Now you might say Dragoon has more AoE, but even AoE combos fall short.
Doom Spike > Sonic Thrust > Coerthan Torment
110 > 120 > 150 potency means 126 average potency per weapon skill

Reaper on the other hand...
Spinning Scythe > Nightmare Scythe
140 > 180 potency means 160 average potency per weapon skill

I think the biggest changes needed are making melee classes more unique while adding some potency.

A few examples:
Monk has 20% speed due to Greased Lightning III. Give them 40% attack/skill speed to make them do really fast weapon skills vs stronger ones. This would give a whole new feel to Monk. Going from 2 > 1.6 seconds to 2 > 1.2 would feel much faster and rewarding at the higher levels.

Dragoon is all about Jump so maybe make more damage based off Jump cooldowns. Make a branching ability based off Jump and transition to single target or multi-target to give variety for large group vs boss. Like...
High Jump 400 potency followed by Mirage Dive 600 Single Target Potency
High Jump 400 potency followed by Stardiver 300 AoE Potency

Samurai you could remove the cooldown of Kaeshi: Setsugekka or make Meikyo Shisui reset cooldown of Kaeshi. Another thing is third eye rarely is used and Samurai is a DPS so why not put an offensive aspect to it like adding a mini Meikyo Shisui or add Higanbana effect to next weapon skill.

Ninja I liked Forked Raiju/Fleeting Raiju after using Raiton. Maybe add weaponskills that can be used between ninjutsu with a cooldown so you are rewarded for not doing them all at once. The bunny is funny, but annoying if lag means you mess it up and you can lose A LOT of damage when it happens. You could make the ninjutsu all draw from the same cooldown, but just use the Doton Ability rather than doing Ten→Jin→Chi for example.

[Oxidized]

> Ranged makes sense to do a little less damage since you have a lot more freedom, but other melee shouldn't be this weak in comparison.

Getting melee uptime in this game, especially in this tier, is not difficult. There is absolutely no reason for melees to do more damage than casters.

[AlgernonBlackwood]

Right now I feel if you do not play Reaper you aren't doing decent damage in comparison. Ranged makes sense to do a little less damage since you have a lot more freedom, but other melee shouldn't be this weak in comparison.

Reaper is second last in rdps among the melee jobs on FFLogs right now. BLM is also beating it by quite a bit.

[Taranok]

Reaper is second last in rdps among the melee jobs on FFLogs right now. BLM is also beating it by quite a bit.

And all it took was removing the nerf on Xenoglossy and increasing the potency on practically everything (except Despair) across the board to fix it. It's quite interesting to see how they nerfed the class going into EW so massively and gave it the single largest buff I've seen since about 4.1 when Fire 4 became a 2.8s cast with 300 potency (from 3s/260 iirc, or was that multiple patches).

They truly were fine with reaper. It was everyone else who was in an awful position.

[CKNovel]

> Ranged makes sense to do a little less damage since you have a lot more freedom, but other melee shouldn't be this weak in comparison.

Getting melee uptime in this game, especially in this tier, is not difficult. There is absolutely no reason for melees to do more damage than casters.

I was looking at a stream tonight on P3S, the most melee unfriendly one.
I forgot how ridiculous the melee uptime was, there is literally 1 single mechanic that forces you out of melee range for... A maximum of 3 GCDs.

Even P4SP2, we agreed on respecting the mechanic and to use our ranged attacks and not caring about DPS.
During progress, I used at most 10-11 ranged attack.
During weeklies, I use around 6 ranged attack.

Mobility tax should be 50-100 rDPS at most, not 1k, especially with the many mobility tools such as Thunderclap.

[remiff]

I think that the bard/dancer are at a good level, on the other hand the machinist must take a massive buff, because currently nothing justifies his weak position.

Same for the summoner/red mage who since the blm buff are outdps of 1200 on average or even more, it's too much, by correcting certain problems they create others because the melee are too strong, and the mage black is the only caster to have a very consistent balance.

[Taranok]

Mobility tax should be 50-100 rDPS at most, not 1k, especially with the many mobility tools such as Thunderclap.

Either that, or the last holdout from having unfettered mobility (BLM) would need to be changed with the universal removal of any tax save for a benefit for any class with hardcasts. And I have an entire thread of people who want to vacuum seal BLM and never let it grow one bit because they find the class perfect as is and impossible to improve.

[Phaty]

Either that, or the last holdout from having unfettered mobility (BLM) would need to be changed with the universal removal of any tax save for a benefit for any class with hardcasts. And I have an entire thread of people who want to vacuum seal BLM and never let it grow one bit because they find the class perfect as is and impossible to improve.

Blm has a ton of instant casts now. With longer duration on procs, force poly charge and 2 charges of triple cast movement is not nearly as much an issue as it was pre ew.

[Awkward]

The combat in this game at high levels(speed and so on) has gotten so unbearably stale and boring it's not even funny and the current balance AFTER this patch is the likely the worst it's ever been. I have no idea what the OP is on but those are some of worst takes I've seen since the Monk, BLM and Samurai buffs by the "balancing" team. Whoever is balancing this game clearly has no idea what raid buffs do and their interaction with burst windows. Right now and basically for years already if you're not taking Samurai and BLM in optimization runs you're griefing and this 'buff the samurai' meta is so old along with the homogenized after thought button presses of 3-5% damage up with varying cooldowns just to pad the "selfish" DPS jobs. In no fair game should BLM be doing 9% more DPS above their role counterparts regulating them to completely useless after prog when people shouldn't be dying anymore anyway. In no fair game should a job without a raid buff be doing more _raid dps_ than a job with one, in additional to doing an astounding 7-10% more personal dps and the fact this game centralizes and balances around TWO jobs and just tacks on lazy damage buffs to everything else so they can buff them in perpetuity is just boring and bland. Combine this with the dumbing down of everything and the combat is so bad at this point it's actively harming my enjoyment of the game.

tl;dr nerf Samurai and BLM into the ground, give them a raid buff since you're already homogenizing everything anyway.

[Zacheris]

In no fair game should a job without a raid buff be doing more _raid dps_ than a job with one, in additional to doing an astounding 7-10% more personal dps and the fact this game centralizes and balances around TWO jobs and just tacks on lazy damage buffs to everything else so they can buff them in perpetuity is just boring and bland.

I wish more people understood the dynamics between rDPS and personal damage. While rDPS does help reflect a job's buff in their overall raid contribution, it does not reflect the contribution you gave to others with your own personal damage due to all buffs others use on you being subtracted in the rDPS metric. Take for example a dancer partnering either a Samurai or Reaper. It's well established through both calculations and real world data that Samurai contributes substantially more rDPS for the dancer than any other job due to their very high personal damage. This difference is invisible if you're solely examining a Reaper or Samurai's rDPS or aDPS totals, it can only be seen in comparisons between different party compositions of similar skill level and the various buff jobs' rDPS gains. Right now Samurai and Reaper appear to be similar in rDPS rankings, however, if you take a Reaper into a party instead of a Samurai, your jobs that rely on buffing others will suffer for it, leading to a lower overall party dps. Unfortunately it's a bit of a complex topic, and more casual players are very misinformed on how jobs compare to each other due to misleading graphs/metrics and simple games of telephone based on what they've heard from others. It's something beyond what most players concern themselves with, so the misconceptions are easy to have.