ZephZaeora discusses job balance and how it's gone downhill in Endwalker. Thoughts?

[Rilifane]

Literally who?

What does it matter whether you know someone or not if they make a good point?
And they do. Names and fame are less important than the reasoning and they bring up several very good points. It's clear they're speaking from extensive experience with the game and its highend content. I didn't know their name either but I'll not discard the validity of their points because of it.
The fact remains that by homogenizing and streamlining everything for the sake of easier balance, SE made it worse.

[Valkyrie_Lenneth]

What does it matter whether you know someone or not if they make a good point?
And they do. Names and fame are less important than the reasoning and they bring up several very good points. It's clear they're speaking from extensive experience with the game and its highend content. I didn't know their name either but I'll not discard the validity of their points because of it.
The fact remains that by homogenizing and streamlining everything for the sake of easier balance, SE made it worse.

I'm pretty sure Heavensward has some of the most unbalanced jobs of any of the expansions, and that had the least streamlining and homogenization of all the expansions.

[Rilifane]

I'm pretty sure Heavensward has some of the most unbalanced jobs of any of the expansions, and that had the least streamlining and homogenization of all the expansions.

Exactly, they streamlined and homogenized for nothing because job balance is still bad. The difference is that this time around you have no wiggle room to make up for it through player skill. It is out of your control.
What are you even arguing for at this point?

[Valkyrie_Lenneth]

Exactly, they streamlined and homogenized for nothing because job balance is still bad. The difference is that this time around you have no wiggle room to make up for it through player skill. It is out of your control.
What are you even arguing for at this point?

That neither uniqueness nor homogenization have an impact on job balance lol.

Everything revolves around buff windows and how jobs interact with them. And they over buffed a few jobs as usual. That's what adjustment patches are for.

[Rilifane]

That neither uniqueness nor homogenization have an impact on job balance lol.

Everything revolves around buff windows and how jobs interact with them. And they over buffed a few jobs as usual. That's what adjustment patches are for.

Then you didn't fully understand their point.
The streamlining did make it worse because now SE has less wiggle room when balancing than before. So yes, it has an impact. The more streamlined something is, the more it becomes the standard. If you cannot deviate from the standard in either direction, it means the standard has to be much better balanced than if less streamlining left more room for individual and group skill expression because the latter allows comps to be viable despite being numerically a bit weaker on paper.

What it boilds down to is that SE has taken away the majority of the control from players and railroaded gameplay. Every small mistake when balancing becomes a bigger issue because the players can't overcome it. SE has taken that ability away for the most part.

[MagiusNecros]

But PvP jobs have almost no skills, and they all have their own heal.

And people REALLY don't want jobs that simple in the normal game.

And somehow is the most fun in the game because each job does different shit and has an actual identity.

Only job with identity in PvE is Blue Mage.

[Cetonis]

It doesn't necessarily have to be a question of burst timings or "homogenization", I think the point being made is broader than that.


When you boil it down, there are two group dps numbers at play.

One is the amount of dps you'd expect a group to do when they're progressing a fight - playing safe, not worrying about burst strategy, just everyone pressing their buttons. Playing their jobs well for sure, but putting mechanics first and being no more coordinated than a PF (or jp RF) group. This 'prog dps' is, ostensibly, what SE would be balancing their dps checks for.

The other is the 'optimized dps', the amount you expect to see when a group does everything it can to get the most damage possible. That can be from messing with buff alignment, from melee or caster uptime strats, from healing optimization, from jobs simply being deep enough to benefit from individual opti, and so on.


What SE has done, with the lump sum of all their decisions, is to close that gap dramatically.

When optimized dps is, say, 5-10% higher than prog dps, then groups can overcome having a couple jobs that are a few percent behind. They can outpace rng, too. If you optimize and get a clean run, you clear no matter what. You can raid - even race - with that purple parser who has a great attitude and is strong at mechanics.

But when that gap is only 1-2% or something, you have the problem we see now. It gets difficult to optimize your way outside of RNG range. Job selection starts to matter a lot. You can be as optimized as you want and get multiple clean enrages, and if even one or two members aren't quite the best of the best, it gets worse.


And it's not any one thing causing this, but the some total of everything SE has done, is Zheph's point I think. It's buff timings AND giant hitboxes AND high damage rng AND shaky job balance AND lowered job skill ceilings etc.

All of the "QoL" has come at a price, it's not just the buff timings. SE is going to be hard-pressed to make a tough dps check as things stand, but they don't have to abandon all of the things to improve that situation.

They could stick to their guns on the buff timing thing but back off on whatever notions are driving the job balancing points they've set. They could make hitboxes slightly less of a joke without going all the way to Garuda. They could re-think Direct Hit in 7.0, or their job design philosophy.


For now though, the best we can probably hope for is some job balancing improvements, and then P12S will likely be undertuned. And then unless they expressly say something, we'll have to wait to find out if there have been any lessons learned until 7.0.

[Sotaris]

What does it matter whether you know someone or not if they make a good point?
And they do. Names and fame are less important than the reasoning and they bring up several very good points. It's clear they're speaking from extensive experience with the game and its highend content. I didn't know their name either but I'll not discard the validity of their points because of it.
The fact remains that by homogenizing and streamlining everything for the sake of easier balance, SE made it worse.

Do I say that they made a bad point?
Name dropping someone random Twitter user make sounds like everyone should know them.

You always see the same thing if you name drop a random streamer.

Calm down.

[Rilifane]

Do I say that they made a bad point?
Name dropping someone random Twitter user make sounds like everyone should know them.

You always see the same thing if you name drop a random streamer.

Calm down.

Someone points something out.
"Calm down". Ah, yes. Sure. If it makes you feel better I am now perfectly calm thanks to your sage advice that was very much necessary and saved my day because I was definitely very upset.

Anyway, back to the real topic: streamlining obviously isn't just about 2min bursts but about everything like uptime and positionals as well.
They streamlined the standard to "naturally aligned burst at all times, easy uptime/ positionals". I personally don't believe they did it to make uncoordinated PF groups have a better time (and they failed at it anyway), so who does profit from it? Nobody. Coordinated groups no longer have the same comp freedom as before, nor do uncoordinated groups because they botched the balance. If SE indirectly enforces a very specific gameplay and that is the standard because you can't reasonably deviate from it, than the standard has to be balanced far better and I still think they'll shoot themselves in the foot if they stick to rigid 2min bursts. Especially with the potencies during burst increasing expansion after expansion.

Even if they make uptime/ positionals less of a joke with giant unidirectional hitboxes, the fact remains that all classes still burst in naturally aligned 2min windows and while it could bring melee and the other subroles slightly closer together, it will still make balancing much more difficult than with buffs spread out and leaving it to the group to squeeze out extra dps by optimizing around them.

[LittleImp]

Do I say that they made a bad point?
Name dropping someone random Twitter user make sounds like everyone should know them.

You always see the same thing if you name drop a random streamer.

Calm down.

Most people that play this game at a high level would at least have a passing familiarity with that name.

If you don't recognize it, it's probably a decent indicator that this discussion isn't super relevant to you.