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

[Jeeqbit]

Jobs kinda went downhill during Shadowbringers, but nobody really said anything...

The developers did in a live letter. They are happy with where they got jobs in 5.0 and want to continue it in EW, acknowledging that some people want 3.0 complexity but that they wouldn't be going in that direction.

Augment essentially every single attack it had with Dark Arts, and I really miss it's ability to chain Abyssal Drain. Blood Weapon also gave you MP per enemy hit, so pair this with Quietus and you essentially had infinite MP and Sustain with Dark Arts + Abyssal Drain. Oh, also had Sole Survivor for 30/20% Max HP/MP restored on top if you defeated an enemy/didnt defeat an enemy before it expired.

Dark Arts was being ridiculed and meme'd on by the community to a point they couldn't ignore. Sole Survivor could be used well but abilities like that were generally annoying or unused.

I understand that Warrior is the sustain tank now for w/e reason. I believe it used to focus on critical hits. Oh well.

Warrior was always a sustain tank with Thrill of Battle, Blood Bath, Storm's Path and in Heavensward it got Equilibrium. It was always about using as many Inner Beasts or Fell Cleaves as possible. Unless you wanted to get your mitigation from Inner Beast (a GCD), it was very lacking in that area in favor of increasing total HP and taking the raw damage, then healing it back up. It's still all of these things, but it's got more mitigation such as the built-in 20% trait reduction, Rampart and Raw Intuition is more useful now because it works against magic and doesn't increase incoming damage from behind.

[LilyPendragon]

So in other words, only relevant to less than 1% of the playerbase...which is nonsense and you know it. You're incorrect on job balance discourse going to be irrelevant if you're not part of that small group, anybody who uses fflogs and runs EX/Savage notices when something is under/overtuned.

Because it's not about noticing or understanding it. It's about it not being *relevant* to 99% of the player base. Is job balance relvant to a 10th percentile parsing Paladin? No. Not when there is so much that can be made up with personal improvement. Balance in almost any multiplayer game is far more relevant to the highly skilled players, because they're the only ones that push their jobs/races/weapons/whatever to the limit and actually exploit the capabilities of them to their fullest. For 99% of us, git gud is far more relevant than a few hundred extra potency on a spell or ability.

[Somnolence]

I'd say some tweaking of numbers can bring balance to acceptable level easily.

Talking about fundamental problems, however.
The DPS has 4 factors essentially:
1. Rotation
2. Uptime
3. Crit RNG
4. Buff windows

We can assume everybody is doing their rotation correctly for balance purposes, obviously there might be shakies in first kills.

With current encounter design melee uptime is easy. Meanwhile casters are forced to move a lot, esp. with PF strats. Thus ranged tax is hard to justify.

Crit RNG is bad when there are big potency skills. SE has put themselves with them into a corner by being forced to make them auto-crit to reduce variance, which makes these skills less exciting.

Buff windows streamline job design and encounter design, but this results in heavy homogenization and saving resources for buff windows on every job.

I am unsure if Zeph Zaeora blaming 2min buff windows is the problem here with P8S door boss enrage, I think job balance needs to be fixed first on numbers then we can think about other things.

For P8S door boss specifically one of the patterns results in lower DPS so encounters having so called cursed patterns is also a problem when they have tight dps checks.

[Rilifane]

I'd say some tweaking of numbers can bring balance to acceptable level easily.

Talking about fundamental problems, however.
The DPS has 4 factors essentially:
1. Rotation
2. Uptime
3. Crit RNG
4. Buff windows

We can assume everybody is doing their rotation correctly for balance purposes, obviously there might be shakies in first kills.

With current encounter design melee uptime is easy. Meanwhile casters are forced to move a lot, esp. with PF strats. Thus ranged tax is hard to justify.

Crit RNG is bad when there are big potency skills. SE has put themselves with them into a corner by being forced to make them auto-crit to reduce variance, which makes these skills less exciting.

Buff windows streamline job design and encounter design, but this results in heavy homogenization and saving resources for buff windows on every job.

I am unsure if Zeph Zaeora blaming 2min buff windows is the problem here with P8S door boss enrage, I think job balance needs to be fixed first on numbers then we can think about other things.

For P8S door boss specifically one of the patterns results in lower DPS so encounters having so called cursed patterns is also a problem when they have tight dps checks.

Zeph doesn't only talk about buff windows though.
It's just one of the factors that makes balance more difficult because it has to be more on point than in the past.
Think about it: if we had more naturally misaligned buffs, it means crit rng and high potency skills don't get amplified as much as they currently do because the damage buffs are more spread out over the encounter while leaving the option for coordinated groups to align naturally misaligned buffs by factoring in fight duration/ kill time/ pot windows.
Rigid 2min buffs play into numbers thanks to how buffs work in this game. The severly restrict the range of which classes have to balanced in.
Zeph talks about all 4 factors you mentioned and a 5th and that is increasingly high potencies during those burst windows which are problematic even without rng as small differences in high potency skills get magnified under buffs into a much larger problem. You can't fix one without factoring in the others and with how strongly high burst potencies and crit/ dh rng get amplified during rigid, naturally aligned 2min bursts it's also something that needs to be changed.

Naturally high to full uptime, rigid 2min buff windows, high burst potencies and crit rng have all become factors that are outside of the player's control. The only factor remaining is the rotation itself but the impact of the player has also been decreased and overall there is little room for coordination and skill expression that could be used to overcome tight dps checks with a suboptimal comp.
Tweaking numbers has become more difficult, they put themselves into a corner there and until they will give back the impact of coordination and group skill expression, it will remain problematic and difficult to pull off.

[Curisu]

I totally agree with this zeph person.
Not a big fan of a buff window burst.

I really hope they reverse this design decision.

[Ransu]

I don't necessarily have a problem with the 2 min burst windows. I think in concept its not bad, but the problem is how XIV does its stat distributions. We have a DH stat that directly contributes to crit damage, thus their answer to the problem has been to start making things auto crit. Personally I think the correct answer would be to remove DH and bring back ACC, but I guess missing attacks can not feel good to a lot of players which is fair, but its the better alternative over DH and boring auto crits imo. So ya, while I miss 3.0 complexity, I don't think we'll ever get back to that design, but the devs have got to change something if they are pushing ahead with 2 min burst windows and imo getting rid of DH stat is that something.

[Mika_Zahard]

People here attacking the messenger because they didnt like the message, but trying to make others not realize the message is right .. you people are sad, sad beings.