"Balance team tests the fights themseslves"

[Atelier-Bagur]

Machinist needs to get taken out the back and changed.

They've had potency adjustments EVERY single patch so far except 6.21 and are still trash.


That's a sign a rework is probably needed.

needs to get taken out back and put down like old yeller.

[Nihility]

They know all the mechanics and intended strategies before even stepping in and, as they've said before, do it in max ilvl gear rather than what normal people would have like crafted sets.

I would imagine they have a pretty easy time of things

[Payadopa]

Ok so; Week 1/2 raiding is an activity that a subset of the community really enjoys, and it's something that only gets to happen like 3 times every 2 years.

For two tiers in a row, certain peoples main jobs have been essentially unplayable (particularly in pugs) during this time, making something they looked forward to for months and months very disappointing.

I know a bunch of people who decided to just quit the tier when they reached P8S and realized they weren't having fun anymore. That is not a good thing for the health of a game, and is bringing back flashes of things like A3S.

HP got reduced, problem solved. Mistakes were made, apparently. I understand the problem, but it's making mountains out of mole hills.

[Deveryn]

Public rest environments are 98% marketing and publicity to generate hype and product sales, 2% developers caring about player feedback on content and job balance.

It's very easy to point to the go-to MMO target with a highly publicized PTR and see just how much the developers have cared about player feedback. Content would still get released bugged despite weeks of reports saying "the content is bugged", classes would release awkward and unbalanced despite the theorycrafters and players who play at the top competitive levels (whether PvP or PvE) warning there are problems with design and/or balance.

Then the player base has to wait weeks if not months for things to get fixed if they are not literally game-breaking in the intended sense of the phrase.

FFXIV patches have generally been released with far fewer problems needing major corrections despite the lack of a public test environment than that other game does with a public test environment. Personally, I like it this way. Everyone gets to experience new content fresh at the same time. If there's a problem with something, the developers take responsibility instead of trying to pass it off as "testers on the public test realm didn't give us enough feedback" or "no one reported the bug" (even when it was easy to quickly point to where in the PTR bug report forum it had been getting discussed). The patch notes give us a list of known issues so we're usually not completely caught off guard if we run into a problem.

A PTR is a mistake. It means the game company doesn't want to bother hiring a quality control team to check for problems to be fixed. They'd rather use players as unpaid labor and the majority of players aren't there to do that. They're there to get their free demo and bragging rights that they got to see content before release.

If the company is so cheap they don't want to pay for a quality control staff to do the bug testing for their game, you can bet they're cutting corners on other parts of development as well.

I agree 100%

[Liam_Harper]

Also the discussion about class balance doesn't affect anyone but week 1/2 and world prog - All jobs CAN and WILL continue to clear all content available.


This p8s boss hp thing only affects week 1/2 and world prog too - I can understand complaints from people actually clearing week 1/2 but it gets picked up by the average PF bob who clears 5-10+ weeks or w/e in and starts banning specific jobs from their groups simply because some video said the job can't do that fight.

Not true, it affects everyone who raids to varying degrees.

Let's say we have 2 casual teams in 630 gear mid-tier. Neither team is amazing at dps, just average players. Team A is a full meta comp and Team B is PLD, WAR, MCH, RPR, double caster, ect.

Team A will probably clear p8s with 6 deaths and 7 damage downs and be enjoying their shiny loot.

Team B will have 3 deaths, no damage downs, wipe to enrage and will probably spend a few weeks longer on prog until they learn the fight well. They likely won't even know why they're struggling so much when team A is online posting about how "easy the raid is".

That's not balanced. Players of equal skill should expect a fairly similar raiding experience. Not a harder mode than others because they chose their favorite jobs. Gear does not fix job imbalance.

[Atelier-Bagur]

Not true, it affects everyone who raids to varying degrees.

Let's say we have 2 casual teams in 630 gear mid-tier. Neither team is amazing at dps, just average players. Team A is a full meta comp and Team B is PLD, WAR, MCH, RPR, double caster, ect.

Team A will probably clear p8s with 6 deaths and 7 damage downs and be enjoying their shiny loot.

Team B will have 3 deaths, no damage downs, wipe to enrage and will probably spend a few weeks longer on prog until they learn the fight well. They likely won't even know why they're struggling so much when team A is online posting about how "easy the raid is".

That's not balanced. Players of equal skill should expect a fairly similar raiding experience. Not a harder mode than others because they chose their favorite jobs. Gear does not fix job imbalance.

isnt that running risk of homogenizing if all jobs perform the same? Shouldnt it be as long as its "doable with all party comps" then it doesnt really matter how fast it gets cleared?

[Jaquan]

They know all the mechanics and intended strategies before even stepping in and, as they've said before, do it in max ilvl gear rather than what normal people would have like crafted sets.

I would imagine they have a pretty easy time of things

Actually if the posts before it is accurate it's the opposite. The only advantage they initially have are wipe prevention mechanics which allow them to learn the fight at faster pace (less restarts). Afterwards they need to clear it with min ilvl needed for the instance and without wipe prevention.

[AmiableApkallu]

isnt that running risk of homogenizing if all jobs perform the same? Shouldnt it be as long as its "doable with all party comps" then it doesnt really matter how fast it gets cleared?

Running the risk of homogenization, yes. Guaranteeing homogenization, no. At least I don't think so. Making jobs "perform the same" is a bit fluid.

- You could require that all jobs within a role do the same total amount of damage every 1 GCD. This gives you essentially no flexibility in job design.

- You could require that all jobs within a role do the same total amount of damage every 72 GCDs. This gives you a bit of flexibility in job design, but you also need to be mindful of how kill times effect things. A job that does the same, small amount of damage for each of those 72 GCDs and a job that puts 80% of its damage into the 70th GCD would, in practice, perform very differently.

As long as you accept that at any given point in a fight, jobs will have delivered different amounts of total damage, but that in the long run, they'll be equal, the question becomes one of how large that difference can get and how much of a difference the players will tolerate.

[ForteNightshade]

HP got reduced, problem solved. Mistakes were made, apparently. I understand the problem, but it's making mountains out of mole hills.

Would you say that if it were other content? How about if the upcoming Criterion Dungeons see no balance changes, thus leading to Warrior being the undisputed best tank due to Bloodwhetting being hilariously broken in an AoE environment? What if Deep Dungeon was made nearly unclearable with certain jobs for similar reasons? Players who enjoy early progression only have a very limited window for their particular content. So far we've had two tiers out of three with a complete failure of job balance. Some jobs, like Machinist, have been suffering for years. At what point does it stop being a "mole hill" and actual criticism the dev team simply isn't addressing?

isnt that running risk of homogenizing if all jobs perform the same? Shouldnt it be as long as its "doable with all party comps" then it doesnt really matter how fast it gets cleared?

Homogeneity is better than uniqueness for the sake of it.

Case in point, let's look back at Heavensward. Paladin and Dark Knight were both unique as the physical and magical tank, respectively. Unfortunately, most mechanics are designed around magical damage. Therefore, Paladin's uniqueness had literally zero value. In an expansion worth of Savage tiers, there were maybe 2-3 fights where you'd even consider Paladin over Dark Knight. Ironically, these two tanks would have a similar problem in Stormblood, albeit reversed. Only Dark Knight lacked in AoE mitigation, supposedly due to its superior single target mitigation—namely TBN. This didn't matter since both Warrior and Paladin had near equal defensives while contributing the highest damage output. In a fight like UCoB, Dark Knight was a liability. Could you still clear? Of course. You just made it harder on your healers.

Certain aspects of job design need to be somewhat homogenized for balance sake. Hence why tank CDs are largely the same.

If you took Reaper and simply pumped up some numbers, nothing about the job changes. It won't suddenly be Monk or Samurai with a scythe. It'll just deal comparable damage without being a detriment. Likewise, Warrior isn't going to suddenly play like Gunbreaker if they give it another 100-ish DPS to better close tank balance. There are easy solutions to the problem. SE just remains incredibly hesitate to do anything. That, or they're stubbornly caught up on aspects of jobs which don't contribute nearly as much as they believe they do. Warrior's massive healing, for example, doesn't matter when autos deal 20k. Dark Knight can handle those just fine without Equilibrium. In fact, I take more damage on Warrior in P7 than Dark Knight because the latter will always have TBN + Dark Mind + Oblation for every single buster.

Like it or not, damage is king in this game. Any job lagging too far behind simply can't justifiable its existing because nothing else is rewarded.

[Raoabolic]

isnt that running risk of homogenizing if all jobs perform the same? Shouldnt it be as long as its "doable with all party comps" then it doesnt really matter how fast it gets cleared?

It's almost like there is an underlying issue that needs to be addresse- HOLD ON 2 MIN WINDOW UP! BURST TIEM~!