Patch 6.21 - DPS Roles & the State of Endgame Balance

[ForteNightshade]

MCH is clearly intened to be selfish DPS among phranged. Its what makes it different and very usefull in content, where there is no-one you can buff except yourself.
Why would you want to hang utility on it and get it taxed in aDPS?
What it needs are numbers and perhaps rotation rework.

Because we're going into year three of the selfish DPS Machinist philosophy that has been an abject failure. At this point, I think most of us have zero faith SE can reasonably balance the Prange to where Machinist can be selfish without overshadowing Bard and Dancer. The easier solution is for them all to have some degree of utility. Not to mention, a lot of Prange players want the old "Support" role identity back in lieu of "Baby's First DPS".

[RylaBee]

Because we're going into year three of the selfish DPS Machinist philosophy that has been an abject failure. At this point, I think most of us have zero faith SE can reasonably balance the Prange to where Machinist can be selfish without overshadowing Bard and Dancer. The easier solution is for them all to have some degree of utility. Not to mention, a lot of Prange players want the old "Support" role identity back in lieu of "Baby's First DPS".

How is resigning on MCH being different from BRD/DNC support role a solution?
Did you actually asked any MCH main, if they want to be fully support-enabled like BRD/DNC and end up together on bottom of aDPS barrel?
Some of them actually play it outside of 8-man content I wager?

[CKNovel]

As a MCH main from HW to ShB 5.5, I used to love how usefull I was to the team support wise. Dismantle, refresh, Palisade.
SQEX failed to deliver the ranged pure DPS as the job keeps orbiting around the "pure DPS" status rather than truly meeting it.
Does it goes against SQEX philosophy? Are they simply failing at balancing the job? Do they think the job is balanced?
We don't know what they think but we're sure of one thing:
The result of "Pure ranged DPS" is "pure crap" getting no upside of ranged or Pure but getting all the downsides.

If it was just about me, I'd resurrect Rook Autoturret and Bishop to respectively heal and shield my party members.
I'd also implement an actual Chainsaw but many probably already know how many times I wished for that.

SQEX needs to make a choice between the Pure or the Ranged aspect.
aDPS, rDPS, I don't care, the job feels like griefing right now.

[Rilifane]

MCH is clearly intened to be selfish DPS among phranged. Its what makes it different and very usefull in content, where there is no-one you can buff except yourself.
Why would you want to hang utility on it and get it taxed in aDPS?
What it needs are numbers and perhaps rotation rework.


Curing Walts being "massive, all rounder utility that can be equal to a Cure III" is quite loaded statement.

I haven't seen the math lately, but it used to be healer potency for heals was point-for-point equal to about 1.9 dps potency. Thats is 90% difference.
Basically, stacked 300+300pt Waltz would heal about ~55% of 600pt Cure III (if someone has new numbers, feel free to update).

I really dont see healers forgoing healing, when whole party bleeds after new juicy raid-wides, because they are counting that DNC is here to save the day.

Mind you, its not *useless*, but the core of DNC utility is its Dance Parner buffing & Technical Finish (both included in rDPS).
Not its healing flavor.

CW alone can save the healers a lot of work. 2x CW from our DNC hits for about 13,5-14k, my Indom (400 potency) for about 11k. CW saves me several AF heals throughout the fight and used at the end of Purgation even allows us to get by without a single GCD heal unless someone mistimes their mit. Without it, I'd have to Spreadlo at the end to survive the last hit.
So yes, healers can definitely forgo a heal with a CW from the DNC.
Impro ticks for about 2,3k with our gear which, again, saves a heal. It's especially useful during bleeds or mechanics where you have a constant HP loss like Purgation. It's useful even without the shield.

I agree that MCH needs more than just utility but DNC brings a lot of free healing on a low cooldown that gives it an edge over BRD and MCH even if their dps would be perfectly balanced. It loses value as you get more gear but before that it does lead to an increase of healer dps.

Edit: I don't think utility has to be free healing. Partywide movement speed, mitigation, MP refresh, heal increase all work and I think it was a mistake that SE scraped it.
As much as many, myself included, meme'd about Expedient when it was first announced, it can make the difference between being able to fully slidecast movement and eating a dps loss not to mention it makes mechanics with tight movement a lot safer. MCH could very well have an infight Peloton on a cooldown.
Palisade and Refresh were great utility and they would go well with current fight/ class design too. MCH has so much real estate on its hotbars, a bit of utility would go a long way and doesn't have to come in the form of healing if that goes too much against the class fantasy for you.

[RylaBee]

I have no "class fantasies" about MCH.
But question strongly the idea of yet another job to be homogenized in way of: If 2 pRDPS have utilities, so must the 3rd.

My CW(2x) averages around 7-8k and Impro ticks 1.4k.
But these abilities have so few "hits", that its not enough to build statistics on it without including hundreds of parses, not even considering various heal-increasing buffs that come from another jobs (SCH, MNK etc..).

[Liam_Harper]

Far as I'm concerned, an entire role's existence shouldn't be dependent on an arbitrary 5% buff the devs slapped on in Shadowbringers to keep the Prange DPS alive. Nowadays, Red Mage and Summoner are clinging to that same buff for relevancy. Even Black Mage of all jobs would barely have any justification existing without it. That alone is absolutely ridiculous.

I don't see this brought up too often and fully agree.

Phys ranged and now to an extent, rez casters, have been on life support with that 1% buff for years now. If that band-aid buff didn't exist, you'd probably just bring 4 melee this tier because you're talking up to 3000 rdps over a caster/phys ranged comp. Having 5 jobs exist in raids only because of a 1% role buff and not their own contribution is awful design and a crutch that allows them to balance badly and get away with it.

[Rilifane]

I have no "class fantasies" about MCH.
But question strongly the idea of yet another job to be homogenized in way of: If 2 pRDPS have utilities, so must the 3rd.

My CW(2x) averages around 7-8k and Impro ticks 1.4k.
But these abilities have so few "hits", that its not enough to build statistics on it without including hundreds of parses, not even considering various heal-increasing buffs that come from another jobs (SCH, MNK etc..).

That's because you didn't include overheal.
No 300 potency skill has a 50% variance, that's not how potencies work; not even with heal buffs. If you want to see how much it could heal, you need to include overheal because the raw amount is the metric to go by, not a sniped value from suboptimal timing. And suddenly you would heal for about 13k in total if timed correctly which is stronger than several of the GCD heals your healers used.
Same with Impro tricks.

And I specifically mentioned different forms of utility because I don't think all jobs should bring the same thing. And I strongly question the notion that bringing any form of utility is the same as homogenization. Samba/ Tactician/ Troubadour doing the same thing on the same cooldown with a different icon is homogenization. Giving one prange oGCD healing, one more mit and one refresh/ movement speed isn't in my opinion.

[CKNovel]

I don't see this brought up too often and fully agree.

Phys ranged and now to an extent, rez casters, have been on life support with that 1% buff for years now. If that band-aid buff didn't exist, you'd probably just bring 4 melee this tier because you're talking up to 3000 rdps over a caster/phys ranged comp. Having 5 jobs exist in raids only because of a 1% role buff and not their own contribution is awful design and a crutch that allows them to balance badly and get away with it.

It's been brought up since Shadowbringer but the topic was abandonned for some reasons.
Honestly that 1% stats feels like a poor excuse to bring "bad jobs" and not having to balance them. Feels like it was their answer to Piercing Debuff+NIN meta in late HW.
It works within a maximum gap but too many times it feels like you have to bring your little brother play with you and your friends or you won't get dessert tonight.

It's not exactly fun to have a meta imposed to everyone.
And it just artificially inflates the number of ranged/caster players. I can garantee they'd be much, much lower if we didn't had that 1% role bonus.

[Rilifane]

It's been brought up since Shadowbringer but the topic was abandonned for some reasons.
Honestly that 1% stats feels like a poor excuse to bring "bad jobs" and not having to balance them. Feels like it was their answer to Piercing Debuff+NIN meta in late HW.
It works within a maximum gap but too many times it feels like you have to bring your little brother play with you and your friends or you won't get dessert tonight.

It's not exactly fun to have a meta imposed to everyone.
And it just artificially inflates the number of ranged/caster players. I can garantee they'd be much, much lower if we didn't had that 1% role bonus.

The worst thing about it is that if fflogs wouldn't calculate with the 5% buff, many people would ditch the prange and even casters in a heartbeat. Anyone interested in logs will only drag them along to make their log look better.
Because even with the buff, many parties would be roughly equal in terms of rdps, some even stronger if they don't bring a prange. Casters are in a slightly better spot but they all only get a participation trophy at this point.

The 5% is such a messed up way of trying to make parties drag a prange along.
You're not here because you're valuable on your own, you're just here to make everyone look better. Doesn't that feel nice?

[CKNovel]

The 5% is such a messed up way of trying to make parties drag a prange along.
You're not here because you're valuable on your own, you're just here to make everyone look better. Doesn't that feel nice?

I don't like it but we have to admit it's great to avoid balance slip-up.
During ShB pRange were low but high enough to make the 1% worth it.

If it wasn't there, pRange would not be played at all since ShB.

I feel that the more jobs we have, the less useful the 1% bonus role will be.
We get more and more jobs and each other is competing for one spot among one or two available slots.
During HW we had 7 DPS fighting for 4 spots, now we have 3 Caster/Range fighting for 1 spot each and soon, probably 4 casters fighting among themselves for a single spot.