Patch 6.21 - DPS Roles & the State of Endgame Balance

[Cetonis]

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.

It's not faith, it's math. It is not possible, full stop.

Two jobs scale dramatically with group quality. One does not care at all. The scaling jobs *have* to be better in absolute peak quality groups, as that's the only way that situation has a chance to be considered balanced at all.

You can fiddle with the "break-even" point, of course. That is, how good of a group/run do you need for DNC/BRD to catch up to MCH? But the answer right now is that you already need a pretty darn good group. MCH solidly outpaces the other ranged in duty finder content like NM raids, and would be the strongest pranged option for the large majority of statics and PFs.

Is it not large enough of a majority? Maybe. Is being the best ranged in 95+% or something of the game's content/circumstances just not enough for MCH mains? Seemingly not. And yeah, one would figure MCH could at least have gotten a first aid kit or something. But clearly SE is fine with this vision of pranged balance, and whether you or I 100% agree with it or not, it's not an insane stance for them to have. There's a logic to it.


What *is* insane though, is the gap between the de jure physical ranged (+rdm/smn), and the melee jobs they've turned into de facto physical ranged. Complaining about that is a case with far more legs, and while the gap has been too large for years, with the hitbox changes the situation is certainly in the worst state it's ever been in.

[Clayr]

... [DNC & BRD] scale dramatically with group quality. [MCH] does not care at all. The scaling jobs *have* to be better in absolute peak quality groups, as that's the only way that situation has a chance to be considered balanced at all.

You can fiddle with the "break-even" point, of course. That is, how good of a group/run do you need for DNC/BRD to catch up to MCH? But the answer right now is that you already need a pretty darn good group. MCH solidly outpaces the other ranged in duty finder content like NM raids, and would be the strongest pranged option for the large majority of statics and PFs...

I agree wholeheartedly with the initial premise. However, I feel it's worth pointing out that content like Normal Raids aren't a great place to draw from when trying to assess job balance (no enrage pressure/randomized comps/players often don't take it particularly seriously) and that Machinists are still under-tuned even given the buff/non-buff job dichotomy.

Dancers, for instance, should have higher rDPS variance than Machinist and be capable of a higher potential damage contribution as a result. When you pull Savage clear data from the last two weeks, however, you'll notice that it's not just the upper potential that's higher:

MCH & DNC Abyssos (Savage) rDPS Standings: Sep. 1, 2022 - Sep. 15, 2022

As it stands a competent Dancer in this context will out-perform a similarly competent Machinist at all skill levels. If you want to balance around buffs providing rDPS variance, then Machinist should have a higher median rDPS contribution than Dancer while still losing out to Dancers and Bards at the upper percentiles (which is actually how they used to compare to one-another during Shadowbringers).

This last bit is spit-balling, but I think part of this is that in addition to Machinist having slightly undertuned potency values, the 2-minute standardization pass the job team implemented with Endwalker made buff coordination easier and more impactful. In-turn this boosted the performance of the median player on said buff-centric jobs.

[Cetonis]

MCH & DNC Abyssos (Savage) rDPS Standings: Sep. 1, 2022 - Sep. 15, 2022

The combined savage numbers are not going to be a very good metric right now, because you're going to have a lot of gear and group skew going on.

10,000 of the parses being factored into DNC there are from P8S1 kills, while only 600 of MCH runs are. Naturally those DNC players are going to have better gear and better groups than the ones comprising almost the entirety of the MCH runs in that number.

As for normal raids, as you pointed out, NM groups are not that strong, which is exactly why those parses are a reasonable approximation of a job's performance with a suspect group. The factors you cite should apply equally to whatever job you might queue in as, it's not like MCH is magically going to be paired with stronger players who care more.


The group quality question is further complicated because we shouldn't conflate "50th percentile player" with "50th percentile group". They are not the same and what we actually care about is the latter.

One thing you could look at is the early fight nDPS gap - this essentially informs how much rDPS value BRD/DNC need to be getting to catch up to MCH. It's around 1300-1400, which is in the ballpark of what a Bard might get on a not-great run. Dancer appears to usually be a bit ahead of that, which might be reasonably explained by the early tier gear skew. Though there was that Devilment / Starfall buff, so perhaps both BRD and MCH could use a 1% catch-up or something.

In any case, it's not a melodramatically awful situation within-the-role if we're talking 1% tweaks. It feels like the volume of complaints and memes about MCH would be more appropriately aimed at RDM/SMN, or RPR.

[Clayr]

As for normal raids, as you pointed out, NM groups are not that strong, which is exactly why those parses are a reasonable approximation of a job's performance with a suspect group.

I don't really follow this. Why would you want to fine-tune job performance in an environment where that performance doesn't really matter and isn't incentivized? It shouldn't be completely ignored, given how much more of the player base participates in them, but Normal Raids aren't space where small DPS differences effect a player's experience in any meaningful way while Savage and Ultimates encounters are.

The developers clearly intend for players to perform better and optimize at higher difficulties and appear to make a great number of design decisions around jobs based on that.

[Absurdity]

The developers clearly intend for players to perform better and optimize at higher difficulties and appear to make a great number of design decisions around jobs based on that.

I'm not really convinced that this is actually the case. They're not really incentivizing players to perform better or making changes to jobs that actually reward playing better, they're making the game have players automatically perform better as long as they have the ability to string keypresses together. A lot of jobs were changed to automatically line up with buffs as long as you press your buttons when they're ready, you're not performing better because you're getting better at your job, you're performing better because they game just gives you that for free.

[Clayr]

Fair. Honestly I'm kind of lost as to what they're trying to do after reading the Yoshi P. post today.

They finally said in an official capacity that they balance job damage based off how difficult they think it is to play, but that doesn't seem to map at all with how much damage the jobs currently do.

[Cetonis]

I don't really follow this. Why would you want to fine-tune job performance in an environment where that performance doesn't really matter and isn't incentivized? It shouldn't be completely ignored, given how much more of the player base participates in them, but Normal Raids aren't space where small DPS differences effect a player's experience in any meaningful way while Savage and Ultimates encounters are.

The developers clearly intend for players to perform better and optimize at higher difficulties and appear to make a great number of design decisions around jobs based on that.

You would think, but they clearly don't. If they balanced jobs primarily around optimized play, why have melee always been tuned as if they're missing 10% of their GCDs to being out of range? Why do they cite things like "difficulty to play", if they're not thinking about how jobs fall off in the hands of lesser players? Why have they left MCH in the balancing spot it's lived in for five years and three expansions now?


To the extent that they do tune for Savage scenarios, I suspect that the JP Raid Finder is a big part of what they're thinking about. Random parties with random comps, no guarantee of this synergy showing up, or of your party being able to coordinate something like buff windows, or of your party members even being all that good. Of course they're also cognizant of jobs being locked out of PFs and such, but remember that on JP the pug clear scene runs through the RF.