Patch 6.21 - DPS Roles & the State of Endgame Balance

[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.