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.

[Altera]

I really hate saying this but I'm almost glad in a way. The dev team only seems to respond with meaningful change when the community as a whole finally gets so fed up they refuse to partake in their nonsense. Monk saw a complete rework largely due to the playerbase revolting after Shadowbringer's media tour saw Yoshida say, "We're most proud of the changes to Monk" only to discover they did almost nothing. Machinist is now reaching the point where Savage clear numbers are a mere fraction of every other job. While both Warrior and Paladin were buffed after people wouldn't stupid up about it.

For all the criticism WoW gets for ignoring player feedback, FFXIV is doing the exact same thing. The only difference is FF has more players willing to defend SE over any little thing. There's no excuse for the jobs to be this horrendously balanced two Savage tiers in. What's worse is we have an Ultimate on the horizon yet a handful of jobs will be locked out of it unless we see some pretty serious changes come in 6.3.

I have seen BLMs from PF also removed from joining parties lately. A lot of PFs now seem to almost wanna skip the Stat bonus from bringing other Job roles to 4 Melees as their combined damage and ease of uptime negates the bonus etc.

I remember in Stormblood META era I had diffifulties getting farming done as I was excluded from PFs as I only play BLM and have done since they added Job System in 1.0. I have leveled all Jobs to max every expansion but none hooks me like BLM

If I again get excluded from doing content outside of my static, I start to wonder if my 10-11 year journey across Eorzea and its Reflections has come to an end. I feel really bad whenever I feel I am holding my static back because I love my BLM and they tell me to play the job I enjoy :/

[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.