"Balance team tests the fights themseslves"

[Iyrnthota]

Honestly I am surprised by this. That was a lot more detail than I'd expect a game producer to give out. Other MMO devs could learn a thing or two from Yoshi-P

I mean, he didn't say anything that most of us didn't already know or assume.
The only real thing of import is that they've doubled down on the "job balance is fine" stance they've taken, and given shoddy excuses with little to no reasoning for why.

[LittleImp]

I thought only a small percentage of the playerbase only does savage, even less ultimates?

There are servers on JP with a savage tier clear rate exceeding 50% in some tiers. P5S was actually the fight with the most clears logged week 1, ever. People really need to stop trying to frame Savage as niche content, because it isn't and hasn't been for a very long time.

I dont know how this arguments holds up, as many players are just playing for the casual content. But one thing is certain, the entitlement in this thread reeks.

If casual players aren't playing this content, they should probably stop participating in a discussion around something that doesn't impact them then.

But one thing is certain, the entitlement in this thread reeks.

Why is it entitlement to expect the game to maintain similar tuning standards? Why is it entitlement to expect to be able to play my main job while raiding? This is the same community that constantly spins the "Anyone can clear any content uwu" and "Every job is viable uwu" bs as some kind of weird virtue signal about how perfect and inclusive the game is, but the moment the game has serious balance issues we're suddenly not allowed to care about it lol.

Stop trying to use 'entitlement' nonsensically to dismiss people you don't agree with, especially on a topic that isn't even relevant to your own experience in game.

[Liam_Harper]

Fair response and good they took the time, even if I don't agree.

We always add a little bit extra to the boss values before rechecking the fight and releasing it live.

There's something to learn from this. I don't think it was that their testing team had more time to learn the fight, but more that the fights are too easy to optimize and player skill isn't contributing enough. We have homogenized, easier jobs this expansion. We have 2 minute burst windows on everything. We have bosses with a massive hitbox that let you line up burst nicely. It's not surprising that a very good team is doing almost the same as a world first team. As long as you press buttons all the time, your rotation isn't a mess and you burst at 2 min, there just isn't much more that world first skill levels can add. There's nothing else to squeeze an extra few % from.

The top percentage of players are overwhelmingly better at the game than we are.

What they haven't learned is that this does translate to jobs too. They balance jobs around the advantages each might have in a specific fight, range, utility, burst potential, uptime, positionals and so on. But they don't seem to get that good players can easily compensate for downsides and narrow these disadvantages down to 1% differences from a job with an advantage. For example in fights where bosses had smaller hitboxes and mechanics forced you to move out, melee could optimize it down to only losing 2-3 GCD's over a 10 minute fight at most. This makes the advantage phys ranged have shrink drastically. They should be balancing around that. 10% gaps are just too massive. Good players aren't losing that much, nowhere close.

[Zaniel]

... get people who actually play the class to work on balance. :/

What could go wrong right?

[Henji]

They really have no clue just how bad the job balance is.

[Saraide]

I mean, he didn't say anything that most of us didn't already know or assume.
The only real thing of import is that they've doubled down on the "job balance is fine" stance they've taken, and given shoddy excuses with little to no reasoning for why.

But then they dont fully take the "job balance is fine" stance, otherwise they wouldnt have buffed paladin and warrior. Instead they seem a bit undecided on what they should do going forward which makes it look like a lazy excuse. Especially with statements like this:

Attempting to ameliorate this by buffing certain jobs without making changes to the raid itself would have negatively impacted overall balance within each role, and likely resulted in disappointment for those whose jobs were already dealing sufficient damage for the raid and therefore received no adjustments. Unfortunately, adjusting all jobs in such a short period is also not feasible.

warrior and paladin were consistently behind in damage since the start of the expansion. Buff them up to the levels of drk and gnb (like they did now) doesnt have a negative impact on role balance, it has a positive.

[Packetdancer]

They really have no clue just how bad the job balance is.

I'm not 100% sure I buy that. I'm not entirely happy with job balance either, mind you, but I do suspect they have access to (quite a lot of) data we do not... and while they balance jobs around endgame fights, they do also need to take the much-larger casual playerbase into account. They could absolutely be aware of the problems and yet feel those downsides are outweighed by some other factor we're not aware of. For instance, if a job suddenly had its popularity in casual play plummet, even if endgame raiders are happy with the job I have little doubt the devs would still consider that a problem scenario to address.

We can armchair-quarterback their development process all we like -- Twelve know I certainly do enough of it in some threads -- but in the end, we really can't know with absolute certainty what factors went into their decisions.

[Saraide]

I'm not 100% sure I buy that. I'm not entirely happy with job balance either, mind you, but I do suspect they have access to (quite a lot of) data we do not... and while they balance jobs around endgame fights, they do also need to take the much-larger casual playerbase into account. They could absolutely be aware of the problems and yet feel those downsides are outweighed by some other factor we're not aware of. For instance, if a job suddenly had its popularity in casual play plummet, even if endgame raiders are happy with the job I have little doubt the devs would still consider that a problem scenario to address.

We can armchair-quarterback their development process all we like -- Twelve know I certainly do enough of it in some threads -- but in the end, we really can't know with absolute certainty what factors went into their decisions.

They certainly have very indepth data on usage statistics, atleast I hope they do. But that doesnt mean we have no data. FFlogs is providing everyone who cares to look with extremely detailed combat data. It's freely available to everyone, even SE could look at it and calculate every potency increase in a vaste variety of situations. They wouldnt even have to admit it either because we expect them to have detailed combat data themselves. Increasing potencies like they did for paladin and warrior has no negative impact on the casual playerbase, it's unrealistic that this is even a possibility.

[xbahax92]

There are servers on JP with a savage tier clear rate exceeding 50% in some tiers. P5S was actually the fight with the most clears logged week 1, ever. People really need to stop trying to frame Savage as niche content, because it isn't and hasn't been for a very long time.

If casual players aren't playing this content, they should probably stop participating in a discussion around something that doesn't impact them then.

Why is it entitlement to expect the game to maintain similar tuning standards? Why is it entitlement to expect to be able to play my main job while raiding? This is the same community that constantly spins the "Anyone can clear any content uwu" and "Every job is viable uwu" bs as some kind of weird virtue signal about how perfect and inclusive the game is, but the moment the game has serious balance issues we're suddenly not allowed to care about it lol.

Stop trying to use 'entitlement' nonsensically to dismiss people you don't agree with, especially on a topic that isn't even relevant to your own experience in game.

What the... I didnt event mention all that stuff, stop interpreting stuff?!

First of all, I started with a question, thanks for answering. Job balancing is done with and around savage and ultimate. Almost all skills and abilities are just done for that one content. And yet the majority of the playerbase is still casual. "Job balancing" or rather "simplifying" hurts the casual content as much. Jobs feel and play literally the same, there is barely any difference between each role. And I highly doubt its because of the "gap" between good and bad players. It's just easier for the dev team to "balance" jobs when they all do and perform the same thing. Even if all raiders quit the game, your point wont hold up. It affects everyone.

Also, the entitlement part was for people being butthurt about a silly statement done by yoshida/devs. It seems so silly to me. As if there are no other important issues...

[Packetdancer]

They certainly have very indepth data on usage statistics, atleast I hope they do. But that doesnt mean we have no data. FFlogs is providing everyone who cares to look with extremely detailed combat data. It's freely available to everyone, even SE could look at it and calculate every potency increase in a vaste variety of situations. They wouldnt even have to admit it either because we expect them to have detailed combat data themselves. Increasing potencies like they did for paladin and warrior has no negative impact on the casual playerbase, it's unrealistic that this is even a possibility.

I would argue that the content of fflogs skews heavily towards a particular subset of the playerbase. While sometimes you'll get casual content thrown on there for purposes of XIVAnalysis (or just because someone was lazy and uploaded an entire evening's worth of logs rather than specific encounters), the vast majority of those logs are going to represent Extreme, Savage, or Ultimate content.

Yes, we can certainly draw conclusions from FFLogs' data, but I'm not sure we can draw conclusions which are applicable to the entire playerbase as opposed to the small subset that run savage. I would assume that SQEX has far more complete data than we do in that respect.

This isn't to say that there is something in that data that explains why they're fixated on the current job balance, mind you. I'm just saying there very well could be, and we would not know. So the fact that they aren't changing job balance doesn't necessarily mean they're ignorant of its state.