Damage "taxes" deserve serious reconsideration

[Keichi]

Let's take an example.
You are a new player, you play through the story, have fun and level up the job that strike your fantasy the most: Machinist. You love mechs and having a fancy gun.
You don't level anything but that, just having bard around level 60 from doing ARR until you go to MCH, and once you're done with the story and have tried the normal raids, you think for yourself "I want to try the harder content, push my skill!" and nice, the new raid tier is coming up soon.
So you get the minimum gear for it, practice your rotation, meld your stuff and... no matter how much you try you always fail. With or without number tools, people would figure out sooner or later that groups of equal skill with a machinist would do worse than groups with something else, so in the end... you get cut out of that content for no fault of you own save from picking the wrong job. So either you level up another job you might not be as interrested in, or you give up on trying the high end content.

Especially when the devs say that for jobs like healers, you have to play savage to fully enjoy your role, that type of balancing just doesn't cut it. Sorry Ransu but that's the issue here, the balance doesn't affect normal content much, yeah, and that's why people don't talk about balance in normal, but balance in hard content.

In your example is the biggest error:
Using minimum gear. Who would even try to do savage with minimum gear?
That this doesnt work is clear as the day. It is logical, that you have hard time with the lowest Equipment. That is even the case in normal content.
I would complain the other player, would they kick out people. Only because of the class.
Yes, there are sometimes groups that didnt work. I had this groups to, by Zodiak and Hydaelin and normal pandaemonium. But, i never complained so much about other classes, only because of the class (most of my complains would be the thinking, that it will need more time). But, because of the gear. Instant of going week 1 into savage (or with the lowest ilvl), i would wait until i have around mid lvl (mean currently around 610-615).

Did whe question this on a other way.
I read the whole time only complainings to p8s. How are the statics for p5-7s, dragonsong ultima, the hair voidsent with 615 weapons and endsinger?
Are there this much problems to? Or are they all not important, because, they are not the last dungeon/ older content?

[Kalaam]

In your example is the biggest error:
Using minimum gear. Who would even try to do savage with minimum gear?
That this doesnt work is clear as the day. It is logical, that you have hard time with the lowest Equipment. That is even the case in normal content.
I would complain the other player, would they kick out people. Only because of the class.
Yes, there are sometimes groups that didnt work. I had this groups to, by Zodiak and Hydaelin and normal pandaemonium. But, i never complained so much about other classes, only because of the class (most of my complains would be the thinking, that it will need more time). But, because of the gear. Instant of going week 1 into savage (or with the lowest ilvl), i would wait until i have around mid lvl (mean currently around 610-615).

Did whe question this on a other way.
I read the whole time only complainings to p8s. How are the statics for p5-7s, dragonsong ultima, the hair voidsent with 615 weapons and endsinger?
Are there this much problems to? Or are they all not important, because, they are not the last dungeon/ older content?

I said it was in the case of a new tier coming up, at first when you attempt it you'll have minimal gear. For which the content is intended to be doable.
Even if you can clear it weeks or months later with better gear, it is still an issue. For a marginal amount of people, true. But let's say you want to participate in races, trying to get a week 1 clear and such, there will be jobs deemed unable to do it, or too much of a liability. Essentially "non serious jobs for high end content"

[ChameleonMS]

In your example is the biggest error:
Using minimum gear. Who would even try to do savage with minimum gear?

Every world racing week 1 clear groups are using the minimum item level which is crafted gear released at the time raid tier.
Min ilvl + whatever drop you get from the previous fights all that you can have. Only 1 or 2 members of a team get any gear during week 1; while the other 6 players are still at the minimum.

Savage adjacent: all Ultimate and Unreal fights are ilvl protected by the level sync and functionally done at minimum ilvl.

[Urielparadox]

In your example is the biggest error:
Using minimum gear. Who would even try to do savage with minimum gear? That this doesn't work is clear as the day.

You forget a lot of things here, but you miss them later on too. So we will come back to that. The answer is a lot of people. Why is it not clear as day? Because people do it all the time in pf. Why else, well lets look below and then come back to this.

It is logical, that you have hard time with the lowest Equipment. That is even the case in normal content.

This statement ignores a few facts and "hard" is also subjective:

1) Currently in lowest ilvl jobs doing perfect may not be able to do the damage required to kill the boss in p8s. thats a big issue. If it was purely about skill that would be different.
2)

But, because of the gear. Instant of going week 1 into savage (or with the lowest ilvl), i would wait until i have around mid lvl (mean currently around 610-615).

Not all gear is equal and thus not ilvl. A rdm decked out in 620 ss gear is going to do less damage than a Penta melded/proper geared 610/620 mix rdm. Wpn damage significantly outweighs any other stats(except SS on blm sometimes). Yet has the same weight towards ilvl as gear. Gearing stronger is also about luck, and doing the fights your locked out of/kept out of for being x job. As well as winning the loot because it takes 1-2 months of not winning anything to get 1 item, which is way too long. If you literally can't get access to the gear you need to improve, you can't improve. Which is where balancing is so important.

3)Crafted gear is available right away and this time a week ahead, and you can wait on avg 4 days for prices to drop to affordable making u at least 10ilvls higher than the minimum for everything but 7/8.

4) Savage/ex(ultimate's are a set lvl their own thing), are tuned in terms of bosses hp, mechanic damage, frequencies of aoes/mechs. This all means at min ilvl gear in normal content actually goes extremely far compared to hard content. So while it might be "hard". A raid wide in normal content wont kill team members if its unmitigated with full hp at ilvl. In savage it will. This is a very big difference.

5) Normal content also has very few dps checks in it with looping bosses with no time limits. Just maybe progressive but usually static mechanics.

6)That most people never experience content at lowest ilvl and therefore the perception at what lowest ilvl means is off. Even if you are minilvl, your teammates are most likely not and that makes big difference in perception of ilvl/gear as people experience the game.

7) lowering the bosses hp of one fight did nothing to change the issues. I'm seeing triple melee locked p7s/p6s, 2 melee locked even for being i619 already with 630 weapon.

All of these differences give people a false perception of the over all difficulty in difference in fights between normal/hard/ex/and savage.

Even in week4 the amount of people I have showing up in p7 party's with i600 weapons/gear/no melds and think they are not in the reason the dps check is tight is insane. Most players have no idea how the gear and stats actually work in this game.

*1* dragonsong ultima, *2*the hair voidsent(barby?) with *4*615 weapons and *3* endsinger?
Are there this much problems to? Or are they all not important, because, they are not the last dungeon/ older content?

1) ultis gearing doesn't work that way.
2) Noticeable the fight is a skill check mostly, as it's an extreme. It actually has a really low hp/enrage for an ex. This doesn't change the fact that if your are farming it; leaving out mch,rdm, and smn. Will mean faster clears if all gear and play is equal. when u have to do a long fight 50 times, leaving out the currently weaker jobs will give u 1 more win per hour. because the balance is that off.
3) balance is the same, you will still kill it faster, which in this case is even more important because then u can skip the final hard mech. while I haven't gone back to endsinger, when the final mech becomes skippable, and you have to have certain job comps to do it. all the unbalanced jobs will be kept out because they can't "skip soar/quad jobs". Which is ironic because that's exactly the situation they used in the live letter as an example.
4) no week 1 or world first group was out there doing these savages, in anything less than 615 weapons. They were literally locked out, even having a weapon that is 1wpn dmg above what is supposed to be required. So in fact the jobs at minilvl could not do the rdps to clear the fight. If you try to say not everyone has windspet for savage. There was no reason to you had a whole week and the crafted options were weaker/more expensive. The only people in older weapons were/are the ones who don't understand how gear progression and ilvl properly.