Let's redefine "damage taxes"

[Reimmi]

No, absolutely not. That is not actual balance, even ASSUMING full uptime MCH should be lower than every other Job on rDPS, sans SMN which it should be tied with. It is weaker than it should be, but it should still be the bottom of the ceiling

Sorry but difficulty should never matter for a jobs DPS
it's not like the players chose for summoner to be braindead easy

[FireMage]

Sorry but difficulty should never matter for a jobs DPS
it's not like the players chose for summoner to be braindead easy

It absolutely should, proper balance and all. Again, punishes harder Jobs

[fulminating]

The problem has two sides: the first that they balance according to difficulty and the second that they adjust difficulty according to balance. This has created a negative feedback loop on every job barring fisher and blue mage which aren't popular enough to be subject to the nonsense yet.

[CKNovel]

Any player who belongs in Savage can learn to play any job at a competent level. Advantages like "no positionals" and "ranged attacks" and "slightly less buttons" are tiny perks that endgame players barely even need. Like I've said before, if you had a choice to pick one of two talents, one being a QoL and the other being 10% dps, it's no competition. In this way, SE making your job easier is detrimental to you. It's not a bonus or a nice reason to play that job, it's a detrimental handicap.

This is right, any savage player can learn any job within their role at a level enough to clear the content.
If it required to shift from a role to another, let's say from DPS to healer, the transition would take much longer. Obviously the reverse wouldn't take as much time.

But overall, there is no job excessively complex, anyone with minimum knowledge of the game can learn a DPS within a few pulls.
Some jobs like BLM will require a bit more adaptation but all remaining jobs can be played at a decent level within an hour of practice.

Especially when the gap of complexity between "easy" and "complex" jobs is as wide as the complexity between "walking" and "running".
A baby will find running a task being too complex and will prefer walking. The difference between walking and running is basically the same for an adult. (Hey look, subjective difficulty)
The same can be said about new players, I do not compare them to babies, they are learning a new field that can appear to them as complex until they grasp the game mechanics.

[Aurora428]

A job being easy only means anything if equally skilled performance on the "easy job" leads to higher outcomes than the same performance on the "hard job".

The logic simply fails there. It doesn't take nearly any effort to destroy your own performance on MCH as a SAM, even avoiding what little uptime optimization there is in EW content. If being easy provides quite literally no advantage, what is its value as a balancing metric? Its just an unquestionable flaw the job has that is holding it down at that point.

The only "tax" there should be is reasonable wiggle room for optimization between BLM, melee and ranged for the actual loss expected when transitioning from a practice dummy to a real fight. This number is not that big.

[Rithy255]

Difficulty is so subjective at this point, I get it certain jobs are deemed easier then others but not everyone's going to find the same job hard or easy.

I guess you could point to jobs such as Reaper or Summoner being pretty easy and 99% of people would agree, but who asked for those jobs to be easy? Especially summoner, I don't think anyone who really enjoyed old summoner wanted it to be significantly easier.

Also no job is really that so hard that it justifies any massive differences like we got now, I think it's fine to reward "harder" job with a little bit more but where do we draw the line on whats hard and whats not, how much of a reward should it be 1%? 5%? 10%? extra? at this point I rather they just ignore "difficulty" and focus on job balance, maybe they can slightly buff jobs later down the line that take more "skill" but right now theirs no trend towards skillful jobs performing better then "ez" jobs, why would samurai be so high, why would dancer be so high, why would drk be so high? it just makes no sense with current job balance.

[UkcsAlias]

The problem has two sides: the first that they balance according to difficulty

There are 2 parts here, skill floor and skill ceiling. And while they themselve do not say anything about damage, they do still affect it.

A low skill floor generaly means higher output at less effort when being new.
A high skill floor means its generaly hard to start on that class.

In the middle ground it then barely matters, since most jobs show overlap anyway and the damage values can often be quite easily adjusted here.

But the skill ceiling is where savages matter, since in this case, if the skill ceiling is too low, players can reach that ceiling too easy. And the normal result is that it caps the output power. This instantly sets an upper boundary for usefulness. You can balance according to difficulty, but once you are reaching that upper boundary on a job, you already run into an issue. And the only way to resolve that is creating a higher skill ceiling on the job (introducing extra difficulty).

This cannot be done on dungeons/raids themselve, it can only be done on the job, since the job is simply capped at what its allowed to do.

But this is the issue of the top 1% of gamers anyway: gamers are excelent at optimizing fun out of a game. Sure, devs can introduce more fun to them (and idealy should), but there is a point where as dev you should stop as it will harm the normal player base.

In the MCH case, this means that any added complexity should not disrupt the lower skill levels too much. Sure, they can add some new mechanics to them that might require a bit more effort to get used to them. But for someone that isnt capable of learning those things, it should not instantly lock him out. And this is a very difficult balancing aspect (but the real issue of this all). Too much added complexity and it raises the skill floor after all, and you generaly want those to be low.

(note, in a healthy case, you can never truly reach the skill ceiling as there are too many factors that are too hard to manage. in an optimal game you can get close, but it should not be sustainable)

[Arguscbf]

I'm not saying RDM DOES have tons of raid damage buffs. I'm saying they should. I don't know how Embolden compares to Searing Light, but it should be much better while SMN and RDM have very close rDPS but SMN has better aDPS. That way, all DPS contribute overall to total damage the same, because if RDM's support DPS should be better than SMN's, they even out in personal DPS. The core identity of RDM should be "I play RDM with the intention of being a support DPS" similar to BRD and DNC.

I do not believe defensive and mitigation utility should affect DPS as DPS jobs. Leave that for the tanks.

I main RDM because i like its gameplay and not because it's a "support DPS"!
RDM is a DPS! If they add tons of buffs to it they'll lower its dps even more so what's the point of bringing a RDM to run Savage if you have an enrage timer due to DPS check? Easier said than done. It's not your job that is being cut off from PF...

[Rithy255]

I main RDM because i like its gameplay and not because it's a "support DPS"!
RDM is a DPS! If they add tons of buffs to it they'll lower its dps even more so what's the point of bringing a RDM to run Savage if you have an enrage timer due to DPS check? Easier said than done. It's not your job that is being cut off from PF...

Well the thing is if you gave buffs to RDM damage buffs or gave them more damage buffs or something... it would kind of go without saying that it would make up for those damage differences and you wouldn't meet enrage...
I like RDM because its a spell caster with a sword but I also like it's more of a "support DPS" just because you want it to be a selfish dps or have the same support options as current doesn't mean everyone does, personally i think RDM other then needing a damage buff is fine as it is, I really like the job.

Should we just have every job be pure damage dealers, but also complain about "job diversity"? I feel like giving jobs support options is generally what can make certain jobs feel more fun and different to other jobs, this also makes jobs such as Black Mage tend to stand out more as a "pure damage dealer" which I personally like.

[Mithron]

I main RDM because i like its gameplay and not because it's a "support DPS"!
RDM is a DPS! If they add tons of buffs to it they'll lower its dps even more so what's the point of bringing a RDM to run Savage if you have an enrage timer due to DPS check? Easier said than done. It's not your job that is being cut off from PF...

I'm a PLD main, so yes my job was being cut off from PF (as was RDM and MCH), and RDM is one of my favorite DPS to play too as I love its playstyle. The point of bringing RDM is that it's the same total DPS as every other job, as because it does less personal damage (currently the case), it makes up for it by buffing everyone else. Why bring a BRD or a DNC currently to Savage? Because while they do low personal damage, they make up for it in raid damage buffs. That's the point I'm making here and something you don't seem to understand. If every job is close to equal in total DPS contribution, then that means buffs like Mug, Embolden, Technical Finish, etc. are included and expected for the job, making every job viable in Savage raids. While RDM may do lower personal damage, they make up for it by buffing everyone else through Embolden (and any other additional buffs they need). You can keep your same rotation, just make Embolden's numbers bigger and perhaps their personal DPS as well if that's what's necessary. I just don't think RDM should do as much personal damage as most other jobs because it's against their core job identity (in my opinion), and if they did, then their total contribution would be too high and OP (like NIN currently is, which I also love NIN because it's meant to be more of a support DPS).

So to summarize: no one is saying nerf RDM. They're already among the bottom. What I'm saying is they should be near the bottom, but not greater than 1% difference, and most of their contribution of DPS should be similar to that of a BRD's or DNC's: through buffing others. They don't have to change their current playstyle of casting and melee combo, you can keep that. Just increase Embolden if necessary, and/or their personal DPS if that's necessary to get them where they need to be.

The differences in total DPS now are way too high, far more than 1%, which is what has caused this schism and PF blocking. The root cause of this schism are both fight design (too melee friendly) and poor job balance. Both need to be addressed, and it is likely a lot of the lower rDPS jobs (like RDM and MCH) will need both buffs in their raid damage buffs and personal DPS to be brought to about 1% difference in each other.