What even is the purpose of all those non melee/blm jobs?

[FireMage]

Right, and how many people challenge savage? Ultimate? A minority of players, with the hardest content being something cleared by no more than 5% of the total playerbase (and that's being generous).

More, a lot more

https://game.watch.impress.co.jp/doc...e/1357797.html

[Aurora428]

This conversation is very much dominated by people who do not understand the impact that seemingly small differences have on the balance in a game as tight as FFXIV

If your team is 1000 behind the DPS check and a job change is netting you 250 to a whopping 1000 DPS depending on team comp, yes, that job change is making a HUGE difference in the execution gap necessary for your team.

"4% is small!". No, it's not, a massive chunk of groups beat the enrage with less than 400 dps over the dps check.

[Ralphe2449]

If your team is 1000 behind the DPS check and a job change is netting you 250 to a whopping 1000 DPS depending on team comp, yes, that job change is making a HUGE difference

"4% is small!". No, it's not, a massive chunk of groups beat the enrage with less than 400 dps over the dps check.

Have they considered not dying to mechanics or farming damage downs?

Have they considered possibly learning the mechanics flawlessly first before resorting to trying to cheese the difficulty by bringing classes that do a bit more dps?

Have they considered getting good rather than depend on meta?
I ve seen so many people use this example "Oh if you played x, we would have killed it instead of wiping at 0.5%" and my response is simple, why should a meta class carry you if you or others in the group have failed mechanically?

Or are we talking about week one raid clears?
In that case if they are doing the mechanics flawlessly and playing their class optimally have they considered waiting for a week or two of gear to get past the DPS check?

Or will their epeen shrink and fall?

[Stasya]

Ultimately, then, this doesn't disprove my statement. If there is indeed an egregious discrepancy between jobs, the developers will rectify it. But if the differences are minor, then the problem isn't the game, it's the players excluding Job A because Job B does 3% more damage despite both jobs being able to clear the content.

Another SE white knight defending small indie company...

[Mikey_R]

Or are we talking about week one raid clears?
In that case if they are doing the mechanics flawlessly and playing their class optimally have they considered waiting for a week or two of gear to get past the DPS check?

Or will their epeen shrink and fall?

In the case of week 1 clears, SE has already stated that gear gating fight is not good and it should be down to the player skill rather than being gear gated as to whether you clear a fight or not. This first came to light in A1-4S, where the fights were gear gated and raiders were getting annoyed that they knew A4S, but they couldn't clear the DPS check. From then on, no savage fight has been locked behind the gear grind and noone required a specific comp to play, then, once P8S came around, suddenly, they were hit by a wall, even world first raiders who happened to have a non-favourable job, but they cleared it when they swapped jobs. This is strengthened by the fact YoshiP himself admitted the fight was overtuned a bit.

As for the rest of your post, that is player skill dictating what they think. Even if they don't farm damage downs, they could just not be skilled enough to beat a fight and swapping jobs in that case probably wouldn't help. So I agree on that point.

[Valence]

10%, where you getting that figure from?

From a certain website that everybody loves and hates. It's not exactly rocket science to find.

[Valence]

Right, and how many people challenge savage? Ultimate? A minority of players, with the hardest content being something cleared by no more than 5% of the total playerbase (and that's being generous). Those people are the ones challenging something as much for the difficulty and sense of accomplishment as they are for the reward. Most people though? They'll get their crafted or normal raid gear, do the MSQ and side content, play around with their house or their island or maybe make an alt or fantasia their main, and the entire time they do this they couldn't care less about skill ceilings, and only care as much about the skill floor as they need to in order to finish the MSQ and engage in side content of their choosing.

I thought we were speaking about raiding and where that kind of discussion actually matters most? Why are you deflecting the subject on the casual playerbase?

Nothing will ever be perfect but most people will agree that ShB balance was probably the best the game has ever had, even if there were still issues with individual jobs. You could clear anything with any combo of jobs just fine. There were simpler options for people who wanted that kind of thing and more complex jobs for players who were into that, but even in the simple jobs you had complexities that allowed for skill expression should someone wish to pursue it.

This ideal has NOT been maintained in EW. One big nail in the coffin was the shift to a 120s buff meta, while another is SE's desire to broaden the appeal of the game to non-MMO players as much as possible. At least some of the job changes we've been seeing are likely casualties of their internal push to make the game as solo-friendly as possible. The current state of job balance is partially as a result of that push.

No. ShB and EW balance are exactly the same. We see the exact same dps gaps between two groups of jobs. Edensgate even went up to a 15% gap between the lowest rphys and the highest melee, which they had to fix once again. This is a repeating pattern.

[Valence]

If 2% differences in DPS seriously depress you, online games with balance changes over time are going to be rough.

The simplest solution in FF14 would be to stop playing (don't play the game if it doesn't make you happy) or level up all DPS and play the fad of the moment at any given time.

10%.

We also have a winner here: I wondered how much time it would last before someone showed up and told me to just leave the game if I have some negative feedback to give. I was pretty sure that the devs in every liveletter encouraged players to leave feedback on their forums, but maybe they actually implied that it had to be showering them with flowers... I have been mistaken? You tell me!

In any case, thank you for your invaluable reply sir. I will now step back from my computer and reconsider my life's choices.

[Valence]

I don't disagree. I think they need to check, double check, and quadruple check the numbers before the jobs go out into the wild. But I also think it's okay that if they get it wrong, that they can quickly adjust the issue and bring the jobs more in line. There's a lot that went wrong with 6.2 that wasn't just job balancing, they also admitted they gave some of the savage bosses too much health, for example. But even here, you seem to agree with my original point. A small percentage difference between jobs is okay, and we've seen the outroar in these forums when one job is doing slightly more DPS than another, and when you go to sites to look at people recording their results on jobs, they differences are less than 5%

It's not just about 6.2 and people need to understand this. That damage tax/gap has been there since ShB, with some variations, but always oscillating between 7 and 15%. This is not acceptable, period, and it's not new. It was harder to gauge in previous expansions like SB and HW due to various factors, like the absence of rdps metrics on a certain website that everybody loves and hates, and the presence of other party factors that actually mattered (like MP/TP party support from rPhys jobs, or party wide mitigation that were almost exclusive to the role as well, but now everybody and their mothers have some), as well as the presence of the old infamous slashing/piercing debuffs.

As long as the jobs can clear the content, I'd argue no. It's not significant, and we shouldn't be excluding jobs because one job does 3% more damage. Honestly, say that out loud and see how petty it sounds that you want the job that does 3% more damage. There will NEVER be a perfect balance where every single job does exactly the same damage within the role, so we shouldn't be fussing over an amount of damage that can change with just crit variance.

You should re-read what the player you quoted actually wrote. Did you do some actual progression first weeks on the latest fights of a tier (and not just this one, which was more gruesome for sure)? Those discrepancies can mean the difference between a clear, or one more week of progression. And we're not talking about 3%, but 10. That's insane and it's been there for as long as I can remember.

[Valence]

This conversation is very much dominated by people who do not understand the impact that seemingly small differences have on the balance in a game as tight as FFXIV

If your team is 1000 behind the DPS check and a job change is netting you 250 to a whopping 1000 DPS depending on team comp, yes, that job change is making a HUGE difference in the execution gap necessary for your team.

"4% is small!". No, it's not, a massive chunk of groups beat the enrage with less than 400 dps over the dps check.

I agree and I am starting to think that some people just never have stepped inside a first week(s) savage progression, and maybe I'm just wasting my time.