Why is everyone anxious about a PLD Rework?

[Shurrikhan]

it's fine if the simple jobs deal 1 less dps than the complicated jobs

No, unless they're all doing so little that 1 less DPS could somehow offset the massively reduced reliability of the harder and more situationally-constrained job. Until they are both competitive choices for a majority of reasonably skilled but imperfect players, parity on paper / for the highest 1% of players simply means imbalance for everyone else, including even at levels over which one would normally be learning the harder job (but would then be largely barred from doing so due to more easier / reliable jobs producing, until perfect play, greater output than the harder ones).

We should balance risk to reward for those ambitious enough to learn harder jobs, if their vibe and challenge click with them. That means doesn't simply bribing anyone and everyone to learn them through overcompensating those risks (truly perfect play across any composition should be at least barely able to clear Ultimate, etc.), but it does mean providing enough to offset those added risks and allow the vast majority of players who would even consider the harder jobs to do so competitively, rather just the top 1% of players.

Edit: All this refers to rDPS, not nDPS. Please do not conflate them.

[Melethron123]

We should balance risk to reward for those ambitious enough to learn harder jobs, if their vibe and challenge click with them.

so if someone happens to think warrior has cooler aesthetics, theme, and animations than DRK, they should just be relegated to dealing less dmg because the devs arbitrarily decided jobs with more buttons should deal more damage? that sounds like a garbage design philosophy

and that's not even including the impact that latency has on this game. you'll already be performing worse due to the inherent delay on your actions, and the few classes you're able to play effectively (the ones with fewer OGCDs) have an artificial performance tax on top...

then there are people with disabilities who might want classes that have lower APM or fewer overall keybinds, etc

[Shurrikhan]

so if someone happens to think warrior has cooler aesthetics, theme, and animations than DRK, they should just be relegated to dealing less dmg because the devs arbitrarily decided jobs with more buttons should deal more damage?

They should be "relegated" to dealing roughly the same damage in-practice, rather than the simpler and less contextually-punished job dealing less damage in-practice for 90+% of players.

[Melethron123]

They should be "relegated" to dealing roughly the same damage in-practice, rather than the simpler and less contextually-punished job dealing less damage in-practice for 90+% of players.

what were you even trying to say with this reply..?

[Shurrikhan]

what were you even trying to say with this reply..?

That your insistence that every job should do the exact same damage even when perfectly rotated on a striking dummy means that all but the easiest jobs will underperform for all but the best players and all but the jobs least restricted by context (movement requirements, etc.) will underperform in most content.

You are not asking for parity as it would affect anyone but the top 1% of speedrunners. You're just asking for the likes of MCH to be better than everyone else for the vast majority of player skill levels and the majority of content.

The game shouldn't balance for on-paper theoretical performance alone. The game should balance for whatever best expands choice in-practice, and that means giving harder and more vulnerable jobs at least some degree of reward for their added risk.

[Melethron123]

That your insistence that every job should do the exact same damage even when perfectly rotated on a striking dummy means that all but the easiest jobs will underperform for all but the best players and all but the jobs least restricted by context (movement requirements, etc.) will underperform in most content.

You are not asking for parity as it would affect anyone but the top 1% of speedrunners. You're just asking for the likes of MCH to be better than everyone else for the vast majority of player skill levels and the majority of content.

You don't balance for on-paper theoretical performance. You balance for whatever best expands choice in-practice, and that means giving harder and more vulnerable jobs at least some degree of reward for their added risk.

i'm not basing my arguments on striking dummies, i'm basing them on actual raid dmg numbers and the statements from people who have been raiding at a high level for years (some of them since 2.0)

what are you basing your arguments on, if you don't mind me asking?

[Shurrikhan]

i'm not basing my arguments on striking dummies, i'm basing them on actual raid dmg numbers and the statements from people who have been raiding at a high level for years (some of them since 2.0)

what are you basing your arguments on, if you don't mind me asking?

You were arguing just earlier against jobs like BLM having even a theoretical rDPS lead, regardless of how much greater a portion of their damage they would lose to complexity or the constraints of specific fights. How else am I supposed to interpret that outside of asking for parity on-paper instead of parity in-practice (within the contexts of actual fights)?

So long as you're asking for parity in practice, then sure, I'm all for that. Buff non-BLM Casters and physical ranged slightly, so in a typical fight (within such a span of content as any of this would matter, such as no easier than Extreme) with a typical player (but one typically open to learning) they're neck-and-neck.

But you're going to have a degree of imbalance regardless so long as the jobs themselves are imbalanced in terms of complexity and contextual loss (from movement, range, spans of uptime, raid synergy, or whatever else); if the likes of MCH were perfectly balanced against BLM even in BLM's few ideal scenarios, then MCH would necessarily be outperforming it everywhere else, which ultimately means that BLM stops being a competitive option and instead becomes "griefing" or "an ego-pick", with more reliable jobs like MCH being pushed over them.

A typical BLM should likely slightly underperform a typical MCH in fights especially bad for the likes of BLM, but the inverse should also be true; in fights decent/good for BLM, they should slightly outperform MCH. That fight-specific gap shouldn't be so great that you end up with "barred" jobs and/or "must pick" jobs, but so long as the two operate so differently, so should their outcomes differ -- with, yes, BLM coming out ahead at least as often as not.

If we want the likes of MCH to be competitive across a larger gamut of content than that, though, it also needs a larger gamut of gameplay behind it between its floor and ceiling commensurate to that balance.

[Gserpent]

then there are people with disabilities who might want classes that have lower APM or fewer overall keybinds, etc

There are people with quite significant disabilities that have cleared ultimates when classes were much harder to execute than they are now. There's a pretty well-known speedrunner who runs some incredibly complex games and he does it using his fucking *feet.* I have personally played and raided with someone with some pretty severe mobility issues in their hands and arms and they still play *dramatically* better than the overwhelming majority of presumably able-bodied players out there.

I don't really think "but disabled people!" as a token excuse is viable. I do think that effort should be put into making things as accommodating for people with various disabilities as possible, but I frankly think it's a damned insult to act like "disabled people need classes to be brainless and homogenized so they can play the game too."

The problem so many people have, and apparently including Square-Enix's design teams themselves, is that *skill floor and skill ceiling are not directly linked.* While there's some amount of connection between them... a low enough floor will inevitably result in a lowered ceiling... it's not proportional. You can lower the floor and still maintain a decently roomy ceiling. As I keep referring to, WAR in ShB was a very good example of this - it needed a bit more going on, the ceiling was a little low, but the floor was *exactly* where it should have been and they shouldn't have fucked with the class in EW beyond the necessary changes to fit their 2-minute redesign.

WoW, in most of its iterations from Cata or MoP on forward (basically, where you'd say "classic" ended and "retail" began) is another fine example. The floor for any given class or spec tends to be quite low, but there's still a decent ceiling available to work within.

FWIW, a skill floor is "you must be this tall to ride." It represents a minimum level of knowledge and competence necessary to play the class as designed (e.g. not freestyle SAM, ice mage BLM, etc.) Meanwhile, a skill ceiling is the reasonable upper limit of performance for that class. Since DPS is the only measurement worth a damn in XIV, this would simply be the difference between "understands the basics but makes errors" and "makes minimal errors and optimizes every opportunity they get." You can have a low, accessible floor while still having room for optimization and improvement.

Moreover, because they quite intentionally design normals, Ex, and MSQ duties to be *extremely* generous... it wouldn't even matter if the floor was comparatively high to what we have now. Trying to freestyle SAM might cause you grief in savage and force you to actually learn how to play the class (climb up onto the floor), but it would be completely fine for normals and it would probably still be alright in Ex as long as you were performing mechanics correctly.

There was no damn reason for them to lower skill floors more than they already had with ShB, and even less reason to bring skill ceilings crashing down across the board. If they were trying to get more people to participate in savage (content where floor-level performance is the *starting place*, not where you should think "okay I'm good enough"), then maybe they should have gotten off their lazy fucking asses and put some actual damn teaching tools into the game instead of obliterating meaningful decision-making and class design. Even if a noob player *wanted* to "git gud" and learn to do things properly, they fucking can't, not without going outside of the game and consulting third-party resources.

It's frankly inexcusably bad design.

[Melethron123]

1st = there are different types of disabilities and different types of people, in case you've never noticed. one or two exceptions doesn't invalidate a rule.

2nd = i never said people with disabilities want "brainless classes" did i? i specifically mentioned APM and total number of keybinds.

3rd = the problem with "skill ceiling" is when it comes from mechanics and systems that are unintuitive to the players. "how can i maximize my lava bursts and overall number of casts in this encounter" is a great way to differentiate great players and good players, but when the skill ceiling requires using tons of macros (arms warrior in cataclysm) or literally ignoring your job design to squeeze more potency by tracking mana ticks with 3rd party software (like the current BLM transpose rotations), that's a problem.

4th = in case you mistook my argument: i never said anything about lowering skill ceilings being better for the game, i said jobs should be properly balanced to deal close enough damage to others of the same role. two completely different things.