Why is everyone anxious about a PLD Rework?

[Guntank81]

As a long-time PLD main, I am excited about the potential improvements that the revamp may bring. While I have enjoyed my current rotation, I am open to any changes that will enhance my performance in this role. Despite the ups and downs that come with playing PLD, I am confident that we will adapt and continue to thrive in any situation.

[Lyth]

aDPS was invented as a kneejerk response to resolving Heavensward and early Stormblood's number padding at a time when players were looking at raw DPS. The idea was to remove targeted buffs (Balance cards) from the equation so that you wouldn't just take turns artificially boosting your friends' raw DPS. It's just the old raw damage numbers that we looked at with Left Eye, Cards, and Dancer buffs removed. It's a bit dated, though. Ideally, you shouldn't permanently lose data in constructing a parameter, which is what you get for discarding certain buffs. This is not a parameter you use to understand raid dps or clear times. It's just built for the purposes of the numbers minigame that people love to play and obsess over so that they can brag to their friends.

You can make the argument that it helps you get a rough sense of your own personal alignment with two minute raid buffs between two encounters with the same group without actually quantifying what the difference in impact is in terms of total raid DPS. The problem is that, just like raw DPS, we know nothing about the buffs that were actually present in obtaining that result. It's subject to all the same padding business as before, except we've just discarded specific targeted buffs. And then there are BRD's rotational buffs to contend with, which are still included but don't relate to 'alignment'.

You're better off at looking at buffs on an individual level. Take Mug for example. You could measure the 'damage taken' generated by individual jobs under Mug across all runs with a NIN present and convert that to percentile data. If I was a NIN main that would be interesting to me, because I would know how much it actually benefitted me to be paired with a GNB vs. say a WAR. You could do that for every buff providing job and we'd be able to make our own judgement calls about what ideal raid group composition we want to be paired with. That would actually add a bit of transparency to all this, but I suspect the raw differences are going to be a lot less significant than people think when arranged by percentiles. At least not worth the extra wait of being picky in PF.

As for why players lock out jobs - it's based on emotion, not logic. If word gets out that a job is weak, players start feeling like they're held back when they hit those sub 1% wipes, especially on launch. So they just lock those jobs out. It doesn't matter whether that's the actual limiting factor or not. PF gets fairly ruthless in the first week or so before everyone loosens up. Again, it's a case of why perception is so important, and why this community tends to be self-destructive with its dps bartering. If the expectation is set that we're all going to be on a level playing field and you make the rDPS totals roughly similar, then that's all you really need. And then just tell the players who come in trying to demand rDPS advantages over others 'because reasons' to spend their time getting good at the game instead. The problem is this community, and the dev team's inability to put their foot down on this.

...

Everything does devolve into 'my job first' politicking, though. There will always be a job that you level first. There will always be a job that you prog on. No matter how versatile of a player you are, there is always going to be a job that you're most comfortable on, because you've spent the most amount of time on it. That's also going to be the job whose depth you understand the best. There will always be that bias, unfortunately.

I think that the 'difficulty' conversation is so subjective. If you had an infinite amount of time to spend mastering the ins and outs of every job, then perhaps you could answer this question in a fair way. But often times 'easy' ends up being the same as 'unwanted'. The community tells you that a job is bad because it has a rDPS disadvantage. Players stop playing it and become out of touch with how it is optimized. Then it gets dismissed as easy. It's actually an awful place to be in, because you're investing effort into a job that is both unwanted and viewed as low skill. Has nothing to do with the actual gameplay of the job.

That's one of the reasons why I want to hear the dev team take back their comment about 'balancing jobs based on difficulty'. No, they've never actually done that. The most broken jobs have historically been very accessible, straightforward, and popular. These are not niche jobs where 1% of the playerbase retreats into a cave for ten years to emerge a master capable of playing it. The dev team only made that claim because that's what the forums have been shouting from the rooftops, and they hate standing up to the playerbase on anything. The dev team balance primarily by mollifying player complaints. Job advantages have historically been proportional to the number of players crying over them. I want to see them balance with an iron fist. Set an clear and transparent standard of fairness and refuse to waver from it. That will win significantly more respect.

Same reason why I want to see them actually talk about game and job direction. Show me what your vision for this game is. Don't just react to complaints.

[Shurrikhan]

As for why players lock out jobs - it's based on emotion, not logic. If word gets out that a job is weak, players start feeling like they're held back when they hit those sub 1% wipes, especially on launch.

Sure, which can sometimes make briefly overpowering a previous underpowered job a reasonable approach (so long as we consider the main goal of balance to be freedom of choice). My point before, though, was simply that we don't need to nihilistically police all ways of even carefully observing the details of job design on the assumption that someone will prefer a given job as a package deal and then campaign for all others to then fall short of that favorite of theirs. While those players may exist, we needn't devolve discussions to that level.

Similarly, there are reasons that guides for some jobs, even at their most comprehensive and concise, will fall far shorter than others; jobs haven't been designed to take the same amount of effort to optimize -- quite the explicit opposite; while individual milage may very, summative realities are still... reality.

The problem is this community, and the dev team's inability to put their foot down on this.

Together, yes. But the problems the community feeds back into the game are, themselves, largely a result of how the devs have handled the game and its PR. Why wouldn't a community become increasingly DPS-obsessive, for instance, when the game's steadily devaluing/dropping all else?

Everything does devolve into 'my job first' politicking, though. There will always be a job that you level first. There will always be a job that you prog on. No matter how versatile of a player you are, there is always going to be a job that you're most comfortable on, because you've spent the most amount of time on it.

Across both this character and my main, I tend to level a different job first each expansion. I rarely even prog on the same job twice in a row. The same goes for like... half of anyone I've been in lasting statics with, swapping their mains at least per expansion. For many, too, the one they've spent the most time on is not the one they best understand or parse best with.

If you had an infinite amount of time to spend mastering the ins and outs of every job, then perhaps you could answer this question in a fair way. But often times 'easy' ends up being the same as 'unwanted'.

Why would it, if as often as not, easy jobs have been the top performers? Even if, again, actually balanced around difficulty, for all but the highest end of players or much deeper into prog (with time to adjust around one's BLM, to better leverage a late LotD for cleave, or the like), the "easier" jobs would still start off the safer choice.

The community tells you that a job is bad because it has a rDPS disadvantage. Players stop playing it and become out of touch with how it is optimized. Then it gets dismissed as easy.

That feedback loop is a good point and a reasonable concern, but does it actually pan out here? We've got plenty of people trying to theorycraft the shit out of the lowest-performing jobs, too, out of sheer curiosity. And what those kinds of theorists come up, where any such further extent is possible, with is rarely ever what would come naturally to those investing play-time alone into it would manage. Modern MCH isn't considered relatively simple, for instance, just because people stopped playing it, any more than Stormblood MCH was considered overly complex or downright arcane off of even lower numbers.

That's one of the reasons why I want to hear the dev team take back their comment about 'balancing jobs based on difficulty'. No, they've never actually done that. The most broken jobs have historically been very accessible, straightforward, and popular. These are not niche jobs where 1% of the playerbase retreats into a cave for ten years to emerge a master capable of playing it. The dev team only made that claim because that's what the forums have been shouting from the rooftops, and they hate standing up to the playerbase on anything.

Agreed. But I don't think a "difficulty should/will play no factor in our balancing decisions" would be at least as bad, both as for PR and as a sustainable philosophy, in part because if there is no reward for taking the time (weeks or days, instead of days or hours) to learn the harder job, just playing those harder jobs will end up treated as egotistic griefing; at least when it carries some consideration it's only treated as such when someone actually underperforms significantly (since it's understandable; they're learning a job that has a much longer time to pay off, but will at least eventually pay off).

The dev team balance primarily by mollifying player complaints. Job advantages have historically been proportional to the number of players crying over them.

I'm not sure that's true, at least without conflating complaints about damage with conflates about anything/everything else. Take Stormblood Warriors, for instance; their primarily complaint was that they did more for less (objectively true at the time), and that their lauded new skill was a cleanse that couldn't cleanse a majority of debuffs. They wanted a bit less finnicky a burst window (less sharp a punishment for a half-GCD's loss, relative at least to other tanks) and for their skill to actually work as stated. It's hard to look at the massive simplifications and buffs that the devs threw at those critiques and say they were mollifying the actual complaints in question.

I want to see them balance with an iron fist. Set an clear and transparent standard of fairness and refuse to waver from it. That will win significantly more respect.

Aye, that'd be preferable.

Same reason why I want to see them actually talk about game and job direction. Show me what your vision for this game is. Don't just react to complaints.

Same. The problem-placating approach has been both rife with Monkey's Paw solutions in the short-term and probably reductive for the game in the long-run.

[Lyth]

I'm going to disagree with you on one point in particular. Performance is always proportional to practice. You will not be 'more skilled' at a job that you spend less time playing. In real life, this concept has repeatedly been proven in fields which are procedurally focused. High case volumes invariably translate into better outcomes. It's also why people who work in such fields (like pilots and surgeons) worry a lot about deskilling. You don't really benefit from being a generalist. What people traditionally attribute to 'talent' is just a reflection of the fact that being repeatedly exposed to a skill earlier in life accelerates your skill acquisition. But it's all just hard work in the end, and you only get better with repeated exposure to a task and only get worse with prolonged time spent away.

In this game, you may find that certain skills translate across jobs, like maintaining uptime as melee. But you're not going to become the world's best dragoon player by playing it less than your competition. And there's always an opportunity cost of time you spend on other jobs. I'm not saying that you can't play multiple jobs well, but you're not going to understand all of them at the same level, and certainly not at a level that's going to let you comment fairly on all their respective depths.

I don't like commenting on 'job difficulty' because it's disrespectful to the work put in by players who spend most of their time on that job. Some people have been playing this game for over 10 years with their primary focus on a single job. Who am I to comment on the difficulty level of 'MNK' across the years when it's not a job that I've ever 'mained' in prog (outside of a brief but enjoyable stint as part of a T8 solo tank strat)? I can play it competently in most standard content due to translatable skills from jobs I have mained, but I won't pretend to be an expert. When I see a particularly vocal section of this forum go on about how much better they are than everyone else I feel tempted to respond, but other than that I think it's better to take the jobs as just a canvas that you can display skill at a variety of levels. It's just mutual respect. You can play a given job at a low level or a very high level, regardless of what your preference is. There are no 'high skill jobs', only 'skilled players'. There is always little tricks that you've never thought about. One of the most skilled tank demonstrations that I've ever seen was actually on Heavensward PLD of all things, in watching someone reposition Quickthinx while constantly maintaining directional autos and swivel locking around to Shield Bash a heart. It's easy to dismiss something that you lack sufficient skill in as being 'easy' simply out of ignorance.

That's why I believe that there shouldn't be official validation of any of this. It's possible that, if you had the ideal player who could play all jobs mathematically perfectly, they would find some jobs easier to achieve that with than others. But that player doesn't exist. So rather than officially sanctioning a particular job as being higher rDPS because it is 'officially more difficult', just level the playing field and refuse to officially take a stance on 'difficulty'. The focus should be on designing actions and fights that allow for more variety in skill expression. Interesting movement abilities. Fights with more movement and positioning.

[Shurrikhan]

I'm going to disagree with you on one point in particular. Performance is always proportional to practice. You will not be 'more skilled' at a job that you spend less time playing.

Across both XIV and other MMOs with classes/professions/specs/jobs for which even the most obsessive of theory-crafters find far less to optimize in some choices than others...)
Can be. Have been. Will likely continue to, so long as there's that much less to do in one than another.

If a given task has some 6 components, and another shares 4 and then adds 5 more, even if my time is fully devoted to the latter at first, I'm going to learn the second in less than proportional time. Not all tasks award mastery in precisely the same time.

But you're not going to become the world's best dragoon player by playing it less than your competition.

...No one's made any argument remotely to the contrary -- only that, yes, some tasks are quicker to learn than others.

That's true even with equal levels of initial familiarity with those and similar tasks. A 4-step computation will be simpler than a 12-step one. And if a person, AI, or what have you can optimize or get very near to optimizing checkers in far less time than chess then, yes, checkers is probably simpler to optimize than chess.

It's possible that, if you had the ideal player who could play all jobs mathematically perfectly, they would find some jobs easier to achieve that with than others. But that player doesn't exist.

It doesn't need to. There need only be jobs that take less learning time with which to reach a level necessary to clear the content they want to do for those jobs to increasingly push out any more difficult jobs on the basis of the latter set being a poor time investment. You just went over the flipside of this.

So rather than officially sanctioning a particular job as being higher rDPS because it is 'officially more difficult', just level the playing field and refuse to officially take a stance on 'difficulty'.

Taking a stance that "difficulty shouldn't factor into balance," though, is effectively "there should be no reward for further challenge" which in turn pushes out a larger set of jobs. The larger point of balance should be the perceived freedom to play whatever you want, no? That would have the opposite effect.

By all means, let the jobs that have the least going on get more to do, and "level the playing field" that way, but else you're just replacing one largely incidental imbalance (balance for the sake of freedom of choice) with a deliberately worse one (balancing for freedom of choice only for those who have the luxury of knowing how to play each job perfectly and are actively seeking additional challenge even if it has no reward).

The focus should be on designing actions and fights that allow for more variety in skill expression. Interesting movement abilities. Fights with more movement and positioning.

I'm all for more interesting movement abilities (though a good half or more of their interest has traditionally come from how they work around one's rotation -- how to trim one cycle of a rotation in order to align a movement opportunity to its need).

That said, the less the game provides of interest even on, say, a striking dummy, the less each developer hour spent towards fight design is effectively worth.

Worse, you still leave barren everything leading up to those modern, more idealized (and more development-costly) fights.

Nor are designing kits with depth somehow zero-sum with designing good encounters. Simplifying toolkits doesn't stop role-based tasks, encounters' mechanical variety, etc., to not be likewise gutted.

[ForteNightshade]

As for why players lock out jobs - it's based on emotion, not logic

This is a pretty absurd argument. You're essentially saying every single speed killer and parser reacts emotionally not logically when that's the literal antithesis on how to engage either activity. Speed killers especially rely on the most optimal jobs to achieve their kill times.

So when I look at Hegemone and see a tank spread of: DRK: 51%, GNB: 40%, WAR: 6%, PLD: 3%. You can't dismiss this as an emotional decision. It wouldn't make any sense. They want the strongest tank based entirely on its damage output. In every single fight, Dark Knight is overwhelmingly dominate. So much, in fact, several groups have been bringing two. Now if you want to dispute the metrics FFlogs uses by all means. However, that is an entirely different argument. Based on what we have now, there's no real position to stand on when claiming the tanks are balanced. They simply aren't.

Meanwhile, if we look at the Melee. We have a spread of: DRG 27%, 27.0% SAM: 24%, NIN: 23%, MNK: 20%, RPR: 6%. There's only a single outliner here in an otherwise very even ratio. In general, Melee is the only role not suffering from exclusion with the exception of Reaper. Unlike the others, it's reasonable balance.

[Lyth]

It's every bit as emotional as your response just now. This community is incapable of thinking for itself. Someone made a video about how the 'two minute meta' is 'destroying the game'? Guess what this forum is going to be talking for about for months, despite the fact that raid buffs have been central to optimization for years. WF cleared with a particular comp? The reason players are struggling with their week 52 clear right now with 7x Echo is because they're not using that exact same comp. Literally unplayable. The more people who stop parroting and start questioning, the more we'll see this cycle break.

One of my favorite moments was when the WF for Unending Coil ran with a DRK at a time when the job was believed by the community at large to be the absolute bottom of the barrel. When questioned about why they picked it over the then dominant WAR, the answer was 'I like playing DRK.'

[ForsakenRoe]

It's every bit as emotional as your response just now. This community is incapable of thinking for itself. Someone made a video about how the 'two minute meta' is 'destroying the game'? Guess what this forum is going to be talking for about for months, despite the fact that raid buffs have been central to optimization for years.'

One day, FFlogs should just hide the percentile and median stats on everyone's page as an april fools joke. Leave it that way for a week or two, so it doesn't just get dismissed right away as 'eh its just april fools' and people start thinking it'll stick. I want to see how many people whine and bitch that they cant see the funny color number anymore. As for raidbuffs, the issue is the adaptability factor that has been lost due to everything being made into 2mins. In the past we could have said 'ok the fight ends in 3:20, we should hold our 2min buffs until the 3min buffs come up, since we're only getting one more 2min use anyway', but now that everything's standardized to be a 2min we can't do that anymore. We can delay the 2min so that it doesn't happen during Pinax, sure, but it's not really the same. Also, it feels like it's even more punishing to mess up the raidbuff window now, due to EVERYthing being funneled into that 2min burst. If someone misaligns their buff, or mechanics force you to be unable to capitalize on the buffs as much as you'd want to (eg in prog, when enrage at it's peak threat level) it's much more of a RIP than it used to be in SB. And people do misalign their buff, Manifold Flames makes some people buff before moving out, some people after they come in for Nest/Tetraflare, and now everything's all screwed up. SE tried to make it 'easier to keep the buffs aligned' and somehow made it, not just 'not really easier' but also 'more punishing', how the heck did they even manage that

[Lyth]

Yeah, I can understand why the dev team isn't interested in officially publishing numbers, even if it would provide an avenue for interested players to critique their own performance and grow stronger with it.

If you think that burst windows are a 'restriction' now, they still were back then. There is always an optimum time to place that burst window. What has changed is:

• It's more obvious when that burst window is supposed to occur (what's the LCM of our recasts again?)
• It tends to get set up without any real coordination or pre-planning
• It's longer, allowing you to be less precise with your button inputs
• It's less powerful than it used to be

In short, they took something that occurred typically at slightly higher levels of play in coordinated groups and made it accessible and forgiving so that anyone can do it on the fly. Just because the average PF player who used to freestyle burst is actually conscious about it doesn't mean that anything has changed.

If they wanted to really throw a wrench into it, we'd just have an assortment of different prime number recasts to deliberately mess with the alignment. But then you might as well stick with personal buffs and make this feel more like a single-player game. That will be next, the way the complaints are going.

[Gserpent]

One day, FFlogs should just hide the percentile and median stats on everyone's page as an april fools joke. Leave it that way for a week or two, so it doesn't just get dismissed right away as 'eh its just april fools' and people start thinking it'll stick. I want to see how many people whine and bitch that they cant see the funny color number anymore. As for raidbuffs, the issue is the adaptability factor that has been lost due to everything being made into 2mins. In the past we could have said 'ok the fight ends in 3:20, we should hold our 2min buffs until the 3min buffs come up, since we're only getting one more 2min use anyway', but now that everything's standardized to be a 2min we can't do that anymore. We can delay the 2min so that it doesn't happen during Pinax, sure, but it's not really the same. Also, it feels like it's even more punishing to mess up the raidbuff window now, due to EVERYthing being funneled into that 2min burst. If someone misaligns their buff, or mechanics force you to be unable to capitalize on the buffs as much as you'd want to (eg in prog, when enrage at it's peak threat level) it's much more of a RIP than it used to be in SB. And people do misalign their buff, Manifold Flames makes some people buff before moving out, some people after they come in for Nest/Tetraflare, and now everything's all screwed up. SE tried to make it 'easier to keep the buffs aligned' and somehow made it, not just 'not really easier' but also 'more punishing', how the heck did they even manage that

It's really fucking weird, the 2 minute paradigm actually punishes casual groups and players *way* more than it punishes skilled ones. If someone has damage down during a 2 minute window, there goes a considerable portion of your raid's DPS. If someone is dead during a 2 minute window, there goes a huge portion of your raid's DPS *for the rest of the goddamn pull.* And then, they added way more body checks than in any previous tier. DSR, at least, has divided opinions on quality, with people either saying it's the worst raid they've ever done and them having damned near "gaming PTSD" from it (people saying that even the thought of doing more DSR makes them wince) or people saying it's the best content they've ever made - seems to be completely reliant on whether or not you had a rock-solid static to grind it with. FWIW, I think the easier UWU-style ultimates are a better design choice.

I have no clue what they're doing but Endwalker is quite easily the worst design for raiding since fucking Gordias. I mean, at least it's *playable* and all classes are nominally viable (lol, PLD), but I think they're getting slapped with reality here - you can't keep taking shit out of the game and dumbing things down, or else you end up in a system that is paradoxically extremely hostile to unskilled players because you've gone and removed all of the little bits and bobs that they could have used to get themselves back on track after a mistake.