BLM DPS

[Bubos123]

First of all, a standard composition is 1 melee, 1 caster, 1 p-ranged and 1 free. No one said there must be 2 melee in the group, but SE has forced people to do so recently with job balance and fight design.

Besides, I don’t believe any melee job is more difficult in keeping uptime than BLM, even before EndWalker. And since EndWalker, there has been little difference between melee and p-ranged.

If BLM does the same damage as SAM it would absolutely break balance, there is only so much loss of DPS the general playerbase will tolerate before the utility becomes meaningless.

Going right back to the core, fights are designed with a DPS split of 2 Melee, 1 Caster and 1 P-ranged.

Each DPS role is designed to do a specific amount of damage compared to the other roles. Melee > Caster > P-ranged. This stems from the perceived difficulty in keeping uptime. [NOTE: I know this isn't the case with more recent fights and this is a problem with fight design in general. If this is the direction they want to go in for the future, then all jobs need to be looked at.] The harder it is to keep 100% uptime, the more damage the job is designed to do, which also meant you lost more damage when you couldn't hit something, which helped to balance things out more.

Now, using this model, if we have a BLM who can do the same or more damage than a SAM, where the BLM can have a higher uptime, this breaks the optimisation the SAM has to do in order to try and stay in melee as much as possible. BLM is now the easier job to keep uptime AND it does more damage, no contest, it is the better job to take.

If you take this into the context of party composition, BLM has basically become a melee, which means you end up with an effective party of 3 Melee and 1 P-range. There is no point replacing one of your melees with a different caster, depending on fight mechanics, it could cause things to not be predictable, among other things, however, in the same vein, you aren't going to replace the BLM with a different caster. DPS is king after all and i have already stated that a job utility can only do so much.

On the subject of utility, if all jobs in a given role do NOT have the utility (res being a small exception), then that utility is not something they balance fights around. They do not want to make a specific job mandatory after all. Res is a bit different as it is a loss in damage, not just from the job being inherently weaker, but because you have to take time to res, but healers should be the priority in ressing anyway. So really, unique utility for a specific job is meaningless. This is why jobs tend to get similar tools, which is where homogeneity comes from. Which, talking about this, homogeneity has NOTHING to do with a jobs DPS or making the job easier. It all comes down to how similar the jobs are to each other. Tanks having a similar defensive suite for example.

[Mikey_R]

Uptime for melee isn't an issue anymore.

[NOTE: I know this isn't the case with more recent fights and this is a problem with fight design in general. If this is the direction they want to go in for the future, then all jobs need to be looked at.]

Don't know if this was meant to undermine what I said, however, I did address this point in the post I am assuming you are referring to.

First of all, a standard composition is 1 melee, 1 caster, 1 p-ranged and 1 free. No one said there must be 2 melee in the group, but SE has forced people to do so recently with job balance and fight design.

Besides, I don’t believe any melee job is more difficult in keeping uptime than BLM, even before EndWalker. And since EndWalker, there has been little difference between melee and p-ranged.

No, that is fundamentally false. All DPS mechanics are designed to be tackled by 2 melee, 1 caster and 1 p-range. Whilst you can replace a melee with a different role, that doesn't change the fact it was designed to be done with a melee.

Melee keeping uptime has gotten easier and easier throughout the expansions, yes, however that doesn't change the fact that the dev team see it in a certain way and balance jobs around that that metric. This is why I also made the comment, which I have quoted above that if current design philosophy sticks, then job balance as a whole needs to be looked at.

[Bubos123]

I don’t think there is a rule in the game that 2 melee is mandatory. Could you please point out? Again, a standard composition is 1 melee, 1 p-ranged and 1 caster, after that you have got all the attribute, leaving the 4th dps position free to choose.

“All DPS mechanics are designed to be tackled by 2 melee, 1 caster and 1 p-range. Whilst you can replace a melee with a different role, that doesn't change the fact it was designed to be done with a melee.” This is not an evidence that 2 melee is mandatory. Since you can replace one melee with caster/p-ranged, it’s designed for a standard comp, and 2 melee + 1 p-ranged+1 caster is just one case of that.

However, what you said has become more true since EndWalker, especially Phase 6 in TOP, which is definitely a bad design.

No, that is fundamentally false. All DPS mechanics are designed to be tackled by 2 melee, 1 caster and 1 p-range. Whilst you can replace a melee with a different role, that doesn't change the fact it was designed to be done with a melee.

Melee keeping uptime has gotten easier and easier throughout the expansions, yes, however that doesn't change the fact that the dev team see it in a certain way and balance jobs around that that metric. This is why I also made the comment, which I have quoted above that if current design philosophy sticks, then job balance as a whole needs to be looked at.