Please decorrelate party support from party damage

[Taranok]

Lodestone post about nerfing P8S
If you scroll down to the section titled "Why Adjust The Duty, Rather Than Job Balance?", you'll find this:


So last tier, he said explicitly that they balance around "difficulty" and utility.
*laughs in RDM*
*laughs in the entire melee role*

I always interpreted this more as: "We want the average player on this class to do well enough to clear the content." Not specifically that they want a hard class to push the biggest numbers. It's more that a hard class where the average is balanced around other classes and the average player will be able to push the biggest numbers by proxy of the average. But as this is speculative on my part.

[Valence]

Personally, I think it's a good to consider difficulty.

Yes, it's individually nebulous and based on at least several appreciable factors for each job, and sometimes the "duller"/"easier" job may see more mistakes just from a lack of intersecting points of engagement. (I find MCH easier to play when I memorize precisely when to swap from comboing to whatever other tasks, as if it played much more rigid/constrained timers, yet some would say that freedom makes it easier [more 'slack' than 'noose'].) But, across large enough sample sizes, one can see what is and isn't being optimized, how far the average nth percentile player is performing from the job's theoretical max, and who is playing what (in order to account for player characteristics separate from their performance with any single job), and we can thereby get a sense whether Job A is, in fact, "harder" for its/the average player than Job B.

And if we don't account for those differences, and we instead end up balancing something that has far less of a general and/or fight-specific learning curve for tight parity against something that takes much longer to master generally and in that specific fight, we disincentivize ever bothering with that latter set of jobs, reducing class choice and parity in practice for the majority of players (as compared to balancing for just the top 1%).

It's a lot of words to essentially boil down to balancing jobs more equally around skill floors and ceilings, in my opinion.

Why are SMN/DNC usually considered braindead? Because they have little to no ceiling, and essentially no floor. Why is MCH considered braindead at high level? Because it has little to no ceiling (and one of the flattest on raiding charts), but retains some manner of mild floor. Why is MNK considered easy but hard to optimize? Because it has a lowish floor (DK rotation go brr), but very high ceiling if one wants to optimize (optimal drift, etc). Why is BLM considered hard all across? Because it's obscure for novices mechanically, has cryptic UI and tooltips not telling everything, a miserable leveling experience, often requires to be told how to be played, which makes for a high skill floor and low accessibility, and also has the phd levels of galaxybrain optimization at high level in the form of Transpose Lines giving it the highest ceiling of everything (for a decent damage gain at that, unlike MNK).

Level the playing field a little and the problem goes away on its own.

But, as Semirhage mentioned above, whatever their balance philosophy may be, it hardly seems consistent. Utility, especially other than that of Resurrect, is likely overtaxed for what little difference it makes, melee likely overcompensated for what few additional dangers they now face, and RDM underperforming relative to SMN for its comparative difficulty, etc.

For my part, I'd like to see utility like %mitigation adjusted to provide in part instead some flat amount useful even outside of Ultimates, and to have utilities in excess of the practical value average across all jobs come at cost to DPS, but with their bearer's DPS being raised in compensation (a bit like ARR Bard and its costs from using Ballad/Paeon, rather than being so taxed by default instead).

I agree, but it seems that they wanted to go away from anything non damage related in the meta when ShB battle system was introduced. It was already starting to show cracks in SB with the reversion of trading damage for utility that was the sole realm of rphys jobs, but SB still kept the party resource utility meta because casters and some physical jobs still didn't have resource neutral rotations, which provided other requirements than just party damage.

[Shurrikhan]

It's a lot of words to essentially boil down to balancing jobs more equally around skill floors and ceilings, in my opinion.

Level the playing field a little and the problem goes away on its own.

I'm all for SMN, DNC, MCH (and to a lesser extent BRD and even RDM) having higher ceilings. (They might then actually be fun for me to play...)

But, so long as that's not the case, yes, I do think we need to balance for the average Savage runners' performance in practice, not just on paper; else we end up giving speedrunners the choice to run even MCH and SMN by giving them the same rDPS as MNK/SAM, but basically force those jobs on everyone else.

[Ayche]

Let's go deeper, let's get potentially spiteful.
Can we demand to nerf some jobs because people who play them are better? Like if all dragoons were bad at the game, and all ninjas were good at the game, does that justify nerfing ninja/buffing dragoon until everything is nice and equal?

[Valence]

I'm all for SMN, DNC, MCH (and to a lesser extent BRD and even RDM) having higher ceilings. (They might then actually be fun for me to play...)

But, so long as that's not the case, yes, I do think we need to balance for the average Savage runners' performance in practice, not just on paper; else we end up giving speedrunners the choice to run even MCH and SMN by giving them the same rDPS as MNK/SAM, but basically force those jobs on everyone else.

Sure, but have you checked the charts though? With the exception of BLM at low percentiles, the gap and mobility tax is still there and strong... So I'm not so sure about that so called gap being needed to make up for poor play at lower level. I feel people grossly overestimate the impact full mobility gives.

[CKNovel]

It's good to consider difficulty to be at the level of the reward.
The problem is that difficulty is objective subjective and balance team sometimes likes to take it in account, sometimes just ignores it.

We have the case with RDM and SMN, one struggling with casting and the others being a ranged in disguise that plays with legos.
We also have the case with WAR and GNB, why is WAR so rewarding when it's a job that requires the least amount of effort, on top of being a job that benefits from downtime contrary to GNB?

The balancing makes no sense at the moment and doesn't reflect the encouter we got for the past 2 years, massive hitbox and melee uptime + positionnals given for free.

[Valence]

Difficulty is objective?

Also I do also feel that people grossly overestimate the massive hitboxes and encounter design of EW. Sure, it helps melee uptime, but the gap was also there in previous expansions where this wasn't a thing. It's not a new problem, but the hitboxes are an obvious culprit to point fingers at.

[CKNovel]

Difficulty is objective?

Also I do also feel that people grossly overestimate the massive hitboxes and encounter design of EW. Sure, it helps melee uptime, but the gap was also there in previous expansions where this wasn't a thing. It's not a new problem, but the hitboxes are an obvious culprit to point fingers at.

I somehow mixed the two, difficulty is subjective I correct myself...

Back in ShB we didn't had massive hitboxes until Eden's promise.
The tax was here and SMN, BLM and all the melees were already top of the chart.
And SQEX tried very hard to force melees to disconnect from the boss in the second tier.

Yet it wasn't the ranged who shined, they were still lower than melees, only caster rose to the top.
To me this is a very solid proof that mobility isn't a strength, but range is. Or to be more precise, was, since disconnecting from melee is very rare today and ranged attacks aren't breaking combos anymore.

[Shurrikhan]

Sure, but have you checked the charts though? With the exception of BLM at low percentiles, the gap and mobility tax is still there and strong... So I'm not so sure about that so called gap being needed to make up for poor play at lower level. I feel people grossly overestimate the impact full mobility gives.

I'm not sure why you're answering an ideal balancing guideline (balance for in-practice for the average Savage-clearer, not just the top 3%) with the present imbalance.

What is (excessive mobility tax given how little uptime casters and melee lose these days) is clearly not what I'm suggesting.

[Valence]

Then I probably didn't understand you at all..