Yet another SMN thread: SMN is the only job that doesn't have a gauge/proc management

[Post]

At no point has FFXIV's job design ever been so inscrutable that any player that can read (at least for the English translation) did not have every tool necessary to play the jobs in the game "correctly" as you put it if not optimally. The actions themselves tell you everything you need to know to compare your actions, from costs to targets to ranges to cooldowns to potency values.

If there's ever confusion, they largely design that element out of the game. E.g.: multiple, competing aoe actions for BRD, MCH, DRG, DRK before aoe combos existed. DoTs, in SMN's case, as some players might never have realized every dot tics every 3 seconds. The only real exceptions to this have ever been BLM's astral fire damage increase being unlisted and MCH's Flamethrower hitting more often than most over time effects

Heck, the MSQ prepares you more for reading than for anything else, you'd figure folks would be great at it by the time they're 90.

I think the number of players that don't read their actions as they acquire them, one by one, while leveling in game says that most don't care about playing well. The number of people unsyncing content for glamour and mounts at every hour, even waiting for groups for duties they could easily solo if they tried also speaks volumes.

But, like your were saying earlier in the reverse, I don't think this is a bad thing. I just come away thinking, as a longtime fan that barely interacts with ANY communities or resources about it from outside of the game:

If you have a type of player that plays the game for the job design, for the battle content, for liking to do better, and you can create content in such a way that it doesn't exclude those that don't really prefer that aspect of the game... Why strictly design for the latter? They're not the ones that are going to play with and appreciate the content or the job design the same way anyways.

Apologies for the double post, can't figure out how to edit a post to beat the character limit on a phone browser.

[Eorzean_username]

If the whole game goes in the direction of lowering the "ceiling", it likewise alienates players that have been around for a long time and HAVE gotten better, from concerted effort or hours regardless.

I'll try to respond in more detail later, but for now I just want to reinforce:

Yes, to your point here — this is absolutely a valid perspective. The frustration from more "dedicated" players is not unfounded, and I'm not at all trying to invalidate that FFXIV is slowly and steadily eroding a great deal of the elements that previously made it interesting and rewarding to more "detail-oriented" players.

You're absolutely correct that, one way or another, someone is being "left out" and "alienated". And I think that it's a lot harder to actually "compromise" on this issue than a lot of people — on either polarity of the debate — seem to realize; in either case, someone's play experience is almost always going to be injured.

This is why I think it's important to be sympathetic to former Summoner mains who have lost a unique experience that no substitute Job provides; current Black Mage is, frankly, in no way at all similar to what optimizing (or just "playing well") ShB Summoner felt like, so telling ShB SMN mains "well just go play BLM" is honestly not a "solution", any more than telling EW Summoner mains "well just go play White Mage".

In my opinion, it's a really sticky situation — kind of a (to be a bit melodramatic) Ancients vs. Mortals case, where someone's just going to "lose" no matter what happens.

At no point has FFXIV's job design ever been so inscrutable that any player that can read (at least for the English translation) did not have every tool necessary to play the jobs in the game "correctly" as you put it if not optimally. The actions themselves tell you everything you need to know to compare your actions, from costs to targets to ranges to cooldowns to potency values.

This is an area where a lot of disconnect occurs between parts of the community, I think.

Different people think differently, and different people approach the game with a different sense of priorities... so it can be misleading to generalize too much from your own perspective.

Something that seems as simple as "consider Potency-per-GCD when looking at combo chains", "make a mental chart of how Potency scales with target count for ST vs AOE actions", or "Divide Potency by Resource Cost to establish the relative value of resource-consumers" is actually opaque black-magic to a lot of players.

Another part of the problem, I think, is that FFXIV is a game that's largely about "setting up the piano-sequence correctly" — seemingly-minor "errors", like where actions are placed in a sequence, can compound and spiral to bloating potency losses due to how the buff system interacts with rotations.

That is also confusing and unintuitive to players — I don't think examples like optimal Perfect Balance usages, or opening encounters with precast Meikyo Shisui, or whether Meisui is actually a DPS button or not, or facepulling on Dark Knight to pump out Living Shadow on-time, or manipulating Acceleration and Swiftcast to prevent OGCD drift on RDM... are intuitive to people, even if they're trying to read their tooltips.

Same for throughout history — I'm sceptical that many players could figure out how to operate HW Dark Knight or SB Machinist or ShB Summoner correctly without some amount of external guidance. There's just way too much going on, and way too many competing possibilities all clashing for attention as the rotation branches through. I think most people definitely become "totally lost" trying to figure it out for themselves, and end up either giving up, or leaving a lot of tools and/or potency "on the table" after they reach their limit for trying to process it.

I think a contributing factor is that, if you look at MMOs from the perspective of players who don't "live" in the genre, a lot of the required "homework" is unintuitive — it's not necessary to perform any calculations or tooltip-analysis to understand how to play Mario, Zelda, shooters, etc. A lot of people coming to FFXIV are in the mindset that they play a game just by using the buttons it gives them, and it starts to spiral into a mess when those buttons start punitively competing with each other, or "rotationally imploding" if done in the improper sequence or outside a narrow "buff window"... etc.

EW Summoner comes much closer to that "pick up and play" feeling that "most" games offer the player, so I think that's another reason that it's well-received by a broader segment.

If you have a type of player that plays the game for the job design, for the battle content, for liking to do better, and you can create content in such a way that it doesn't exclude those that don't really prefer that aspect of the game... Why strictly design for the latter? They're not the ones that are going to play with and appreciate the content or the job design the same way anyways.

It's a fair question, I'm just arguing that it's too binary.

You're positing a world — and this is a very common argument that I've seen for years — where there exists exactly two types of players:

a) Doesn't read tooltips and doesn't care, just wants to unsync everything and farm glamours and RP in clubs

b) Carefully-reads tooltips, seeks external resources, practices rotation religiously, seeks perfection in parsing and content-optimization as a point of personal pride and honour

And under that premise, certainly, it makes sense to say, "Why design for A? 'A' doesn't care anyway".

I just think that this is actually reasoning from an inaccurate premise, and so it's reaching an inaccurate conclusion.

In reality, I think that it's not "a" and "b", but much more like a smooth continuum that flows between something more like "a" and "z", with the entire alphabet in-between.

So as you increase your distance from "a", you encounter players who take increasing amounts of pride and willingness in trying to learn their Job and play their rotation "correctly".

But as you increase distance from "z", you encounter more and more players who aren't dedicated enough to master things like Optimal Drift Monk, or play Black Mage in Extremes/Savage (or, any more these days, Red Mage in that same content... ironically enough).

So what you're actually encountering is a "filter system" — the more intuitively-accessible a Job's "correct play" is, the more of the upper and mid-level continuum it appeals to. The more exacting and demanding a Job is, the more it starts to winnow the willing candidates down towards the "z" end of the spectrum.

In my own anecdotal experience, I would guess that the population distribution is kind of "bell-curvy":

• At one "tail", a minority of "hardcore a" types that truly don't care whatsoever about their tooltips, and will happily "freestyle" or "RP their rotation"
• At the other "tail", a minority of "hardcore z" types that will eat, sleep, and breathe encounter timelines in order to ensure that not a single cast is dropped (or etc)
• And distributed through the central "hill", a much larger number of "b-to-y" types who are genuinely trying, but have varying limits and standards for how much is "too much" when it comes to trying to understand and master a single class in a single game.

I think that EW Summoner has "struck sparks" for a large segment of that distribution. As much as it can be memed as the "EZ farming Job", it's also appealing to a wide demographic of players that all feel like they can "figure it out" and "play well" entirely on their own (and are genuinely trying to).

I think this may be because FFXIV has a bad habit of "overcorrecting" — making things either utterly-pointless ("Press Glare, then press Glare again") or the exploding-brain-meme ("EW Monk burst optimization").

For a lot of players, EW Summoner seems to make a sweet-spot in-between — it's far more engaging than "1111121111" on Healers, but far less intimidating than "Here is a 34-point plan for how you can get Red Mage through a single 20-second mechanic sequence in Savage Floor 3".

[Renathras]

If the whole game goes in the direction of lowering the "ceiling", it likewise alienates players that have been around for a long time and HAVE gotten better, from concerted effort or hours regardless.

Sure, but who is arguing that?

Who is suggesting that BLM or RDM's difficulty should be reduced?

No one seems to be making the argument to lower the skill ceiling of the entire game. People are just saying having one Job with a lower skill ceiling is nice, popular, enjoyed by many, is likely good for the game, and isn't having the over-hyperbolic dire consequences people wanting it to be made harder are insisting.

SMN is easy, people like that. The rotation is intuitive, people can understand it by just reading their tooltips and playing with it. This is good Job design.

It cooexists in a space with BLM, which isn't at all easy. People (generally different than the first group in SMN) like that, too. The rotation is convoluted, can be tuned to specific fights and even specific phases of specific fights, but no one's playing the Job anywhere close to optimally without spending quote a few hours on Discords and reading/watching guides online, as well as playing with it on their own, testing various things out, and memorizing fights, including watching videos and timing mechanics out, to squeeze every last ounce out of the Job.

...and BLM actually does reward those players with higher DPS, enough to make them worth taking even though SMN has superior utility.

Everyone's comparing SMN to RDM, but the opposite end of the spectrum is BLM, and SMN and BLM seem to have a healthy coexistence going.

This suggests the problem isn't SMN, the problem is RDM. Either it's doing too little damage, its utility isn't seen as worthwhile, it's too hard to optimize, or maybe some combination of the above. But the problem seems not to be that SMN is simple nor that SMN is simple and doing the damage it's doing, since it and BLM still seem to have a healthy relationship.

"But fewer people play BLM!" - True, which may not be because "SMN is easy" so much as it is "Most people don't like having to hyper-optimize and spend ours in weird third-party places outside of the game". But at the high end, people that want to play BLM aren't being denied and BLMs are assets to their teams.

The problem seems to be with RDM.

At no point has FFXIV's job design ever been so inscrutable that any player that can read (at least for the English translation) did not have every tool necessary to play the jobs in the game "correctly" as you put it if not optimally.

That's the point being made, though:

That players should be able to figure out how to play their Jobs optimally with in-game resources. And we're not even saying all Jobs; just 1. Jobs that require extensive outside research and planning are fine to exist as well - BLM does.

EDIT:

This is why I think it's important to be sympathetic to former Summoner mains who have lost a unique experience that no substitute Job provides; current Black Mage is, frankly, in no way at all similar to what optimizing (or just "playing well") ShB Summoner felt like, so telling ShB SMN mains "well just go play BLM" is honestly not a "solution", any more than telling EW Summoner mains "well just go play White Mage".

Agreed.

It's why I've held since 6.0 that the next Job they need to introduce should be Green Mage which just takes old SMN's kit (minus Egi-Assault, and the Demis) and replaces them with DoTs and the same refresh and cycle system. The only things that would be missing would be Egi-Assaults, Demi-Bahamut, and FBT. DWT isn't inherently "SMN-y", and the two big summons can be replaced with field effects that do things. The "get 8 GCDs in during Bahamut" could work like NIN's Dotan gaining the ground snake attack when you do your AOE thing while it's up. That would keep that same type of gameplay without the "Summons" and thematically fit a "plague doctor/DoT Mage" class fantasy (think Corrupted/Salted Earth). And Egi-Assaults were honestly just glorified GCD attacks that generated a stack of another ability to use for movement and "Corrupted Earth" optimizations.

This way, both playstyles can exist side-by-side.

I do think the Devs want to move away from DoTs (except on Healers for some reason...), but if they could be persuaded, GRM would be a good addition to the game to scratch that itch some people still have.

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SMN itself...I want them to give Carby a SCH-like Ruin 2. Just SOMETHING it can do other than Radiant Aegis, and an instant cast will have minimal disruption (at most while waiting for the 0.7 sec animation lock after casting Ruin 2) before Aegis, which I think is more than acceptable. Especially since Searing Light doesn't cast from Carby anymore and since every time I want to use Aegis, it seems to be while a Primal or Demi is on the field and I can't ANYway, so nothing different.

[Rokke]

this thread has a whole lot of "I don't want a button for a sake of a button!1!!"s as if baha summon, baha enkindle, and deathflare had reasons to be 3 separate buttons lol


reworking even just one of them to be worth a hotbar slot would be an improvement.

[Raikai]

That players should be able to figure out how to play their Jobs optimally with in-game resources. And we're not even saying all Jobs; just 1. Jobs that require extensive outside research and planning are fine to exist as well - BLM does.

Forgot to post to this comment, because is a specific point that needs attention - I think is flawed beyond the job's structure.

FFXIV is not good in explaining mid to advanced mechanics. Basic stuff like the concept of weaving. I remember back in my sprout days, it took be quite a while to realize what weaving was, or even that double-weaving was a thing.

Some stuff you may eventually figure out, maybe through someone's criticism, like that (sadly) is important to follow the 2min meta. Or even more obscure things, like that the cagetory difference between a 'spell' and an 'ability' is important.

I'll never forget that I spent a LONG time thinking that Fey Illumination buffed all of my actions, and after reading a comment somewhere I realized that the healing boost was exactly for the actions I shouldn't be optimally using (gcds) and not everything, because the tooltip's wording is extremely vague. It says that buffs healing magic... How a new player is supposed to know that 'abilities' is not considered magic even though they are presented visually like magic spells? Please someone correct if I'm wrong and this changed, but I don't think this is explained anywhere in the game.

[Ivtrix]

Forgot to post to this comment, because is a specific point that needs attention - I think is flawed beyond the job's structure.

FFXIV is not good in explaining mid to advanced mechanics. Basic stuff like the concept of weaving. I remember back in my sprout days, it took be quite a while to realize what weaving was, or even that double-weaving was a thing.

Some stuff you may eventually figure out, maybe through someone's criticism, like that (sadly) is important to follow the 2min meta. Or even more obscure things, like that the cagetory difference between a 'spell' and an 'ability' is important.

I'll never forget that I spent a LONG time thinking that Fey Illumination buffed all of my actions, and after reading a comment somewhere I realized that the healing boost was exactly for the actions I shouldn't be optimally using (gcds) and not everything, because the tooltip's wording is extremely vague. It says that buffs healing magic... How a new player is supposed to know that 'abilities' is not considered magic even though they are presented visually like magic spells? Please someone correct if I'm wrong and this changed, but I don't think this is explained anywhere in the game.

It’s a big failure on the devs & the games part, especially when higher level content is balanced around it. Maybe it’s already assumed that players participating in that content will already seek 3rd party resources, but it should really be built into the game.

[Renathras]

FFXIV is not good in explaining mid to advanced mechanics. Basic stuff like the concept of weaving.

Agreed. Weaving is such a basic concept, people barely even explain it, since most everyone just assumes everyone knows it.

I didn't figure out the difference until one day I noticed playing PotD how some floors would lock me out of Abilities but I could still use my normal spells, and how the Pacification blocks Spells/Weaponskills but I could still use those other abilities.

It was after that I looked through the spell list and noticed that keyword the first time.

At this point, I still didn't know what an "oGCD" was nor the concept of "weaving"; I only knew that "Ability" meant "think I can use instantly even while the other weaponskills/spells cannot be used yet, and which I can use while pacified" and "Spell" meant "thing that is not an ability".

Shortly thereafter, I was watching guides about SCH (this was in SB, I'd been playing since around 2.4) and they talked about weaving. That was the first time I realized "Tetra doesn't just cast faster, it ignores the casting que and goes off instantly where those 'Spell' things do not." I had noticed in the past Tetra seemed "more responsive", which was my wording for it at the time, but I didn't understand WHY that was, which was that it ignored/was exempt from the GCD. That wasn't really apparent. What was apparent was I could "use it whenever", and it was "more responsive". Of course, it was also "more responsive" than Benediction...which is an oGCD, so that one just made things even more confusing.

Coming from WoW in 2013, "Instant Cast" just meant "Instant Cast" to me. The idea there were "Instant Cast" "Spells" (Regen) and "Instant Cast" "Abilities" (Tetragrammaton) is just not a natural thing for someone to just know. "Instant Cast" on one thing and "Instant Cast" on another thing doesn't really explain the distinction to the player. The game has the Spell/Weaponskill and Ability tags, but I doubt many people notice them until they have a specific reason to look through their abilities for them, as I did after PotD and my own observation.

The thing is, understanding oGCDs isn't just important, it's mandatory to come anywhere close to optimal in the game. Even just doing ABC (Always Be Casting), but treating oGCDs like normal spells (waiting 2.5 sec to cast them, then waiting 2.5 sec to cast anything else) is massively suboptimal. For Healers, it's super important since optimization is based on using oGCD heals weaving between damage spells, but this requires you know what an oGCD is and what weaving is. For DPS, it's essential for your opener and burst phases, and not doing it can be a pretty massive DPS difference, sometimes 30+%. And, of course, knowing that buffs that affect "Healing Magic" and "Healing Abilities" are two completely different buffs, with the former not affecting the latter but the latter does affect the former. The game never explains that, either.

It's hugely important, fundamental, even, to understanding Job design and the combat system. But there's pretty much no way for most players to know this without hours/years of playing or reading a guide, as the game never even draws the player's attention to the Weaponskill/Spell/Ability tag to tell them that it's significant. It's not mentioned in Job guides in the game, the help tooltips, Hall of the Novice, nothing.

Clearly, Bob should play SMN and Greg should play RDM (or SMN).

This isn't a good reason to go to the proposed SMN. In both cases, Bob is going to have a lower performance than Greg, thus Greg is "rewarded" for his "hard work". What's the problem? That Bob is still able to come close to him and thus still allowed to do content without being blacklisted? Should Bob, playing a videogame, not be allowed to do content in said videogame, because...why? He's specifically playing a Job that allows him to contribute meaningfully to the team. What's the problem? If Greg is happy just being challenged, then he can play RDM, Bob can play SMN, and everyone's happy. If Greg doesn't feel challenged enough, he can also try out BLM.

Where is the problem here?

But have you even thought about Bob? Bob has feelings too, you know. What if he liked RDM for it's appearance, visuals and so on?

I'm not sure why you're saying this. All that argument would suggest is that RDM needs to be made easier.

It's also not "only natural for even casual gamers to min max everything". That they don't min max everything is part of what makes them casuals, bu the standard definition used for that term, anyway.

Taking "I would like to be able to learn, grow, and gain skill" to mean "you just want to lord over other people" is the most...

So, what's insisting repeatedly people who enjoy SMN are just lazy Pieces Of Snozberry who want carries and output that they aren't deserving of?

While it's easy to make mocking caricatures of people, they're generally just that, caricatures. And if one engages in them, then said one isn't really one to complain when other people use them...except in this case, she didn't even use it.

What's his reason for playing? Because he wants to be good and that's how he has fun, right? Then "playing the job should be the reward". That was literally what was said.

Thats fine for casual play but the moment you add an enrage timer everything changes. Thats the only time that balance actually matters.

So again, what's the problem with Greg playing RDM or SMN and Bob playing SMN?

If Enrages are a problem, then surely we want SMN as an option for Bob so he can still complete the content and contribute meaningfully to his team, do we not?

It's very strange to me that some people believe those who want some form of skill expression on SMN just wants to lord it over others, maybe consider that they just want to have fun in their own way on a job that they enjoy the aesthetics of? I don't think anyone is asking that SMN be only playable at a base level after reading a 20 page documentation, they just want some form of skill expression so they can have their own fun.

The problem with this is the justification used by people to increase the skill expression always seems to end up "the players not playing to the optimal level should be doing much less damage". The implication isn't "we want a Job that allows for skill expression" from that. The implication from that justification is "we want to be able to very clearly dominate/lord over people who don't play at our level". At best, it's wanting to look better at the expense of other people looking worse (that is "best" since in that case, it's not an active desire people do worse, it's just a requirement for one to look better).

If the argument was truly just to be able to have skill expression, then it wouldn't matter how much or how little more damage they were doing. A 100% Energy Drain SCH vs one who doesn't even have ED on their hotbars is ridiculously small. The difference is 300 potency per minute, peanuts. But some people really enjoy it for that reason. No one's contesting the idea of having skill expression. People are contesting what that skill expression should look like, if SMN has it already (some people think it does; you may not believe so, but "skill expression" is not an objective measurement, so it is ultimately subjective), and how big the gap from the floor to ceiling in damage output should be.

No one has an issue with people wanting some expression of skill.

People have an issue with wanting said expression of skill to translate into a huge gulf in damage done. Besides which, it causes a huge problem with encounter design. In order for the "you can play badly and still clear content" to work with a large damage gap, then the encounters must be tuned for the skill floor players. That means skilled players will find even Savages and Ultimates trivial to complete. On the other hand, if you tune it to where the Enrages require the skilled players damage output, now "you can play badly and still clear content" is out the window. It cannot be both at the same time unless the gap between skill floor and skill ceiling is small.

Of course, the other alternative is just to have at least 1 simple Job and at least 1 complex Job, and let the players play as the one they find best meets their desired skill level.

I have a concern that arguments about "skill expression" and "skill ceiling" really don't have an objective standard, and inevitably end up being something like:

I think this is a big piece of the issue.

Part of it is that people like arguing against strawmen and caricatures - they're much easier to beat in a debate than actual Human beings making actual arguments. Look at Gaius' reply mentioning me. It's completely wrong and probably somewhere deep down he knows it, but he says it and people support him saying it. The people who like saying that people wanting a low gap in damage want to be lazy and get carries...but suddenly are offended when they're treated to a caricature of their own desires as "wanting to lord over" other people. Suddenly caricatures are beyond the pale...until they're ready to call people braindead lazy babies again, then it will become okay again.

But setting aside those people:

The issue really is that it's subjective, and that not everyone wants the same skill ceiling even if it somehow wasn't.

If everyone in this game really wanted skill expression, we'd be drowning in BLMs. They'd be everywhere. All those BLM players would be frustrated that some of them have to play BRD (the...most chaotic?...Ranged) or MNK (Melee), because they really just want to play on the super hard BLM because they enjoy the gameplay and skill expression so much, that even if BLM was the lowest DPS Job, they'd all still be playing it. We'd be looking everywhere to see someone who has "Main Class:" as anything other than "Black Mage Lv 90". Yet not even the people pushing for SMN change are BLM mains.

...we don't see that in the playerbase as a whole, either. We see the exact opposite, with even very highly skilled players swapping to SMN in a heartbeat.

That doesn't seem to show a playerbase - even of the Ultimate raider type - that wants this mythical high skill expression Job..

And the change to nerf SMN doesn't seem to be because some people want to just express their awesome skill for the fun thrill of it. That they want to do more damage suggest they either want other people to be unviable and unable to clear content or alternatively, that they want people to notice when they're doing so much better than their friend Bob and how much better than Bob they are, which requires the gap be really big for people to notice...and, of course, that people need to be running illegal software against the TOS to even see the difference, since there's no way anyone can tell in a boss fight directly.

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People need to just understand that not everyone thinks like them. FFXIV doesn't have specs like WoW, so that means Jobs are like specs. That's just the way it is.

If you want a super high skill ceiling caster, it's right there as BLM.

If you aren't playing that, that's your choice.

But you might want SMN's aesthetic with a higher skill ceiling. That's fair. But others might want BLM's aesthetic with a lower skill ceiling. Are you willing to offer them that? Probably not.

There are, absolutely, some people who want to put a dipping bird on their keyboard and get carries. There are also, absolutely, some people who want big damage gaps explicitly so they can show everyone how much better they are and point and laugh at the people they're leaving in the dust, gaining notoriety at the direct expense of others.

...but these are (I hope) the minority.

Thing is, FFXIV's Job system doesn't really allow much besides an all or nothing. Either a Job is easy or it's not. And if a Job has to have a lot of extra damage to "reward" people who want the harder skill ceiling, then that makes it non-viable anyway, meaning "you can play bad and still clear" goes out the window.

The only solution that works is to have at least 1 Job be easy and at least 1 Job be hard. The only alternative to that is for a Job to be hard, but where playing it "at a base level" does 99% of the damage. That is, where getting that last 1% requires massive skill and work, but both are entirely viable. But then the people who say they're just in it for "skill expression" will complain that they aren't being "rewarded with damage".

So that leaves us with the other option: At least 1 easy, at least 1 hard, let people pick the one that matches their desired level of dedication.

So then we're at an impasse and the only solution that gives everyone something is if some Jobs have high and some Jobs have low. As Eorzian_username said:

I really need to stress that "Oh, it's okay, you can suck and still clear content!" is actually not a satisfying "compromise" to a lot of players.

[Aravell]

The problem with this is the justification used by people to increase the skill expression always seems to end up "the players not playing to the optimal level should be doing much less damage". The implication isn't "we want a Job that allows for skill expression" from that. The implication from that justification is "we want to be able to very clearly dominate/lord over people who don't play at our level". At best, it's wanting to look better at the expense of other people looking worse (that is "best" since in that case, it's not an active desire people do worse, it's just a requirement for one to look better).

I can see your point, but the other side also has a point. Skill expression should have a gap, perhaps not a huge one, but it should at least be there.

Let's use the example from above, so we have Bob and Greg, let's say Greg is performing at 90% efficiency and Bob is performing at 70%. If the skill expression gap is about, let's say 8%, Bob will lose some damage but will still be performing at 62% efficiency, this would not gate him from any content, he still has enough skill to clear extremes, even savage, perhaps not week 1 savage, but he can still clear it.

It's also my opinion that clearing hard content should require some form of skill. Take any other game for example, playing on hard mode would require you to at least understand the game and perform gameplay at a decent level, and that's exactly what savage is, a hard mode. People who want to clear savage fast will put in the time to learn and get better, people who don't, they can still clear savage, just a little bit later when they have more gear. No one is really being gatekept out of any content if there's a noticeable gap in skill, 5-10% won't hurt anyone. I understand that people want to do as good as possible, but is it fair to be just as skilled as someone who has put in way more hours in that same job?