Please decorrelate party support from party damage

[Shurrikhan]

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

I asked that jobs be balanced for progression --assuming a decently but far from perfectly skilled party-- not for BiS speedrun farms or for their striking dummy relative-potency-per-minute.

In that case, there is still no need for a MCH to have the maximum rDPS or aDPS of a BLM. Not just because they're mobile (that tax is frequently excessive, given how close SMN comes to that anyways when it matters), but because it's simply a hell of a lot easier to optimize than a BLM.

That's it. I have in no way defended a mobility tax that is disproportionate to the advantage it provides. I've merely noted that if you make jobs that are broadly felt to be --by those actually playing both/all-- far easier to optimize than another/all others, then you leave no incentive to learn the more difficult jobs.

Balancing every job to have the same maximum rDPS, as some have suggested here and elsewhere, would be a disaster for the vast majority of players' actual range of jobs that they could competitively choose (which should be the goal of balance).

Either the least demanding jobs would have to have their skill ceiling raised to match (my preference, mentioned just above in what you quoted) or we should accept that not every job will necessarily be competitive for BiS barse speedruns, and that that's fine (since they're not something we should favor over the average Savage player's breath of job choice).

[Valence]

I do not agree with that direction at all. It promotes a clunky system where there is no real balance except what SE is already doing for casuals: rphys/SMN have their mobility tax because easier to play, but who cares about casual balance in storymodes anyway? As long as there isn't huge gaping holes that somehow get more noticeable than skill difference, gear difference, etc... In savage even in lower percentiles except for BLM you won't see much different and find the exact same patterns. This is not just about BiS parse runs or whatever strawman we can think of.

Classes should all have accessible skill floors and optimizable/intricate ceilings. That solves the problem instead of making job X better than job Y.

( but yeah, give us some more intricacies on the second rate dps jobs, I dare you yoshi )

[Taranok]

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.

Not quite sure how to interpret it, but you seem to be suggesting casters don't lose that much uptime despite having literally the worst gameplay of any role in the entire game at present. There's a reason SMN has a ~48% plurality on cDPS players in pretty much all content across the board. Unless we're trying to call Summoner a cDPS and not a rDPS by another name. The only role the devs are catering to is mDPS.

[Lyth]

...

Just out of curiosity, because this 'difficulty' argument gets brought up often - would you opt for occasional 'bowmage' style actions that require you to set up a charged sniper shot if it removed the justification to treat casters as a higher tier of ranged dps? Or alternatively, would you opt for more proc heavy or high APM gameplay to add more 'intricacy'? I think that rather than allowing a dps discrepency to exist, it probably makes sense to eliminate the discrepancy and remove any excuses to put certain jobs in a privileged spot over others.

[Shurrikhan]

Just out of curiosity, because this 'difficulty' argument gets brought up often - would you opt for occasional 'bowmage' style actions that require you to set up a charged sniper shot if it removed the justification to treat casters as a higher tier of ranged dps? Or alternatively, would you opt for more proc heavy or high APM gameplay to add more 'intricacy'? I think that rather than allowing a dps discrepency to exist, it probably makes sense to eliminate the discrepancy and remove any excuses to put certain jobs in a privileged spot over others.

Personally, a bit of column A, bit of column B. I'd like to see MCH have a lot more going on around its CDs, rather than their just being 'hit when available'. I'd like to see Bard have more to it than just key-swiping RA->BS and an button 3 per 45 seconds, button 4 twice per average minute. Charged shots or procs would fit for either but wouldn't be essential.

[Urielparadox]

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*

It has made no since too, yet they buff samurai and warrior into god hood for no reason either
1)warriors slightly lower dmg had no negative impact on clears cause it was only slight, and warrior is almost impossible to kill even in savages(as well as having the easiest and least punishing rotation in the game by far.
2)samuria has the least upkeep of the 4 big jobs(sam,mnk, blm, and drg) yet does the most damage by a significant amount.

If you want to see how little SE actually knows about the dmg output of jobs just look at the SSS striking dummies hp requirements for kill. they believe reaper to be the second strongist pure dps. in a solo situation reaper has to do the second highest dmg/time to clear, only samurai has to do more(and barely anymore) while we know all those other jobs out dmg reaper pretty strongly in a solo setting. SE has no clue how their own jobs work and this expansion has made it painfully obvious(and for some reason they are scarred of the samurai fan base but no one else, because every time they talk about dps adjustments they use the samuria fan base as the why they cant...)

[Valence]

Just out of curiosity, because this 'difficulty' argument gets brought up often - would you opt for occasional 'bowmage' style actions that require you to set up a charged sniper shot if it removed the justification to treat casters as a higher tier of ranged dps? Or alternatively, would you opt for more proc heavy or high APM gameplay to add more 'intricacy'? I think that rather than allowing a dps discrepency to exist, it probably makes sense to eliminate the discrepancy and remove any excuses to put certain jobs in a privileged spot over others.

Yes, SAM player never complained much about Iajutsu, so having a charged shot or two? Sure. Doesn't change anything at all, it's still full mobility, unless we're talking about HW rphys (esp BRD), but then again, it was still 1.5s cast charges like current healers, not full GCDs. I don't mind it that much, although HW was pushing it.

In the case of pervasive/majority of cast times like in HW with Minuet/Gauss Barrel, my real problem is that I don't think that's a real answer though, for the simple reason that if I want to play a caster, i'll go play a caster.
In the case of Iajutsu like moves, I'm all for it. You can even pepper it with some melee moves like DNC used to have, I don't mind either.

Edit: I almost skipped the question about high APM and proc heavy.

I'm on the fence on that. I do feel that BRD and MCH are already mega heavy on APM (except during resident sleepers Army's Paean), and after long raiding sessions I can actually get some physical pain (when you keep spamming hypercharge sequences or even bloodletters during Mage's). I do feel BRD gets enough procs as it is, and DNC probably as well since a full burst window is often barely enough to weave everything when stacked on feathers. MCH has been gutted of its procs so RIP, but yeah i'd take ammo back any time, because currently it's a boring and especially tedious job to play ala GNB.

I think the better answer would be systems akin to ammo, where the procs lie on the GCD weaponskills rather than OGCDs, which we have already way enough on the three jobs, introducing clipping, latency unfriendliness, and brainless carpal tunnel (Hypercharge being a heavy culprit in that regard). I guess DNC has enough procs on the GCD as it is, so maybe it could benefit from other things, perhaps more priorities which have been severely removed over expansions.

[Raikai]

At this rate, I feel the best way to move forward would be simply create a new "dps-support" role and tailor the party composition towards it. Of course, it would require a complete overhaul of both the jobs elected to fit in this new category and the encounter design, and that's simply too much work to expect in one go, unless we'd get a xpac without new jobs.

[Shurrikhan]

I do not agree with that direction at all. It promotes a clunky system where there is no real balance except what SE is already doing for casuals: rphys/SMN have their mobility tax because easier to play, but who cares about casual balance in storymodes anyway?

...How does balancing for Savage progression for "a decently, but not perfectly, skilled party" have anything to do with storymode content? I literally said that this would concern only the content that actually requires that as many options as possible be competitive. Multiple times now. So why the strawman?

We have a broad range of actual difficulty as perceived by those playing the jobs in question and with enough knowledge/context (across other jobs) to make comparisons. Yet, actual performance doesn't match with that, making the likes of playing RDM over SMN a greater liability for literally zero reward (worse, actually -- negative, as SMN max dps is higher).

That should NOT be the case, and actively hurts the breadth of jobs that feel competitive (as it would even if RDM only faintly edged out SMN under absolutely perfect optimization, since almost no one would reach that state).

Classes should all have accessible skill floors and optimizable/intricate ceilings. That solves the problem instead of making job X better than job Y.

What are you disagreeing with, then?

Either the least demanding jobs would have to have their skill ceiling raised to match (my preference, mentioned just above in what you quoted) or we should accept that not every job will necessarily be competitive for BiS barse speedruns, and that that's fine (since they're not something we should favor over the average Savage player's breath of job choice).

[SilversLyu]

At this rate, I feel the best way to move forward would be simply create a new "dps-support" role and tailor the party composition towards it. Of course, it would require a complete overhaul of both the jobs elected to fit in this new category and the encounter design, and that's simply too much work to expect in one go, unless we'd get a xpac without new jobs.

I am curious what they will do the next expansion(s). As I said in another thread, they will probably equalise all roles eventually. Tanks and healers are in a pretty good spot for the devs (except some job balance issues), and the dps will follow I would assume. Endwalker is streamlining Melee (less positionals, bigger hitboxes, boss untargetable at times - easier uptime), The next expansion will tackle on another role, presumably Caster. By equalising I mean streamlining. Whether that is to simplify the jobs or to create some sort of balanced ground along the role identity, it goes hand in hand. People dont have to like this approach & homogenization, but this is where we are headed I guess.