Please decorrelate party support from party damage

[Raikai]

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.

Jeez, I can't imagine SMN simplified even more, but I don't know... what there's even to streamline for casters without losing their identity? Zero cast times, so they can have the same uptime advantage as melee?

[SilversLyu]

Jeez, I can't imagine SMN simplified even more, but I don't know... what there's even to streamline for casters without losing their identity? Zero cast times, so they can have the same uptime advantage as melee?

Yeah stuff like that might be their intention. Essencially making everyone more flexible and mobile. I dont think they will change the jobs making them more difficulty anymore, but what they do instead is ramping up the challenge in fights and building the jobs around that. We can see that in Endwalker, the fights are getting more intense, dynamic and arguably more sweaty than previous expansions. But the difficulty is amped up artificially (via movement around the arena etc.), like for example the whole team needs constantly to keep everyone alive, or the fight is pretty much bound to be over, that is severely noticable especially in Endwalker and is sometimes taken to questionable levels. It's more punishing, but not in a healthy way. So in conclusion they simplify and ease the jobs (more or less) but increase the rythm of the fights so to speak. It's mainly the thing in savage, but extremes are also getting that "all or nothing" treatment more lately.

[Raikai]

Yeah stuff like that might be their intention. Essencially making everyone more flexible and mobile. I dont think they will change the jobs making them more difficulty anymore, but what they do instead is ramping up the challenge in fights and building the jobs around that. We can see that in Endwalker, the fights are getting more intense, dynamic and arguably more sweaty than previous expansions. But the difficulty is amped up artificially (via movement around the arena etc.), like for example the whole team needs constantly to keep everyone alive, or the fight is pretty much bound to be over, that is severely noticable especially in Endwalker and is sometimes taken to questionable levels. It's more punishing, but not in a healthy way. So in conclusion they simplify and ease the jobs (more or less) but increase the rythm of the fights so to speak. It's mainly the thing in savage, but extremes are also getting that "all or nothing" treatment more lately.

I can understand the logic... I just don't think it can be applied to XIV at its current state though, because it's something that works well when we actually have a more steady stream of content to play with.

We get 4 Savage fights every 8 months. 1 Extreme Trial every 4 months... If we don't account Ultimates (which is not for everyone due to a number of reasons), that's a really low delivery rate to justify the game simplifying classes in favor of more well designed complex encounters.

I would add Criterion to that mix if it didn't have the issues it currently does.

They could make a savage variation of the Alliance raids to help with the 'raid drought' during the odd patches. Or even turning that savage variation into a 8 or 12 man party to make it more accessible to statics.

[Valence]

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 wouldn't mind since it was essentially what we had in ARR/HW/SB with rPhys, at least at a basic level, because party damage was not the only alpha & omega to go through a fight. Party resources had to be managed, like MP, enmity (though enmity was NIN only), among other things.

Since they removed all of this, I really doubt that somehow they'll put it back.

[Valence]

...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 completive. Multiple times now. So why the strawman?

What strawman? Every savage chart, no matter the type of party, shows the exact same patterns (BLM excepted). The difference between fully optimized log running parties and more casual parties in savage doesn't lie in the patterns of job performance and balance, it lies in how high party damage they can output. You'll see some minute variations between high end percentiles and lower end but it does not fundamentally change the core patterns that are here at every level.

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).


What are you disagreeing with, then?

Not with that last statement, I'm disagreeing with your point that somehow introduces differences between lower end and higher end in savage and raiding as I explained above once more.

I also strongly disagree with anybody saying that rDPS shouldn't be equal across all DPS jobs, period.

[Valence]

Yeah stuff like that might be their intention. Essencially making everyone more flexible and mobile. I dont think they will change the jobs making them more difficulty anymore, but what they do instead is ramping up the challenge in fights and building the jobs around that. We can see that in Endwalker, the fights are getting more intense, dynamic and arguably more sweaty than previous expansions. But the difficulty is amped up artificially (via movement around the arena etc.), like for example the whole team needs constantly to keep everyone alive, or the fight is pretty much bound to be over, that is severely noticable especially in Endwalker and is sometimes taken to questionable levels. It's more punishing, but not in a healthy way. So in conclusion they simplify and ease the jobs (more or less) but increase the rythm of the fights so to speak. It's mainly the thing in savage, but extremes are also getting that "all or nothing" treatment more lately.

I do agree with that assessment, encounters have been made more gruesome since Abyssos and I do feel like they're dropping the ball completely on the job side to focus on encounter design. More body checks, less tolerance for deaths or failure, because those don't matter much anymore due to the slow disappearance of party resources like MP, etc. It's becoming less and less about the RPG side of things (stats, party resource management, etc) and more and more about executing a ballet without mistakes.

It pains me a lot to think about it.

[Shurrikhan]

What strawman? Every savage chart, no matter the type of party, shows the exact same patterns (BLM excepted).

Which has what to do with my statement that the point of balance should be to maximize the depth of competitive choices for Savage progression among decently skilled but imperfect parties (i.e., BLM would have a higher damage ceiling than RDM, which would have a higher damage than SMN, but not to the degree that someone especially bad at movement optimization would take BLM)?

If I'm saying it "should be X", you can be pretty certain it is not currently X. So how would my point be demonstrated in the existing charts?

Party damage, moreover, is a sum of its parts (not the sum merely of rDPS, no, because that is an incomplete metric, but absolutely the sum of it and aDPS for the given context, or simply averaged over any and all of them).
You cannot have damage disparity across compositions without also having disparity in potency-per-cycle and what portion of that potency may fall within raid buffs across the different jobs that may source those compositions.

I'm disagreeing with your point that somehow introduces differences between lower end and higher end in savage and raiding as I explained above once more.

...But I have never made that point. ???

I said only that making rDPS almost perfectly equal across all jobs is effectively to balance only for BiS speedrun parsers --since only they would be unaffected by the reduced reliability and ease of harder jobs-- while reducing breadth of choice for everyone else.

I've never advocated for different balancing paradigms based on what Week it is or what percentile one's at, nor anything of the sort. I have no idea how that would even work, and do not want anything like that. I simply pointed out who the actual beneficiary would be, outside of OTPs who happen to benefit from that imbalance, of making the likes of MCH perform as high as MNK, and it's not who most equal-rDPS-for-all advocates seem to think it is (since equal rDPS regardless of ease/reliability would damn near force less skilled players towards just a few jobs while maximizing choice only for the top 1%).

I also strongly disagree with anybody saying that rDPS shouldn't be equal across all DPS jobs, period.

Then we'll have to continue to disagree. While they should be closer, given the current context (much of the difficulty of melee having been reduced), equal rDPS for all jobs is position that benefits only the top 1% while screwing everyone else. So, no, I will never agree with that.

The target balancing point should be skilled but imperfect Savage raiders prior to farm/overgearing, not speedbarse runs.

Tl;dr: rDPS should not be equal so long as skill ceilings are highly unequal. Such just reduces choice for the majority of players. All jobs should have accessible floors and fairly high skill ceilings, with the same effort producing about the same performance among jobs that more or less equally click for a given player, rather than just giving additional performance for free to a few jobs (as would be the case if EW SMN or MCH had rDPS equal to a MNK, for instance).

Edit:
Heck, rDPS shouldn't be equal, regardless, by the mere fact that rDPS ignores the party synergy component of over a third of the roster (WHM, PLD, WAR, DRK, GNB, BLM, MCH, and SAM) -- and, no, homogenizing jobs to have an identical raid buff value is not a good way to patch up an insufficient metric. I don't know why people pretend rDPS tells the whole and complete story. It doesn't. It never has. aDPS tells the whole story for those without buffs, if of sample size sufficient to average out party composition, but for anyone else you need both aDPS and rDPS to get the full picture.

...Or actually use a potency map, including for different parties optimizing for comp raid windows when considering buffers, instead of just relying on fflogs bars to gesticulate at a mere part of the roster's contributions and insist that the product should all be equal despite their differences everywhere else.

[Valence]

Which has what to do with my statement that the point of balance should be to maximize the depth of competitive choices for Savage progression among decently skilled but imperfect parties (i.e., BLM would have a higher damage ceiling than RDM, which would have a higher damage than SMN, but not to the degree that someone especially bad at movement optimization would take BLM)?

I am not sure if I am expressing myself very badly, but i'll say it again: the patterns are similar no matter the skill levels of the party and show the same gaps of damage discrepancies between jobs in terms of balance, BLM excepted which slowly plummets to the bottom as you go down. I do not know how else to state it, but it proves on its own that uptime constraints are NOT a factor influencing skill levels a lot, at least not on the same level than balance discrepancies.

When it comes to support, I also said that even in lower skilled parties, bringing mitigation is a double edged sword, because lower skilled parties also use those a lot less optimally or at all (have you been in PF and checked how often people use their party mit besides healers?). On the other hand, higher skilled parties use mitigation very well, even though they rarely need it because the margin is already loose enough (unless maybe the last fight of a tier or ultimates, but then gear makes it a non issue past a few weeks anyway, and lower skilled parties don't go for week 1 clears anyway).

equal rDPS for all jobs is position that benefits only the top 1% while screwing everyone else. So, no, I will never agree with that.

I do not understand the meaning of that statement. This is why I brought up the chart patterns at various percentiles, since you brought up the top 1%. Those patterns are barely changing except for BLM.

I said only that making rDPS almost perfectly equal across all jobs is effectively to balance only for BiS speedrun parsers --since only they would be unaffected by the reduced reliability and ease of harder jobs-- while reducing breadth of choice for everyone else.

I think we're starting to run into circles, but as I said, an equal rDPS across the board also asks for similar accessibility levels for every job (and if possible similar ceilings as well), even though difficulty is subjective as hell, but it's not exactly rocket science that a job like SMN doesn't play on the same field than BLM.

But even without balanced floors and ceilings, having equal rDPS is a lot less obnoxious and toxic already than balancing over difficulty, which frankly, sucks the most out of all options, because it sucks the fun out of everything.

Tl;dr: rDPS should not be equal so long as skill ceilings are highly unequal. Such just reduces choice for the majority of players.

Yes, and how different is this from what we have already that advocates for skill balance? The most used jobs have always been the ones with the better damage output (including raid buffs), the only exception, again, being BLM. Ease of play only comes into the equation when the damage differences aren't enough to justify taking something better, unless we're talking about... BLM. It's always been like this since as far as I can remember.

And of course you'll always find players going for the underdogs as well.

All jobs should have accessible floors and fairly high skill ceilings, with the same effort producing about the same performance among jobs that more or less equally click for a given player, rather than just giving additional performance for free to a few jobs (as would be the case if EW SMN or MCH had rDPS equal to a MNK, for instance).

Then what are we arguing about? This is confusing?

Heck, rDPS shouldn't be equal, regardless, by the mere fact that rDPS ignores the party synergy component of over a third of the roster (WHM, PLD, WAR, DRK, GNB, BLM, MCH, and SAM)

There seems to be a mathematical fallacy here. Those jobs are affected by rDPS like any job. They just don't produce party wide raid buffs out of their kit, which is something rDPS also takes into account in the damage potential they bring to the party.

rDPS is a purely balancing tool between what jobs bring to a party overall. Obviously there will be finer details with a way lower weight in how some comps will skew rDPS a little (like fielding SAM/BLM with a DNC or BRD to inflate a little the latter's rDPS results), which is true though. But that's just not the same weight and I didn't want to enter into that kind of finer print before addressing the rougher outlines.

aDPS tells the whole story for those without buffs

No, that is a common misconception. aDPS is great to indicate when party buffs have been taken care of optimally, that's about it. Else it siphons a part of the damage that a job didn't bring on its own to the field out from another job.

Don't get me wrong, I do agree that all those metrics are flawed, but rDPS is the one that offers the best picture there is so far. It doesn't mean it has to be followed blindly, and as a stat freak I'd like to have better metrics, but that's what we have for now.

[Aco505]

Jobs will never be balanced if you only take rDPS into account. A party that will make good use of buffs won't be the same as one without.

Think of a DNC whose partner is the least optimal melee and also with a non-optimal group composition. The rDPS will be affected if you compare it with a group optimized and stacked for buffs.

rDPS cannot be the sole factor to balance jobs because buffing jobs would require not only more skill to play but also people in the party knowing how to play properly as well, thus increasing the gap between buffing and non-buffing jobs until a specific skill point is reached. This is one of the points that was raised when discussing MCH months ago, for example.

Non-buffing jobs don't rely on anyone else and their contribution will be mostly the same across skill levels. BLM is a different case as it's a job that can present wider differences in performance related to skill due to the way it works.

Having rDPS be the only metric would also mean that non-buffing jobs will be good in every single scenario, with or without buffers in the party. A DRK will do the same rDPS if they save mana for 2-min burst (excluding the pot) than if they don't, a WHM will do the same DPS if they use every single Afflatus Misery outside of buffs, a SAM will do the same damage if they arrive at a 2-min burst without kenki and so on.

Yes, this behavior affects other people's rDPS but not the non-buffing jobs' themselves, thus creating bad gameplay. This is why guides always tell you to make sure that you save up resources for buffs, or to use a specific mini-burst if you get an AST card as RPR or RDM, for instance.

As much as people like going on with the 2-minute meta hatred meme, ShB was not really balanced compared to now. SAM was at the top of the rDPS for a long time while being a non-buffing job, meaning that SAM was without a doubt the best DPS in the game due to it being good regardless of party composition. Or MNK at the beginning of EW, which was good in every single scenario as well.

Jobs must be balanced taking into account all three metrics: rDPS, aDPS, and nDPS.

There should be an inverse relationship between rDPS and aDPS when balacing jobs: a job such as SAM that greatly benefits from buffs (high aDPS) should not have a higher rDPS than a job with strong buffing capabilities (DRG/NIN) and vice versa.

For example, BLM should be the strongest job in dummy situations with full uptime and have higher nDPS/rDPS than SAM, but SAM should thrive when buffs are present (higher aDPS).

From then on, you would have a specific list for rDPS, aDPS and nDPS from top to bottom. In the case of melees, rDPS wise you would have DRG/NIN at the top, MNK/RPR in the middle and SAM at the bottom and the opposite of that when looking at aDPS/nDPS.

And yes, specific jobs are going to thrive in certain circumstances. SAM will be the king of aDPS due to having one of the strongest bursts in the game while also having a good filler phase, DRG will keep breaking rDPS records due to its ability to feed off others' damage and particularly due to the nature of crit buffs and Dragon Sight being usually given to either SAM or NIN.

It's also important to understand that metrics are not perfect and with the exception of nDPS, they all depend on party composition. This is why a lot of data is needed. The metrics are good to check tendencies but cannot be used as gospel. Other factors should be taken into account when balancing.

I remember people foaming and complaining when looking at the charts during the first weeks of a specific patch. We simply cannot draw conclusions until a lot of people have gear and there's enough data.

Finally, as Shurrikhan said, SE does not balance jobs based on the top players. They balance around something like the 50-75 percentiles, as otherwise fights like P5S, P6S, P9S... would be harder to clear. When looking at the world race for Anabaseios, it was very obvious due to how low the overall HP of bosses was, particularly Kokytos. Or how people could clear Hegemone with 10 or more deaths in week 1.

Jobs will never be equal if you only look at one metric and they never will be regardless unless you remove all buffs, and even then, there will be differences. The point is to make sure that these differences don't cause imbalances, such as the aforementioned SAM situation in ShB.

[Shurrikhan]

No, that is a common misconception. aDPS is great to indicate when party buffs have been taken care of optimally, that's about it. Else it siphons a part of the damage that a job didn't bring on its own to the field out from another job.

I never said to use it for considering the balance of every job. I said, very specifically and explicitly, that it tells the whole story as averaged across various party compositions of the jobs without any buffs.

Consider:
If you had a job that was in fact just a mobile totem and brought with it zero attacks, only raid buffs, rDPS would tell its whole story averaged across whatever various party compositions could be taken with it. That's because it'd have zero ability to exploit others buffs in/by itself. The difference between its aDPS and its nDPS would be zero, because it would have neither (zero buff-exploitation possible)

In the same way, a job without any buffs has zero buffing capacity and therefore no difference between its rDPS and nDPS, both trimming a valuable portion of their contributions (buff exploitation) while aDPS trims nothing.

So, yes, non-buffers are a lot easier to judge balance between (now that we're no longer pigeonholed towards Stormblood-style set comps). Everyone else requires one to look at both metrics, aDPS and rDPS.

Never, though, will rDPS be a decent metric by which to judge WHM, WAR, PLD, DRK, GNB, BLM, MCH, or SAM. rDPS is specifically designed to ignore non-buffers' party-synergetic contributions.

(If there's no buff exploitation, then the buffer brings zero rDPS over their nDPS. The exploiter is half the picture, and you cull half that partnership in insisting on fixating on rDPS alone.)

I do not understand the meaning of that statement. This is why I brought up the chart patterns at various percentiles, since you brought up the top 1%. Those patterns are barely changing except for BLM.

Fcs... It has nothing to do with what the rDPS at each percentile are right now. That would be like my responding to your "All jobs should have equal rDPS" by posting a picture of a current chart and saying "But they aren't." 'What is' is not the same thing as 'what should be'. We wouldn't be talking about this if what we wanted had already happened.

If you make it so every job has equal rDPS, not only do you overbuff every not buffer, making playing any buffing job a thankless risk, but you also make it so jobs with far less effort required to be optimized are essentially getting free value (which, yes, is already the case for SMN relative to RDM, etc., and is a problem, not something to be made yet more pervasive).

Again, I'd prefer to raise their skill ceilings instead, but in the meantime, no job should have greater throughput for the effort put in than the other jobs get. That applies as much in one job doing the same for less (see, SMN > RDM) as it does in one job doing more for the same (if all casters had the same --internal and contextual, together-- skill ceilings but BLM somehow still outperformed them).

Finally, as Shurrikhan said, SE does not balance jobs based on the top players.

I'm not perfectly sure where they balance it around, nor do I care, as the balancing philosophy itself (what criteria are rewarded and to what degree) is inconsistent in their application. Mine was a suggestion, not commentary on what is.

Again, I just think that both rDPS and aDPS need to be accounted for and that the balancing target should be Savage Progression by decently skilled but imperfect players. Because anywhere else, competitiveness of job choices rapidly stops being a bottleneck to breadth of job choice anyways.
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Aside / Not at Aco:
Perfect rDPS parity across all jobs would be a shitshow. It'd be less terrible if all jobs had roughly the same skill ceiling, but even then it'd slightly to noticeably overpower 8-10 jobs (since some jobs are especially strong exploiters even while also being buffers) over everyone else. I don't understand why some have trouble understanding that. It's a simple matter of what is or is not included in the metric and the disparities in the other aspects of jobs design.