Please decorrelate party support from party damage

[Aco505]

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.

No one really knows. Even now we use terms like rDPS, aDPS and nDPS when none of us has a clue of which metrics SE uses. They probably have their own, and their own criteria for balancing can sometimes seem to be a bit random.

But we use what we have at our disposal and what is clear is that they don't balance the DPS checks of the fights around 99 percentiles or the top playerbase. Otherwise, they wouldn't have nerfed the health values of P8S.

In any case, the point of my comment was to emphasize the fact that the enrage timers of Savage raids appear to be adjusted around a more average type of player.

[Valence]

I'm sorry to say but you're forcing open doors as far as I'm concerned, but maybe it never hurts as a reminder.

You people seem to think I advocate for looking at rDPS and only rDPS and nothing else. Again, You're latching onto strawmen, not on what I actually advocated for. I just strongly, vehemently disagree with the way you seem to put every metric on an equal basis in terms of weight, but maybe I'm also reading too much into what you wrote?

I also need remind you that the original OP was about decorellating non damage support from damage support (raid buffs) into job balancing, so we've been going off on a very, very different tangent here. If anything, the only remotely related thing I had in mind was the ranged tax (which includes RDM/SMN), not minute balance details between metrics.

[Valence]

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.

This is a slippery slope at best, because the heaviest buffers in the game right now still get 80-90% of their total damage contribution from their own personal damage, which essentially puts them closer to fully selfish jobs than any 'rdps totem'. This in essence is what makes rDPS have immensely more weight when getting an overview/snapshot in the general trends of job balance. An aDPS chart on the other hand, will tell you very little on its own. Obviously, you can then use it to get into finer details once you're done with the former.

[Shurrikhan]

You people seem to think I advocate for looking at rDPS and only rDPS and nothing else. Again, You're latching onto strawmen, not on what I actually advocated for.

By all means, tell me what other way would arrive at your "give all jobs the same rDPS"? Balancing specifically for rDPS... means disregarding all that is not (accounted for in) rDPS.

You can't simultaneously balance rDPS and balance real/total contribution, for the simple fact that real contribution isn't just rDPS. You have exploitation (the difference between nDPS and aDPS) and buffing (the difference between nDPS and rDPS). Both.

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

If rDPS were equal across all jobs, that both means that jobs' actual total contribution must be unequal and the amount of effort required for a given amount of throughput would be wildly imbalanced. (Again, why would anyone take the likes of MNK or BLM if SMN and MCH had the same rDPS despite being damn near foolproof by comparison, and bringing rez atop that.)

This is a slippery slope at best, because the heaviest buffers in the game right now still get 80-90% of their total damage contribution from their own personal damage, which essentially puts them closer to fully selfish jobs than any 'rdps totem'.

No one has said otherwise. Literally no one. You asked why, say, aDPS would tell the full picture of a tank's contribution while rDPS would not. There's your answer. aDPS accounts for the whole of their contribution, while rDPS purposely leaves out ~6-14% of that contribution.

This in essence is what makes rDPS have immensely more weight when getting an overview/snapshot in the general trends of job balance. An aDPS chart on the other hand, will tell you very little on its own. Obviously, you can then use it to get into finer details once you're done with the former.

No one --literally no one-- is asking for aDPS to be the sole metric of use for all jobs.

You do not need to either metric to be the be all and end all of job balance at a glance. You can average the two and get a good picture, since now the buffer and exploiter each get half the contribution, but we should not be satisfied with just looking at rDPS alone and then saying we can maybe balance out the unaccounted for synergies (which have been up to a sixth of a job's value) "when we're done... if we want to get into the finer details."

In what world would an unintended disparity of over 5% be okay just because it doesn't show up on your preferred metric / in your oversimplified slice of the larger picture?

[Valence]

I guess that would have been a misuse of language, the more proper way would have probably been to just speak about "damage contribution". I didn't expect people to actually write gigantic essays to nitpick on this, but it would seem that it's been the problem since the beginning, we are unable to understand each other, case in point, I never asked anything about aDPS telling the full picture of a tank's contribution. The same way, you're assuming once more that I'm saying you're asking for aDPS to be the sole metric for all jobs, which I never stated anywhere.

You've been literally latching onto strawmen since the beginning, barring that misuse on my behalf using rDPS (my mistake here).

"jfc" as you say it so well...

[Shurrikhan]

I guess that would have been a misuse of language, the more proper way would have probably been to just speak about "damage contribution".

So, by "rDPS" you didn't mean rDPS, but simply 'synergetic value (+ personal value)'..., of whatever form that may take?

:: Which would be aDPS (in excess of nDPS) and rDPS on buffers and aDPS (both again in excess of nDPS) on pure exploiters? (Or, for simplicity's sake, the average of both on each job, though that still fails to account for utility like rez, mitigation, etc..)

...That explains a lot then, yep.

In that case, so long as we bring up skill ceilings to nearly the same point and have a consistent accounting of/for non-rDPS utility, agreed.

Sorry for the point of confusion over terms. I haven't heard anyone use rDPS to mean something broader than that actual metric since... early HW, maybe? Especially since it's been the literal name of the metric on fflogs since xivhero / Stormblood fflogs.

[Lyth]

Job balancing isn't just a math problem. It has a lot to do with community perceptions. If a job is perceived as ineffective, players will see that job as holding them back. This is why you can't focus in on just the median and say that performance at the skill ceiling doesn't matter. People want to know who is dealing the biggest numbers 'in general terms'. The reason why rDPS gets weighted so heavily in player's minds is because it's the easiest parameter to interpret, and because it correlates directly with kill times. And unless you can convince the playerbase as a whole that there's a better parameter that encapsulates raid performance, that's the value that will influence player behavior.

The aDPS discussion, while interesting, really comes down to the fact that if a job is doing the highest rDPS even without needing to bring any raid buffs (read: SAM and BLM), then there's probably an underlying balance problem. How much that needs to be offset by is really difficult to quantify, and aDPS itself, while providing some insight into contributions under buffs, won't provide us with an exact number.

There are a lot of things that you can do to identify a more 'accurate' parameter for damage output. There's a really nice machine learning problem in this, to generate a theoretical variable that correlates with pick rates. But a lot of it is going to come down to 'who is in first place?'

To get to the crux of this thread, the numerical 'value' of support functions is incredibly difficult to determine in relation to dps. You cannot say that a 'Raise' is equivalent to 'X' dps. You cannot say that a raidwide mitigation action is equivalent to 'Y' dps. This is one reason why support actions on Physical Ranged have become progressively more vestigial since ARR. It's more exciting to be doing the damage yourself rather than being a second-class 'support' DPS. Balance support actions with support actions. Balance DPS with DPS.

The last issue comes down to 'job difficulty'. It's important for all jobs to have some form of skill expression, as subjective as it is. Players should feel good that they have figured out a fight specific trick that lets them maintain uptime and do more damage. At the same time, that cannot be used as a reason to privilege one job over the others. If you do this, you create a major balance problem. Why play a job that is not only weaker than the others, but generally viewed as low skill as well? This is why DPS parity is essential. There's enough 'my job takes more skill to play than yours' put out there without having it receive an official rubber stamp from the dev team.

All jobs should be on a level DPS playing field. Because rDPS is the parameter that most influences player behavior, this needs to be balanced relatively tightly across all skill levels. All jobs should have room for skill expression, but this should never be used as an excuse to give special privileges to one job over the others. Support actions and DPS output should be evaluated independently of each other. If Raise is a problem, increase its availability and limit its use. If mitigation is a problem, spread out equivalent solutions to jobs that share the same raid slots. Don't balance apples against oranges.

And more than anything else, don't balance jobs based off of who is shouting the loudest. Good players aren't looking for handouts. They're too busy finding ways to challenge themselves.

[Valence]

So, by "rDPS" you didn't mean rDPS, but simply 'synergetic value (+ personal value)'..., of whatever form that may take?

:: Which would be aDPS (in excess of nDPS) and rDPS on buffers and aDPS (both again in excess of nDPS) on pure exploiters? (Or, for simplicity's sake, the average of both on each job, though that still fails to account for utility like rez, mitigation, etc..)

...That explains a lot then, yep.

In that case, so long as we bring up skill ceilings to nearly the same point and have a consistent accounting of/for non-rDPS utility, agreed.

Sorry for the point of confusion over terms. I haven't heard anyone use rDPS to mean something broader than that actual metric since... early HW, maybe? Especially since it's been the literal name of the metric on fflogs since xivhero / Stormblood fflogs.

Sorry for the original misuse of the term, I do really know what lies behind those metrics and I'm not exactly new to that table, so that's something I could really have taken more care not to do in the OG posts. The real issue is that we don't really have any way to properly designate an all encompassing balance metric besides perhaps "job contribution AND synergy", on top of that I do still believe that rDPS has the biggest weight to already draw approaching pictures and general patterns for job balance at a glance. It becomes insufficient when for example comparing melees between each other, but it's way enough to talk about other things like the ranged tax for example since the rDPS gap is way too big for anything else to make up for it on the sheer scales of differences, or.. the original point of that thread that was about constantly having to account for inconsistent balance when one starts adding non damage contributions on top of the pile.

To get to the crux of this thread, the numerical 'value' of support functions is incredibly difficult to determine in relation to dps. You cannot say that a 'Raise' is equivalent to 'X' dps. You cannot say that a raidwide mitigation action is equivalent to 'Y' dps. This is one reason why support actions on Physical Ranged have become progressively more vestigial since ARR. It's more exciting to be doing the damage yourself rather than being a second-class 'support' DPS. Balance support actions with support actions. Balance DPS with DPS.

Yes

The last issue comes down to 'job difficulty'. It's important for all jobs to have some form of skill expression, as subjective as it is. Players should feel good that they have figured out a fight specific trick that lets them maintain uptime and do more damage. At the same time, that cannot be used as a reason to privilege one job over the others. If you do this, you create a major balance problem. Why play a job that is not only weaker than the others, but generally viewed as low skill as well? This is why DPS parity is essential. There's enough 'my job takes more skill to play than yours' put out there without having it receive an official rubber stamp from the dev team.

All jobs should be on a level DPS playing field. Because rDPS is the parameter that most influences player behavior, this needs to be balanced relatively tightly across all skill levels. All jobs should have room for skill expression, but this should never be used as an excuse to give special privileges to one job over the others. Support actions and DPS output should be evaluated independently of each other. If Raise is a problem, increase its availability and limit its use. If mitigation is a problem, spread out equivalent solutions to jobs that share the same raid slots. Don't balance apples against oranges.

And more than anything else, don't balance jobs based off of who is shouting the loudest. Good players aren't looking for handouts. They're too busy finding ways to challenge themselves.

That's how I've felt playing rPhys for ages. Even in HW and SB they were already ranged taxed (the chunk of total DPS came from our DRG buddies, not ourselves), but at least we could take consolation in that we had a true use besides it, which was party resource support, especially as MP batteries, even though they started to notice that people in HW MP supported less and less since it was a DPS loss, but they still had to past a point. So we ended in SB with no more DPS loss for it and a synergy and party mechanic being already dumbed down as a result. It was only the beginning of the fall really.

Those days I play BRD because frankly, MCH is just mindless carpal tunnel and as tedious to play as GNB for similar reasons, and the little optimization there is for the job (double queen in bursts or heat management before bursts) is negligible on the grandest scheme of things and extremely unpleasant/frustrating to deal with in the first place as it feels like the rotation is badly designed and doesn't loop well (unlike SB MCH). And DNC is just a snooze fiesta. At least with BRD there is still a lot of very finicky things you can master and optimize within the rotation, at least during burst and minuet. Other songs are not really interesting actually, Ballad being carpal tunnel BL spamm and Army is resident sleepers.

I'm overall annoyed that I'm in a party just for my 1% bonus. My party wide mitigation tools are appreciated, but not necessary. What matters in the current meta is the damage contribution I bring. I'm literally out DPSed by tanks during openers and the only thing that puts me above them from a decent margin are the massive raid buffs I give, but that's still not enough to make me contribute in the same way any melee DPS does, or a BLM. Unlike a SMN or a RDM that tend to fare similar to me, I don't bring additional raises to the party to save the day or prog further. I'm just there to inflate the parses of others with that 1% bonus, because otherwise we would be close to see triple melee comps + a BLM.

[HeilendeBlume]

I cant agree rly with thread opener. In a lot of old and new MMORPGs are one or more support classes which are a bundle of healer/dps. Like the classic redmage in FF. And its very useful and supportive for the healer (With rezzing, one heal Input, let the rezz MP (that would be lost by healers) by the healers.
Also there are people who want vatiety in a healers Life. And there a lot of healer mains who play redmage or summoner as alts and have also fun and are a bit of a healer Like and can do DMG the same time.

And its useful for the class to get into Party not just for helping healer but also to buff and support party. So its ok that they do often not have the same solo DMG like other "normal" dps.

And even in FCS u Sometimes have problem with too much healers want to play. So u can switch in different positions. A heart born healer plays redmage and has some similar skills and then switching with other healers. So no stress between them.

I remember old Rift Online. In a little Party u had 1 tank, 1 healer, 2 dps and 1 support class (Violet symbol in its own). There where different types of it. One support class had some heal skills, other had a lot of debuffs to the mobs, another had party buffs.

There are people who like to play supports. Just FF 14 Team, pls dont remove this playstyle.

[Valence]

If people enjoy taxed DPS classes then all the better for them. I'm glad they do, really. I also do enjoy playing them, for different reasons.

All i'm saying is that our mitigation has become a lot less prevalent since everybody and their mother now have mitigation to use in droves (tanks have reprisal AND a crapton of effective party wides of similar power, healers have more and more of those as well, and even melee DPS/casters have feint/addle that got buffed each expansion). rPhys mitigation is still appreciable, but it's a gimmick drowning under a sea of mitigators at this point, which is why justifying this by a damage tax makes no sense to me. Maybe it did in the past, but it's long overdue now.

If you actually think that I am advocating to remove support (I hope you're just asking SE not to consider it, and I do agree), then no, I am not. In fact, I want to go back to that identity that got diluted into an unfavorable meta since ShB. I don't mind in what form it takes, but my whole point is that it will take a meta change for mitigation support to hold any weight against the all damage meta.

Another point of the OP and that people regularly make is also that the current damage balance related to support abilities rarely makes sense (MNK has strong non damage support, yet sits at the top, SMN/RDM have raises which are arguably a lot stronger than all support rPhys has to show for, and yet perform similarly, or better, etc).