Anyone else think caster has suffered this expansion? (hopes for the future)

[Valence]

You said that smn and dnc are the classes that are used the most in raids. I made an observation saying that if smn was treated like mch, I think we wouldn't see as many smn in savage/ultimate. The smn is in a position that is just worth carrying, always. minimum effort, maximum output and you also have the ress to easily replace the rdm with the addition that you survive raidwave if you are underequipped.

The smn is just cynically more worth carrying around. It's factual.

But SMN is currently treated like MCH though? Or RDM, or BRD or DNC. They're all in the same puddle of second rate DPS jobs.

[Ggwppino]

yes, but before nobody wanted the mch because it wasn't worth bringing it to raid.

It's true that it doesn't make sense for melee to do more than a caster. it's a matter of principle. (as fights are designed, casters should be by far the classes that carry raids). But the general balance of the macro categories works. Raids are meant to have these percentages for each class, so in practice it's not that influential. On the other hand, the fact that there are individual classes relegated to the various roles that suffer because there are others of the same role that outclass them in everything with minimal effort is influential, this is a problem.

[Lyth]

It's really difficult to do a proper comparison on 'role difficulty'. Even if all jobs in a given subrole were completely interchangeable gameplay experiences, you will always be biased towards your preferred progression job in subjective experiences of 'difficulty'. How does a caster main without any melee jobs raid-ready have any idea what melee progression was like this tier? Yet the subforum gets filled with this sort of rhetoric from players hoping that the next set of caster buffs will finally clear them through the next fight.

I don't think that melee needs preferential treatment. The only reason the rDPS difference exists is because, if you haven't already noticed, all the fight designs push for a two melee/two ranged composition. If you eliminated the physical ranged/caster divide, you'd very quickly erase the erroneous perspective that casters are a 'superior' form of ranged. Equalize rDPS across the board, and lock the slots into two melee/two ranged of any physical/magical flavor. You will very quickly eliminate any further debate on the subject.

And if casting is widely reported as 'too hard' in the feedback, you know what SE's response is going to be in 7.0.

[Ggwppino]

It's really difficult to do a proper comparison on 'role difficulty'. Even if all jobs in a given subrole were completely interchangeable gameplay experiences, you will always be biased towards your preferred progression job in subjective experiences of 'difficulty'. How does a caster main without any melee jobs raid-ready have any idea what melee progression was like this tier? Yet the subforum gets filled with this sort of rhetoric from players hoping that the next set of caster buffs will finally clear them through the next fight.

I don't think that melee needs preferential treatment. The only reason the rDPS difference exists is because, if you haven't already noticed, all the fight designs push for a two melee/two ranged composition. If you eliminated the physical ranged/caster divide, you'd very quickly erase the erroneous perspective that casters are a 'superior' form of ranged. Equalize rDPS across the board, and lock the slots into two melee/two ranged of any physical/magical flavor. You will very quickly eliminate any further debate on the subject.

And if casting is widely reported as 'too hard' in the feedback, you know what SE's response is going to be in 7.0.

I agree that if the melee rdps is so high it is precisely to push the double melee (because the fights are punctually designed to have two melees, given that there are 5 melees) which if a new magical dps comes out in the future (hopefully caster), it will no longer be so obvious, since there will be 4 roles that will compete with each other for a spot. It must be said that unlike melee that their main point is to stay close to the boss (clearly and rightly), having a double caster, or two first ladies, maybe it is more difficult to manage them because they would "get in the way" of each other. It's already difficult for a party to find the right precautions for a single caster (they be flabbergasted when you remind them that making me run to the other side of the arena is madness when I can stand still), I don't imagine with two.


That said, I don't agree that you can't compare 2 classes of the same role (I would like to underline role) and find points of comparison: which can be for example challenge in finding uptime, challenge in movement, challenge in managing one's resources, challenge in managing one's dots, challenge in managing one's procs, challenge in managing one's burst times, challenge in finding the correct positioning , challenge to vary one's own rotation but simply one's own rotation.
I also disagree with holding 2 melee and 2 ranged (caster or not). Casters unlike ranged non casters, have the *challenge* not *difficulty* of keeping uptime and with the same optimized rdps and competition for the "ranged" spot, the caster would be clearly disadvantaged. The physical ranged have/had other things to think about even if over the years and with the expansions it has been a bit lost both because by now all the classes have become utility classes with buffs and mitigations, and because they have lost utility skills (like Refresh).

[Valence]

On the other hand introducing a weaker output for rphys jobs in order to prevent the 3 ranged dps party syndrome you'd get otherwise, you're also introducing the potential risk of getting 3 melee comps at times, which is only barely avoided by cumbersomeness and the party bonus from rphys (which the role is essentially reduced to, it brings nothing else that truly valuable). And it's actually funny to see in early patches of every expansion SE buffing rphys because they're lagging behind the rest by more than 10% damage, which flirts way too hard or even outpaces the gain from the party bonus. Happaned in 5.1 ShB, happened in 6.1 EW it's almost pathetic. It's only been going downhill so far because casters are now subject to that as well, and it's made even more janky because it doesnt affect BLM.

[Lyth]

I don't think you are likely to see a three melee comp even if the dps output somehow justified it, because one of them almost certainly would be forced off the boss for mechanics (and you know how melee feel about that).

...

The raid slots themselves are a reflection of fight design, and the usual clock/pair/TM/HR setup that groups put together. If that wasn't immediately obvious, it's also worth noting that Criterion/Criterion Savage treat Physical and Magical Ranged as a single category as far as the four role slots are concerned, so hopefully these will be merged into a single subrole category in the future. The total number of jobs themselves aren't really indicative of anything, otherwise we'd only be seeing new tank and healer jobs for the next few expansions until the numbers caught up (which would be fantastic, but unlikely).

You might be able to do a comparison of two jobs within the same subrole, but that assumes that you've cleared the tier and can actually play both jobs at the same skill level. Realistically, it's unlikely for you to be able to do a fair comparison, because there will always be one job that you have invested more time in than the others. And it's even less reasonable to expect that comparison to be made between different subroles. You're essentially asking for Dunning-Kruger cognitive bias at that point.

[Ggwppino]

You might be able to do a comparison of two jobs within the same subrole, but that assumes that you've cleared the tier and can actually play both jobs at the same skill level. Realistically, it's unlikely for you to be able to do a fair comparison, because there will always be one job that you have invested more time in than the others. And it's even less reasonable to expect that comparison to be made between different subroles. You're essentially asking for Dunning-Kruger cognitive bias at that point.

In fact, the comparison is not based on "how I find it easier to play", but on actual challenges.
Having one or more dots, easy to manage or not, is a challenge. Having and measuring the cast time is effectively a challenge and therefore the search for uptime is also a challenge, having procs is a challenge, having resources to manage is effectively a challenge.
Simple or not (which varies from player to player), they remain challenges and points of comparison can be drawn up.

[Lyth]

...

How do you intend on to drawing up comparisons between those subjective 'challenges', though, without an understanding of the nuances of each job and their interactions with all of the mechanics this tier? Stating that you have a 'cast' is meaningless without context. A melee cast that occurs during the SC1 burst window or the Pangenesis burst window is a specific context, because then we start talking about decision making. Can I cast and then teleport to the appropriate shape/tower at the last second? Do I utilize dummy GCDs to delay the cast to buy me time to get in range and then cast after teleport? Can I pre-position based off of buffs/shape position? What are the downstream effects of my decision on GCD alignment? The same is true for positionals. The boss is slightly north of centre prior to Para3, and I predict it will turn south then north. Do I hold my 60s burst and use my south positional first, or do I burst while the jump happens and then go for the positional after? You don't need procs to see that there are multiple cases for every significant mechanic.

I think if you aren't at the point where you've seen and considered all of these little variations that occur based on shifts in tank positioning, spawn points of various objects in the arena, and so on, then you're not really at the point where you can describe the decision-making for your chosen job, let alone anyone else's.

My point here is that this completely subjective comparison even for a player who has completed the tier on their chosen job to make, let alone anyone else. And what's particularly bad for this community is when players start pushing claims that an entire subrole is 'inferior' to theirs simply because of feelycraft, without taking the time to even attempt a more nuanced analysis based on experiences with the tier as a whole.

[Ggwppino]

What you have described are solutions to challenges. Well if you have a challenge, you have solutions rightly so. The challenges are not subjective, they are decided at the table when creating a class or a fight. Subjectivity is the dexterity with which you solve these challenges which varies from individual to individual. Keeping uptime is a challenge. The solution of how to keep it, is the solution of how to keep it, nothing more, nothing less. Class A must challenge at 1,2,3,4. Class B must challenge at 1.2, class C must challenge at 1.
It is objective that there are challenges, it is subjective how these are faced by the player.
Which I'm not saying anything absurd, since that's what the designers of this game have always said based on balance. But it also doesn't strike me as absurd in general to balance a game based on the challenges a certain class faces. That said, to me that the sam does more damage than the rdm doesn't change much for me, because objectively it doesn't create me penalties in the game. The penalty is created when the entire role is not balanced.