Quote Originally Posted by Renathras View Post
I'm quoting him because overall his point is more like your own, but I found his argument compelling. If I quote something from Socrates that I found compelling, would you accuse me of idolizing him?
If --in place of anything solid, be it your own or otherwise-- you choose an argument from him with a contextually gaping hole or obvious hypocrisy in it... all atop having made a months-long campaign out of an idea you say was taken from him ... yeah, as it seems unlikely you'd otherwise think that shit sufficient.

Because it's a videogame and that's what people find fun. No one finds being blacklisted fun, so that's a no-go and limits how much damage variation can exist.
No, having only minimal variation as a result of skillful play is not some super broadly held preference. It's yours.

(And it's a direction that's necessarily limiting; while having higher skill ceilings while jobs are still able to clear with highly imperfect performance creates something for everyone --as one can simply play to that ~60% maximal effort for ~90% of the maximal value and still meet the checks for all but the very hardest content, just with less the carry potential for others-- purposely limiting a job's ceiling just means that the job excludes anyone who wants a greater amount of engagement from their kit itself.)

And the "blacklisting" goes both ways, as why would any PF leader take, say, a BLM over a SMN if there is only at most a "minimal variation" in their max throughput yet the BLM is far harder pressed to even get clear-capable damage out of, let alone its max.

If the playerbase was still consistently taking people that did 30% less damage, sure, we could have massive variances. But the community doesn't, so it doesn't work.
The difference between a BLM's 95th percentile throughput and a SMN's is 8%, even with SMN also bringing additional utility. Even if SMN were nerfed to a fairer position relative to RDM instead of RDM being buffed to equal or greater rDPS, we'd be talking about a ~9% difference. No one is asking for a whopping 30% gap between them, only that the harder jobs shouldn't be a reward-less hazard.

When you can clear every Savage fight with a party that averages a performance of just ~75% of what each job in that party can maximally produce, asking that a job that is harder to optimize to the point of clearing (has 40% more deviation despite only 8% more max damage) should at least have enough of a max throughput gap to make it worth learning and taking... is not asking for the world. It's literally what's necessary not to see such jobs blacklisted for being holdouts against skill ceilings being increasingly squished.



Why hyperbolize?