Giant boss hitboxes and constant mid teleports make melee less fun.

[Supersnow845]

Something curious is how AST provides less damage to the party through this hidden buff than SCH. Plus this damage doesn't go to the buff jobs themselves but the entire party, thus making the "selfish" jobs present even stronger.

I think that’s because they are only compensating divination vs chain rather than chain vs everything that AST has and in general SCH loses more to a 4 man party with chain than AST does when you factor in that they already consider AST’s AOE damage balanced (even though it’s not)

[ZiraZ]

Something curious is how AST provides less damage to the party through this hidden buff than SCH. Plus this damage doesn't go to the buff jobs themselves but the entire party, thus making the "selfish" jobs present even stronger.

Definitely don't look at the amount of parses AST has vs SGE in savage crit
Or DRG/BRD vs MCH/SMN.
It's all fine

[Supersnow845]

AST is just weirdly unbalanced in all AOE situations and while it’s balanced better in savage it has to do way more work for minimal gain over WHM (and still generally loses to SCH who is generally easy to optimise damage on till you are getting to gold parse 0 aetherflow heal levels of optimisation, it’s really only more complex on its healing side and that isn’t saying much)

AST is just a hot mess in everything this expansion and easily the least popular job overall and relative to its peers

[Aco505]

Definitely don't look at the amount of parses AST has vs SGE in savage crit
Or DRG/BRD vs MCH/SMN.
It's all fine

Speaking of, SGE is without a doubt the best Criterion healer. It has higher personal DPS, plenty of mitigation to practically deal with the raid damage without any help, and several movement tools.

I play with a WHM and we need to plan the mitigation of the entire party extremely carefully, to the point where two charges of Divine Benison and Aquaveil can all be needed to be used at the same time for a specific raidwide and missing a single Feint can lead to a death.

In fact, I often require my GNB's HoC because of DRG's lack of personal mitigation.

Going with a SGE would make all this a non-issue although it is fun optimizing and planning the mitigation with a WHM.

Criterion definitely is a type of content that shows the differences and disparities between jobs. However, this should not be taken as a call for homogenization.

[Valence]

Even with the hidden buff it's a crap-shoot
Some jobs like BLM and MCH are head and shoulders above everyone else, specially for BLM since crit is heaven for them practically designed around triple cast, while things like Bard even when accounting for the biggest hidden buff I mean look at that sheet lmao, they are still a huge joke.

Yes, running through the numbers it seems to be a little undertuned, which doesnt surprise me with SE. After very fast napkin math a BRD would give the healer about +150 dps, the tank about +200, and you and the other dps around +300 (*2) average, which isn't enough to account for the 2k difference that a MCH would bring for example.

Something curious is how AST provides less damage to the party through this hidden buff than SCH. Plus this damage doesn't go to the buff jobs themselves but the entire party, thus making the "selfish" jobs present even stronger.

Probably for the same reason that DNC provides half what BRD does even if both jobs in full parties are very similar on the party wide damage buffs (DNC is even a bit ahead). DNC partner's mechanics aren't affected by the size of the party and count for a decent chunk of their buffs, much like AST's card are solo targets and a constant source of buffs that is unaffected by the party size.

Now, if that does compare well in terms of numbers in fine or if those numbers are off, idk.

Having a theoretical superior damage is fine if it's reflected by the gaussian spread of skill level. Ranged should provide a tighter reliable spread while an excellent melee player should be able really push their uptime to the upper quartiles past simple reliability. I don't know if that's at all reflected by fflogs data currently. I doubt it.

No, because it means that one role favors bad players (rphys) and one favors good players (melee). As a rphys afficionado, I do not want to be shoehorned into the "role for bad players", thank you very much.

We can also see how great it's working right now within the caster and rphys roles with the amount of players just going for SMN and DNC (over 50%), because DPS checks don't matter that much, and if they did people would whine because some jobs would become useless. And since everything those days has been baked into encounter difficulty and mechanics and not on the battle system or the job gameplay, then the only thing that matters is the effort one has to pour into playing DDR and solving mechanics.

The only solution would be to bring back uniqueness to the rphys role, that currently has been left as a melee without positionals and a ranged without casts. Those jobs used to have the most demanding rotations and the most demanding support, which they lost. And they still had the ranged tax already anyway, because fuck them rphys amaright?

[Lyth]

That's actually not a design point; it's a statistical observation of what would happen if you balanced normally-distributed jobs such that they all had the same mean rDPS value. You can't control the degree of 'spread' directly. That's a byproduct of the best and worst performances on a job in a given fight. You could think of a measure of spread (SD or IQR) as describing how differences in skill translate into performance gaps for players of a particular job. In practice, though, all jobs are right-skewed rather than normally distributed, meaning that there are a lot of people who have no idea what they're doing, and relatively few who are in the know. That's because fight-specific optimizations are not always obvious and you do have to go out of your way to do your research.

A good example of this would be if you added more movement to a fight and then looked at a job that had access to a lot of clever movement tech for maintaining uptime. The average rDPS would probably stay roughly the same, but the spread would increase. And if the tricks were obscure enough, so would the right skew.

Unfortunately, skew and spread are still not metrics of mechanical difficulty, which is always going to be a subjective and controversial topic on its own. All they do is demonstrate the job-specific advantage of 'being in the know'.

[ThorneDynasty]

No, because it means that one role favors bad players (rphys) and one favors good players (melee). As a rphys afficionado, I do not want to be shoehorned into the "role for bad players", thank you very much.

That's not what that means. Do we always have to get egos involved like this? Just because you can't push your damage as hard beyond the average as another class, doesn't you can be a good player and perform better than your respective average. I didn't say ranged should just do flat damage completely regardless of skill.

[Valence]

That's not what that means. Do we always have to get egos involved like this? Just because you can't push your damage as hard beyond the average as another class, doesn't you can be a good player and perform better than your respective average. I didn't say ranged should just do flat damage completely regardless of skill.

It still follows a design that pits roles against each other because for some reason we need roles that are harder and roles that are easier.

I don't get why people are so allergic to having an equal spread of difficulty, and playing on skill floors and ceilings instead of going for that crap.

[Lyth]

That's intrinsic to the role design, though. You have a category called 'Melee DPS' that cannot hit the boss outside of a set range. You have a category called 'Ranged DPS' that can hit the boss from anywhere. That constraint results in a performance spread, even if you make their damage output identical on average.

If you wanted equivalence on this point as well, you would have to make it such that Ranged DPS cannot hit the target when they are inside of a set distance, at which point they have to start clubbing the boss with their ranged weapons.

I'm not really sure how you're going to be satisfied here. Damage equivalence is one thing, but 'challenge equivalence'? You'll never have consensus.

[ZiraZ]

It still follows a design that pits roles against each other because for some reason we need roles that are harder and roles that are easier.

I don't get why people are so allergic to having an equal spread of difficulty, and playing on skill floors and ceilings instead of going for that crap.

Because people are allergic to casts, next expansion SMN is gonna unlock the Z axis and float above mechanics, the hitboxes are gonna get bigger and everyone will finally achieve range physical status. Uptime? Planning movement? nah press button that lights up