Please let summoner keep raise

[Lyth]

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This discussion is about homogenisation, yes. There's another term that we use to describe 'homogenising' the total DPS output of jobs (read: equalizing) across a given role. It's called job balance. Having some jobs that are only valuable in progression is a terrible design decision. Every job should provide value in progression. Every job should provide value in optimised clears. The current design promotes a different type of homogeneity, in which every group locks in PCT into the caster slot.

Healers aren't individually taxed for having access to raise. That's because it's a property of the role. Nobody looks at a healer raise and sees this as unique job flavour, either. If raise was standardised, then there is no longer any need for a raise tax. You can instead look to other forms of utility as a means of job diversity. We currently have job with a personal barrier, a raidwide barrier, a raidwide heal, and burst mobility, without any form of utility tax whatsoever. It's clear that the DPS discrepancy within Casters specifically is about raise and nothing else. So standardising raise as a role action frees up jobs to diversify their utility in other ways. By your own admission, we see variation in utility between melee jobs with a much tighter DPS balance than you see on ranged. Why else would there be such a large DPS discrepancy amongst ranged jobs?

I just still don’t see the point in ‘remove raise and make it a cool down’. I mean, there’s barely anything left in the game that isn’t a cool-down anymore lol. Do we really want more ? Plus there’s the whole debate of whether it’s really fair to put all that pressure on newer healers.

If Raise becomes essentially a healer exclusive outside of a 120s cool-down, doesn’t that just make it extremely punishing if the healer dies more than once?

There are a couple of ways to implement Raise as a role action without tying in a MP cost. If I were designing a 'Phoenix Down' action, I would give the action a set number of charges that scale based off of fight difficulty (i.e. less charges on harder difficulty fights). Perhaps you could tie in a short mandatory cast that can't be made instant. You create the option of replenishing charges either on a fixed timer, or relative to pre-determined fight transitions that refresh uses, or relative to LB gauge generation. There's a lot of flexibility around how you could influence access to this.

My impression was that the whole point of experimenting with Raise design in Criterion/Criterion Savage was to try to develop novel solutions to the problem of non-healer raises. There are a lot of different directions they could go with this.

[Galvuu]

Healers aren't individually taxed for having access to raise. That's because it's a property of the role. Nobody looks at a healer raise and sees this as unique job flavour, either. If raise was standardised, then there is no longer any need for a raise tax. You can instead look to other forms of utility as a means of job diversity. We currently have job with a personal barrier, a raidwide barrier, a raidwide heal, and burst mobility, without any form of utility tax whatsoever. It's clear that the DPS discrepancy within Casters specifically is about raise and nothing else. So standardising raise as a role action frees up jobs to diversify their utility in other ways. By your own admission, we see variation in utility between melee jobs with a much tighter DPS balance than you see on ranged. Why else would there be such a large DPS discrepancy amongst ranged jobs?

Let's not compare healer balance to dps balance- healer balance has its own problems and challenges and I don't want to go off-topic more than we have already. Although, again, you touch on the problem yourself. Rezzing is a property of healers. Not of casters. That's why a caster having access to rez lends it a unique niche and identity. It's a reason to pick that caster, it's a consideration you need to have when deciding what comp you want to run with. Hypothetically, if Paladin still had its raise and it could be used in combat but dealt less damage, I could see a world where it would be very desirable for prog (imagine PLD using Hallowed Ground and rezzing a healer for a lb3 save). These decisions lead to different prog/raid dynamics and niche- but valuable- use cases. The game needs more of this, not less. Much like SMN having a heal that it can somewhat time (unlike PCT's worthless one, which you need to fire on your 2 mins and is minuscule), RDM having mitigation and PCT having a shield are all different pros with different use cases that might make one more desirable than the other in terms of utility. On an aside, I wish people stop bringing up the Starry heal up. It's a worthless 25k aoe heal that you have no control at all when you're going to use and really has no meaningful use in this raid tier. Tempera Coat, on the other hand, is actually very useful and decently powerful. It's very disingenuous to keep bringing up the PCT heal when its existence is irrelevant.

This discussion is about homogenisation, yes. There's another term that we use to describe 'homogenising' the total DPS output of jobs (read: equalizing) across a given role. It's called job balance. Having some jobs that are only valuable in progression is a terrible design decision. Every job should provide value in progression. Every job should provide value in optimised clears. The current design promotes a different type of homogeneity, in which every group locks in PCT into the caster slot.

My original comment was addressing your suggestion of giving ranged jobs raises left and right. I made a counterpoint that this is not the case in melee dps. MNK has by far the best utility suit of the melee (and, imho, of the whole dps role), and we don't seem to be wishing every melee dps job would copy/paste its tools (adding VPR as an example). Again, I already stated numerous times that the ranged balance is off and that SMN/BRD/DNC and especially RDM/MCH need a damage buff. I still don't know how big that buff should be, but they should be buffed. There's a difference between raising their numbers while keeping their superior utility at the cost of some (but not as much) damage and just copy-pasting their unique niches across the role.

I don't know why having some jobs be more valuable in a prog or pf setting when compared to farm or speedkilling is a problem, either. Every job obviously brings some value- more damage isn't useless (well... this tier it was, but that's an issue with the tier, not the jobs). The tradeoff between bringing a BLM for raw damage or a SMN for easy of use and a rez has been a thing for a while. Again, it's a meaningful decision with pros and cons. This will depend on your comp, on how good your players are, etc. I've progged with rez casters before for safety/comfort (my first dragonsong clear was on RDM), and I've done it with BLM for damage. It's a very different dynamic. This is, again, in my eyes, a good thing. I don't want 15 builder/spenders with different coats of paint.

There isn't any game of any genre with substantially differentiation between its classes/champions/etc that has achieved perfect balance without making every of those classes the same. It's impossible. This is also true for XIV. The point is to make the gap small- but noticeable- so there's a tradeoff. As a final aside, this is a funny discussion because I do think it's suspect MNK has the best support suite of any dps and leads the melee pack in rdps on the 70 thru 90 percentiles (or it did a few days ago), but obviously the gap is small enough it doesn't bother people. So, clearly, all we need to do is narrow the gap we have right now and each job should be able to preserve its utility niche. Again, we can just use the melee role as guide. The gap might need to be slightly bigger because a raise is definitely more powerful than even the mighty Mantra, but I doubt we'd be seeing this uproar if the difference between BLM/PCT and SMN/RDM was 7 or 8% rdps.

[Lyth]

There is no 'job-specific flavour' associated with raises, unless you're counting the different job icons. Let's take a look:

• Raise: Resurrects target to weakened state. 2400 MP, 30y.
• Resurrection: Resurrects target to weakened state. 2400 MP, 30y.
• Ascend: Resurrects target to weakened state. 2400 MP, 30y.
• Egeiro: Resurrects target to weakened state. 2400 MP, 30y.
• Verraise: Resurrects target to weakened state. 2400 MP, 30y.

Job-specific flavour occurs when you actually have significant variation in the implementation of an action. An example of this is tank invulns, which I would argue are even more powerful utility than raises. Every tank has access to invuln, but every invuln is implemented in significantly different ways. As a result, none of the tanks are taxed for having access to them. There are definitely balance issues that exist around this as well, as having a 3 minute variation in recasts across the role has a huge impact on how you tank fights. But it goes to show you that powerful actions can provide job-specific flavour without a DPS tax.

There's a false equivalence in comparing access raise on PLD with a raise on SMN/RDM because tanks also have access to invulns. That being said, if every tank had access to raise (and I'm definitely not recommending this), then there would be no DPS tax within the subrole around the effect. The only reason why the tax exists is to discourage teams from preferentially designing their comp to maximise their access to raises. But that creates the current scenario, where people have a progression comp which brings the raise casters, and a clearing comp which discards them.

If a raise action was available across a role, then it would incur no raise tax, because every comp would have access to the same amount of raises. SMN and RDM would benefit, because they would gain DPS parity. BRD/DNC/MCH would definitely benefit, if you included them, from both DPS parity and a raise. Even BLM/PCT would benefit. The only reason why anyone would ever want to argue against spreading this across the role is because they want to preserve the existing 10% DPS discrepancy that splits ranged jobs into an upper and lower tier of damage dealers. And that's what this conversation really about. Preserving the status quo. Preserving PCT's role dominance.

All forms of utility are worthless until they're not. Players will happily say that these raidwide benefits are 'useless', but the moment that someone recommends that those benefits be removed from them, they'll instantly switch gears to protest with 'that's homogenisation!!' If the dev team was willing to directly nerf Arcane Crest at the start of last expansion in response to player backlash around RPR, then I think it's very reasonable for the team to scrutinise the impact of Tempera Coat/Grassa, Smudge, and Star Prism's raidwide heal as well. That doesn't necessarily mean DPS nerfs, but at the very least it does mean that the rest of the ranged jobs deserve to not be penalised for potentially bringing a variety of support and utility effects of their own. There should not be an upper and lower tier of ranged jobs.

DPS parity is essential. This is the starting point. Having a job do significantly more DPS than another is not 'job flavour'. I want to see a level DPS playing field. Any utility actions that are considered to be 'too unbalanced' to be incorporated on a job-specific basis without a DPS penalty, like invulns and raises, should be shared across the role. You could theoretically have job-specific flavour in how those raise effects are implemented, similar to what we see with invulns, so long as they are shared across an entire role. Once you have established DPS parity, then you are free to be as creative as you like with the rest of your utility effects.

[Galvuu]

There is no 'job-specific flavour' associated with raises, unless you're counting the different job icons.
(...)
There's a false equivalence in comparing access raise on PLD with a raise on SMN/RDM because tanks also have access to invulns. That being said, if every tank had access to raise (and I'm definitely not recommending this), then there would be no DPS tax within the subrole around the effect. The only reason why the tax exists is to discourage teams from preferentially designing their comp to maximise their access to raises. But that creates the current scenario, where people have a progression comp which brings the raise casters, and a clearing comp which discards them.

Lyth, you usually make good points, but I really think you're being deliberately obtuse here. A job having rez and another not having it is a differentiating factor, even if the rez itself is exactly the same. You literally contradict your first point in the second half of your statement by (correctly) highlighting that a tank having access to it would cause a very different dynamic due to also having access to an invuln, even though the skill itself is exactly the same. This is already the case for RDM, due to Verraise interacting with Dualcast in a manner that allows it to get three/four people up faster than any other job in the game, healers included. This is job identity, it's a niche that only RDM fills right now, and it absolutely has cases where it makes a substantial difference.

All forms of utility are worthless until they're not..

Every world first for the last 4 or so years had a rez caster in the comp except TOP. This is absolute domination, which shows that this rez is not useless. These jobs are also completely serviceable on reclears (obviously, if they do enough damage to clear w1). So, really, this is only an issue when you look at killing a fight as fast as possible. This is absolutely something that top end statics thing of, but, for the majority of players, shaving 30s off a kill saves substantially less time than recovering a pull with RDM rez (which will save anywhere from 5 to 10 minutes).

Preserving the status quo. Preserving PCT's role dominance.
(...)
DPS parity is essential. This is the starting point. Having a job do significantly more DPS than another is not 'job flavour'. I want to see a level DPS playing field. Any utility actions that are considered to be 'too unbalanced' to be incorporated on a job-specific basis without a DPS penalty, like invulns and raises, should be shared across the role. You could theoretically have job-specific flavour in how those raise effects are implemented, similar to what we see with invulns, so long as they are shared across an entire role. Once you have established DPS parity, then you are free to be as creative as you like with the rest of your utility effects.

Does this logic of yours extend to melee then? If dps parity is such a priority, are you bothered by the absolute chasm between melee and the other roles? Of the top 5 in all dps metrics, 3 to 4 have been melee for 90% of the past 3 to 4 years (and none were physical ranged). Right now, on the 80th and 90th percentiles, VPR, DRG and MNK are top 5 in every fight in rdps (Honey Bee has BLM at 4th, otherwise it'd be top 4), and SAM and VPR dominate the adps category. I vaguely remember you arguing otherwise in the threads about ranged tax. In this world of yours, where we give a raise to every caster, are they now meant to be dumpstered by every melee, as is the case now except for PCT?
I don't even know why you keep bringing this point up- I've said that the bottom ranged jobs need buffs, and have been saying so for months. I also think that ranged mobility (pranged and SMN) and rezzes warrant a small tax.

[Lyth]

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There's no point comparing a tank's access to raise with a ranged job, because there's no way whatsoever to compare the two. Tanks do significantly less damage than DPS jobs. They have significantly more survivability. They're not even competing for the same raid slots. A single tank having access to raise would definitely create tank role balance issues. All tanks having access to raise would not (although I think such a design decision would devalue healers further).

Raise is ultimately gated by MP. Four raises is 9600 MP, and you also need to spend MP on additional spells if you want to dualcast.

I think you're actually reinforcing my point about utility. Utility is always situational. Raise is a really powerful tool, so much so that players have to sacrifice 10% of their DPS to have access to it. But what happens if you never use it? That's why you can't balance DPS against utility. Give players DPS parity, and then be as creative as you like with the utility. If there's a tool that's going to be potentially gamebreaking (invulns, raises), then just give every comp equal access to it.

PCT absolutely dominates most of the current fights due to the design of its burst, and is going to have an even more of an overwhelming advantage in FRU unless the devs wake up and do something about it. The DPS chasm that you see is between a higher and lower tier of ranged jobs. If you're willing to rectify that, we'll have a level playing field.

I'd actually like it if more DPS role balances were done similar to melee, in that you actually see trade-offs in the rankings over the weeks between more burst-orientated jobs and more consistent DPS jobs as fight durations get shorter.

I think it's interesting that your main objection to handing out Raise is that you see it as a potential DPS liability for PCT, while you're happy to encourage someone else to bring it and take on that DPS liability on your behalf. The truth is, if there is a fixed number of raises in every raid comp, then nobody needs to be taxed for having it because it no longer impacts game balance. You'll lose that free 10% DPS edge, but that needs to go away regardless.

[Galvuu]

I think it's interesting that your main objection to handing out Raise is that you see it as a potential DPS liability for PCT, while you're happy to encourage someone else to bring it and take on that DPS liability on your behalf. The truth is, if there is a fixed number of raises in every raid comp, then nobody needs to be taxed for having it because it no longer impacts game balance. You'll lose that free 10% DPS edge, but that needs to go away regardless.

So, in your version of the game, casters can all rez and just flat out trail behind melee by 10%? All of them? I don't even understand why you're talking about PCT's damage and FRU- the topic is about SMN and its raise (spoiler: unless it's a fight comprised of body checks, the rez will almost always have value: just look at how many corpses you can carry in UCoB/UWU/DSR). Somehow, every conversation devolves into "b-but PCT dps". I'm sure melee will dominate again Lyth- again, they're already 60% to 80% of the top 5 in every dps metric for every Savage fight. That's probably what this whole tirade is about anyway.

How fast you can rez someone is what's important anyway, that's what grants RDM its unmatched recovery ability. Every piece of utility is situational to an extent. If you overmitigate an aoe by 10% when it was not lethal, it's probably useless. If you use Asylum or Soil and the former overheals and the later overmits, they're useless in that situation. That doesn't mean they're worthless. Magic Barrier isn't worthless even though content isn't designed with it in mind (hell, you can make an extreme argument that extra damage is worthless too unless it allows you to skip a mechanic, and even then it would depend on what you're skipping).

I'm far less attached to Picto than you seem to suggest. I'd delete this job if I could have EW BLM and ShB SMN back. In fact, I think the niche PCT is currently inhabiting should've been SMN's. I feel like I was forced into this goofy job more than I willingly chose it. But, on the flipside, I'm tired of melee supremacy coming from EW. Like there's an unwritten rule that every dps must trail behind melee. And I'm tired of no actual diversity between jobs too. But sure, something something FRU and PCT supremacy something.