Concerns Regarding DPS Balance: Physical Ranged, Red Mage, and Summoner

[Sylvain]

Very interesting reading indeed,

I know that Yoshi-p stated that the devs balance jobs based on the 'difficulty of playing that particular job and its rotation, as well as its support actions and their effects' during his
Job 'difficulty' has no fixed goalposts, because anyone can claim to find anything difficult.

While it is true, it is also false to some extent. Some jobs are easier to handle simply because they require less management. BLM vs SMN is a great example, no matter how you put it, SMN has very little management involved. Provided you just smash your buttons you have no strict timers, very little cast which can be placed how you see fit with very little downside (as, no cd such as triple cast involved), the burst window is full of instant whereas BLM needs to stand in a little circle.

Unlike some other jobs the weaving isn’t franctic (like DRG I’d say) and you have no CD intereferences (like old MCH with Drill + Hypercharge). While it is much less of a problem nowadays, the job is also fairly intuitive, there’s no obscure mechanic you need to be weary of (Looking at you Addle during Bahamut for that extra attack…) The point being, if you picked a sample of 100 players and asked them to play BLM and SMN for 5h, you’d just see better result on SMN.

So in a sens it would make sens that playing a job requiring more effort is being rewarded with more dps. On the other hand, it does suck for those equally skilled but who simply prefer the easier one for any reason. If you can pull 95+ on BLM and SMN, playing SMN feels like a punishment (provided there’s an actual DPS check).
I don’t see how SE can go around that without either making all jobs of a specific role roughly on par.

If they equalize the DPS of said, all casters, then harder jobs (BLM) play harshly drops. If they don’t, then we have the current problem.

you just accept a degree of DPS discrepancy across various fights and try to mitigate it in other ways (i.e. downtime actions or role locks).E=Lyth;6606662]
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The same is true for consistent damage and burst. In the extreme case, if you have a fight with alternating downtime intermissions and burst windows, consistent damage jobs fall massively behind on damage
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I think the end goal should be to give the closest level of DPS parity within the DPS category for as many fights as possible

Well that’s the core of the issue and why DPS balance is such a problem. Basically back to difficulty vs reward. If they have difficulty gap but marginal reward gap, then why bother?
If both the difficulty and reward gap are big, then you can bother but you can’t have meaningful DPS check adapted to every comp as the gap between meta vs “weta” would be huge.

Personally, I don’t believe having “easy” job is good thing. Or at least not to the level of summoner for instance. Jobs within a role should be on average all equally difficult each with their own subtilty.

The difficulty of a caster should be “casting”, SMN entirely negates that. The difficulty of a melee should be melee uptime. If you want neither of those, there’s range.
If all caster, melee and range within their category have roughly speaking the same intrinsic difficulty, (so that it comes down more to personal preferences), then we can easily fix an average rDPS range for each category which would be slightly modulated by utility. Melee do on average X rdps, caster do 0.95X rDPS, range 0.9X rdps. BLM has 0 utility so it gains a tiny bit more, RDM has an extra mit so it is slightly below. Etc etc

I think the 'damage' vs. 'utility' side is probably harder to reach a consensus on. The primary function of a DPS job is to do damage. So you do have an obligation to independently balance DPS with DPS, and utility with utility.).E=Lyth;6606662]

It is, it’s always the same, how much dps is worth this utility, and rez being the hardest one to balance out. Because once you go for a clear, it goes from “utility” to “useless” as the goal is to never rez anyone. Utility should also be on par within the role. Because DPS are DPS first, they can’t be too low otherwise they become unviable. You can bring all the utility in the world, if we can’t meet the DPS check then it’s useless.

The only way out is to have a clear consensus on “what should a role bring”, which is why for instance all caster got addle, range got AoE 10% mit etc. Those should be the core utility, and anything extra should be of equal or lower value. The issue with rez most notably is that it stands out waayy too much. It is just too much of an utility during prog (which becomes useless afterward).

I’m firmly against having within the same role jobs with and without rez. Either all caster should have it or none should. Or it should have a serious drawback such as a very very long CD. RDM level of rez applies too much of a tax for something that ideally wouldn’t be used.

[Sunako]

The only way out is to have a clear consensus on “what should a role bring”, which is why for instance all caster got addle, range got AoE
10% mit etc.

It is actually 15%, they buffed it during this expansion. Addle and feint bring 15% each type of damage reduction together while physical ranged skill bring 15% alone.