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

[mallleable]

The thing is that Reldhir does kinda of have a point about phys ranged 'having it easy.' Unlike every other role, phys ranged have no environmental challenges to overcome while in combat. Tanks have to consider melee uptime, incoming damage against themselves, incoming damage against their party, and sometimes boss positioning. Healers have to consider incoming damage against their party, and casting uptime during heavy movement. Magical Ranged have to consider casting uptime during heavy movement, and Melees have to consider melee uptime, and positionals. Granted they all have incredibly strong, and easy to use tools to overcome these challenges, but the challenges exist none the less. The fact that Phys Ranged have no such environmental challenges to overcome, to me, is a failure in class design. Which is why I froth at the mouth over walking casts because they would give phys ranged that environmental gameplay that is missing as well as being able to increase their damage numbers even if it would resemble Magical Ranged gameplay.

[Lyth]

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 apology for the P8S job balance, but I don't actually believe that to be the case in practice. What's more likely the case is that jobs are currently balanced in a reactive fashion to player feedback, with SE trying to cater to perceived popular demand.

Job 'difficulty' has no fixed goalposts, because anyone can claim to find anything difficult. It also comes out in the wash when you balance for an encounter. If a job is 'intrinsically' harder to play, you would expect players to put out less DPS on it prior to rebalancing. Do you really believe that a 50th percentile PCT is more skilled than a top 1% MCH? If you're balancing around 'difficulty' alone, you just need DPS parity. Match 50th percentile with 50th percentile, and top 1% with top 1%. That's balancing for difficulty.

A more accurate statement is that job balance is dependent on uptime and burst potential. Melee and ranged is a classic example of this. In the extreme case, if you create a boss with a moat around it that you can't cross, tanks and melee have 0% uptime and do essentially no damage under all conditions. In contrast, if you have a target dummy with an arena-sized hitbox, there's no advantage to playing at range. This dependence on fight design means that you either design all the fights to be the latter case (which is terrible design and very unsatisfying for players), or 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).

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. In contrast, if you have a long duration target dummy fight with 100% uptime, there's less of an advantage to burst. You can't balance both of these cases simultaneously. So you do have to have jobs with consistent damage output do more damage under target dummy conditions, because they're going to tend to fall behind in the actual thing. You can also try to mitigate this difference in other ways, like resource-gated (or more accurately, 'uptime-gated') burst and caps on damage variance (guaranteed Crit/DH).

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. There will be a degree of discrepancy that is always present due to fight design, because if you balance jobs based around target dummy conditions, some jobs will be consistently behind. So you do have to uptitrate the DPS in those cases, such that they push ahead under some conditions and fall behind on others. You'll know you've hit the correct balance when the same job isn't always on top.

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. I know that there are some Physical Ranged players that like the traditional 'support-focused' aspect of the role previously. But we're also at a point where Magical Ranged offers simultaneously more utility and more DPS than Physical Ranged, which is a failure on both counts. It's a cross-roads, but something needs to change, or you'll eventually find that players don't want to play Physical Ranged anymore.

I'll also say that I don't think that walking casts will result in parity for Physical Ranged. The goalposts around 'difficulty' will just shift, and you'll be told that you're doing less damage because standing casts are 'harder' than walking casts (even when those 'standing' casts are actually instant). Don't get me wrong, I think it's a fresh idea and I'd love to see it implemented on some current or future jobs (not necessarily even just Physical Ranged), but I wouldn't pin your hopes on it instigating a change.

To overcome this situation, SE needs to take a stand, throw out community biases, and say that they want to give equivalent value to the Physical Ranged subrole. I also think this will be a catch-22 as long as Physical Ranged is in a different subrole category from Magical Ranged, simply because there's no incentive for actual balance if you've got a guaranteed slot, and there's no way to accurately detect the drop in interest in the role with role locks present.

[Reldhir]

Do you really believe that a 50th percentile PCT is more skilled than a top 1% MCH? If you're balancing around 'difficulty' alone, you just need DPS parity. Match 50th percentile with 50th percentile, and top 1% with top 1%. That's balancing for difficulty.

So, this comment is where I think this is where maybe there's a difference to how I see the phys ranged situation vs some peeps in this thread.

I think way back in the day the dev team intended all dps to be equal in contribution. This was way back in 2.0 when there were far fewer jobs and yoshi P made the comment about difficultly=increased output

Since then, we've gotten a ton more jobs and for (lol)balance's sake, a lot of the game has been simplified and shoehorned into categories.

I think the intent with this was so that rather than balancing across the entirety of the job roster, devs could balance between roles. Those roles being Tank, Healer, Melee, Magical and Physical ranged DPS. (whether or not this has been successful I think a lot of people think otherwise :P)

So, just like it's not a fair comparison to say a top 1% healer should do more damage than a 50% tank. MAYBE, it's not a fair comparison for phys ranged to be judged against melee, or caster. While the differences between a phys ranged and melee may not be as on the clear as tanking vs healing. I see them as different by way of how they function in a raid setting.

It only takes making a melee job do all the typical phys ranged mechanics in a raid to very quickly see that they're not built the same.

A fairer comparison in DPS might be between a phys ranged and a melee dps that has to do all the phys ranged mechanics. It is still possible! but you will very quickly see how much the melee takes a nose dive in DPS. between similarly skilled players phys ranged will come out on top every time.

They are not the same role.

You might then say well casters, how do casters fit into all this? The line is admittedly a lot blurrier especially with the advent of smn (and now picto), but I feel like those issues are fundamental oversights by the balance team rather than them being examples of why the view or balancing within roles is not the intention. However, for argument's sake having to cast vs not having to cast may have been the excuse for assigning different roles (admittedly a weak one).

Additionally, I do believe that there has been a huge push toward making the game more accessible to new players, in general and in raids. Phys ranged seems to have been allocated the entry point, the role with the lowest skill floor and lowered stakes. How much more comfortable are you taking a new phys ranged player with you into raid vs any of the other roles. And I don't mean you're a nice person and it doesn't matter, which role can you compensate for the easiest as a team?


There is an argument to be made for keeping an entry point role like this in raids to encourage inclusion of new players.

Finally, I will say again, I am not opposed to improvements people are asking for across what is being discussed, just offering another viewpoint that isn't simply gamedev bad. I mean they can still have all the best intentions and end up making a poor decision, but maybe its worth also discussing the intention as well as the result

[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]
…

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
…
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.

[Connor]

Thing is they’ve already tried the ‘balance ranged DPS to be same as everyone else’ and it was an absolute disaster lol. When 2.0 came out, for the first few weeks of Coil raids Bard was literally so strong people were just taking 4X Bards for a lot of it. Song effects didn’t lower damage, it had a shitton of utility including a GCD 10% damage reduction on Rain of Death, its DoTs let it cheat those robots on T4 (who needs magic when you can do it physically then let it die to ticks with 0 damage reflection lol), Silence was actually worthwhile.

Naturally, it was immediately given heavy nerfs, they reworked a bunch of its skills to remove their utility like Rain of Death, and they had to put a hefty 20% damage reduction on the Bard anytime they were singing. Even if they tried to push phys ranged dps further than what it is now, we’ll just end up in that exact same situation and they’ll reactively nerf the absolute shit out of all three which will just lead us back to exactly where they are now. I mean, aren’t Red Mage and Summoner already close to phys ranged dps? If we get any higher what happens to them lol?

And I still don’t see where tf devs expect Machinist to slot into all of this? Is phys ranged a role for support or is it a varied role of everything (pure dps, medium dps, support dps)? If it’s the first one why does Machinist have like the least amount of support in the entire game besides BLM/MNK/VIP?

If it’s the second then how tf do they ever expect to balance a three-point tiered support system? Machinist is no support, Bard is a ‘little support’ *spits in disgust*, Dancer is ‘more support’. Like it shouldn’t take being an actual game developer to see the issue with trying to balance the jobs like that. Either ‘no support’ is superior or the ‘more support is worth more overall than the pure dps, little support is fucked either way unless it somehow manages to do both support and dps better than the ones that are actually dedicated to that. Which hilarious I’d say Bard pretty much does already considering it’s the top contributor of the three jobs.

Lastly I’ll say what I always say about phys ranged; pick a fucking lane SE . Either make the role actually a ‘support’ role or stop trying to pretend your game is more complex or interesting than it actually is and just make them pure dps

[Valence]

For those interested, here is PLL XXXVII, where they clearly stated moving away from balance based around difficulty, and wanted instead to balance around uniqueness. I am slightly amused that they clearly have backpedaled from this on a 180°.

A fairer comparison in DPS might be between a phys ranged and a melee dps that has to do all the phys ranged mechanics. It is still possible! but you will very quickly see how much the melee takes a nose dive in DPS. between similarly skilled players phys ranged will come out on top every time.

They are not the same role.

You're actually comparing ranged and melee, not rphys and melee dps. There is virtually no difference between caster dps and rphys mechanics in modern raids and this has been ongoing since forever (shadowbringers and the great demolition of all other metrics beyond damage and uptime). And there is actually almost no difference between all melees (dps and tanks) and all ranged (rphys, casters and healers) either beyond that some raid mechanics are role based, but the mechanical execution and solutions on their own aren't specific to support or dps beyond an arbitrary filter.

The reality is that in modern encounter design in XIV, the only difference is between a melee mechanic and a ranged mechanic. The former allows room for any job to perform it, while the latter doesn't work well with melees and requires range. This is the root of the problem and why melee DPS are constantly kept ahead of everything else by the devs, else they'd be obsolete, even if performing, because all the ranged jobs would be able to take their slots as well. And then, we have BLM and PCT... which have the luxury of ignoring that model and fill for every spot. This isn't a rphys specific issue.

[Khryseis_Astra]

Being caster is having cast for most of its rotation
Sadly this isn't the case for red mage and Summoner and I believe this is the reason why they are this weak.. developer don't want to anger true casters by this low cast time jobs

A caster casts spells. You said it yourself, there are long cast times and slow/instant cast times… I'm not a fan of the idea of “true casters” only being the ones with long casts. Having started the game on a slow caster, I enjoy playing a fast caster now, and having variety is a good thing.

We have a balance within the group… 2 fast, 2 slow, 2 that can rez, 2 that can’t. While I wouldn’t mind seeing the gap between their damage numbers narrow at least a little, you can still find good SMN, RDM and phys ranged out-dpsing a bad BLM or melee at times. (Not so much PCT or VPR though! lol)

And that would be my ideal as far as balancing goes: if you play your job well, your damage should reflect that, so just play the job you enjoy playing! The idea that some jobs aren’t “worth” playing just because they’re not at the top of the dps charts is oddly persistent here for a game that has over 20 battle jobs and keeps adding more each expansion.

[Connor]

The idea that some jobs aren’t “worth” playing just because they’re not at the top of the dps charts is oddly persistent here for a game that has over 20 battle jobs and keeps adding more each expansion.

Isn’t the amount of jobs we have one of the reasons why people are starting to see how little ‘worth’ certain jobs bring (i.e phys ranged)?
The devs have tried to make a combat system where each job is perfectly balanced by having almost entirely the same toolkit besides one or two gameplay flavour tools to differentiate them. But with 20+ jobs, it’s practically impossible to have every single one be mathematically equal without simply removing those ‘flavour tools’ and making them identical on each job, Meaning that because everything is mostly the same, it’s those (sometimes tiny) ‘flavour’ benefits now that cause people to say ‘this one is better than the others’.

If every job brought its own unique characteristics to the party then they might actually have a situation where jobs can be taken and exist by their own merit and not by which one was most recently released lol (do new jobs always need be top dps for people to play them? Idk lol). I mean, every expansion is becoming ‘party composition Flavour of the Expansion’. Look at VIP and PIC lol. If the next new dps is a phys ranged I am absolutely terrified for Bard/Machinist/Dancer because they’re going to take everything good from them and put it on the new job ‘so people will play it’. Ofc it’s much harder to balance overall, but at least it doesn’t lead to the dead-end brick wall current design is rushing into lol

[BabyYoda]

...

Balancing the game around difficulty is the worst decision they have ever made..

the correct way to balance job is not around damage.. but around what they can bring to the party.. some bring damage.. some bring heal.. some bring tank.. some bring buff.. some bring utility

that's why we see DPS jobs like PCT.. MNK.. RPR that is doing better than others because they bring more than just DPS