Picto makes the game less fun

[Aco505]

It doesn’t have to be PCT but the whole idea that only the three selfish jobs can ever be the highest rDPS dealers needs to die

They're balanced around doing the highest personal damage, which statistically shouldn't be rDPS, if using the specific metric. They should be ahead in nDPS and aDPS but never rDPS (BLM is an exception in some cases because of its specific damage profile).

I do agree with the sentiment though, "selfish" jobs appear to be "pampered" by SE sometimes.

[Lyth]

Which of the following are the high aDPS/nDPS jobs? Which job actually has the highest burst in practice?



That's the downside of reducing everything to a single number.

Buff synergy depends entirely on your burst, but not all 'selfish DPS' are burst-focused. VPR and BLM rely on consistency and uptime to do their damage. Of course, you could have predicted this entirely by usage rates in Savage speedruns. Shorter clear times favor burst. (I'll also say, I think Criterion Savage is looking to be especially hilarious, as triple PCT is already the standard for dungeon speedruns given how motifs reset instantly between encounters).

I'm not entirely sure what the 'advantage' of being a 'selfish' DPS is. It's certainly not utility. It's not necessarily even burst. It's not even buff alignment, and if anything you have to be extra aware about how the rest of your teammates are setting up their burst to get the maximum advantage out of your own, especially if you're in PF. Perhaps a better term is 'commensal DPS'?

[Aco505]

That's the downside of reducing everything to a single number.

Buff synergy depends entirely on your burst, but not all 'selfish DPS' are burst-focused. VPR and BLM rely on consistency and uptime to do their damage. Of course, you could have predicted this entirely by usage rates in Savage speedruns. Shorter clear times favor burst. (I'll also say, I think Criterion Savage is looking to be especially hilarious, as triple PCT is already the standard for dungeon speedruns given how motifs reset instantly between encounters).

I'm not entirely sure what the 'advantage' of being a 'selfish' DPS is. It's certainly not utility. It's not necessarily even burst. It's not even buff alignment, and if anything you have to be extra aware about how the rest of your teammates are setting up their burst to get the maximum advantage out of your own, especially if you're in PF. Perhaps a better term is 'commensal DPS'?

It's a bit reductive to claim that discussion focuses entirely on one number. Those metrics are one of the scarce tools we can work with when commenting job balance as long as we don't have access to the data that SE collects.

That the second picture is of a PCT burst peaks and troughs doesn't change the fact that it will have less personal damage than the "selfish" jobs over time, on average. In fact, I'd argue that it's positive that a non-selfish job can compete with SAM for highest 120s burst in the game, as NIN did in EW until SAM slightly surpassed it.

SAM, RPR and BLM are consistently the jobs at the top of the nDPS and aDPS metrics, with the difference being mainly how much they can abuse buffs.

The advantage of "selfish" jobs is that they don't depend on the party to deal their personal damage. The damage you deal to a dummy in Urqopacha will be the same that you will deal in your average encounter with a similar kill time. But it doesn't end there because they can further their damage by playing into others' buffs. This is why it's bad for game balance when "selfish" jobs have higher rDPS than buffing jobs, as SAM in ShB and BLM* in EW attest.

*BLM is a bit different, as its aDPS contribution tends to be lower, so the job having higher personal dummy damage than normal would be logical to account for it, as long as it doesn't become overtuned.

On the other hand, a buffing job not only has to do the above, but they also need to expect everyone else in the party to press their buttons properly and align their buffs. This means that it's entirely possible to lose hundreds or even thousands of DPS depending on how well or badly the other seven people in the party play. It will be precisely buffing jobs that will lose more on average in the PF environment that you're citing. For instance, players dying will have a big effect on the rDPS of a DNC or BRD.

Jobs like VPR can even choose to put extra damage like an odd minute Reawaken on a drifted or mistimed buff to get some benefit, unlike many other jobs that are not that free flowing.

"Selfish" jobs are not as affected by party size either. They are even more effective in 4-people content precisely because they don't care about the amount of jobs present that abuse their buffs.

It is interesting that you mention Criterion when in EW and right now, BLM remains the top job. PCT is not far behind though but that's to be expected. However, the current sample size is not that great. RPR was an excellent job in EW Criterion and is likely underrepresented at the moment, so its potential and likely that of other jobs will not show in the current statistics. Conversely, MCH is ahead of more than half the jobs in rDPS, something unthinkable in 8-people duties.

You're right that PCT is extremely strong in normal dungeon speeds and damage but VPR is also quite high and competitive, a fact that you have curiously omitted. Every other job is either absent, very low down the list or has at most one or two representatives in a sea of pink and green.

PCT being overtuned, particularly when downtime is involved, doesn't change the fact that rDPS and aDPS have always had an ideal inverse relationship. Jobs have been designed like that in this game for a while now, as otherwise buffing jobs would be at a (further) disadvantage. All the metrics we have now exist due to player request, and are precisely meant to reflect the state of the game's balance.

VPR or BLM having a flatter damage profile with lower buff contribution should be balanced by their filler. If it's not, then that's a balance problem. You've said it yourself: M2S current kill times at high end benefit VPR because the boss doesn't die after an even burst. Many encounters in PF or otherwise are not always going to end on such a burst for the average player, thus playing into VPR's strengths.

But yes, PCT's ability to benefit from downtime and deal extremely quick high bursts of single target and AoE damage in different types of content is something that we have already discussed in different threads. Whatever SE does or does not do about it is anyone's guess at the moment.

[Grumblecakes]

In the 100 dungeons, PCT and VPR murders everything way too fast. I don't like being another DPS in those because I can't even finish a burst rotation sometimes. I don't care about Savage numbers in a static memorized environment. But all that trickles down making normal content with those jobs (which everyone queues as) a miserably boring experience with powercreep no jobs should have. PCT and VPR need nerfs, or they need to fix power creep because it isn't fun playing with those jobs on your team. I think some of you forget how awful the savagw balancing makes normal content in a more random environment where you aren't queued in with your static measuring dps on a spreadsheet.

[Namir]

In the 100 dungeons, PCT and VPR murders everything way too fast. I don't like being another DPS in those because I can't even finish a burst rotation sometimes. I don't care about Savage numbers in a static memorized environment. But all that trickles down making normal content with those jobs (which everyone queues as) a miserably boring experience with powercreep no jobs should have. PCT and VPR need nerfs...

Not even just in the 100 dungeons, I wrote a while back that I was doing a lv 65 dungeon and got paired with a PCT. While I don’t know the PCT kit at that level, the difference in kill speed between PCT and any other DPS I had been paired with til then was very noticeable, everything was dying so ridiculously fast that it made the dungeon a very boring experience for, and I generally really enjoy dungeons. Since then I’m glad I haven’t been paired with another, but from that experience, I totally agree that PCT needs to be nerfed.

[Altera]

If this weeks LiveLetter does not bring any good news about changes and buffs to BLM, I feel after 13+ years since 1.0, and never taken a single break from the game, to finally permanently retire my subscription :/ I dont wanna quit, but BLM is a HUGE reason I enjoy the game, but since DT and the changes has severely impacted that enjoyment. And its even made me hate the PCT Job due to how easy it is to play while being Overpowered and just removing every reason for BLMs to exist in the game sadly :/

Im praying for good news this weekend, but with how poorly the devs seem to have interacted with players this time around, I feel worried and dont expect anything good

[Lyth]

...

It really comes down to your choice of metrics. Selfish DPS have been historically valued because of their burst potential, because they have bigger contributions under two minute raid buffs. SAM is the classical example. The problem is that aDPS and nDPS can't distinguish between burst and consistent DPS. PCT, SAM, BLM, and VPR all have solid aDPS/nDPS, but they achieve this in different ways. It's only when you look at the burst profiles that you get the real picture of what's under the hood.

Part of the problem is that aDPS and nDPS were introduced in Stormblood to combat single target buff padding that was rampant during Heavensward, causing players to dismiss performance metrics altogether. It was a reactive strategy for a service that survives on ad revenue. These parameters were then retroactively re-envisioned as 'measures of buff alignment', but there are much better ways of doing this. One way of doing this is just looking at the area under the DPS curve during your various potion bursts. It's pretty intuitive to interpret this visually, but it's much harder to extract that automatically from a data set. One issue is that a lot of resource-gated jobs (PCT excluded, due to motifs charging instantly outside of combat) tend to have asymmetric first and subsequent potion bursts. And then there are fight specific considerations, like M4S very deliberately destroying the platform right before the end of the six minute window.

It's correct to say that buff providers can have extremely competitive burst windows. That's why both DRG (31%) and NIN (22%) are much better performers in M1S speedruns than VPR, to the point that it's the least used melee in the fastest clears on that fight (1%). You have a short fight that ends on a potion burst. I think that having a trade-off between burst and consistent jobs is actually quite healthy for the game, so long as it doesn't become too one-sided. I also think that it's great to see burst and consistent DPS jobs trade-off across the weeks as clear times shrink and you alternate between ending on burst and ending between burst. The problem arises when you go over to the caster side, and you see PCT with 100% pick rate in M1S, M3S, and M4S speedruns. It's kind of funny that M2S is currently the one exception where you see BLM used, because I'm fairly sure that BLM is allergic to bees.

Legacy Criterion Savage is a bit of an odd one at the moment, because there's only a few hundred documented runs over the past three months, with many jobs having a single digit number of clears in individual instances. You'd be comparing 6 BLM performances vs. 60 PCT in some cases, resulting in an underpowered data set. Now that I think about it though, it's probably the byproduct of both the existing damage multipliers and synced power balance, so I suppose we'll have to see how it turns out in practice. I'd be curious to know what PCT's multiplier is, as I haven't looked at that chart since Endwalker.

[Supersnow845]

This is just kinda the endgame of their current design. Burst is everything in this game because they made it this way, jobs that don’t burst well tend to require specifically unfavourable burst profiles of the kill time in a tier to be competitive with high bursting jobs because the goal is always to end with a burst and a potion. Pretty much all fights these days are specifically designed around the presence of the burst.

If they want to rebalance this problem they need to make more fights that specifically de-emphasise the burst or redo the way the burst works in its entirety

Even taking PCT out of the equation look at the overall contribution of the remaining 20 jobs as an aggregate across the tier, MNK and RPR have higher highs than VPR or SAM and AST and SCH have far higher highs than WHM and SGE

PCT plays to the burst better than any other job in the game (except maybe AST) but the problem is much more with the burst than PCT itself. If we remove and nerf PCT who is currently 5% above VPR on the gold parse is MNK being 4% above VPR on the gold parse acceptable

[Valence]

If this weeks LiveLetter does not bring any good news about changes and buffs to BLM, I feel after 13+ years since 1.0, and never taken a single break from the game, to finally permanently retire my subscription :/ I dont wanna quit, but BLM is a HUGE reason I enjoy the game, but since DT and the changes has severely impacted that enjoyment. And its even made me hate the PCT Job due to how easy it is to play while being Overpowered and just removing every reason for BLMs to exist in the game sadly :/

Im praying for good news this weekend, but with how poorly the devs seem to have interacted with players this time around, I feel worried and dont expect anything good

Good luck in your endeavors. I personally can relate in how it feels as I've been left in the exact same state after the butchering of MCH in ShB. But by focusing on other things one may like it's possible to... cope with it and move on, as long as you can find some amount of fun in other parts of the game.

But it is true that seeing a job one clicked with in PVE (being the main activity of the game generally) getting that kind of treatment WILL leave a void that is hard to fill with anything else.

[PercibelTheren]

Good luck in your endeavors. I personally can relate in how it feels as I've been left in the exact same state after the butchering of MCH in ShB. But by focusing on other things one may like it's possible to... cope with it and move on, as long as you can find some amount of fun in other parts of the game.

But it is true that seeing a job one clicked with in PVE (being the main activity of the game generally) getting that kind of treatment WILL leave a void that is hard to fill with anything else.

Yeah, it really doesn't feel good when a job you loved gets everything you enjoyed about it taken away. This happened to me with Astrologian when Dawntrail came out, causing me to completely retire from healing for the first time in my 15 or so years of playing MMOs. I've found enjoyment in playing physranged, but the void of not having a fun healer class to play is still there.