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

[Lyth]

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I personally tried to be sympathetic towards Physical Ranged up until now. But watching your exchange was probably the most convincing argument that I've seen thus far for preserving the status quo. Were the situation reversed, it's clear that you would not offer the same courtesy.

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I think this is a pretty solid post overall and agree with a lot of the points, outside of one.

I'm fine with job balance being adjusted for uptime and burst, and I think that happens naturally if you titrate the numbers to achieve balance over a variety of fight conditions and durations. 'Difficulty' tends to rely more on player consensus, and it's harder to understand how those viewpoints form. For example, 'difficulty' has been used for several expansions to justify why Physical Ranged provides less damage (and more often than not, less utility) than Magical Ranged. That in turn informs players views about other jobs, because it's treated as a statement of fact.

For example, SMN has often described as 'easy to play' because it's 'essentially a Physical Ranged' due to having a lot of instant casts. We then start using this almost as an epithet for disparaging jobs that we don't like. 'Your job has no casts, it's essentially a physical ranged.' 'Your job has no positionals, it's essentially a physical ranged.' 'Your job is so easy, it's essentially a physical ranged.' And with each repetition, it turns into dogma.

There are two issues with obsessing over 'difficulty'. Player retention depends on job variety. Ideally, you should be able to find a job with a gameplay aesthetic that you like, and continuously get better at it. But MMOs are intended to be played for thousands of hours. So why invest effort into a job that is underpowered and the community views as 'easy to play'? And it often ends up being a vicious cycle in a world where we intuitively equate damage output with player skill. 'Entry level' jobs might as well not exist, which decreases your selection variety. Players then leave because they don't find any of the 'acceptable' jobs interesting, and there's no point staying on a job that you know is going to be permanently underpowered.

The second point is that most jobs do actually have layers of optimization to them that aren't obvious from the outside unless you've played them extensively, especially in a prog environment. I don't think I've ever mained a job where I didn't find some interesting fight specific tech or timing window on most encounters. That's probably why players tend to perceive jobs that they play more often as having higher difficulty. Is it that those jobs have 'intrinsic depth', or is that just our experience of personal growth as players?

Either way, I trust objective measures that translate into DPS differences (i.e. uptime, burst), but a lot of the community discussion around 'difficulty' ends up being unreliable and subjective.

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4/10. Was that post typed up between PCT button inputs? (Thanks for unintentionally proving my earlier point, by the way.)