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

[Valence]

I feel like I'm being gaslit rofl. The exchanges are all there for everyone to see lol. You're so determined to pigeonhole my response to some sort of adversarial position despite my repeated clarifications. I almost feel like I'm being used as a proxy for you to debate your grievances for the perceived wrongs dealt to you and phys ranged.

You want to play that game? Alright then. Let's go back through it all even though it's pointless. Call it ego if you want (it's probably more autism tbh), but your replies are extremely annoying to read.

This is my original message:

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.

This is literally saying that the root of the matter is that the devs have to keep the melees ahead of everything else due to them having a range constraint that ranged job do not have, else their own spots would be overcome by ranged jobs (why bring a melee when a range dealing the same damage can occupy the melee's spot?).

Your reply was:

You mention the "root of the problem" being that melee are kept ahead in dps because they would otherwise be made obsolete my phys ranged. But this point is exactly why phys ranged having dps parity with melee would break the current game balance. I'm not sure why you would raise a counter argument against yourself as though it was for? maybe I'm not understanding the nuance of your statement.

You were specifically, I quote, not understanding the nuance of my statement, yet chose to push the issue and say "you say X, but this point is exactly why X". This is literally what your reply says. This is literally why we did agree since the beginning, and yes, I think your assumption that you "maybe were not understanding the nuance of my statement" was probably true and you should have kept it there.

FYI when I said I didn't play the role, I meant I didn't main it. BUT I have played it casually enough to clear content up to the savage level here and there throughout ff14s existence (I am old) Not enough to say I "play the role" but enough, and successfully enough to know that if my limited IQ can comprehend and perform it to a level high enough to clear at least savage content then that should be a pretty good indicator of its ease of entry. I AM that noob phys ranged.

Good to know. Then I apologize for understanding that you didn't play the role AT ALL.

That's not even mentioning all the new and low skilled friends ive put in the phys ranged spot BECAUSE we've had significantly higher success rates covering for that spot over the others. Yes, I can call them low skilled, they're casual AF they know it, I know it, it's not meant in a derogatory way it's just reality. they're not great at the game but still wanna be included!

That's probably where my own experience differs. Did they all went to play DNC?

Or... maybe I can see what you mean actually. They have full uptime so they can move and follow mechanics even if their rotation is completely out of the window.

AGAIN, not that it seems to matter to you, I'm talking about the skill floor. that first post must have really bruised your ego for you to be so obnoxiously insistent lol just stop. or dont? the conversation is veered way off topic and is no longer productive anyway. I feel like we'll just go around in circles so AGREE TO DISAGREE i spose xD

It's always funny reading responses on online forums where people tell you to stop discussing and agree to disagree because this is going nowhere, yet they do a full blown post of their own on the issue.

But you seemed to still have to respond to one more point (and passive aggressively because why not)...

*forgot to respond to one point even though I'll probably just be told some how that my words are not my words and that I mean something else BUT

You mentioned SMN and VPR being the easier jobs that supposedly "demolish my whole fallacy" I already mentioned smn, not that you seem to have bothered to read it. SMN is admittedly the weak spot to the argument, but that job is the unicorn, it's a caster that doesn't cast! that to me seems more like a flaw of the job itself rather than the intention to balance by role.

"SMN is the weak point of the argument, but that's a unicorn, that doesn't count!"

ALSO it doesn't address the fact that SMN is graded against the potential of picto (or blm in the past) so it isnt as ideal a ROLE to give up to a new or low performing player, AGAIN AGAIN AGAIN, bringing a low performing phys ranged means losing out a percentage of the highest phys ranged potential, which is lower than a low performing SMN when graded against what they COULD BE, that being picto.

what's the term? opportunity cost?

I do agree with that and I'll concede that for this reason rphys is probably more interesting to consider, even though this doesnt paint the full picture of why a group would bring a SMN/RDM either. After all those have turned into prog jobs more than anything, and what you'd end up with would be the low skilled player staying on SMN instead of switching to BLM/PCT for clears/reclears.

also, i dont agree with you about viper lol. no way is phys ranged harder than viper. tbf im not saying viper is super difficult either, and of all the melee it could probably fit the lolphys ranged slot as a melee the best. BUT if you wanna play it optimally, you still need to deal with melee specific things. things phys ranged doesnt.

again blah blah blah opportunity cost, melee role is more valuble dps wise than phys ranged, so new players go to phys ranged as theyre easier to compensate for~ not that you will read this anyway

And that's where opinions will differ. I do think that VPR is easier than any rphys (yes even DNC) rotationally. Even when taking melee uptime into account.

Funny how difficulty can be subjective, and that roles and jobs may not be that binary when it comes to accessibility..

again again again again blah blah not talking about high level phys ranged players being bad, not saying I dont want phys ranged players to have more important roles, not saying you're bad at the game, not saying johnny mc fly is bad at the game, just saying that there are a lot of low skilled players in the game and phys ranged is the easiest role to direct them to hands down. You can still ask for what you want to ask for, I said many times im not anti phys ranged improvement. I was only making a point to offer a different view point... like ive repeated several times...and youve ignored... several times.... im sick. why am I still typing xD

I don't know why you're still typing, you tell me.

I also do know that you're not targeting higher skilled players or saying rphys should stay in the ditch. I also do understand that saying that a job welcomes all the low skilled players, which incidentally means it's the easiest dps role (by your own admission), is not only a blanket statement formed out of prejudice, and for the reasons I mentioned before, I'll probably not change my opinion on the matter.

[Kazimere]

Because it's a ranged that has zero DC issues. None

[Reldhir]

But you seemed to still have to respond to one more point (and passive aggressively because why not)...

I'm weird, and also I was on a roll xD sometimes that keyboard starts klack klack klacking away and suddenly you've ranted out an essay xD

I mentioned before, I'll probably not change my opinion on the matter.

While I still don't agree with how you've posed some of the responses regarding why you chose to interpret what I meant in past responses. This current post is probably about as fair a shake as I'm gonna get regarding the actual points I raised and not some imagined ones. So I appreciate you going through the effort to rectify things.
We may still disagree! But thats perfectly fine~

It is unfortunate that it took me annoying you before getting a fairer response to the point I was making.

Either way, respect for the reply xD

[Lyth]

...

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.

...

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.

??

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

[Supersnow845]

To me the last vestige of this “ranged tax” died with VPR, VPR can straight up be played as a physical ranged but it is not taxed at all for it, nor is it taxed for its overwhelming simplicity

If you don’t believe that VPR should be doing physical ranged damage but believe the physical ranged should be doing physical ranged damage then your point really doesn’t have any logical consistency, it’s just blatant favouritism

(Note this isn’t targeted at anyone, just a general “you”)

[Supersnow845]

I don’t see button inputs as equivalent to complexity unlike you, to me VPR is the perfect example of no matter how many button presses you have per minute if the class is empty and vapid then it’s still easy, VPR has 4 times as many buttons as SMN but it’s barely 10% more complex. PCT doesn’t have a lot of button presses nor an I arguing PCT is a paradigm of complexity either but VPR is just an absolute perfect example of APM not remotely translating to complexity and a melee that doesn’t get taxed for its overwhelmingly utility of being playable as a physical ranged simply because melee never get taxed for anything

VPR is the easiest melee, its only remote competitor is RPR, its the easiest yet it has the highest APM, the APM is just there to fill its void of class design, not actually make it more complex

Also I have no idea what point you think I just proved

[Aravell]

To me the last vestige of this “ranged tax” died with VPR, VPR can straight up be played as a physical ranged but it is not taxed at all for it, nor is it taxed for its overwhelming simplicity

If you don’t believe that VPR should be doing physical ranged damage but believe the physical ranged should be doing physical ranged damage then your point really doesn’t have any logical consistency, it’s just blatant favouritism

(Note this isn’t targeted at anyone, just a general “you”)

I still find it incredibly stupid that they killed Raiton as a flexible disengage tool by tacking on a followup that requires you to be in melee range or go into melee range.

Then the very next expansion, they introduce a new scouting melee that can run circles around the edge of the map for 3 GCDs while losing nothing but autoattacks.

[Lyth]

UF is the highest potency action in the toolkit outside of Reawaken. If you realized that, you'd understand the trade-off a bit better.

...

Your statement was an indirect jab at Physical Ranged as well. It was genuinely funny after I provided several similar illustrations of how people reference the Physical Ranged role to disparage jobs that they don't like. Your timing could not be any better.

[Supersnow845]

Yes because we are discussing the physical ranged and their characteristics and why they are taxed, of course I’m going to compare the other classes to how “easy” the physical ranged are to prove a point that the physical ranged are unfairly taxed

Disparaging VPR by comparing its complexity to WHM doesn’t really make sense in a thread discussing if how “easy” the physical ranged are warrants them being taxed. I’m not insulting the physical ranged by proxy of saying “x class is as easy as physical ranged so like easy physical ranged this class is easy” I’m comparing other classes that aren’t being taxed to the focal point of this thread which is the physical ranged

[Reldhir]

A couple good posts I missed and want to address:

Except that was during a time when there were no tools in place to insure that would never happen again. That was when healers and casters needed bard present to insure they didn't run out of Mana. When only bard had access to a TP regeneration song to insure you didn't run out of tp on tank. When Bard was one of the only jobs that had access to central raid wide damage utility. When accuracy was a primary stat so having a job like bard that could pemanently attack from the rear and have the kindest accuracy limit was something that existed. When there wasn't a role damage bonus to insure that every role remained present. When there wasnt a limitbreak gain penalty for repeating the same jobs (and also there were hardly ANY fights that necessitated the use of an LB3 to get through mechanics). When there was only 4 other DPS jobs besides bard instead of 12. Oh and don't forget that was when Rain of Death put a damage down debuff on the target, so cycling it between 4 Bards was a legitimate way to make difficult fights easier.

It was just a totally different time frame and advocating to keep that in mind is just ignoring that there are many systems now in place that invalidate that view.

Ah yeah, I admit it was an off the cuff addition to my thoughts at the time and it didn't fully illustrate the situation back then regarding bard meta in the early life of the game. You make good points about all the other reasons why bard was favoured. However, I will disagree with your statement that the DPS argument is ignoring the new systems. While not the sole reason, Bard/archer dps being so high was also one of the reasons it was favoured, not discounting any of the points you listed. Just because bard had enough reasons to be favoured over other dps does not mean high DPS was not also one of them.

In fact, the systems you make mention that prevent this scenario from taking place is exactly the point I'm trying to raise in regard to people asking for dps parity between phys ranged and the rest of the dps. There was a scenario where bards were far to OP, DPS being a factor (as well as the other points you raised)

Does the current framework mean Phys ranged can never be anything more than what they are at the moment though? Of course not, this is just the "solution" SE came up with. I'm sure there are a bunch of great ideas out there that can address the lacklustre feeling some players have with phys ranged. I was only addressing the call for DPS parity of phys ranged with the rest of DPS and how on its own, would cause problems. Whatever the solution is to this conundrum it is more multi-faceted than "I am a dps too, let me do more damage"

If told you what percentile performance someone's BLM play was at, could you tell me what their equivalent percentile is on SMN?

Likewise, if someone is a 50th percentile BLM and a 50th percentile SMN, should they do the same damage in both cases? Should a mediocre player do more damage just because they picked a job that the community views as harder? These are the questions you need to ask when balancing based off of 'difficulty'.

Well that is exactly the question.
If you think it should be a role thing, then yes a 50% BLM should do as much as a 50% SMN. But the result would be most BLM dropping becaue why bother if all your extra work has no reward.

I apologize if I missed some context here but I just wanted to offer my interpretation of YoshiPs comments around difficultyutput in DPS.

My understanding of the philosophy is that: on average, a player of average skill could play an "easy job" at a higher proficiency thus average out at the higher end of the job's potential, where as that same player wpuld play a "harder job" at a lower proficiency but because the job was innately stronger, they would do similar damage to the "easy job"

When we talk about the 50th percentile I don't believe the median value to be a robust enough indicator for whether a job is balanced according to the above philosophy. It would be better to look at the spread of between the upper and lower quartiles. An easy job should have a relatively small interquartile range, as theoretically, an easier job should be easier to execute and therefore have less variation in the average.

Likewise, a harder job should theoretically have a relatively larger interquartile range as with higher difficulty comes a higher variance in its execution.

Therefore if the philosophy for job difficulty equating to higher output as means of compensating the average player is true, we should see a small inter quartile ranges of the "easy jobs" that fully overlap with the relatively larger interquartile range of the "harder jobs"

Looking at ahem* player generated logs, what we actually see is that within the melee role, the interquartile range is very similar, which would indicate on average they are being performed to very similar proficiencies, this might suggest that there is little variance in difficulty between melee jobs. Therefore, differences in output are unjustified under the above philosophy.

Unsurprisingly, PIC and BLM have noticeably higher interquartile ranges than that of RDM and SMN, indicating a greater difficulty to execute the former two, which reflects player sentiment. They are correctly compensated as per the balance philosophy with higher outputs, however, the third condition where the interquartile ranges of all jobs within the caster role should completely overlap is missed. Blm lags behind PIC despite having a similar interquartile range while both RDM and SMN severely lag behind, from a purely DPS balance perspective this role fails the balance criteria, PIC is too unjustifiably strong (putting aside the raise tax debate)

Then we have the phys ranged, and surprisingly all 3 have noticeably different interquartile ranges, suggesting a difference in difficulty between each of the jobs. BRD having the greatest range, followed by DNC and finally MCH, likewise, suggesting a descending order of difficulty. Also consistent with player sentiment.

Interestingly, DNC and MCH to share a complete overlap in interquartile ranges suggesting they meet the balance philosophy, however, like with other roles, BRD extends beyond DNC and MCH ranges, suggesting BRD has an unfair dps advantage over the other two.

With this all in mind and assuming we are balancing purely off: difficulty = more output. BLM needs a buff (or picto nerf), SMN and RDM need significant buffs (ignoring raise tax)

MCH and DNC need a slight buff (or bard nerf)

while melee dps need a few slight buffs here and there (too many jobs to list) to bring them into better alignment

Finally, just for vanity sake, all phys ranged, smn and surprisingly rdm have noticeably smaller interquartile ranges than the other DPS jobs, suggesting that they are indeed easier to play, or atleast the average joe is executing them more consistently than the rest (coz its ez) with MCH being the easiest followed by DNC and then SMN. I mean hey, 2 of the 3 phys ranged jobs are easier than smn with the third not far behind according to the average joe~~ just sayin :P