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

[Carighan]

I do hope 8.0 does more to shake the battle system up than just introducing stupid arbitrary hierarchies and a single metric of performance (uptime versus damage). It's so basic it's depressing.

Exactly this. It's why it is so aggravating to see players seemingly seriously asking for the utterly rare unique aspects of combat design we get right now to be taken away. As if the insane homogenization of all damage roles isn't the very problem plagueing them all.

But yeah sure, remove Red Mage spam rezzes, remove Dancer priority system (and hey, dancing with it!), out with it! Make one new job, "Damage". It just presses 6 GCD and 18 oGCDs in a fixed rotation, has a few 120s CD buffs including one raid buff, and one 60s selfbuff. Done. All damage players now deal the same damage just bound by skill, and considering 80% of the current damage classes, would not even feel different. Which is just sad.

[VellAshe]

If you go to open world content in FFXIV you will see Elite boss HP increase based on people in the instant, not only that but also fates, but it seems that you first time hear this [...]

Agreed, and don't worry; I know about this!

Scaling fates based on the # of players is completely viable.
This works in a singular world instance, in a singular area instance where the only the quantity of players is being assessed, not their jobs.
All that info is in a singular instance, and it's easy enough to acquire in real-time to adjust the values of the area bosses and FATEs!

...But that isn't what you're suggesting.

this idea wont work immediately it require calculation for each job how much their utility actually do then do a statistics based on that boss/mob/lite boss damage and HP will change.

This is the crux of the issue; this is easy to say in a vacuum, but the question is 'how do you calculate this'? Assuming we're still talking about a standard full party inside of instances, you're talking about retaining data of every single major instance, and calculating a weighted value based on how jobs perform on average across all players of FFXIV, and applying a modifier to the boss health and damage numbers based on that information. You've gone from a home world, singular field, "how many players in one area" scenario, to a multi-datacenter data retention and modification based on subjective job performance.

Like I said, I get your concept. It isn't that hard to grasp, and when applied to smaller scales like a singular field instance like in FATEs, Skirmishes and Critical Engagements, it could work just fine!. I don't want to completely dismiss it, and apologize if I came off that way!

But on a wider-scale implementation, there's loads of other things to take into account beyond the 'job performance' scaling. Do you assess gearsets in overall performance? How does that metric get calculated, if so? Do you assess player skill in your data? Do other performances have a stronger weighted effect? How do you acquire the averages across all datacenters? Where is this information stored, and at what interval would these calculations be updated or applied?

These are the sort of questions that add additional hurdles and obstacles to your thought process, and changes it from 'it's simple' to 'this isn't realistically possible.'

Then again, I'm pretty sure we don't know the datacenters' internal workings, nor their data retention policies. (Someone correct me if I'm wrong!) Maybe they do have those calculations! It's obvious that we don't agree or aren't seeing eye-to-eye, so I think this'll be the last I post about it. I just hope you understand why I'm saying it isn't as simple as 'just balance the encounters around the jobs chosen'.

I hope you have a good day! Thank you for the involved conversation!

[VellAshe]

All those scenarios already happen and most fights (no, all fights really) can be cleared by any of those compositions. Yet balance remains scuffed, but the problem is that you're considering balance on a viability scale, where it works fine for what we have to clear ingame, but not on a logic, utility, and fair scale, where it starts to seriously fall apart and that's the crux of the problem. This is not a clear rate problem.

I think I understand what you're saying, but I wanna make sure I'm on the right track; usually when I perceive balance within a game, I tend to lean towards viability, as you mentioned. Can you elaborate on the logic, utility and fairness further? (Or, have you already in this thread and I just missed it? Sorry, if that's the case!)

[Valence]

It pertains to many issues which can be found literally everywhere on those forums, the most usual and notable being what's fair in terms of cDPS discrepancies between jobs and what's arbitrary and unfair, but also materialistic concerns like not rendering melees obsolete. Why do SMN and RDM output the same damage as a MCH or BRD when they do offer way better raid utility and support? What's rphys as a role is even supposed to be those days when all of what made it unique has been either stripped away (MP/TP support) or done better by other roles (party utility)? Does raising and utility justifies such dire discrepancies between RDM/SMN and BLM/PCT? Do we really want a model where half the casters are prog casters and the two others are clear casters? Do we want a system where some ranged are allowed to play in melee or ranged slots and not the others unless you want a subpar damage output? And the elephant in the room: do we want to keep rphys not being a DPS role but a 1% party bonus because that's the only reason you bring them to a party?

But in short it just boils down to some jobs doing garbage mathematical dps comparatively to others and we end up with two main groups that do not pertain to ranged vs melee: the top dogs and the second rate jobs. Even if anything can clear, it feels unfair, it feels arbitrary, it sends shitty messages to the players, it generates endless fights about it and it doesn't feel satisfying at all.

[Carighan]

I mean physical ranged would be easy to give a niche "back to" if they'd actually dare return the intended "downsides" of being a melee or a caster.

Namely loss of uptime and hence ~0% damage output & exposure to non-avoidance point-blank damage causing strain on the healers. Respectively for casters, forced movement and hence ~0% damage output.

But since they trivialized the existence of both melee and casters (even BLMs have a ton of mobility and instant casts, and they're supposed to be the immobile mage, but nowadays it genuinely feels like RDM is less mobile than BLM in most actual raid fights!) the supposed upside of physical ranged - being neither constrained by melee reach nor by cast times - is automatically gone. Which is just sad, because on top of that issue, it just removes the defining feel of playing a melee (is dangerous to be up close!) and caster (better hope you get some quiet time!) to begin with.

[Lyth]

Damage is used as a proxy metric for player skill. As such, damage is the main thing that players on all roles care about (supports included). That's part of the reason why the 'trinity design' in this game has atrophied over time. Support functionality just isn't valued by the community the same way that raw damage is. That's also partially a function of a move away from pass-fail support checks.

You can argue that the value of tanks and healers is at least somewhat protected from this by a combination of fight design constraints, LB penalty, and role buffs. But the Physical Ranged/Magical Ranged split (or more accurately, Physical Ranged/Magical Ranged Support/Magical Ranged Damage split) is a lot more tenuous and much less enforced. I think the bottom line here is that all ranged jobs should provide an equivalent level of damage output and support functionality to each other. Large discrepancies in damage, like what currently exists between PCT/BLM and the other ranged jobs, are a problem.

Most people are happy to offload support functionality and the associated damage penalty that comes with it to another player. If you need that raise, just bring a second Caster with raise. If you don't, lock out the prog Casters. SE fully understands what the problem is, but I think they're afraid of rocking the boat. That's exactly why popular jobs stay popular.

[Supersnow845]

Damage is used as a proxy metric for player skill. As such, damage is the main thing that players on all roles care about (supports included). That's part of the reason why the 'trinity design' in this game has atrophied over time. Support functionality just isn't valued by the community the same way that raw damage is. That's also partially a function of a move away from pass-fail support checks.

You can argue that the value of tanks and healers is at least somewhat protected from this by a combination of fight design constraints, LB penalty, and role buffs. But the Physical Ranged/Magical Ranged split (or more accurately, Physical Ranged/Magical Ranged Support/Magical Ranged Damage split) is a lot more tenuous and much less enforced. I think the bottom line here is that all ranged jobs should provide an equivalent level of damage output and support functionality to each other. Large discrepancies in damage, like what currently exists between PCT/BLM and the other ranged jobs, are a problem.

Most people are happy to offload support functionality and the associated damage penalty that comes with it to another player. If you need that raise, just bring a second Caster with raise. If you don't, lock out the prog Casters. SE fully understands what the problem is, but I think they're afraid of rocking the boat. That's exactly why popular jobs stay popular.

That’s just advocating for nerfing everything that’s not the melees down to where the physical ranged are now

Would you support the same idea of “all ranged jobs should do the same damage/have the same rough utility” if that damage was equal to MNK’s current position rather than DNC’s current position

[Lyth]

I'd go one step further and advocate for a setup where a variety of melee and ranged jobs can take turns trading off for the top spot depending on fight uptime and burst considerations, if and only if there was a protected and enforced 2/2/2/2 TMHR setup on current content. You'll have to remember that the most recent tier ran a triple ranged meta on release because of how broken PCT is.

You can up-titrate most of the ranged jobs to be more competitive with melee, but PCT has no business being consistently above BLM and MCH. Possibly even RDM and BRD.

[mallleable]

The problem with trying to think of way to force true down time on certain roles is that it isn't just the DPS who would be affected, the supports will be affected as well. Supports arguably have worse tools for maintaining damage on an enemy in unfavorable situations. Like if you make fights or mechanics that are borderline unresolvable by magical ranged then you've screwed over healers, and are begging players to lock out any job that isn't AST or SMN. If you make fights or mechanics that are borderline unresolvable for melees, then you've screwed over the tanks, and possibly RDM, and SGE as well. That isn't balance, that's spite. Even mechanics like Liquid Hell, or Pantokrator, the rest of the party is still able to play the game even if they aren't doing a whole lot.

I feel like a mechanic like Mountain Fire from Valigarmanda extreme should be the standard for role celebration mechanics. It goes hard on delivering the fantasy of being the party's shield for tanks on top of being mechanically engaging for them even if it is simple. The rest of the party also has to participate, they take on an active role of 'being protected' by following valigarmanda's movements so they can stay behind the tanks. And to top it all off, it is just a very cinematic mechanic, and doesn't require lb3. You need all of these elements. So like what does a 'Mountain Fire' look like for other roles?

[Lyth]

Fights are more interesting when they are designed with varying amounts of melee uptime, because managing the disconnect is a really simple way to differentiate between players. It just means that you tune ranged jobs to do slightly less damage under target dummy conditions. The same is true for downtime segments and burst-orientated jobs, where you tune burst-orientated jobs to do less damage under pure uptime conditions. This type of numerical balance is the easy part, and it's really just player and development team dogma that prevent it from occurring.

The hard part is determining what sorts of support functionality each job should have, such that it's viewed as fair. But you can't really trade-off support functionality and DPS, nor can you have large discrepancies in support functionality within the same category. I suspect that the long term options are either to remove Raise altogether, or to merge Ranged down into a single role category with two slots, each which brings Raise as a role action.