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

[Lyth]

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the role labelled 'DPS' is primarily concerned with how to output more DPS. Anyone who claims otherwise is trying to sell you the bridge at Griffin Crossing.

That aside, numerical DPS parity for all jobs is really easy to achieve on a single fight. The problem is that DPS is also a function of fight design, which makes it a lot more challenge to balance over multiple fights. The problem with Endwalker's DPS balance came down to the fact that Abyssos in particular had a large number of bosses with large hitboxes and wall bosses. It's worth noting that no melee player enjoys this type of design, because managing disconnects and uptime challenges is how melee players differentiate themselves from other players. You could just as easily design a fight at the other extreme, and everyone would happily just play ranged if given the choice.

The problem that PCT presents in particular is that it completely ignores downtime because of how motifs were designed. If you want an analogy, it's the equivalent of designing Soul Sow on RPR to grant you full gauge (and even that would be a bigger constraint than what PCT has currently, because Soul Sow has a longer cast time than PCT's motifs.) As a result, you're not going to balance it for uptime and downtime considerations simultaneously, because no other job ignores downtime in the same way. I'm just baffled that we're approaching the midpoint of the expansion and the balance team still hasn't identified that pure potency adjustments will not fix this.

[Carighan]

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the role labelled 'DPS' is primarily concerned with how to output more DPS.

Yeah but from the other perspective, if your design for DPS is largely concerned with your DPS-output, then you fail as a designer and need to start over at the beginning.

And you keep ranting about Picto, as if a caster jobs working genuinely different from one another is a bad thing. I don't think you understand how much you are essentially just praising how all four casters work quite different and how good that is for the game as a whole. Is their output balanced? Of course not. Does it matter? Sure, but that's the menial work you can leave for the intern to tweak numbers up and down. The actual designers did their job and hammered out four implementations that - despite sharing the same base gameplay paradigm of "fixed-ish rotation" - work largely different and feel really different to play and cannot just more or less copy hotbar setups like say melee DPS can usually do where similar buttons do similar functions in your rotation.

And it even spans the gamut of what players want to engage with, from a super-mobile and low-APM Summoner for an easygoing job over a quite immobile but uniquely spam-rezzing and melee-range-using Red Mage and a somewhat immobile and always-casting Black Mage to the drift resistant free-form casting Pictomancer.

Sure, sure. At some point someone has to balance the numbers. That's so utterly unimportant though (by comparison), it's difficult to even meaningfully put into words how little it matters. It's the opposite (tight numerical balance but bad design, see melee DPS, ranged DPS and in particular tanks and to a degree healers) that is really really problematic for a game's combat system health, as evident by how bad physical ranged DPS works right now.