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.

[Supersnow845]

There is also a very large contingent of melee players who don’t like forced downtime, to use an extreme example does anyone know a single tank who liked conflag strike, I certainly don’t. How do you deal with melee mains who don’t like parity induced by forced downtime; especially when the 2/2/2/2 you advocate for just locks square into designing mechanics around the ability for 4 players to stand in melee range. archadion may have smaller hitboxes but its mechanics are still explicitly designed for 4 players to stand in melee range for 99.9% of the time. Mechanics like junction shiva are a distant memory. Right now the greatest showing of high level disconnection with minimal uptime loss strat you can do is making VPR R1 using UF as a proxy ranged tool; this is to say nothing of the complete lack of uptime concerns for tanks despite having even more mobility tools than most pure melees

How do you make most melee mains happy when you have two distinctive camps, its the healer problem all over again where you have two camps who want exactly opposite things (when I play melee I prefer the work for uptime and downtime method, others I know prefer dummy’s)

As for PCT its ability to turn downtime into uptime with its motifs is incredibly strong nobody denies that, but take your suggestion all the way through to the opposing end. A full suite of motifs is 15 seconds long to cast, if preparing for a burst it’s 18 seconds as you cannot activate the creature muse the same GCD you paint it and you want to paint landscape last and immediately activate it. TOP is a 19 minute fight with like half of that being downtime, if PCT had to paint for 18 seconds with a target it would either delay everyone’s burst by 18 seconds which in some phases would even push half the burst out of the uptime window or PCT would be an absolute sandbag on the previous phase doing zero damage for 7 GCD’s to paint for a future phase, not even contributing filler. The job would be an absolute hot nightmare in ultimates approaching the level of standard BLM in DSR. This is of course also ignoring how this changes how it plays in casual

I honestly don’t think you’ve thought your solution to PCT all the way through, right now it’s too strong in downtime, but your suggestion would break the job so badly in the other direction ultimates like TOP that have phases where you hold everything for a burst in the next phase would absolutely hate PCT sandbagging and delaying bursts across different phases for painting in uptime. It’s PCT’s burst that needs to be reigned in, if PCT didn’t do 80% of its damage in its burst phase then letting it gain burst tools with downtime motifs wouldn’t benefit it so much. For example if PCT had BLM’s damage profile an ability to generate xenoglossies in downtime (which BLM functionally has with umbral soul) wouldn’t be broken

[Aco505]

The reason why I intentionally leave PCT out is specifically because lyth and I have had multiple long discussions about PCT’s balance state and I’ve given multiple suggestions of how it can be nerfed and explained my reasoning and even providing Maths for how that would constitute a nerf and how much of a nerf it would constitute on pages relating to PCT. I’m not ignoring PCT I’ve already given a comprehensive explanation of what I would do to nerf PCT

Your claim that a "70% uptime melee beats a p.range" is the 3rd message of this thread. There was no Lyth involved then and you still talked about melees only. I will concede that you did mention "damage casters" in the previous sentence to that statement though.

However, I've seen you make claims against melee often, with or without Lyth present, and I remember calling you out on it for ignoring PCT/BLM on another thread in the General Discussion sub forum some time ago, in which you actually agreed with me at the time.

Therefore, you do have a history of criticizing melees often.

Like, don't get me wrong, my only worry with PCT is the downtime gains. Otherwise the job is fine. Overtuned in most content except level 70 Ultimates (in which is still in a good 4th position) but otherwise relatively fine. The main problem is that the gap is too wide between the two "DPS groups".

I don't personally want the job over nerfed and I don't think its utility tools are that big of a deal. There would be literally zero fuss around PCT if it was at the bottom half of "group 1" or doing BRD DPS.

But, since every time you look at the top damage dealers of most content, what you mostly see is a sea of pink in both casual and high end duties with or without downtime... Well, it's concerning when there's complaints about melees that leave the damage casters out, because then we'd simply be shifting the meta to double caster parties instead of double melee parties. Where's the consideration for double p. range parties?

And to reiterate my point, your feedback of "remove gap closers from melee" or "remove ranged tools from NIN" just shows a clear misunderstanding of the role. How would we react to statements like "remove all instant casts and movement tools from casters" or the opposite of "make all casts fast and/or instant"? There's a reason why SMN is a contentious job for many caster mains: it feels like a p.range more than anything.

The solution is not removing tools but introducing choices that matter such as the aforementioned uptime vs burst cost: keeping Perfectio or damaging gap closers for uptime... all at the cost of dealing less damage in burst, in a relatively similar vein that casters have to deal with.

There is also a very large contingent of melee players who don’t like forced downtime, to use an extreme example does anyone know a single tank who liked conflag strike, I certainly don’t. How do you deal with melee mains who don’t like parity induced by forced downtime; especially when the 2/2/2/2 you advocate for just locks square into designing mechanics around the ability for 4 players to stand in melee range. archadion may have smaller hitboxes but its mechanics are still explicitly designed for 4 players to stand in melee range for 99.9% of the time.

It's logical that no one likes Conflag Strike. It's a mechanic that forces tanks to stand in a corner doing five or so ranged attacks with no possibility to work for uptime. The "uptime" strat was to simply skip it with enough DPS.

A mechanic silencing casters for 5 GCDs would be as bad, or Athena doing Superchain Theory I on loop just to grief caster movement (even though it might still be solvable somehow).

Melee downtime is fun when there's ways of overcoming it, such as good boss positioning in E12-2S. It becomes less fun when you sit there tossing ranged attacks for several seconds because unlike casters, melee have either very limited ranged tools or extremely weak ranged attacks that break the rotation. Casters can keep attacking the boss regardless at the cost of damage in burst if movement is involved. If anything, the ones that really suffer due to a bigger lack of tools are the healers, as they have to rely way more on slide casting.

I play DRG, a melee job known for having no defensive and no strong ranged GCD cooldown. Just to provide an example, you only need to use one Piercing Talon in M4S if playing well: the forced one between the platform destruction and the boss teleporting to a side during Ion Cluster. But playing well means learning how to adjust to and greed the different patterns of Witch Hunt 1 (which determines the whole timeline) and 2, as well as in Electrope Edge 2 and finally during the cannon blasts before the platform is destroyed. Without tank help, you're likely to die if taking several cannon hits while trying to keep uptime so it also becomes a team effort. This is what melee uptime should look like: a puzzle to solve and optimize (just like positionals) even if it can be tight or hard, not dropping tons of GCDs for no reason like in Conflag Strike.

One thing I definitely agree on is that if melee or positional uptime was harsher, less people would play melee or they would at least stick to the "easier" ones like VPR. But that's what happens with all roles. There's a tendency to favor the ones considered easier. AST is stronger than WHM but the latter is still the most played healer.

Additionally, mechanics have to be designed with 4 melee players in mind because a ranged player can do melee mechanics but it doesn't work the other way around. The fact that VPR can act as a limited pseudo-ranged DPS in some cases should in fact be welcomed as something different and interesting, even if the job does have too easy of a time when dealing with melee downtime. Don't we want uniqueness in the game or are all those discussions against homogenization hollow?

Perhaps one solution for VPR would be to introduce another GCD that uses Rattling Coils and deals slightly more damage than Uncoiled Fury to create a choice. VPR can also potentially lose damage if having to bank UFs that could've been used in a buff/pot for uptime later.

In conclusion, the whole damage gap and melee uptime topic has been beaten to death since Abyssos, a tier in which mostly one boss actually challenged melee DPS: P5S with positionals. Otherwise, practically full uptime. As Lyth said, this is boring. This is why Criterion dungeons were a breath of fresh air. Melee shouldn't have to suffer in every single encounter but we shouldn't get uptime for free all the time either. I think the first Arcadion tier and Criterion have been steps in the right direction and I hope we get more of it in the future.

[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.

[Valence]

I don't personally want the job over nerfed and I don't think its utility tools are that big of a deal.

Man, I wish as a rphys player I had PCT's utility tools. Oh right, I have tactician? PCT has tempera grassa which is just as good. And it can party heal. I have dismantle? Oh right, they have addle too. This job has utility on the level of freaking DNC. And the damage of a melee.

Where is my sustained damage and support yoshi? All casters but BLM are starting or outright have better support than us.

Well, it's concerning when there's complaints about melees that leave the damage casters out, because then we'd simply be shifting the meta to double caster parties instead of double melee parties. Where's the consideration for double p. range parties?

Not gonna lie and I don't mean this in a bad way because I agree with you, but it's something to read melees being afraid of getting the rphys treatment and being relegated to the 1% party bonus..

[PercibelTheren]

Man, I wish as a rphys player I had PCT's utility tools. Oh right, I have tactician? PCT has tempera grassa which is just as good. And it can party heal. I have dismantle? Oh right, they have addle too. This job has utility on the level of freaking DNC. And the damage of a melee.

Where is my sustained damage and support yoshi? All casters but BLM are starting or outright have better support than us.





Not gonna lie and I don't mean this in a bad way because I agree with you, but it's something to read melees being afraid of getting the rphys treatment and being relegated to the 1% party bonus..

This is exactly it. It's hilarious when people claim the utility of PCT is "no big deal" when Physranged players have been told for years that their utility is the reason they barely deal more damage than tanks. Same with mobility - SMN is right there (it's creeping up on RPhys levels of utility, too, by the way) and PCT isn't exactly immobile, either. At this point, there has ceased to be a reason beyond "it's just that way" and that's annoying.

[Aco505]

Man, I wish as a rphys player I had PCT's utility tools.

Which is why I said some posts ago that the role of p.range must be reconsidered as a long-term solution. If they're going to be support, then give more to them. If it's going to be something else, then clarify it.

Not gonna lie and I don't mean this in a bad way because I agree with you, but it's something to read melees being afraid of getting the rphys treatment and being relegated to the 1% party bonus..

That's not what I'm saying. There's nothing to be afraid of here. What I mean is that often discussions on the damage gap center on making meta comps go from double melee to caster or both but that the possibility of double p. range comps is rarely considered in the equation.

[mallleable]

I've been thinking about jobs on a sliding scale between generalists, and specialists. Generalists are good in any situation, and specialists spike in power depending on their situation. The melee role is a generalist damage role while there are a lot more specialists in the caster, and ranged roles. PCT, and BLM are balanced as generalists while the rest of the ranged jobs are being balanced as specialists. RDM, and SMN are being balanced as resurrection specialists, and BLU is so specialized that it is excluded, and has limits. Every job in the physical ranged role is being balanced as being kind of free movement, uninterruptable uptime specialists. Why are there so few (2/7) ranged generalists? Why is there specialty overlap between the available specialists (2 rez/3 mobility)? Why are there no specialists in the melee role?

[Lyth]

I think in an ideal world, it would be nice if every job had its own set of little tricks to make everyone's performance indirectly better in a non-quantifiable way (and using movement tools to generate uptime is my favorite example of this). But DPS absolutely matters to DPS players, and there's no escaping that fact.

I also think that nobody would play melee if there wasn't that risk trade-off that exists around melee uptime. Ultimately, that means that under full melee uptime conditions, a melee job necessarily should deal more damage, or else everyone would swap to ranged because it just does more damage under all conditions. But fight designs with large hitboxes and wall bosses are also fundamentally unsatisfying to play on melee. It's only when you're challenged around uptime through melee disconnects that the gameplay becomes engaging. Every fight should be designed around this principle of disconnect challenges, with ranged jobs naturally pulling ahead on fights which are more technically demanding on melee.

The same is true for consistent DPS. Why would you ever play a job with a flatter burst profile and a strong uptime focus (i.e. BLM) if burst always reigns supreme? That's why you design consistent DPS jobs with higher damage at baseline, so that when you have downtime periods and intermissions, burst doesn't pull so far ahead. This is just common sense. And the problem with PCT comes down to the fact it just cannot co-exist with this type of gameplay, which is why job designs like BLM are being rapidly driven to extinction.

...

What makes melee disconnects interesting is what happens at the moment of the disconnect. It's really about understanding the cut-off point in the castbar where you disengage and re-engage, as well as the tools and resources that you use to do so. It's perfectly fine to have lots of little moments that individually test the player's timing and movement toolset. It's also great to have lots of little moments that give players a choice of either a risky high-precision movement vs. a safer movement that generates downtime. That's one of the big draws of playing melee.

Temporary disconnects are a skill differential. Sustained downtime is just a DPS penalty for the sake of it, which is why it's poorly received. A good fight designer understands the difference between the two. If you don't like to be challenged in this way, then you just don't pick a role that plays in melee range. I don't think there are two camps here. Either you can do it or you can't.

2/2/2/2 design is a natural barrier to additional jobs in melee range. No self-respecting tank or melee will take a ranged slot. Least of all a job with the highest positional counts in the game.

As far as PCT is concerned, it's worth noting that many other jobs have asymmetric burst on their openers because you need uptime to build resources. That's one of the features that prevents burst-focused jobs from being completely dominant (it also potentially generates some interesting considerations around potion usage). There are lots of directions you could go with this, either in terms of shifting some potency off to motifs themselves, or in developing a resource dependence using the palette system. But purely time-gated burst that is completely disconnected from uptime is a bad idea. Resource systems are what link uptime to burst. You have to earn your burst.

[mallleable]

The same thing can be said about casters as well in exploiting the holes in an enemy's attack patterns so you can just plant yourself, and keep casting. It's just fun, and makes you feel clever by rewarding you for being observant even if they are there by design. And it's why I'm generally frustrated with the phys ranged role because there just a lack of opportunities for clever gameplay in the job's toolkits. The only ways to change up how a phys ranged might approach a fight is to force down time by either removing their target or by taking control away from away from the player with things like stuns, and forced marches. But these situations affect everyone.