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

[Lyth]

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No, it's a viewpoint built on 10 years of doing raid content. The primary advantage that FFXIV's job system offers is that allows you to cater the same role to a variety of players. You might not be playing a certain role right now simply because the right job doesn't exist yet. For example, if you were a fan of DoT effects, the thing that might tip you over to raid as Magical Ranged might be a pestilence spreading DoT Caster. Or perhaps you're not interested in the current tank aesthetics, but you've always wanted to play a tank job with a giant hammer.

I can personally attest to this as well, because my interest in tanking and melee arose specifically out of having 'the right jobs' to pique my interest. I would love to spend an expansion or two playing healer, and it's usually my most played role in games with a greater PvP focus. But the right job doesn't exist yet (mostly because they're all WHM/SCH clones).

Inversely, if you restrict the jobs that people can play in content, then you drive people out of those roles, and out of the game. Not everyone is willing to swap. The problem with physical-only and magical-only effects is that they are the epitome of 'bring the job, not the player.' They don't have anything to do with skill or execution. You can't even really argue that this is a flavor thing, because this isn't the kind of game where spell reflects and counters exist, at least not currently. I've seen that this game handles these physical-only/magic-only abilities consistently poorly, and the advantages that certain jobs get grandfathered into as a result persist for expansions on end.

[Valence]

It works both ways. The right job or system may also get taken away. What's your point in all of this?

[Aco505]

Inversely, if you restrict the jobs that people can play in content, then you drive people out of those roles, and out of the game. Not everyone is willing to swap. The problem with physical-only and magical-only effects is that they are the epitome of 'bring the job, not the player.'

I see your overall point but this doesn't really happen based on that. DRK and GNB are still widely popular jobs. Sure, perhaps less than WAR because the latter is considered easy and strong but that happens with every role.

The reason RDM is at a disadvantage is because it deals way less damage than BLM/PCT. If the damage was similar or closer, these differences wouldn't matter as much (to the players).

Could actions like Dark Mind or Dark Missionary change to include a portion of physical damage for the former and all damage for the latter? Yeah, but it wouldn't be the sole reason why the job would be at a disadvantage. WAR is so strong because it's capable of sustaining itself well while having an easy rotation and being a 1-minute job without a burst buff to manage and plenty of auto-crits, ingredients which makes it consistent.

If some players swapped from WAR/PLD to GNB/DRK during Abyssos, for instance, it was due to wanting to do more damage.

Shake It Off is quite strong but HoL and DM can easily cover equal or higher amounts of damage if used to mitigate two or more magic hits.

[Carighan]

Yeah WAR is dominant not even because of the ease of play, but definitely not for their generic damage reduction, rather for two highly specific reasons: Their personal short-CD scales with enemy numbers which makes them the clearly-best job in dungeons, and their invuln has a very short CD which makes them the automatic choice in raids.

[Supersnow845]

I think they were more referring to HW where PLD blocked physical and DRK resisted magical but WAR just did both (though it was slightly weaker)

So sorta by default you picked a WAR then whatever damage was worse in the tier (which in HW was 99% magic) determined the second pick (which was almost always DRK)

It’s an interesting point but it’s also kinda moot because the modern tank AOE CD’s (well until they buffed SIO into the stratosphere) were a good example of equal but different because the magic CD’s are better for multi hits (which except for HH have mostly all been magic in the past) while shields were better for all damage but could only be consumed once

[Carighan]

No, it's a viewpoint built on 10 years of doing raid content. The primary advantage that FFXIV's job system offers is that allows you to cater the same role to a variety of players. You might not be playing a certain role right now simply because the right job doesn't exist yet. For example, if you were a fan of DoT effects, the thing that might tip you over to raid as Magical Ranged might be a pestilence spreading DoT Caster. Or perhaps you're not interested in the current tank aesthetics, but you've always wanted to play a tank job with a giant hammer.

Holupaminit!

If that were the core tenet, wouldn't that imply that homogenization - of which the removal of specifics type and hence, folding all defensive abilities to be generic is but one tiny tiny building block - is a crucially, back-breakingly bad move to pull as it reduces the amount of diversity within a certain role and hence makes players find less hyper-specific "for me"-ways of expressing themselves within that role?

As in, if someone does not pick up tank because they enjoy spellcasting too much, a caster-tank would solve this. A Battle Mage, someone who actually has to stand still and hardcast spells, but all that while tanking the boss? But the thing is, hopefully it's easy to see how this inherent weakness with no upside (hardcasts as a tank) is not at all incomparable to the weakness of having a magic-only defense vs someone elses all-damage defense? Yes? And from there, would it not make sense to remove the hardcasts? Of course it does, it levels the playing field between tanks.

But, you just removed the very thing that someone can used as their personal hook to dive into tanking with.

Hence my "myopic view"-comment, it's a very FFXIV-centric point that eshews the breadth and wealth of information about the upsides and downsides of various individual and overall class designs and changes to design other MMOs have already explored and from which FFXIV can easily learn and take stuff that works while avoiding things that do not work.

(edit) Mind you I'm not really disagreeing, but I feel if we want diversity within roles to appeal to as many players as possible we should find a combat-side way to support as many divergent and unique job elements as possible, instead of trying to fix this on a job side.

[Lyth]

A lot of people are of the mindset that 'homogenization' is a bad word without thinking more critically beneath the surface.

Job balance is essential. If there's one job that is consistently better to the point that it overshadows all others in the role, then those other job aesthetics might as well not exist. PCT is one of the most blatant examples of this that we've seen in a while. It really doesn't matter if you like the aesthetic of RDM, SMN, or BLM. You must play PCT if you want to consider yourself a 'Caster main' in higher stakes content. Are there times where a raise could be useful on a second Caster? Sure. Are there times where your friends will let you play BLM in a speedrun? Sure. But if you're going to only learn one Caster job, that needs to be PCT. And if you show up as the only Caster, it had better be on PCT. Because even when that slot isn't locked to PCT on fights with soft checks, your teammates will still be silently cursing you for scuppering their prog. There's just that intrinsic bias in people's minds right now.

And it really only takes a moderately difficult DPS check for players to become openly resentful about this type of balance discrepancy and start locking slots.

Homogenization is one way in which job balance occurs. The primary issue is that it's not interesting. Let's say that you want every tank to have a raidwide mitigation tool. So you add in Reprisal as a role action. That's homogenous. It's also balanced. But it doesn't mean that you have to sacrifice your chosen aesthetic to play tank.

Partial homogenization is a different story. Shake it Off is very clearly superior to Dark Missionary and Heart of Light. Let's set aside the magic damage only effect, because that's beyond obvious. Let's also set aside the partywide healing and regen effect, because that's also really obvious. The break-even point between flat DR and %DR, all other thinks being equal, is when the total damage mitigated is equal to 100% of your maximum HP. But Shake it Off is already higher tuned from the outset, so that damage has to exceed 150-210% of your maximum HP instead. And that's excluding the effect of all other raidwide defensives. And we know that %DR effects are multiplicative, which means that your 10% DR is actually much lower than this in practice. Multiple hits don't really redeem this, because that's accounted for under the total damage mitigated. These are effects that you can mathematically compare, and there's a clear winner.

Because SE doesn't rebalance these effects as regularly, I would say that if you want to play tank, it is probably better if you have a long term interest in WAR's gameplay aesthetic. Other jobs will fluctuate in value based off of DPS balance, but WAR is always the safe pick. I don't enjoy this, which is one of the reasons why I won't invest in playing tanks in the long term.

I think that there are some things that should just be standardized. DPS parity. Pass-fail effects. I think the theory behind what they did with the 40% DR actions on tanks is interesting, with a unique effect on each in addition to the standard pass-fail effect (although Great Nebula just has superior eHP). If you want to have divergent effects, they can't be directly comparable. That's the mistake that they keep making. You can have individual strengths and weaknesses, as long as they are not unilateral. Because then one job just becomes mathematically better, and you end up with a job like PCT with 100% representation in a slot. Why bother introducing more jobs on each role if there's going to be a consistent dev favorite, sometimes across expansions?

[Supersnow845]

Still the wider implications of this affect far more than just PCT. Returning to the original point of this thread, the position of the physical ranged in the DPS meta. The physical ranged are partially homogenised to just be objectively weaker for near no benefit. Their unique “utility” can basically be found on any other role (MNK has both BRD and DNC’s unique effect, PCT has both DNC’s and MCH’s, RPR has a version of DNC’s, SMN has DNC’s, RDM has BRD’s) and they don’t bring the damage to justify the punishment uptime concerns inflict on the other roles. The damage casters don’t lose enough casts to be pushed below the phys ranged nor are the melee at ranged of downtime concerns pushing them below the phys ranged

The physical ranged have zero niche, they have no unique mechanics (renalds from T7 anyone) dedicated to play into their design and they bring nothing unique to the table utility wise that justifies their existence (the only class that has truly unique utility is SCH)

The phys ranged need a proper niche. Nerfing PCT above below or round the twist in regards to the melee doesn’t fix this problem. If PCT gets nerfed below the melees then it just ends up in RDM and SMN’s position of being a pseudo physical ranged that shares the same problems as the actual physical ranged, if you don’t nerf PCT then PCT continues to dominate the magical ranged spot over BLM for those who don’t want a rezz caster

There needs to be a legit reason to want to bring a physical ranged over bringing a melee depending on one situation hush as there needs to be a reason to bring BLM over PCT depending on the situation

[mallleable]

One of the ways I've been viewing a lot of the ranged woes as a problem of generalists versus specialists. Specialists have affordances, and actions that spike in power situationally, while generalists have affordances, and actions that have a broader use. An action like Mantra is a generalist support action that has a use anywhere where healing might be needed versus dual casted Verraise which is only strong when lots of other players have been KO'd including the healers. MNK, despite having two support actions, can be considered a generalist, while RDM can be considered a specialist.

Without getting into too much detail, I think there should be more generalists than specialists. A problem with the ranged role as a whole is that there are too many specialists, and not enough generalists. If we consider BLM, and PCT as well as the entire melee DPS role to be generalists then it leaves the rest of the ranged to be considered specialists. There are two rez specialists in the magical ranged role, and three "mobility" specialists in the entire physical ranged role. And now we can see the redundancies, and where tough decisions could be made like which rez caster, and which two phys ranged could become generalists. It also begs the question: could any of the melees afford to become specialists? If so, which job(s), and what specialty?

[Valence]

Having different tools with some clearly, objectively superior like SiO, isn't a proof of anything but bad balancing and design execution.

And there will not be a unique reason to bring rphys with the current battle model anyway, unless they turn rphys into casters or melees.