Melee is easier than it's ever been. Can we stop babying the role?

[Reginald_Cain]

This role gets insane damage for free, gets utility like crest of borrowed time and mantra, have ranged nukes that do a better job at clearing content to make phys ranged shine (viper in m6s) and for some reason melee players cry if a ranged dps like pictomancer dares encroach on their damage territory.

But my uptime wah! Stfu the only melee with no spammable ranged gcd is monk and tp is gone and these attacks no longer break combo.

Even red mage got its melee uptime made easier which is ridiculous and subverts class fantasy.

It's time all selfish and hard jobs dealt comparable damage and melee isn't taking the 4th slot 99% of the time .

[Carighan]

It's a problem in fight design.

In ages past (on a gaming scale I mean), the deal was this:

• Melee DPS deal high damage, and have superior defenses for being a damage dealer. This was because not only can they not always attack (say ranged enemies that run away), but they also are exposed to a barrage of 360° cleaves and such, all untelegraphed. They needed to survive this damage. Their output was also partially balanced by their higher burden on healers having to re-heal that melee-range damage.
• Caster DPS dealt high damage but usually less than melee, on account of having to lose casts and abort whatever they were doing when they had to move. Potentially letting DoTs fall off, buffs drop, etc. To make up for this, their damage when they could actually stand still and cast in peace was superior.
• Some ranged DPS like rangers or archers dealt the lowest damage, but in return for usually having full mobility while dealing damage. This was not universal, something they suffered from having to be in melee reach, but that just meant they were bad at solo-play in older games (and back then nobody except classes specifically meant for that could solo well in the first place).

I'm all for melee dealing tons of damage despite their nowadays near-inexistent restrictions and lack of even positionals (with low-CD 2-charge True North it's a joke anyways). But it needs to have actualy consequences to be in melee reach of a boss, tbh. Something you don't want to be doing unless well, that's what you do, but you need to sometimes just sit outside and chuck lances for example.

[aiqa]

It's a problem in fight design.

It is not. Shifting the problem toward fight design is basically arguing for maintaining status quo.

In ages past (on a gaming scale I mean), the deal was this:

• Melee DPS deal high damage, and have superior defenses for being a damage dealer. This was because not only can they not always attack (say ranged enemies that run away), but they also are exposed to a barrage of 360° cleaves and such, all untelegraphed. They needed to survive this damage. Their output was also partially balanced by their higher burden on healers having to re-heal that melee-range damage.
• Caster DPS dealt high damage but usually less than melee, on account of having to lose casts and abort whatever they were doing when they had to move. Potentially letting DoTs fall off, buffs drop, etc. To make up for this, their damage when they could actually stand still and cast in peace was superior.
• Some ranged DPS like rangers or archers dealt the lowest damage, but in return for usually having full mobility while dealing damage. This was not universal, something they suffered from having to be in melee reach, but that just meant they were bad at solo-play in older games (and back then nobody except classes specifically meant for that could solo well in the first place).

Looking back to 3.x as an excuse for class balance in 7.x, is nonsense. History isn't the reason for current balance. The current developers are.

I'm all for melee dealing tons of damage despite their nowadays near-inexistent restrictions and lack of even positionals (with low-CD 2-charge True North it's a joke anyways). But it needs to have actualy consequences to be in melee reach of a boss, tbh. Something you don't want to be doing unless well, that's what you do, but you need to sometimes just sit outside and chuck lances for example.

The choice is to either change some potency values, or completely redesign every bossfight in the game. Melee would need extremely excessive downtime for VPR to approach the rDPS contribution of a BRD. No melee player would enjoy that much downtime. And melee jobs would need a big rework to balance our their ranged dps, VPR has far better ranged options than MNK. And SE is not going to rework all bossfights.

And even if they managed to change content so that melee has far more downtime, that would end up with BLM contributing far more than any melee. So then all bossfihgts need top account for that too. And I have no idea what would work. BLM is very mobile these days, so adding more forced movement is not going work.

The only realistic way forward, is to make the optimal rDPS contribution for any dps job far more equal.

[Carighan]

Looking back to 3.x as an excuse for class balance in 7.x, is nonsense. History isn't the reason for current balance. The current developers are.

Well yes. The players asked for tons of homogenization, and the devs listened. Also, I think you misunderstood me. But I sometimes forget I'm a bit older than most gamers. >.>

The only realistic way forward, is to make the optimal rDPS contribution for any dps job far more equal.

So basically yes, players want more homogenization and less identity. You are even doing it right there.

But I mean, there'd be plenty space to do role or even class identity while keeping overall rDPS nearly identical. Virtually all possible setups of class and fight design have been explored in some *RPG. We had everything from the designated best-at designs per role from late-TBC era WoW, we had learn-skills-to-advance with limited hotbar slots so you can't use all your abilities in GW2, we had all-telegraphed-AoEs action combat in Wildstar, we even had an MMO that sadly never made it out of alpha where you earned XP by roleplaying and GMs followed you around to play into it and judge your roleplay. On top of MMOs we had so many RPGs in general that virtually and class setup, unique gimmick or combat mechanism has been done, and we can see what worked and didn't work.

We also can see how elastic playerbases in general are to certain degrees of numerical balance vs class uniqueness vs fight designs.

One important thing however is to accept that by and large, homogenized output is inherently incompatible with class or even role identity. Do it long enough and you will erase what it even means to be "melee" or "a caster". The logical consequence btw would be a near-GW2-like design where even tanks and healers no longer exist, rather everybody can do anything, and you just select different loadouts to put onto your hotbar depending on what is expected of you. It's in a lot of ways the more "honest" version of the design paradigm we already see nowadays.

[aiqa]

Well yes. The players asked for tons of homogenization, and the devs listened. Also, I think you misunderstood me. But I sometimes forget I'm a bit older than most gamers. >.>



So basically yes, players want more homogenization and less identity. You are even doing it right there.

May I ask, have you played a lot of other MMORPGs, or RPGs in general? Most of this design space has been explored, to any end imaginable. We know how different designs look, and how they work or don't work. Somebody has long done it. We've had everything from what I said above in early WoW or early~mid DAoC, we had designs based on learning skills and freeform class construction with just a handful of hotbar spots in Guild Wars 1, we had all-telegraphed-AoEs-no-exceptions in Wildstar, I mean we even had albeit only as an alpha an MMORPG where you earned XP for roleplaying (and GMs followed you around to play into it and judge your RPing).

We can just see how changes would look. Like, you seem to be a bit confused how BLM would work if a system were to differentiate melee by downtime and damage-intake more, and well, I even mention that just in the second bullet point: Casters miss spellcasts. Due to not being able to stand still. So we're looking at very very slow but very very strong damage output, coupled with few if any movement tools and ability to cast on the move. Casters excel when a fight doesn't force them to move repeatedly. And they falter when it does. That used to be the design paradigm. Not in 3.0 or some other modern game (by comparison). In older MMORPGs!

Would that be viable from a modern perspective? Of course not. But it'd be possible to take some minor notes from it to promote some role identity but only if fight design is adapted to work with that.

I reject the idea that similar rDPS across dps jobs has to mean homogenization. The uniqueness of a job isn't "best rDPS". And I never argued for removing variance between different fights. The reason why things are all the same, is because players couldn't accept a job being better in content A, and worse in content B. And players demanding strict dps checks, without excluding any job

But this thread isn't about that, it's about job ABCD having far higher rDPS than EFGH. And they have been for years, multiple expansion, through multiple reworks, consistently in any relevant content. So the point is, the FF devs seem to have some idea about why melee "should" contribute more than ranged jobs. And why that idea is inherently flawed. Just tweaking some potency numbers can completely fix the wide rDPS spread across dps jobs. No more homogenization needed.

[Carighan]

Yeah but my solutions is to make melee difficult to play. Their rDPS would be balanced, because they say have 20% higher DPS, but can only contribute it 83% of the time.

Unpopular maybe? Maybe. But it's not like ranged DPS cannot take the melee spots (so only one is required for the buff), and devs could also stop spamming more and more melee jobs into the design every second expansion if the role becomes less popular. (I'm not a melee DPS fan conceptually, yes)

But fair enough, just reducing melee DPS across the board while upping caster+ranged slightly would work in making all roles functionally equal, which yes they mostly are (which isn't a good thing, and this'd make it worse, but it is a tiny numbers change of course).

[Reginald_Cain]

Well yes. The players asked for tons of homogenization, and the devs listened. Also, I think you misunderstood me. But I sometimes forget I'm a bit older than most gamers. >.>.

I don't always agree with you but you have fun ideas half the time.
Don't see yourself as an unc but an OG

[SpeckledBurd]

Well yes. The players asked for tons of homogenization, and the devs listened. Also, I think you misunderstood me. But I sometimes forget I'm a bit older than most gamers. >.>

I've been playing since Heavensward and I'd argue that the players didn't ask for homogenization, we just asked for better balance because the balance in Heavensward was terrible. Some of fixing that balance did require homogenization, but that was stuff like making it so Paladin just being worse at mitigating any fight where the outgoing damage was magical instead of physical which just made playing that job miserable rather than actually have anything to do with playstyle or job feel. Changes like making every raidwide DPS buff on a 120 second cooldown, every healer having their offensive kit reduced to a 30 second dot and a single spammable spell, or making every tank's burst window some flavor of Fell Cleave spam was never something people asked for, it was something the devs did on their own presumably because every job existing on the same or similar timelines makes determining how much damage a job will contribute over that timeline much easier.

Now that said there probably should have been more pushback in Shadowbringers/Endwalker when those changes were made, but hindsight is 20/20 and unfortunately everyone just saw those changes as buffs because of the multiplicative nature of partywide buffs aligning at the time.

[Carighan]

I've been playing since Heavensward and I'd argue that the players didn't ask for homogenization, we just asked for better balance because the balance in Heavensward was terrible.

Goomba fallacy nonwithstanding, asks for more homogenization are constant, even nowadays when we're already so over-homogenized. Look at DRKs every so often flaring up that it's soooo unfair that their Living Dead might not trigger but they didn't die either way (and conveniently forget that getting this homogenization would cost them their extra 1s-10s invuln duration). Look at the discussion around caster DPS in particular Picto.

The problem is as always this: You can improve balance but at some point, which depends a lot on your combat system and enemy design, be it 3% rDPS difference, 5%, 10%, you cannot further improve balance without removing most unique aspects as these naturally make a class better or worse at a specific mechanic and as your game ages you'll naturally have more and more fights where that mechanic is either overrepresented or underrepresented.

And yes, like you say though I'd go a step back further. Though Stormblood was highly unique on many jobs, it ended up laying the groundwork for the massive homogenization effort that was Shadowbringers (amazing as that expansion was, overall). Its fight-design was never re-implemented mid-expansion, and it was understandably quite beloved. So wanting to expand on that naturally required tighter balance and removal of per-class hindrances to fight design. Which in turn necessitated sweeping reforms to class design. Stormblood was also a particular high point of players asking for strong tight balance efforts, which again naturally require the removal of per-class hindrances to rDPS balance.

[Carstien]

I've been playing since Heavensward and I'd argue that the players didn't ask for homogenization, we just asked for better balance because the balance in Heavensward was terrible. Some of fixing that balance did require homogenization, but that was stuff like making it so Paladin just being worse at mitigating any fight where the outgoing damage was magical instead of physical which just made playing that job miserable rather than actually have anything to do with playstyle or job feel. Changes like making every raidwide DPS buff on a 120 second cooldown, every healer having their offensive kit reduced to a 30 second dot and a single spammable spell, or making every tank's burst window some flavor of Fell Cleave spam was never something people asked for, it was something the devs did on their own presumably because every job existing on the same or similar timelines makes determining how much damage a job will contribute over that timeline much easier.

Now that said there probably should have been more pushback in Shadowbringers/Endwalker when those changes were made, but hindsight is 20/20 and unfortunately everyone just saw those changes as buffs because of the multiplicative nature of partywide buffs aligning at the time.

The party buffs themselves are a big problem with homogenization, and are all at 120 CD for balance reasons that only exist because they do. Back in ARR, there was only BRD and NIN with a damage buff that affected the party. That left jobs able to have different paths to damage, you had jobs with heavy burst like DRG with it's multiple damage buffs and spineshatter dive and dragonfire dive lining up with blood for blood, a huge damage buff at the time and WAR, saving for inner beast with berserk on CD, then you had jobs like MNK that has almost no burst at all and the parse looked more flat, with small bumps when the smaller damage buffs applies such as cross class blood for blood. Since then most dps jobs added have some kind of party buff, and DRG and MNK and SMN had them added as time went on.

With so many party-wide buffs in the game, consistent damage across the entire fight became less valuable than what you could squeeze into the burst so a job that did the same overall as a burst job while being a consistent job would still perform poorer when you took stacking buffs into account. So, SE has now made all the jobs into burst jobs, and all the buffs on the same timer, that way it is easier for them to balance.

I think it would be interesting to remove all the damage buffs, and let some jobs be burst and others be consistent damage and see what happens, but that's almost certainly not gonna happen because I can't see SE re-working every DPS job, and 2 healers, to make that happen.