SAM out classing all other DPS

[Oscura]

Indeed it might as well be. Those demanding Samurai be nerfed are certainly expressing as much with their sentiments. :'3

Low quality bait.

[Thunda_Cat_SMASH]

Low quality bait.

No more than tacitly blaming SAM mains for wanting to be relevant. As a MCH main, I sympathize.

[Eyvhokan]

On SAM you lose potency in ways that aren't readily apparent. Same with positionals. People see that the combo potency doesn't require the positional, so they assume SAM has it easier. Untrue. It loses you Kenki. To be exact, 300 potency lost through 5 missed positionals, roughly the same level of punishment as the other Melee.

Hold on a sec.

Losing 300 potency through 5 missed positionals is only the skills Kasha and Gekko. They each feature once each in the weapon skill rotation, meaning it happens after 2.5 rotations of missing positionals.

DRG loses 310 to 350 from 4 missed positionals, and uses 6 in the whole weapon skill rotation (12348956798). This means only 0.67 rotations of missing positionals will causes a greater potency loss.

MNK has even more positional attacks than DRG, although I don't think the missed positional potency is as high per individual weaponskill on average.

Nastrond is a grand total of 4% or so of a DRG's DPS. Needs changing, but losing one set of Nastronds would set you back probably less than 1% of their total DPS.

Rather than switching away from potency and to % from the positional potency punishment mentioned, losing the nastronds (with a big enough timer) is losing 960 potency. Each Nastrond dropped from shorter timers is 320 on its own.

[Black_Starr]

So, what does drg needing love have to do with sam anyway? If dragon sucks atm nerfing sam will not make it unsuck. The two jobs aren't competing with each other, they are supposed to compliment one another. Instead of talking about how we can destroy sam for destruction's sake, should we not be discussing how to bring jobs like drg and mch back to desirable levels. #dontnerfmebro

[Eyvhokan]

So, what does drg needing love have to do with sam anyway? If dragon sucks atm needing sam will not make it unsuck. The two jobs aren't competing with each other, they are supposed to compliment one another. Instead of talking about how we can destroy sam for destruction's sake, should we not be discussing how to bring jobs like drg and mch back to desirable levels. #dontnerfmebro

Actually that was defending SAM damage, because for all we know, the high SAM damage in parses is because the class isn't punished as hard by boss mechanics so has less to lose rather than the damage being inherently too high. A lot of bosses spin around (even easy ones), meaning you either miss the positional or delay a GCD and the former is usually the better option.

[TheRedMage]

Hold on a sec.
MNK has even more positional attacks than DRG, although I don't think the missed positional potency is as high per individual weaponskill on average.

Not sure how crits are in potency compared to non crit. But 5 missed positionals for MNK is 190-200 pot loss at least.

[Nominous]

Losing 300 potency through 5 missed positionals is only the skills Kasha and Gekko. They each feature once each in the weapon skill rotation, meaning it happens after 2.5 rotations of missing positionals.

DRG loses 310 to 350 from 4 missed positionals, and uses 6 in the whole weapon skill rotation (12348956798). This means only 0.67 rotations of missing positionals will causes a greater potency loss.

MNK has even more positional attacks than DRG, although I don't think the missed positional potency is as high per individual weaponskill on average.

Rather than switching away from potency and to % from the positional potency punishment mentioned, losing the nastronds (with a big enough timer) is losing 960 potency. Each Nastrond dropped from shorter timers is 320 on its own.

In a vacuum, let's say we miss a positional 5 times flat, in a row. Heavy Thrust loses you 80 potency, you lose 50 from Chaos Thrust, 90 from Wheeling, 90 from FC, 90 all the way at the FC after Full Thrust. 400 potency lost in that sequence, for the sake of comparing it to SAM's 5 weaponskill break-point for losing potency, which rounds out to 300 (losing one Shinten). DRG gets it a little worse than SAM, can't argue that. The actual DPS losses incurred are close enough for either Job to be negligible, which is also true. Even a terrible run where you missed like 20 positionals total (on either Job), ends up being about 1200 potency lost for a SAM, and 1600 potency lost for a DRG. I mean, even if you're embarrassing at melee, the gap is extremely small over the course of a fight, if played even half decently.

Potency lost makes more sense than percentages when talking about positionals. That's why I switched over to percentages when talking about Nastrond, since I feel it's more effective for illustrating the 'punishment' for losing eye stacks during a fight. It's not a totally arbitrary amount, and it must be considered. However, it's yet another small discrepancy.

The whole point here, is that discussion keeps shifting from one thing to the next about SAM, and hardly any have much weight to them. First it was how much DPS it does. Then it became about how easy they pull off their numbers. Then it was that they don't lose resources. And it just cycles, without end, regardless of how much you can prove that...

SAM, like every other Job in the game, needs to work, in their own way, to achieve min/maxed numbers.
SAM, like every other Job in the game, is punished for mismanagement of resources/mechanical downtime. The gap between other Jobs being negligible at best.
SAM, like everyone else, is balanced based on overall methods of contribution, of which, they have no exclusivity other than 'raw damage'.

Everyone talks about balance being by 'degrees', and that SAM pulls far too ahead. Well, the only place where that remains true, among all the aspects of the Job compared to others in the game, is in regards to MCH, arguably DRG. QoL is one thing, and I think almost every Job in the game needs that at this point. That has nothing to do with the state of SAM, which is what it really feels like everyone wants to blame SAM for. Not that it's the case, but.

[Galvuu]

I think you mistook 5% of SAM dps for 5% of raid dps. On average, SAM does about 18.6% of raid dps. If MNK does 4.5% less than SAM (according to my analysis), i.e. using MNK in place of SAM would cause you to lose only 0.837% of raid dps. This is negligible.

No, no, I was talking about someone posting a result if "NIN/SAM/RDM comps on average yield 4.5% more raid dps than (some other comp)". I don't remember the exact remark (and too lazy to find it), but I meant that if a NIN/SAM/RDM/BRD core has ~5% mroe raid dps, that is very significant (we can't downplay a number as large as 5%). I didn't specifically mean SAM alone there.
At least that's what I meant, sorry if it wasn't clear

[Oscura]

No more than tacitly blaming SAM mains for wanting to be relevant. As a MCH main, I sympathize.

"Wanting to be relevant" is such a paper thin argument.

It implies SAM is perfect where it is and that the balance itself regarding SAM is completely fine. This is not true regarding any class. The meta from 2.0 to 2.5 had some big changes. 3.0 to 3.5 followed this. The meta alone in 3.x was far different than 2.x. To imply that SAM "wants to be relevant," implies that if SAM is shifted anywhere in their DPS or that another class that possesses utility is shifted too far ahead of a previous iteration, SAM would no longer be "useful." Do you know what this means? It means the class is inherently imbalanced. As someone said before, having a "Selfish DPS" in this game makes no logical sense. It's even worse that prior to this, the development team had sworn they had learned their lessons with Monk yet still repeat it with another class. They could've simply made SAM a lot like MNK now, a strong class with strong DPS that has some utility in the form of realistically one skill, but they refrained. The fact of the matter is, even if SAM is untouched, the meta changes constantly within a patch cycle. Right now the argument is if SAM is nerfed it'd be "useless," but what if the other jobs were pushed too far ahead instead? It's a distinct possibility, what with the backlash behind AST after 3.4, or MCH in general dominating the DPS game after a certain point in Heavensward.

The fact of the matter is that almost every post I see in here assumes that the other DPS should be balanced around SAM instead of each other. To me that is just an inherently flawed argument regardless of how you spin your words.

I'm not saying SAM should be nerfed (nor am I saying it's overpowered, as "imbalanced" is not the same thing as overpowered), but if the ultimatum for a class is "touch it and it dies," maybe the dev team should go back to the drawing board and make sure the class isn't so overly dramatic about any sort of change.

As it stands though, I feel people are exaggerating about relevancy. Most of the people here it will never apply to, as most casual groups never rejected or locked Monks out in HW. Unless you specifically are progression raiding or doing speed kills the game is mostly just having fun.

[Lastelli]

Most of the people here it will never apply to, as most casual groups never rejected or locked Monks out in HW. Unless you specifically are progression raiding or doing speed kills the game is mostly just having fun.

This is the only thing that matters though. Except for some cases where a given job is frustrating to play, in which case we're not talking about balance but rather actual gameplay issues, discussing about job balance and relevance only makes sense with progression raiding and speekills in mind. And of course everyone here is talking about how SAM performs relative to other jobs. When we say that SAM should stay where it is now in terms of dps we mean to say that it should be ahead of any other job (with the possible exception of blm) be a high enough amount to justify its lack of synergy, whether or not other jobs are buffed. For instance, if mnk and nin are buffed, sam should be buffed as well, otherwise mnk/nin would be the preferred melee pair.

Casual players shouldn't even care about job balance unless one job is severly underpowered (like mch and brd were in 3.0) and/or not fun to play (I think this is what DRGs are complaining about right now) and/or has a stupid mechanic (again, barrel and minuet in 3.0 were basically a dps loss).