BLM needs some love and RDM needs a nerf

[JunseiKei]

*Looks at fight data from raid group. Sees BLM sitting at the same DPS as RDM and MNK on multiple different fights (all new Omega, Lakshmi EX, Susano EX) on multiple runs.*

...BLM needs love and RDM needs a nerf. Wut? Have you compared the classes against others of the same level? I mean, I know our group comp is weird (PLD, WAR, AST, SCH, RDM, MNK, BLM and BRD), but sans the BRD, everyone sits at the same DPS. A SAM friend was pulling more DPS than us, but we were all evenly geared with optimal melds. Our SCH also plays SMN, but until she's about geared as us, or I'm partied with a SMN of equal skill level and gear, I can't really tell how good or bad they are currently. A friend is saying it's top DPS; due to reasons, I largely believe him. I mean, when I first started playing RDM, I felt it was a little OP, but as I started doing fights with the raid, I found we mostly fell into the same area on amounts we did and I suddenly didn't feel so OP.

RDM is mostly punished when they "need" to wait for mechanics to happen to pull of their melee range combo- or run the risk of having their mana the same amount and messing up their priorities a bit.

[Galvuu]

snip

So you think it's fine a class with easier execution and more utility does as much damage as us (RDM)? Even MNK has more utility than we do, especially in terms of damage...

https://www.fflogs.com/statistics/15/#dataset=90
Any percentile you check from 75% onwards (the "good" level of play), NIN, MNK, RDM and SAM beat us on average- over a large number of parses, too. Like thousands. It's not "that one group", it's a consistent thing. There's a large corpus of data supporting this.

Also, just look at that "punishment". RDM's punishment is doing their spell rotation for a few seconds while they wait for an opportunity to use corps-a-corps to dash in and do the melee finisher. The only downside is putting their burst on hold, while dpsing, and losing nothing else (they don't even have any cds they need to align).

Mine is doing literally no damage during the whole mechanic and having to hit transpose, resulting in further dps loss when I can finally cast stuff again.
SMNs lose Bahamut and are thrown back into a 2 min buildup for their burst.
Seems fair.

This isn't against you personally. I'm just putting in perspective what the other two caster jobs have to put up with for smaller returns.

[CecMiller]

-Snip-.

I've been telling people to look at this data before but they don't listen. Instead you get comments like this:

...BLM needs love and RDM needs a nerf. Wut? Have you compared the classes against others of the same level?

Our SCH also plays SMN, but until she's about geared as us, or I'm partied with a SMN of equal skill level and gear, I can't really tell how good or bad they are currently. A friend is saying it's top DPS; due to reasons, I largely believe him.

and when you look at the data sets from 10th percentile to 99th percentile, what you find is RDM is doing fantastic in comparison to BLM and SMN. Now as for RDM with regard to buffs and nerfs, hear me out. I don't really want them to get nerfed - I'd much prefer if the other casters got buffed to do more damage than RDM as this balances out class difficulty to dps output (personal opinion). It's clear in their initial testing they were content with the dps output from RDM and as such, I don't see how both BLM and SMN doing more dps than them should break fight difficulty if they were buffed to more dps. This is just my personal opinion, but I do enjoy the fact that RDM is very easy and as such, even the average to bad player can perform decent dps on that class.

If we analyze the dps data on both fights, we can identify which classes are performing well at each level of play and which might not be up to standard. You can make your own conclusions about the data: whether its down to class difficulty, skill level of class players, fight design, how "strong" you think the class should be relative to the skill level needed to play optimally, how effective the class is with party buffs, stat distribution on their gear etc

All the data is retrieved from here using standard comps: https://www.fflogs.com/statistics/15...unt&dataset=90

Lets do a statistical breakdown for both bosses (you can check the data yourselves for the individual bosses to the see the differences). I skip the 25th, 75th and 95th break points just to make the division more nicer looking. However, they are good break points to look at regardless.

We have the following (assigning 9 for the worst dps and 1 for the best dps):



Averaging the results, we get the following scores/rankings in terms of DPS for both fights:



Keep in mind this is data from only 2 EX fights and so fight design plays a key part, but even still, the data is useful. There are some "obvious" observations from this however. It is clear, across all levels of play, SMN, MCH and DRG are the 3 worst performing dps in the two fights and SAM, RDM and NIN are the best 3 performing dps. There are a lot of factors to consider as I pointed out earlier. For the lower percentiles, it could come down to class difficulty/design or how badly deaths affect a class etc. For the higher percentiles, it's more about the dps ceiling of the classes coupled with mechanics in the 2 EX fights. If you look at the full breakdown of the dps at each percentile, its interesting to see the dps difference between them (the bottom 3 have very minute differences generally speaking).

For example at the 75th percentile the bottom 3 are: MCH (3067), DRG(3087), SMN(3090) a difference of 23 between 10th and 7th place]. However the difference is more stark as you go up: comparing SMN (3090) (Ranked 7th) to BLM(3190) (Ranked 5th) or even NIN(3275) (Ranked 4th) demonstrates this.

To end, my personal opinion is that I really like how easy RDM plays and I'd much prefer the other 2 casters receive buffs if they were found to be weaker (I'm a caster/SMN main so I'm biased - go figure). It's clear for me that both SMN and BLM are more complex from personal experience on said classes. I've already voiced my concerns over how bad SMN's dps is considering their difficulty. We'll have to wait and see what 4.0.5 has in store. For now, we can just try our classes out in omega and add more data to the pool and keep giving feedback to SE.

[Karja]

snip

I would like to add another point of view to the discussion.
While the performances for each job is important the bigger issue in HW was group synergy.

I checked the 25 fastest group clears for Laskshmi and Susano on fflogs for standard comps and you can already see the current meta shaping.
Most groups did use RDM + BRD for their 2 ranged slots, while a few had SMN in it. Not a single group from these 50 clears used a BLM not one.
For healers I assumed we would see a similiar thing but to my surprise I actually found a few WHMs in there but overall AST + SCH was the default setup for healers.

It will be interesting to see the numbers for Omega Savage but if we don't see big changes for the caster I doubt BLM will be in the meta.

[edit] Because I was curious I actually checked the top 50 clears on fflogs for both fights. I found one single BLM in these 100 clears

[Galvuu]

snip

Off-topic, but these are the nicest tables I've seen.
Imma save these and use them later if needed.
Many thanks for compiling this information so neatly

[JunseiKei]

~snip~

~snip~

There's been lots of discussions in the past as to why FFlogs is not a serious source for accurate information on job DPS in comparison to one another. It's simply a leaderboard of players on certain jobs in certain group positions. There is far too much number padding to make most the information reliable.

[Galvuu]

snip

There's a no balance option now... which is what I generally refer to.
Plus, even if all parses were padded... well, all parses were padded.
If you multiply everything by some constant (take this has a heuristic), the relational results should still be valid.
Plus, the entirety of the 75%, 80% and 90% are not padded. The 99% surely is, but below most parses are quite fair (as you'd able to verify yourself, should you wish to).
That's why I also restrain from using 95%+ to illustrate any point.