Please decorrelate party support from party damage

[Valence]

We can clear any encounter without a range physical and their mitigation. One can whine all we want about the damage meta, but damage is the only thing that matters at savage level. Tanks and healers already have way enough support tools to ensure that we survive most things, and fights are designed to be clearable by most if not all comps anyway (in theory).

Are some of those tools appreciated? Sure. Are they mandatory? Absolutely not, perhaps in ultimate at best (to be debated).

We're not in a pre Shadowbringers meta anymore where party resource support is still a required part of any fight encounter due to non neutral rotations that ate more MP and TP than the jobs could regen and where support teamplay actually mattered. This has been nuked out of the sky.

Yet we consistently see jobs with heavy party support used as excuses to get subpar damage outputs, rphys being the prime example of it, but not only: it also has applied to red mage for ages, and now summoner is also affected by it. Yet we still have melees with decently appreciable support like Arcane Crest or especially the elephant in the room which is Mantra. Do we want to also nerf their damage output just because, or are they immune of that treatment just because they're melees in meleewalker?

Don't get me wrong though, I actually appreciate the party support buffs (Minne and the Wrench) we got recently to give back to rphys some semblance of role identity, but I'm not delusional enough not to see that it was made to shut us up about the range tax and other damage issues.

Fact of the matter, SE decided to remove a whole part of gameplay that wasn't part of the damage meta, and now have to deal with the consequences of that decision. Nobody will find any solace in it until you either reintroduce something beyond just damage and individualistic teamplay, or just balance every DPS jobs around their rdps ratings for good.

I am not making this thread to talk about subjective difficulties of play, that horse has been beaten to death already, and if that's really a problem, then make our bland rotations engaging and intricate again to shut everyone up, I dare you.

[Valence]

If the worry is about more casual play, I'll have two counter arguments about this:

- In more casual and lightcore savage or endgame challenging content, party support and mitigation is used a lot less aggressively and reliably than in teams that play perfectly anyway. Having more of it doesn't benefit the casual teams as much as it does for more serious teams.
- In non challenging content like storymodes and whatnot, most of party support is a lot less important and sometimes inconsequential compared to the very basics, which are bare healing through mechanics that are designed to be forgiving enough. The storymode desigjn makes party support a lot less valuable most of the time, with possibly the exclusion of DPS raises (RDM and SMN). For those though, duty finder will never guarantee that you end up with at least one of those there. Also, I really doubt that any wipe happening in such content can really be blamed or badly used party support or complaining that we don't have enough party support tools, that most players don't even use 90% of the time anyway.

[Semirhage]

There's also some bizarre messaging going on from Square. I keep hearing on the forums that Square "doesn't balance jobs based on difficulty", when Yoshi-P has stated outright that they do. I think the reason the fora believe this is that Square's balancing decisions look barely related to job difficulty, even taking subjectivity into account.

• RDM and SMN are a prime example. RDM is clearly more difficult to optimize than SMN, but their balance doesn't reflect this
• The gigantic advantage melee have. The relative difficulty between roles is arguable, but you can't deny that Square has been trimming positionals, adding True North effects, blowing up hitboxes, adding melee safe spots for mechanics, and making bosses untargetable during forced disengagement. Square has been taking steps to make melee easier to play, but hasn't made intra-role changes to their relative damage with respect to those steps.

I could probably think of more. The community have been guessing that utility and damage are the key factor here (and honestly probably play a role), but I think we're also just spitballing. Square's been making damage balancing tweaks based on party finder popularity just as much as they've made them based on utility. Hell, Monk has some great utility for a melee and yet is allowed to do quite a lot of personal damage.

[Taranok]

There's also some bizarre messaging going on from Square. I keep hearing on the forums that Square "doesn't balance jobs based on difficulty", when Yoshi-P has stated outright that they do. I think the reason the fora believe this is that Square's balancing decisions look barely related to job difficulty, even taking subjectivity into account.

• RDM and SMN are a prime example. RDM is clearly more difficult to optimize than SMN, but their balance doesn't reflect this
• The gigantic advantage melee have. The relative difficulty between roles is arguable, but you can't deny that Square has been trimming positionals, adding True North effects, blowing up hitboxes, adding melee safe spots for mechanics, and making bosses untargetable during forced disengagement. Square has been taking steps to make melee easier to play, but hasn't made intra-role changes to their relative damage with respect to those steps.

I could probably think of more. The community have been guessing that utility and damage are the key factor here (and honestly probably play a role), but I think we're also just spitballing. Square's been making damage balancing tweaks based on party finder popularity just as much as they've made them based on utility. Hell, Monk has some great utility for a melee and yet is allowed to do quite a lot of personal damage.

I'm fine with RDM and SMN more or less being around each other. That in-and-of itself is good design and balance, and I don't want people to feel like they need to suffer to play optimally. But that's neither here nor there. The problem is, melee no longer deserves to do more damage than anything else. The devs aren't forcing melee downtime, so they don't deserve bonus damage. Hell, the fight design is so bad in endwalker that even being the top DPS outright, BLM is still just not worth playing. These are all problems.

Ranged phys is supposed to be balanced around having permanent uptime. How are they supposed to gain any damage back against mDPS if they're never forced out, or cDPS if they're being turned into rphys in everything except name alone?

I really wish fight design would be more reflective of neo exdeath. The boss forces melee downtime by forcing melee out, jumping from one side of the arena to the other, and through other such mechanics. All while forcing casters to move, but not too much, and forcing rphys to have good damage by just never skipping a beat, despite still being squarely middle of the pack.

[Semirhage]

I'm fine with RDM and SMN more or less being around each other. That in-and-of itself is good design and balance, and I don't want people to feel like they need to suffer to play optimally.

That's fair. I was more commenting on the mixed messaging that comes from Square A. Explicitly stating that they balance based on difficulty, and B. Though "difficulty" is nebulously quantifiable, there are several difficult-to-argue scenarios (RDM vs SMN optimization for one, melee for another) where that's clearly what the balancing team isn't doing.

I think (lack of) Ultimate participation is a better measuring stick for what they're *actually* doing. They're overbuffing classes unpopular in the most recent Ultimate.

[Valence]

There's also some bizarre messaging going on from Square. I keep hearing on the forums that Square "doesn't balance jobs based on difficulty", when Yoshi-P has stated outright that they do.

Do you have a source for what Yoshi said about that specifically? It's possible I read it already in a liveletter, but I forgot tbh. I just know that one of the Stormblood launch (or just prior) liveletters, which was LL 36 or 37, had a Q&A when they specifically said they were done balancing jobs around difficulty.

So yeah they tend to send very mixed signals there.

[Valence]

I'm fine with RDM and SMN more or less being around each other. That in-and-of itself is good design and balance, and I don't want people to feel like they need to suffer to play optimally. But that's neither here nor there. The problem is, melee no longer deserves to do more damage than anything else. The devs aren't forcing melee downtime, so they don't deserve bonus damage. Hell, the fight design is so bad in endwalker that even being the top DPS outright, BLM is still just not worth playing. These are all problems.

Ranged phys is supposed to be balanced around having permanent uptime. How are they supposed to gain any damage back against mDPS if they're never forced out, or cDPS if they're being turned into rphys in everything except name alone?

I really wish fight design would be more reflective of neo exdeath. The boss forces melee downtime by forcing melee out, jumping from one side of the arena to the other, and through other such mechanics. All while forcing casters to move, but not too much, and forcing rphys to have good damage by just never skipping a beat, despite still being squarely middle of the pack.

It's always been like this. EW possibly magnifies this with outrageously big hitboxes and specific designs, but way before EW melees and casters always had the upper hand on charts. People always found ways to optimize and made most of those uptime concerns irrelevant, either because designs back then asked casters to move less, or because melees could already play around their own downtime anyway.

[Semirhage]

Do you have a source for what Yoshi said about that specifically? It's possible I read it already in a liveletter, but I forgot tbh. I just know that one of the Stormblood launch (or just prior) liveletters, which was LL 36 or 37, had a Q&A when they specifically said they were done balancing jobs around difficulty.

So yeah they tend to send very mixed signals there.

Lodestone post about nerfing P8S
If you scroll down to the section titled "Why Adjust The Duty, Rather Than Job Balance?", you'll find this:

When balancing jobs, each job's base damage numbers at the applicable item level are adjusted with respect to the difficulty of playing that particular job and its rotation, as well as its support actions and their effects.

So last tier, he said explicitly that they balance around "difficulty" and utility.
*laughs in RDM*
*laughs in the entire melee role*

[Semirhage]

Wouldn't it be funny if Square's balancing data is just like, Hikaru the intern going "yeah I like Ninja", so they plop him in front of a striking dummy and stopwatch how long it takes this one guy to kill it, then decide "that's it, that's how much damage Ninja does"? Looking at things like WAR and BLM buffs this patch make me wonder if statistics go into their decisions at all.

[Shurrikhan]

Personally, I think it's a good to consider difficulty.

Yes, it's individually nebulous and based on at least several appreciable factors for each job, and sometimes the "duller"/"easier" job may see more mistakes just from a lack of intersecting points of engagement. (I find MCH easier to play when I memorize precisely when to swap from comboing to whatever other tasks, as if it played much more rigid/constrained timers, yet some would say that freedom makes it easier [more 'slack' than 'noose'].) But, across large enough sample sizes, one can see what is and isn't being optimized, how far the average nth percentile player is performing from the job's theoretical max, and who is playing what (in order to account for player characteristics separate from their performance with any single job), and we can thereby get a sense whether Job A is, in fact, "harder" for its/the average player than Job B.

And if we don't account for those differences, and we instead end up balancing something that has far less of a general and/or fight-specific learning curve for tight parity against something that takes much longer to master generally and in that specific fight, we disincentivize ever bothering with that latter set of jobs, reducing class choice and parity in practice for the majority of players (as compared to balancing for just the top 1%).

But, as Semirhage mentioned above, whatever their balance philosophy may be, it hardly seems consistent. Utility, especially other than that of Resurrect, is likely overtaxed for what little difference it makes, melee likely overcompensated for what few additional dangers they now face, and RDM underperforming relative to SMN for its comparative difficulty, etc.

For my part, I'd like to see utility like %mitigation adjusted to provide in part instead some flat amount useful even outside of Ultimates, and to have utilities in excess of the practical value average across all jobs come at cost to DPS, but with their bearer's DPS being raised in compensation (a bit like ARR Bard and its costs from using Ballad/Paeon, rather than being so taxed by default instead).