NIN/MNK difficulty?

[Foodgoesinhere]

On the topic of parses/class difficulty, help me with the following thought experiment:

Imagine two almost identical classes A and B. With both classes the real test of skill is being able to use Ability 10, which you can only do if you perfectly manage cooldowns, DOTs, etc. However, in class A Ability 10 does 500 damage and in B it only does 400 damage. Doesn't Class A therefore appear more difficult on the parses (higher skill ceiling) even though A and B are equally difficult to execute optimally? With A simply having a higher reward for optimal play (granted that might be how you define difficulty, but that seems like more of a tuning issue than a mechanics one--the classes play identically in this hypothetical)?

[Wyndam]

Well, so I think this whole ratio thing is flawed in that DPS is a measure of output and job difficulty is a matter of input. As far as I know there aren't a ton of random elements to DPS classes in FFXIV but where there are procs, direct hits, and crits you are going to see higher standard deviation in the classes that see greater benefit from them. If you get lucky and everything crits or just crits at the right time you'll get a lot more DPS but you didn't actually do anything different. Anyone who's spent any time gathering or crafting knows how streaky RNG can be in this game.

I think the guy who was talking about casts per minute was on the right track. I actually know for a fact (because I spoke directly with their community rep during a beta test) that the developers at Blizzard who worked on WoW tracked two things in particular when assessing a class's difficulty: button presses per minute and bits of information tracked. Each buff, debuff, resource, and cooldown is a different bit of information. The more of each the harder the class. If you look there's a TED talk that discusses the affects of video games on the brain and there's an exercise with little dots that change color. The average person could reliably handle maybe 3 dots and remember which dot was which color at the end. Gamers could usually handle something more like 7. The point, however, is that all participants found additional dots to be a more challenging task.

From what I'm hearing, it sounds like people using the performance ratio metric are suddenly saying monk is harder this expansion... coincidentally after a mechanic which relies on crits was introduced. A few months ago I saw bard, another very crit dependent class, being put forth as deceptively difficult.

I'd like to put it another way. Slot machines aren't difficult to operate but casinos can adjust the payouts to whatever ratios they want.