NIN/MNK difficulty?

[Jkei]

I don't agree, but maybe I wasn't clear. I said that this showed how punishing the Jobs are rather than difficult. Difficulty is fairly subjective in my opinion and the differences could easily just be gear level and the people who naturally better at X type of gameplay vs those who aren't.

But comparing the numbers themselves shows how much is at stake. A BLM making a mistake may cost the raid 300 dps while a NIN making one will be a fair amount less. For the most part, raid buffs naturally align and adjusting to boss mechanics to re-align some isn't a huge deal. So those Jobs with more focus on buffs have less at stake with doing their rotation perfectly (once they buff properly), compared to the higher personal dps Jobs.

The raid pays for every mistake you make as one of those Jobs a lot more and that's an important factor in my opinion. I'll call buffing easy cause it's fairly rudimentary (except i guess on Bard) with few wrenches/nuances to really debate on. But add a few more and you'll easily find people who will argue which are the wrenchiest.

I think how much dps you are prone to lose for messing up is a factor in considering the challenge of a Job. The rest I'd leave to the player cause something might objectively have more to manage but also flow better or make more sense than a different Job with less. That will usually be a bigger factor if how much you succeed with it than a relative variance.

So a job being punishing is not the same as a job being difficult, then? The major issue here is that you imply that a 'mistake' costs a given job a certain amount of dps. What constitutes a mistake? Failing a mechanic and dying as a result is a mistake, as is missing a small opportunity for dps optimization while still maintaining a core rotation. Obviously, one means losing hundreds of dps while the other means missing out on maybe ten dps, though avoiding the latter really adds up over the course of a fight. Thus, avoiding mistakes, both big and small, leads to higher dps. And that takes skill; it's difficult. A player's ability to stick as closely as possible to a perfect dummy rotation is key to attaining the highest dps. At lower percentiles, you'll find those players who made various degrees of mistakes along the way.

And that leads me to say that your method is invalid. Because you cannot attribute the difference between 95th and 60th % to a single mistake in the 60th % parse, and in fact cannot calculate a precise number of mistakes in a given run at all, you cannot say (with this method) that one job is more punishing than another. A lower parse can be the result of lots of smaller mistakes, a few big ones, or anything in between. You can't tell the difference. On top of that, there's also gear differences.