Black Mage

[Sigiria]

To all the people saying this - SAM has the exact same problems BLM does, and is one of the weakest in terms of raid DPS in the game right now. This is a significant problem with the game's current design. Their personal DPS is no where close to being enough to offset that they do not have party damage buffs. Meanwhile, you can play SMN, do almost identical personal damage, AND have radiant shield + devotion now. Same argument for MCH, which will do very similar personal DPS, but have a 6% hypercharge.

Please, please start looking at the contribution to the raid's dps rather than the job's personal dps alone. If you do, you will see a very disturbing imbalance in this game that is only getting worse for BLM, and even SAM
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Alright then, let's calculate the gain from the nin TA which is currently the most powerful raid buff in the game, boosting damage on a single boss by 10% for everyone 1/6 of the time.

For that I'll use Alte Roite's fight, since it's pretty basic for every jobs.

I'll use the parse for the top SAM dps (with no nin in their party) and the top NIN, both got about the same amount of balances (10 for the SAM, 9 for the NIN) and we'll see what is the real dps of the NIN once we factor its utility to the party.

So the SAM did 6367dps (2.58M damage over 6.34 minutes of fight)
The NIN did 5723dps (1.97M damage over 5.34 minutes of fight)

(Edit: which in both case is weird, I guess the parser kept counting dps few seconds after the death of the boss since 2.58M/394 seconds = 6548dps for the SAM and 1.97M/334 seconds = 5898DPS)

Now we'll give back to the NIN the damage they provided to the party.

6 TA of 10 seconds over the fight
so 60 seconds out of 334 seconds of fight mean it was there 17.96% of the time
17.96% of the total damage of the party (11.41M) amount to 2 053 800
Out of the 2 053 800 damage, 10% belong to the NIN so 205 380
add that to the NIN total damage 1 970 000 + 205 380 = 2 175 380

The top NIN real dps is 6513 (2.17M over 5.34 minutes of fight)

So yes this is just an average, to be really accurate we would need to determine how much damage was made precisely during each Trick Attack. But it does show that while being powerful and not making the nin any less viable the utility is not that crazy and depend a lot on the dps of the players that are with you opposed to your dps being entirely in your hand for SAM or BLM (making only you accountable if you screw up your dps).

[Huntington]

>I'd like to point that (imo) there is nothing wrong with BLM being a selfish dps akin to the SAM.
>BLM is the SAM of the casters, you're meta 2nd highest DPS, and because you have no specific utility that the others don't also share with you through cross role

To all the people saying this - SAM has the exact same problems BLM does, and is one of the weakest in terms of raid DPS in the game right now. This is a significant problem with the game's current design. Their personal DPS is no where close to being enough to offset that they do not have party damage buffs. Meanwhile, you can play SMN, do almost identical personal damage, AND have radiant shield + devotion now. Same argument for MCH, which will do very similar personal DPS, but have a 6% hypercharge.

Please, please start looking at the contribution to the raid's dps rather than the job's personal dps alone. If you do, you will see a very disturbing imbalance in this game that is only getting worse for BLM, and even SAM.

You say they're problems but it's not an issue with game design, they made the direct choice to have both jobs play like that. Little to no party utility for higher personal DPS, party buffs matter very little if your group doesn't have the damage or awareness to capitalize on TA Hypercharge or otherwise. For those top 1% of groups that do take proper usage of those moments, you can likely look through logs to see how much Raid DPS is being contributed, for everything under that, it's not going to make a large difference in groups. If your personal DPS is great and high, you're doing what the job is designed or oriented for, and that's not an issue in of itself.

What is an issue is something like DRG getting steady buffs and changes that it has been getting, while providing a lot of party DPS. It's steadily catching up to the top damage because of how they're lessening positional misses and changing how "clunky" it is and being made to be easier to play. I still see tons of SAMs doing huge d*** DPS in groups and being 600-700+ higher than the 2nd DPS in groups, same with BLMs depending on how much the group is willing to cater to them to let them do that damage. I don't see SMN doing identical personal damage to SAM or BLM even after it's soon to be buffs, I just can't wrap my head around that. Been playing SMN/BLM since 2.0 way back in August of whatever year that was, even when they didn't have MP issues or otherwise, BLM has nearly always been higher DPS wise. NIN/DRG steadily getting stronger despite their utility is a different issue, but I don't think there's anything to worry about regarding SAM/BLM. I'd like the difficulty in playing BLM to stay because as soon as they notice picks on them decreasing and the job being used less because of the perceived weakness in comparison to other jobs with utility, then they will start nerfing and adjusting things instead of players just improving their personal performance and not worrying about what they "could" be doing and focusing on what they are doing.

[zuzu-bq]

BLM has some of its own clunkyness in it. Most are tied to the fact we lose too much damage to move, convert being arbitrarily 20% MP instead of a fix number like literally everything else on jobs that rely on exact amount of MP for rotation and Transpose cd makes no sense to be 12s aymore, and literally thunder procs duration... why so short.

[BlackcatChen]

>I don't see SMN doing identical personal damage to SAM or BLM even after it's soon to be buffs, I just can't wrap my head around that.

Doesn't matter if you believe it or not. Look up some statistics, it's absolutely true. This isn't a "my personal opinion" thing.

>but I don't think there's anything to worry about regarding SAM/BLM.

Yeah, there is. They're simply not doing enough raid dps, and all they bring to the party is personal damage in the first place. I don't care what you're seeing in groups where people don't know how to press buttons, that's completely irrelevant. There is only a very small difference in personal damage between MCH/BRD, and BLM, and almost no difference between BLM and SMN right now. And that's really screwed up, since when you add in the contribution of their party buffs, BLM falls far behind. The design of BLM and SAM makes sense when their personal damage outweighs the fact that they have no raid buffs. Right now it absolutely does not, that's why this thread happened in the first place, because this problem is directly opposed to the design of the job. BLM is pretty much the least useful DPS in the game right now, you don't find anything wrong with that?

>instead of players just improving their personal performance and not worrying about what they "could" be doing

There are BLM that have full uptime or as close as possible to it on these fights already, we're not talking about situations where there is room to improve. We're talking about what the job is capable of doing at its full potential.

[zuzu-bq]

For BLM and SAM to be worthy in a group the group has to be significally worse than the SAM/BLM player. The SAM/BLM player will be outputing great damage no matter of bad usage of utility from others. But if you're good why aren't you in a better group. And if you're in a better group why aren't you a NIN/DRG or MCH/SMN. Thats the pure damage DPS' dilenma right now, to me.

Also about players improving their performances. BLM is right now the bottom 3rd on popularity. Only SMN and MCH are player less than BLM by statistics everyone can have access to. And surprisingly most BLM players that are playing it right now are really good compared to the other two on low popularity and they're all slowly shifting to better jobs. By the way you've two of them actively posting on this thread right now, one of them being the OP. SAM is hella more popular for being new and weeb and wanted for the community for much longer and DRG/NIN are so much more absurd in power than SAM that good SAM players just play those instead. Usually DRG because of shared accessories.

[Huntington]

>I don't see SMN doing identical personal damage to SAM or BLM even after it's soon to be buffs, I just can't wrap my head around that.

Doesn't matter if you believe it or not. Look up some statistics, it's absolutely true. This isn't a "my personal opinion" thing.

>but I don't think there's anything to worry about regarding SAM/BLM.

Yeah, there is. They're simply not doing enough raid dps, and all they bring to the party is personal damage in the first place. I don't care what you're seeing in groups where people don't know how to press buttons, that's completely irrelevant. There is only a very small difference in personal damage between MCH/BRD, and BLM, and almost no difference between BLM and SMN right now. And that's really screwed up, since when you add in the contribution of their party buffs, BLM falls far behind. The design of BLM and SAM makes sense when their personal damage outweighs the fact that they have no raid buffs. Right now it absolutely does not, that's why this thread happened in the first place, because this problem is directly opposed to the design of the job. BLM is pretty much the least useful DPS in the game right now, you don't find anything wrong with that?

>instead of players just improving their personal performance and not worrying about what they "could" be doing

There are BLM that have full uptime or as close as possible to it on these fights already, we're not talking about situations where there is room to improve. We're talking about what the job is capable of doing at its full potential.

So are you basing your numbers off the top 1% of players who speed run and pad FFlogs with AST/DRG/BRD buffs or are you getting aggregate numbers from players that are in lower than the top 99 percentile? Because it's a big difference to be claiming there's an issue and that the statistics prove it when there are only 3 SMNs in the top 50 of all recorded parses at this moment in "standard comps", the bulk of that 50 being MNK/BLM/SAM. All being lead to be believed that they are padded and boosted as much as possible to show those numbers.

Checking the statistics for all percentiles up to max and down to the 10th I'm actually honestly surprised that I'm seeing what I am, did that potency buff to SMN's DoTs really make that much of a difference? What else could have changed the numbers so drastically? Last I checked it, SMN was in the bottom tiers near BRD/MCH and BLM/SAM were blowing everything else out of the water. Did people figure out it's DPS was still decent it was just a little clunky, or did gear make that much of a difference for it's numbers to improve that much?
I'm checking parses of top-tier players I know on my server, I'll shorten their names, on respective jobs and while I don't have anyone off the top of my head for SMN players, I have two great results for BLM/BRD.
A.T. is a BLM main, always has been, his numbers go as follows.
Alte Roite: 5,373.8
Catastrophe: 5,482.0
Halicarnassus: 5,883.1
Exdeath: 4,883.8
Neo Exdeath: 4,866.0

S.B. is a BRD/MCH main, his numbers are as follows:
Alte Roite: 5,188.5
Catastrophe: 5,040.6
Halicarnassus: 5,125.0
Exdeath: 4,328.5
Neo Exdeath: 4,407.3
These are the two best BLM/BRD results I have on hand from my server, and the numbers are pretty shocking. I've been playing BLM primarily for months now since we got Deltascape Savage, and there have been a few way too powerful buffs to BRD, very decent changes to BLM, and some minor potency buffs to SMN, what could have made the numbers we saw on SB's launch and a few weeks into Savage after we got it, that show completely different numbers all this time later? The patches don't account for it, player skill improving with gear seems to be the only possibility. But if that's the case and people are improving on SMN to the point where they're outperforming BLM's who should be doing higher Raid DPS because of their lack of utility, then why has this only been getting around as an issue the last month or so? Before the Live Letter came out, none of this was being talked about anywhere by what I saw, not on Reddit nor GameFAQs or on here. Suddenly we have a huge issue with BLM being mediocre trite garbage compared to SMN/BRD/MCH, and I can't fathom what's caused it besides people just figuring out how the job works now.

Despite the statistics and parses from FFlogs, there are still thousands of great players on all aforementioned jobs, that do not parse or post logs anywhere yet still do great personal DPS. You can't account for every player's performance at all times because we don't have the numbers or data to crunch to analyze. So when I said " For those top 1% of groups that do take proper usage of those moments, you can likely look through logs to see how much Raid DPS is being contributed, for everything under that, it's not going to make a large difference in groups. If your personal DPS is great and high, you're doing what the job is designed or oriented for, and that's not an issue in of itself." You ignored that and replied with "I don't care what you're seeing in groups where people don't know how to press buttons, that's completely irrelevant" which is the furthest thing from the truth.
The playerbase is larger than the top players in the game, they make up the smallest constitution of the playerbase, which means the numbers SE sees from that majority of players, is going to tell them a lot more than what the parses from those top echelon players do. The significance of this shouldn't be lost on you but with your reply it feels like you tossed everyone that isn't posting to FFlogs or isn't in a top-tier static to the wind. Just because people that aren't in those high percentiles don't sync their damage CDs or utilities up properly, does not mean that their feedback and numbers amount to jack and s***. Those, are the numbers that SE looks at. Those are the numbers they see first. The top raiding statics in JP may be listened to very largely by them, but the top raiding JP statics do not make up the entire JP community. So when they by and large, Hardcore to Casual to Semi-Hardcore and so on, complain or gripe about something, that is when SE listens. And as of yet I haven't seen anything from the JP side that says this SMN/BLM predicament is as huge as one or two threads on the DPS roles forums have said it is.

I agree that the statistics I looked through do show a shockingly close gap between SMN/BLM, but as those numbers are gained from any number of comps setups and language communities, until we see more raw numbers and feedback from that side of the pond, this could still just be an issue being blown up 15 sizes by the small sample size of Western and European posts I've thus far seen, since I doubt many people speak fluent Japanese to interpret or translate if they're talking about it.

I ask this question again: What changed in the last month and a half for this DPS disparity to be such a huge concern? Because from my own small hyperbolic example, until the Live Letter went out I saw no complaining or griping about SMN and BLM. We all knew they were going to make more adjustments and changes to WAR/SMN, ever since they announced those changes would be pushed back to 4.1. We all knew it was coming, but it wasn't this huge concern until people saw preliminary notes and started buggering out about it, because I've seen no such forum post exemplifying this problem until the last two weeks. If you can source anything to the contrary by all means show me some to educate me. But as it stands now for me personally, until we get 4.1 and really run things through some more and have more numbers and data to crunch, this could be much less of an issue than it actually is. Sure the parses we can see now show how small the gap is for SAM/BLM being top compared to SMN/BRD&MCH, but we don't have the data that Square does. And while they've been wholly inept and tuning jobs so far in this game up till this point, they do still see the actual raw data that the playerbase never does until they give us official census numbers.

[BlackcatChen]

Please do not use parses with balance and left eye feeding as an argument (on either side of it, it still doesn't add up regardless). Also, the value of trick attack in parse runs, and the value of trick attack in speed kills where burst is utilized is very, very different. The value of trick attack can be almost triple of what you noted. I can prove that, but I'd rather not on the OF because of really obvious reasons (like possibly getting banned for it).

Also...
>so 60 seconds out of 334 seconds of fight mean it was there 5.6% of the time
Wait isn't 60/334*100 = 17.96%?!

[Sigiria]

Also...
>so 60 seconds out of 334 seconds of fight mean it was there 5.6% of the time
Wait isn't 60/334*100 = 17.96%?!

You're absolutely right about that, was a pretty clumsy mistake, I changed that

But the circumstances were the same for both, both had a dragoon, both had about the same amount of balances buffs. As I said it is an average. Just here to show a more clear value of the utility, which is actually pretty balanced.

[BlackcatChen]

You're absolutely right about that, was a pretty clumsy mistake, I changed that

But the circumstances were the same for both, both had a dragoon, both had about the same about on balances buffs. As I said it is an average. Just here to show a more clear value of the utility, which is actually pretty balanced.

Shadewalker