Take a step back, and adjust.

[RyuDragnier]

all i know is warrior really sucks and is super boring now with anything below 72. was my main class but i will never play it for anything lower than that now.

Wait, you mean it wasn't originally?

[ForteNightshade]

On the flip side to them not balancing the game around the lowest common denominator, the game should also not be balanced around just the hardcore raiders either. The balance point should ideally be somewhere in the middle for most of the content. And from one expansion to the next, what is used as the perceived balancing point for the Developers is going to move around a bit. I made no comment about balancing around any one group, but was suggesting that it might pay to step back and not assume that the devs used the same balancing metrics for Shadowbringers as they did for Stormblood.

I'm going to be blunt. Content beyond EX Primals does not matter when it comes to balance. Even that has become a stretch nowadays given how easy many Extremes are. While you obviously want to avoid scenarios where say, WHM Holy spam is so much better than anything AST and SCH have no one ever wants to queue as the latter two for a dungeon. It doesn't matter if WHM remains the "best" because dungeons are, simply put, face roll. Balance should always focus on what the job's highest potential is; how far they can be pushed. Only afterwards should you focus on the easier content. Unfortunately, SE seems to do the opposite, which is why it took them four bloody years to finally realize not balancing BRD/MCH around piercing led to huge damage creep issues.

You aren't going to get proper results balancing job design around dungeons.

[NinjaTaru72]

I'll take a step back, but I can't adjust.. Cuz I'm not a healer (points for people who get this lol)

[HyoMinPark]

On the flip side to them not balancing the game around the lowest common denominator, the game should also not be balanced around just the hardcore raiders either. The balance point should ideally be somewhere in the middle for most of the content.

The issue with balancing around the lowest types of content, or even the middle types of content, is that jobs can end up broken (on either end of the spectrum) when you get to the highest types of content. What good does it do to balance jobs so that they're gods in dungeons...but then you take them into a Savage raid or an Ultimate fight and they aren't living up to their god potential anymore?

The developers have made many balancing mistakes in the past. They need to start seriously looking at how the higher end plays, and considering balance around party compositions (with all applicable buffs) in high-end content. They didn't do that for Heavensward or Stormblood, and look what happened:

- Heavensward: double physical ranged was meta in Creator and completely destroyed the casters because SE never considered how valuable piercing was to them. Of course, it also didn't help that they'd buffed BRD and MCH to the moon and back, but still. Let's go to Stormblood.
- Stormblood: same thing happened here. DRG/BRD/MCH was still meta in Deltascape because of piercing. Casters only started pulling ahead after they broke SMN in 4.1 and finally allowed BLM to do decent personal damage in Alphascape. There were also issues with BRD dealing far more damage than jobs like RDM, NIN, and DRG because the developers did not account for how much impact piercing and +critical hit buffs would have on the job. Especially as the gear tiers progressed and BRDs could stack nearly 3,000 critical hit by the end of the expansion.

Now we have Shadowbringers:
- Healers: the developers still do not seem to realize just how healers are played at the high end, and that has become a bit more obvious in some of the 5.0 healer changes (see: SCH and the Aetherflow stack issues they're currently having). AST also has to deal with Play, which currently does not allow for queuing as an oGCD, so we end up clipping our next GCD cast to get it to work. This was something they went to lengths to fix in 4.3 with the recast change to Malefic, but now it's back (and honestly quite annoying).


They've since rectified some of the issues I have mentioned from HW and SB for Shadowbringers - at least at first glance. Piercing is gone, and utility overall has been nerfed foe most of the jobs that were meta for an entire expansion (and the latter half of HW). However, this does not mean that they should not look at the higher end and consider balance there. Because, at the end of the day, balancing around dungeons is not necessary. The content is not pushing the jobs to their absolute limits or their highest potential, and you always need to consider what jobs can do at the highest. Not the lowest or the middle ground.



As for the thread topic of stepping back and considering the changes: some of the jobs have lost the identities they've had for years now. BRD is one such job. It was and has always been a support job in this game...until Shadowbringers. Its support now has been reduced to Nature's Minne and Troubadour, with its only buff being Battle Voice. No more resource management like Refresh to aid a party, which has turned off a lot of players from the job. 4.0 BRD was absolutely the perfect balance of damage dealer and support job...and that's gone now. As someone who has played BRD since I started this game up until now, it left a bad taste in my mouth to remove the aspects that I loved most about the job: the support. If I wanted to play a job that just dealt damage and didn't have support tools, I would have. But that was never why I played BRD. I liked supporting my party.