Probably a dumb idea on class balance.

[Hash_Browns]

Damage is not the end all be all of progression or anything to be honest.

You might think that, but the people who are interested in savage content will take a 1% DPS buff over 10% mitigation, or a 100 potency regen for DPS. I know I would.

The only way to make mitigation, or regen, favorable over DPS is to make the DPS buff crap, and make the regen/mitigation buff OP.

Quicker kills = less healing = less damage taken

[RyuDragnier]

Due to the mentality of this playerbase that DPS is more important than anything, that would never work. Look at all the healers who are complaining because DPS is now boring, at the DPS with utility who are complaining because they feel they don't do enough damage. Such an idea cannot work just due to player mentality.

[Hash_Browns]

Due to the mentality of this playerbase that DPS is more important than anything, that would never work. Look at all the healers who are complaining because DPS is now boring, at the DPS with utility who are complaining because they feel they don't do enough damage. Such an idea cannot work just due to player mentality.

If SE wanted to stop this mentality they should stop making scripted fights where a healer is only needed because of auto-attacks, AOE damage, and tank busters.

[Hawklaser]

Due to the mentality of this playerbase that DPS is more important than anything, that would never work. Look at all the healers who are complaining because DPS is now boring, at the DPS with utility who are complaining because they feel they don't do enough damage. Such an idea cannot work just due to player mentality.

Lets see... the vast majority of incoming damage is scripted, making it quite easy to plan out the heals, leaving a lot of down time to use 1 dot, and then either one instant cast or one hard cast dps spell.

Lets try taking all the dps classes damage abilities and simplify them into 5 buttons. 1 aoe, 2 for single target, 1 class specific, and one buff or dot ability. How long do you think it would be for all the DPS players to be up in arms about things being boring?

Its not that DPS is everything, its knowing that the longer a fight drags on, the more mistakes add up, and eventually lead to failure. You have heard of wars of attrition right? Over time resources do run out, be it something visible like healer mp, or something invisible like a players ability to focus.

[RyuDragnier]

If SE wanted to stop this mentality they should stop making scripted fights where a healer is only needed because of auto-attacks, AOE damage, and tank busters.

I'd personally love to see more non-scripted fights, but I don't trust the playerbase to adjust to it well. Remember pre-nerf Pharos Sirius, pre-nerf Ampador Keep, and pre-nerf Steps of Faith. The playerbase will try to get nerfed anything it perceives as too hard, which quite a few already see several scripted fights as being. Remember they also tried to get Yoshi-P to nerf Final Steps of Faith and Royal Menagerie. Non-scripted fights would make people around here scream even worse to have those non-scripted fights nerfed into the ground.

[Bonbori]

Every attack that a dead enemy cannot make is one less bit of damage that needs to be healed or mitigated. Ergo, DPS = mitigation.

Also big no in general to slottable role actions. We just got rid of them and for good reasons.

[RoyalBeef]

Damage is not the end all be all of progression or anything to be honest. Unless you have insecurities I can count countless times a extra sheild or or extra health could get us to enrage to learn the whole fight, learning the entire fight front to back is better than 1 peace at time due to wipes. Not to mention you can then make more content more dependent on certain buffs, like alliance raids, heals would be like straight up better than DPS. Also I love straw man counter points, probably the best society has to offer.

No everyone needs a OP job with bigly huge numbers, its screams insecurity and a measuring stick with no real depth.

Real recognizes real.

Yeah, when you're in an Ex training party that's still wiping to mechanics in phase 1 and some genius goes "dps is low". Dude, no one cares about DPS, we didn't even see 2/3 of the fight yet xD Don't be that guy ^^

[Stanelis]

Lets see... the vast majority of incoming damage is scripted, making it quite easy to plan out the heals, leaving a lot of down time to use 1 dot, and then either one instant cast or one hard cast dps spell.

Lets try taking all the dps classes damage abilities and simplify them into 5 buttons. 1 aoe, 2 for single target, 1 class specific, and one buff or dot ability. How long do you think it would be for all the DPS players to be up in arms about things being boring?

Its not that DPS is everything, its knowing that the longer a fight drags on, the more mistakes add up, and eventually lead to failure. You have heard of wars of attrition right? Over time resources do run out, be it something visible like healer mp, or something invisible like a players ability to focus.

DPS is mostly "everything" with the way encounters have been designed since heavensward. Basically all bosses are DPS checks with positional mechanics players need to handle to their best abilities while maintaining uptime. But this wasn't always the case. Back in ARR the game was more balanced. Some encounters were a challenge to tank due to tanking mechanics (eg T5 with the snakes to aggro asap before they killed someone), healing mechanics (titan hard used to hit very hard at the beginning) or DPS making use of their utility (DPS having to kite adds during T7). But it was deemed too complicated so now we re trapped with fights that have simplistic mechanics in their concept (Everything is about avoiding AOE, soaking and looking in a particular direction) but have tight DPS requirements (and now with a lot of raid AoEs), with almost no adds on encounters and where the only difference between a good and a bad tank is the amount of DPS dealt. Honestly this is very sad.

Look at eden savage, it is all about positionals, raid AOEs so healers don't fall asleep and DPS checks. Now just go run all of the coil of bahamut with min ilvl requirement (if you didn't complete it back in they day) and come honestly tell me the design wasn't different back then.

[Connor]

I feel like the devs are misunderstanding people’s preoccupation with DPS numbers and intentionally designing future content to require pretty much only DPS. And of course, the result is that jobs become highly oversimplified when they all exist solely to deal direct damage( *cough* Bard *cough* ).

The devs release content where DPS is the only thing that will ever matter, then players naturally become focused on DPS because they want to succeed, them the devs see this as ‘players only want to dps’, and release content where nothing else matters. It’s like an endless cycle.

Surely there are ways to add DPS without just relying on basic direct damage attacks. Raid support is the main one, but it’s either all been moved to the one job (Dancer), removed from everything else (except Melee), or given such a heavy DPS tax that nobody wants it (Red Mage).

They’ve tried to address the whole ‘DPS is everything’ mentality that they created intentionally by simplifying every job so it only has to consider DPS outputs.

I think the class balance issues would be solved by giving jobs that are supposed to ‘support’ the party meaningful ways to contribute that haven’t been watered down to the point they’re not worth taking, without just falling back on the ‘lol potency increases to dps’ which honestly is a little lazy in my opinion.

Lastly I don’t think it’s accurate to say defensive abilities can’t contribute to overall raid DPS. Using Bard as an example because the remaining support is has left is almost purely defensive. Nature’s Minne can allow the healers to replace an GCD with an oGCD or just leave it to regens/Minne/shields, creating a DPS gain for healers. Warden’s Paean removes the need for Esuna, saving healers a GCD and removing the potential DPS loss of the status ailment (depending on what it is). Troubadour is self explanatory, less AoE healing = more healer DPS. The only reason nobody cares about these abilities for their support effects is because they’re all on long cooldowns that essentially makes the potential DPS gain redundant (can’t add much healer damage if you can only support them once every 45/90/120 seconds).

Basically, class balance is kinda messed up, they have jobs that are supposed to ‘support the party’ but their personal DPS is too low for that support to be worthwhile. Either that, or the support is oversimplified and made very limited use so that players can focus on personal DPS, meaning that it doesn’t add anything particularly valuable. I think that in trying to simplify every job so maximum personal DPS is easier to achieve, they’ve completely neglected the jobs who were never there for their personal DPS in the first place. Which has resulted in the balancing issues we have now. DPS is definitely more important than anything they will ever add in battle content, invariably, but that doesn’t mean they can’t think of interesting ways to contribute to it outside of just ‘deals’ damage

[CorbinDallas]

That is the complete opposite of balance. Why should an easy to play job do the same amount of damage as a difficult job.