Balance and difficulty

[Hocus-Pucus]

Many people tend to use 'difficulty' to play a job as an excuse for their either over the top dps or lack of. Jobs are just designed differently, why should a job being seen as easier do less damage than a class seen as hard? It is just a subjective view point... So why on earth are the red mages left in the dumpster? Because they can res? While monks are given an ok raid buff and at the same time deal a billion of dps. I know it is 'just' a 13% difference between the high and low, but it is enough for some to exclude job choices from raids.

Why are we using hard or easy as an excuse for imbalance? Let the balance be based on the actual impact of the jobs' group buffs.

[TcomJ]

Many people tend to use 'difficulty' to play a job as an excuse for their either over the top dps or lack of. Jobs are just designed differently, why should a job being seen as easier do less damage than a class seen as hard? It is just a subjective view point... So why on earth are the red mages left in the dumpster? Because they can res? While monks are given an ok raid buff and at the same time deal a billion of dps. I know it is 'just' a 13% difference between the high and low, but it is enough for some to exclude job choices from raids.

Why are we using hard or easy as an excuse for imbalance? Let the balance be based on the actual impact of the jobs' group buffs.

Because people ask for homogenization, all utilities are nerfed, all combos gone, you leave with well, the dps number ditches that does well.

Who would have thought? Wow people actually discriminate on just DPS number now. Surprise surprise!

[Drayos]

Because people ask for homogenization, all utilities are nerfed, all combos gone, you leave with well, the dps number ditches that does well.

Who would have thought? Wow people actually discriminate on just DPS number now. Surprise surprise!

It’s more some people play difficult jobs for the wrong reasons.

U will see loads of 9 percentile black mages proclaiming red mage is too easy, just as you will see 9 percentile monks say SAM is too easy

Lots of people tend to look past what they enjoy most in trade to find the “most difficult” in some sorta flex on players and automatically feel their dps needs to be higher. Mostly because they perform said job to such a low percentile they get out dps’d by almost everyone. And take that as the job being the problem.

Everyone else who doesn’t care for anything but what they love most see the problems in these things happening.

I defintly do not want 4 of that example of player every time I attempt to pug I’d much rather see someone playing a easy dps competitively then see them struggle til they give up on some high mechanically challenging job that they can’t deal with under pressure.

[dinnertime]

I know difficulty is subjective, but what's ironic is that the high DPS jobs like BLM and somewhat SAM and MCH aren't actually difficult to play. Can't say much about MNK since I don't really play it, but I've been told it's easier, especially with the 5.05 changes giving it basically 50% uptime on ignoring positionals. If DPS was balanced around difficulty, NIN and SMN would be on top since they require the most effort out of every DPS right now, and yet they're at the bottom.

Even the devs have explained that they don't balance like that.

[TcomJ]

It’s more some people play difficult jobs for the wrong reasons.

U will see loads of 9 percentile black mages proclaiming red mage is too easy, just as you will see 9 percentile monks say SAM is too easy

Lots of people tend to look past what they enjoy most in trade to find the “most difficult” in some sorta flex on players and automatically feel their dps needs to be higher. Mostly because they perform said job to such a low percentile they get out dps’d by almost everyone. And take that as the job being the problem.

Everyone else who doesn’t care for anything but what they love most see the problems in these things happening.

I defintly do not want 4 of that example of player every time I attempt to pug I’d much rather see someone playing a easy dps competitively then see them struggle til they give up on some high mechanically challenging job that they can’t deal with under pressure.

That's true too. But from my bard main perspective, the fact that they give the reason that the more pdps you have the less utility and buff the job should have....then I look at mnk and drg and I'm like that makes no sense.
But it could be that they think bard is easy so they take almost all of our buff and utility away while mnk kept most of theirs and ended up having more of it than Bard.

[Zerathor]

That's true too. But from my bard main perspective, the fact that they give the reason that the more pdps you have the less utility and buff the job should have....then I look at mnk and drg and I'm like that makes no sense.
But it could be that they think bard is easy so they take almost all of our buff and utility away while mnk kept most of theirs and ended up having more of it than Bard.

In bard's case, I think it has more to do with complete unrestrained mobility. Especially now that they also have knockback immunity. Which maybe could be considered difficulty, but I feel raw mobility is more than that when it let's ranged be perfect candidates for bait mechanics and other things while keeping perfect uptime without having to compromise or mix up rotations. Also the utility for damage reduction is superior imo for some fights being that it flat reduces damage taken for the party rather than reduce the bosses damage. That allows mitigation from untargetable sources like p3 titan tumults from big titan, which is pretty nice.

[CapricaLangley]

Many people tend to use 'difficulty' to play a job as an excuse for their either over the top dps or lack of.

Coming from competitive gaming, I have to agree with them. In a perfect world, high skill jobs, classes or heroes should be the ones rewarded the most. Skill ceiling should be on par with potential result, but it's very difficult to balance a game with that in mind, almost impossible i'd say.

[Acidblood]

You're assuming that this is the intended balance... MNK got a huge buff in 5.05 and DRG has been over-tuned since the start, so they are hardly jobs to compare to.

In the case of BLM vs. RDM vs. SMN it's a bit more difficult to quantify as BLM DPS can vary depending on the encounter due to movement / mechanics / co-ordination, though you could say the same for RDM. RDM and SMN also bring Raise, the value of which is highly variable. RDM has Embolden, SMN has Devotion, whereas BLM only has its pDPS...

Which brings me to the counter point: If ‘difficult’ (or 'pure') jobs are not more rewarding then you end up with the opposite situation where they are excluded (due to risk of low performance).

As TcomJ said, this is what happens when you strip every job down to the point they are only measured by their DPS (and design encounters where DPS is ultimately the only thing that matters); i.e. DPS will literary become the only thing that matters and even minor differences will be seen as a huge imbalance... which is not to say all jobs are currently balanced; some are clearly not; but unless there is shift in design to the point where jobs are valued for more than just their contribution to the parser there will be no end to the measuring contest.

[Drayos]

Coming from competitive gaming, I have to agree with them. In a perfect world, high skill jobs, classes or heroes should be the ones rewarded the most. Skill ceiling should be on par with potential result, but it's very difficult to balance a game with that in mind, almost impossible i'd say.

No, it’s not hard to balance. Because you would be imbalancing the game.

The problem is you would slaughter your raid scene by reducing the viable jobs to 2 - 3 options throughout the entire playerbase.

You would slaughter the popularity of end game raiding further as accessing raids would become less approachable.

Everyone would roll the same job which will kill diversity throughout the game. Which would again hurt the raiding scene.

This mentality would drive SE to eventually reduce every jobs skill curve to that of a red mage because it’d destroy their end game to such a area they’d have to.

[TcomJ]

In bard's case, I think it has more to do with complete unrestrained mobility. Especially now that they also have knockback immunity. Which maybe could be considered difficulty, but I feel raw mobility is more than that when it let's ranged be perfect candidates for bait mechanics and other things while keeping perfect uptime without having to compromise or mix up rotations. Also the utility for damage reduction is superior imo for some fights being that it flat reduces damage taken for the party rather than reduce the bosses damage. That allows mitigation from untargetable sources like p3 titan tumults from big titan, which is pretty nice.

The problem is all range has it. And then all our identity and job specialty and depths are all gone for universalized abilities. The dmg reduction buffs Tactician, Trabador, Defense Samba are the same, they do not work on top of each other.
Also, if difficulties and utilities are such a concern on what a job can do, BLM and SAM should have done more dmg than MNK or DRG by now.

And for the ridiculously low DPS from almost all range dps, range DPS should get more of their own unique specialized buff/utilities abilities or combo of our own. It used to be only bard+DRG combo, but people ask to remove ALL combos but never explore more combos pair for other jobs. It's an easy copped out way for a good RPG.

And the fact that they make bard easier, they make the job more boring and linear...

The reasoning for this kind of balance is all over the place. It's a mess.