Ranged DPS role is about to be excluded from all content

[ForteNightshade]

But as they stated before, people playing through the savage and extreme are not the majority of the playerbase and the way they seem to balance stuff is on a larger scale than just the people that do this type content. For them a 1000 dps gape might not be such a difference if they think it won't prevent people to clear with a decent gear.

You may be right in saying that is their approach. Unfortunately, it's an incredibly shortsighted and flawed approach. When it comes to job balance, the only content they should be focusing on is Savage and Ultimate. Why? Because only those pieces of content push the jobs to their capacity. Dungeons are a complete joke. Back in Stormblood, I ran 70 dungeons without a Healer. That's how piss easy they are. You don't balance around content that barely requires a pulse. This is the exact same problem they had with Piercing. Yoshida outright acknowledged they never considered Dragoon when balancing Bard which led to Bard utter dominance throughout all of Stormblood—to the point if you did like Machinist, you were going to struggle finding a group at the Savage level.

And therein lies the issue. We've already seen more and more people either refuse to recruit certain jobs or lock them out of PF. If you're a Red Mage main. You better be parsing at an orange level or you're going to struggle finding a group. Not to mention, it feels pretty bad knowing that if you, a physical range or non-Black Mage caster, played at other job. Your party would have much higher success on any Savage fight in the game.

[HyoMinPark]

Casual players don't notice nor care about subtle differences which result in a clear vs enrage scenario. The content casual players run very rarely scrutinize each and every class and obstruct roles from participating simply because the majority of it is ran through duty finder. I'm yet to see someone leave an expert roulette or normal level raid because they had a bard/red mage combo in the party.

The concerns are perfectly valid for extreme, savage and presumably ultimate content, although we're led to believe that classes are periodically adjusted to balance for the current endgame and that any team composition should be good enough to clear. Yes some more easily than others but in a time where people also complain about how easy the game is, why not embrace a challenge?

Your problem is thinking that balance should occur in a dungeon setting. That is not—and never should be—where jobs are balanced. They should be balanced around higher levels of play, so that one can assess the limits each job can reach and observe the discrepancies that arise there. Only by doing that can they address them at the higher levels of play. And this wouldn’t negatively impact the lower levels of play. Conversely, balancing jobs around dungeon content—where you can get by doing the bare minimum—would cause severe issues at the higher levels.

Embrace the challenge of bringing weaker/struggling jobs? I don’t really consider it any sort of challenge to bring these jobs into a party. It almost borders on griefing your team, in my opinion. Consider the casters: it’s inherently better to bring a BLM over SMN/RDM because BLMs are so far ahead of the other two—we’re talking ~1,500 DPS ahead. Even with the battle raises, BLMs are downright better. It doesn’t feel good for RDM and SMN mains to know that their jobs are that far behind another caster. Likewise, with the physical ranged, it doesn’t feel good to know that literally every other job save for SMN and RDM (whom are also struggling) are stomping all over you, and that it would be more useful to bring a third melee or a second BLM as opposed to a job from your role.

As I said before, I shouldn’t feel as if my team would be better off with me rolling a melee job or BLM. I should feel as if I can pull my weight on my preferred job without worrying about costing them. I may not be the best DNC, but I’m fairly competent—and I still feel weak and just bad.

The problem we have in this game, is that people are judged solely on their dps, but if content can be cleared and you play with friends, who does the biggest dps shouldn't be a problem.

If you have this mindset of “as long as we clear, everything is fine”, that’s fine. But some of us don’t like feeling like we’re weak or a hinderance to our party. Some of us don’t raid with the mindset of “well, we cleared so everything is gucci”. Try to understand the opposing mindset instead of just thinking your mindset will suit us all. For me, “we cleared” isn’t enough when I know my group could clear easier if I were playing a different job right now, despite my skill on DNC.

My group aren’t going to ask me to swap jobs—but that’s the static collectively agreeing with allowing me to stay on a job I prefer as opposed to one that would be more useful. However, that doesn’t change how I feel. Nor does it change how people in Party Finder can and will react to the physical ranged falling behind. I’ve already seen DNCs being locked out and criticized for its low damage—and it just makes you kind of feel like crap. Inb4 we start saying to just ignore what the others think: this isn’t easy to do when you start getting locked out of content, or trashed for playing a “subpar job”. It has happened to jobs before when they weren’t doing so hot.

[SaitoHikari]

I want to bring up what I personally experienced over the past four days in E4S.

I got my first clear as a Bard on Sunday in a pug party. Our party comp was Black Mage, Dragoon, Bard, and Ninja. The Black Mage and Ninja died once. We cleared 20 seconds before enrage.

My static runs a Bard/Dragoon/Dancer/Summoner comp. We made it to last phase with only our Scholar dying in phase 1.

My static failed to beat enrage at 0.7%, despite performing much better at a mechanical level.

That said, the paladin and scholar in the pug party made up for those deaths by pulling 1.5k more dps than my static members of the same classes (and it’s also worth mentioning the pug Black Mage still pulled similar damage with a death as the summoner that didn’t die at all), but that’s not the whole point.

I find that if say, a party of non-meta classes have to perform at a collective 75+ percentile level without any mistakes to achieve similar results compared to a meta party making major mistakes at a ~30th percentile level... It is absolutely unfair and a sign of just how dire the state of the balance is. Most players of the non meta comps are not going to be ‘hardcore’ enough to make up for that difference with their skill level. Those that are could decide to just switch classes anyway.

And it brings up a lot of uncomfortable design and balance questions that I’ll speak of, when I wake up in the morning and make a different thread outlining these concerns.

Mind you, I say all this as a consistent 90+ percentile Bard. I initially made a thread believing that ShB Bard wasn’t that bad and had its advantages. But even I had to face reality, and realized that the thing I should have been most concerned about was the place of all ranged as a whole.

But even that isn’t the big issue anymore. If this performance gap isn’t shrunk big time soon, the balance in this expansion will be a lost cause.

[Yandere-chan]

... you do realize this is worse[ for casual players, yes? The damage discrepancy is so high right now a Black Mage could literally jump off after phase one of Titan and still beat every single job outside of the melee. All the melee could do the same. A perfect Dancer or Red Mage will straight up lose to an above average Monk. In fact, lets look at how insane the numbers are.

Summoner is currently the highest ranked job in the "weaker" category on Titan, pulling in 13,436 at 99%. Monk at just 60% is pulling 13,515. Black Mage at that same level is at 13,312. That means a stellar Summoner with near perfect logs is weaker than an average Monk and barely beating an average Black Mage or Dragoon. Now think about that in a pug setting, where you have no idea the caliber of player you'll get. If you insist on bringing a Black Mage, said Black Mage doesn't even need to be good; just average, and they're already better than every other Range or Caster DPS in the game. Do you really think that's good for a casual or midcore setting?

I stated that I think it's good that Square is adjusting classes. I don't think it would be good however to make make ranged DPS at 100% optimal performance the same as melee or casters at 100% optimal performance (under ideal situations). I think things are at a reasonable middle ground when Ranged DPS generally performs better in fights that are both highly mobile and impossible to have high uptime for melee. I think there could be better balancing between utility vs. personal dps as well.

The point of contention I have is that it's far easier to perform optimally with less restrictions, range being an important one, in which ranged dps can highly bypass it. Caster is in the middle because casters generally have more movement restrictions than ranged dps. Classes shouldn't be balanced around all of them doing 100% damage potential in all fights because it would just leave melee as the most shafted, casters as the second most, and ranged dps would then be just be better overall at that point (there is also considerations of output vs. class complexity that can play into avg results too among each role specifically).

I also do have to consider the flaw in logs. There isn't any real control group. You may just happen to have a lot of poorer performing players or poorer performing groups that make worse relative use of certain classes or certain utilities, or you may have an unproportionate number of classes having support buffs stacked upon them, making differences seem far more exaggerated than what they actually are. Wanting Square to balance around random log results isn't a good way to go about things at all. I do think there are some balance issues recognized though and we are seeing changes, thus why I said I think it's good Square is making some adjustments.

[Lina_Slayer]

SE has been insanely melee biased this expansion, just look at the struggling melee jobs versus a struggling caster:

SAM: Huge damage buffs, NIN: Huge damage buffs, MNK: QoLs that resulted in a big dps gain, SMN: lol I guess you are now slightly easier to play?

I'm convinced we BLM mains are lucky that we got released broken or else we'd be like everyone else bowing down to our melee overlords.

[AxelDH]

Don't worry. I'm sure we'll still be needed for our Leg/Foot Graze utility in the next Ultimate.

[Eliadil]

SE has been insanely melee biased this expansion, just look at the struggling melee jobs versus a struggling caster:

SAM: Huge damage buffs, NIN: Huge damage buffs, MNK: QoLs that resulted in a big dps gain, SMN: lol I guess you are now slightly easier to play?

"huge damage buffs". I would be very surprised to see why sam is, in your opinion, in a good spot now Although I'm still doubting about the fact that even Ninja is above Sam when it comes to rdps now.

Monk are having a great life atm, but saying that the current ninja/sam buffs are on the same level as the monk ones is really being out of touch with the whole melee balance right now ^^

I'm still hoping that 5.1 will solve every issue, and it better be. I don't want a Stormblood balance to happen again, where some class had to wait until 4.4 just to be accepted in most pf.

[Aomine1992]

I just mentioned how this may make things worse for ranged, cause now people are thinking triple melee with just a BLM lol unless mechanics dictate otherwise which honestly they don’t just make a healer do the mechanic a ranged otherwise would.

[Vendalwind]

I just mentioned how this may make things worse for ranged, cause now people are thinking triple melee with just a BLM lol unless mechanics dictate otherwise which honestly they don’t just make a healer do the mechanic a ranged otherwise would.

No one is seriously considering triple melee.

That is a meme and a trash panda joke.

Fights are frequently built in such a way that triple melee will destroy one players dps. (Even if it is the tank that enslds up screwed).

Dbl black mage tho is a real threat sadly. And ranged do need a bump.

Alternatively tho blm and mnk need a slight nerf. Game pretty easy right now. Ive been saying this for awhile but i think the optimal balance goal is right around 1% below current DRG lvl.

I do also firmly believe that some ranged tax has to exist. They by far have mechanics the easiest because of their mobility. It absolutely shouldnt be as severe as it currently is, but it does need to exist.

Also the SAM balance didnt math NIN right. Nins think the lineup will be MNK>>SAM>DRG=NIN

But its still up in the air till seen in practice via parses.

[Marc-Vigar]

There are some jobs that are better for progging like RDM, there are others that are immune to movement mechanics like ranged DPS, so it seems fair that those who are weak to mechanics (casters and melee) have higher DPS than those who can move freely and have 100% uptime no matter what.

High risk high reward VS low risk low reward.

If they lower the damage on high risk jobs there will be no point to bring them over low risk jobs.