Automatic Job Balance System

[LeoLupinos]

Encounters are not designed to have everyone do the same damage outputs. And that is taken into account in the calculations and the overall fundamental design. YoshiP explained in the SHB Job Preview live letter that they look at the "Role" first and then move from Pure DPS down to DPS with Utility. Pure DPS will and or should be at the top of the list as BLM is. They recognized that SAM was not and have started tweaking as required to fit that paradigm. In the Ranged Physical Role as an example it is MCH > BRD > DNC, with MCH having the highest personal dps potential to the DNC having the lowest but the largest group enhancement potential. It is on the players to take the tools given in their chosen job to make that job achieve its maximum designed potential in the framework created by the game designers. If there is a glaring fault in the chosen design the Dev team will make the choice to change it. They themselves do play this game as well.

And if I may be so bold how would a composer know the beauty of different conductors and orchestras playing their music with the varying tones and pace if they are all uniform and the same! Where is the exaltation of practicing your job and seeing improvement as you master it? How would you know when the player who does nothing to prepare themselves does the same output as someone who spent weeks honing themselves?

This is not about numbers it is fundamentally about a mind set. A mind set that I can only see as wanting to turn combat in FFXIV into that of a mobile game or something you could play on a tablet. WoW did that and look where that got them along with the other poor design choices.

On a technical level the very system you want even if done by real people is only suited for PVP centric MMO's whos source code has been designed with instance specific controlled encounters or mobile games with limited skill sets. In those settings Dynamic Difficulty Adjustment (DDA) works just fine. In FFXIV we have Overworld combat, Instanced Combat, PvP Combat (I list it separately because its done separately with its own skills), Raid Combat, and Solo Trial Combat. All of these are worked with in job balancing were talking the flying spaghetti monster from hell in coding trying to put DDA into all of that. And it would have to be uniform or portions of the community would scream from the deepest pit of the seven hells to the very pinnacle of the heavens. FFXIV just does not have the hardware, software, or human base required to do this cost effectively at this time. Even then if it was integrated it would be done as a tool to make it easier for the Dev team to do their jobs not to make it so every player no matter how good or bad they are does the same damage.

Why do you think every job will do the same damage with this system?
I explained that it will do little adjustments to the damage just for it to reach the EXPECTED damage for that encounter for that Job. It does not mean BLM that do 14k will make all of other jobs do 14k too. I does mean that If BLM is underperforming in that encounter, because there is no time to cast spells and is doing 13k, it will get a buff for that encounter to reach the expected damage of 14k. I'm saying damage, but in reality it needs to be potency. I'm sure every Job has a maximum output of potency per second that no matter what they do, they only reach that number. The only time where they don't reach that expected number is bases on encounter design, ex caster not having time to cast, melee not having time to stay near the target to damage it, boss jumping off the targetable view and thus expiring Job buffs etc...

It's not homogenization, it's balance. Because there is already a expected ranking in personal DPS in the dev team creation, and some encounters make it impossible to reach the expected value.