Quote Originally Posted by IruruCece View Post
Screw the Savage meta. The people who help "trickle down" that garbage are not worth actually listening to for anything.
Unfortunately, there will always be a meta. There is no way for there not to be. If that is what you are hoping for, you will be disappointed. The high-end will always find the most effective comp, and there will always be people below them who listen and wish to emulate.

People who exclude specific jobs from party comps are either actually pushing the very limits of this game, or they are pretending they can outside of Savage for some reason and are trying to imitate those who are while also having a very crappy attitude to be around.
Pushing the game to its limits is generally why people run meta comps and optimize to the levels the most hardcore 0.1% do.

As for “outside of Savage”—no one cares about dungeon meta. When you talk about meta, you’re talking about Savage and Ultimate. People seem to think that this applies to dungeons, but it doesn’t. The trickle-down I am referencing merely applies to lower-end PF Savage groups attempting to emulate what the higher-end Savage raiders do. Not trickle-down from Savage into things like dungeon content. That’s just silly.

No developer should listen exclusively to either one of those groups.
Then, who should they listen to? Balance should always be done around what jobs are capable of—their max potential. It should always take place within the hardest content in this game, since the easiest content would never require anything close to maximum potential from any job: it only requires the bare minimum. Listening to players who know the ins and outs of jobs, how to push them to their maximum potential, and who have collected data about jobs’ performances seems like the crowd to listen to, in my opinion. Versus a crowd that has none of these, and instead wants to talk about balance with unquantifiable metrics.

5.08 was never, ever promised to be the grand fixes that Samurai or Ninja are in need of, nor was it intended to be the nerfs some of the angrier folks in this community were expecting the current dps kings to get slapped with.
Never implied that 5.08 was meant to be anything else other than what it was. However, it did a poor job of actually balancing much of anythin,g outside of NIN no longer being in the grave: SAM still does less than MNK, and SMN is still getting destroyed by BLM. 5.1 will hopefully bring more balance to some of the roles, as well as gameplay changes for NIN and possibly SMN, but there are still larger balancing issues present: if SMN is buffed considerably in any way, RDM dies. And the physical ranged are still facing their own imbalance issues, which haven’t really been addressed, or even acknowledged, by the development team.

If Samurai want to be king DPS so badly, they should also have to play the same ridiculous keyboard bemani than Nin or Smn do to go along with the huge bursts they get to squirt out just for following a rotation correctly.
I’m sorry, but there is no reason for a job that has utility (MNK) to deal more personal damage and contribute more to rDPS than a job that doesn’t offer any sort of utility within that same role (SAM). Jobs should also not be balanced solely around complexity: otherwise, RDM would never get off the ground. (And I think balancing off of a moderately subjective measure is poor balancing practice anyways.)

The more “selfish” DPS jobs should always deal more personal damage and have slightly higher raid contributions compared to the jobs that bring utility. With it being the other way around, why would one bring the selfish job to an optimized setting over a job that buffs the party? This has been seen numerous times in this game’s past: starting from Creator in Patch 3.4, when DRG/NIN/BRD/MCH absolutely dominated and casters were pushed aside until Patch 4.1 when the developers broke SMN. It took until Alphascape for BLM to finally wiggle its way into speedkills and optimized settings as well.