Thread: 5.08 Patch - DPS still not balanced.

Originally Posted by Kabooa

"SE, what are you thinking, no one will play Bard now if Machinist just does more damage!"

I mean that's fixed by giving bard some utility and buffing dancer's skill potencies so that they're not abysmally low. I don't think people much care for the current iteration of bard where your only utility is an addle/feint with twice the cooldown and battle voice which really doesn't give much dps contribution.

Originally Posted by whiskeybravo

Yes, of course. It's not rocket science. The thing is, it's basically always been that way. Support jobs have always done less raw damage than damage dealing jobs. Only now it's a "problem" because it's more apparent, or something.

So the only solution is to get rid of support jobs and just have every DD at 15k DPS (or whatever arbitrary number you want to input). You can't have support jobs deal as much damage as raw dps jobs, because then they would boost each other and exclude the raw dps jobs eventually. Even so, if all the jobs then do more base DPS, SE simply designs bosses to have more HP. It's a horizontal shift that doesn't actually grow into anything new or interesting.

What support? The Range now have one 10% mitigation CD while the Casters have Addle. Even Dancer's support is primarily damaged based, thus it should even out. Regardless, support jobs have routinely dominated. Bard, for example, ended Heavensward as the strongest DPS in the game. Summoner pulled ahead of Black Mage until Alphascape and we all know the prevalence Ninja. Support jobs aren't really a thing anywhere. Which is why the damage discrepancies have become such an issue. Bard isn't bringing passive Crit buffs, Refresh and etc. All they're offering is the aforementioned mitigation which is arguably comparable to melee Feint, and Minne. The latter of which is laughably inferior to Mantra.

Originally Posted by ForteNightshade

Bard isn't bringing passive Crit buffs, Refresh and etc. All they're offering is the aforementioned mitigation which is arguably comparable to melee Feint, and Minne. The latter of which is laughably inferior to Mantra.

thats the big one, the "support" jobs all lost a ton of effective support while gaining 0 personal damage in return, it may very well be that say a bard that does 10% less personal dps than a blackmage but offers 2% passive crit, foe's requiem, battle voice and refresh is "overpowered", but there is an enourmous gap between "10% less dps and 3 damage buffs+a really usefull support skill" and 13-15% less [personal] dps and 1 damage buff+nothing else wortwhile.

also i would argue refresh is actually the biggest offender for casual groups here, the rest comes in play at a speedkill meta level, i at least can say that my last three (casual) statics all made sure to have a bard or mch (they didn't even care which of them, just their were more bards) but not for the dps but for refresh.

Also if dps "support" at a perfect level barely breaks even with personal dps of "selfish" classes that would mean that instead of (just for example) going from bard going from 5% worse->5% better than blackmage depending on group composition we simply go from bard 10% worse->bard barely able to break even depending on group composition, and while i get that it sucks to be excluded from anything, even if its "just" the speedkill meta i'm not sure i would call the "'support' is allways worse" version better balanced than the "'in an ideal group the 'support' class may overtake the 'pure' class, while in a non-meta combination it may actually be the other way around and in reality they will probably meet somewhere in the middle in any non meta speedkill party"

at least not as long as the only "support" they offer that others don't is dps support, if people really want to argue how useful nature's minne for example is we might aswell start calling manaward support as if it keeps you alive it saves the healers mana because s/he doesn't have to rezz you

Honestly though if fflog dont show rdps ninja and the other synergy job will still be prefered for number justice...

The timing of SE decision of weakening the synergy job and fflog decision to show rdps come put as the worst outcome

Yes imagine if rdps rankings didn't exist, there's a decent chance overpowered jobs like black mage would be able to 'hide' how overtuned they are. People would look at black mage doing, for example, 16,000 pdps, and summoner with 13,000 pdps, and handwave it away with unscientific excuses like "Oh it's pdps, people probably like to pad black mages more" or "I bet devotion is actually worth 3000 dps (lol) so summoners are actually not behind". The only way people would notice is when high end speedrunning groups realize they're getting far faster clears with blm/mnk/drg comps and slowly everyone gravitates to that and people start noticing that trend. That would've taken months to sink in, now all that data is out in the open visible to everyone from day 1.

In that vein, I have to question how true the claim is that jobs like summoner were actually strong in Stormblood. Rdps rankings did not exist back then, so it's not like there's any numerical proof. Black mages were already doing more pdps than summoners in alphascape, and the actual choice to run with summoner was just, again, unscientific handwaving like "I bet devotion contributes more damage than the pdps advantage that blm has". If you look at the speedrun rankings for alphascape, since speed is the clearest indicator of rdps, you'll see that the top 5 runs for all fights all feature black mage in it. In fact, in some fights black mage is present in 4-5 of the top 5 rankings, so clearly it isn't as weak as some people claim.

Of course player perception is another story. It doesn't always match up with reality because information takes time to trickle down and influence behavior. A job can be strong but unpopular (HW ranged), or weak but popular (current ranged). Like I have said before, black mage was objectively balanced in alphascape, but also underplayed because the bad reputation they had from the start of the expansion took time to wear off. SE probably balances partially around the playrate numbers of the job, so seeing everyone abandon black mage probably led to the panic buffs and the current overpowered state of the job. Now the situation is reversed and summoner is in that position, and mark my words history will repeat itself again.