Thread: 5.08 Patch - DPS still not balanced.

Originally Posted by whiskeybravo

Nobody cares because it discredits their entire argument. Fair enough I suppose.

That's OK. It's only been what 6 weeks or so since savage released? How much of the community has even cleared or attempting savage? Half? A third? A quarter?

I'm no more stubborn than anyone else. If you don't agree then you don't agree, doesn't change a thing.

Does it ever get tiresome building all these strawmen?

You don't balance around lower tier parses because people aren't playing the jobs to their potential. Therefore, the data will be misleading at best or flat out useless. Look at say, 50%, and you'll see Black Mages dropping Eno-chan; Dragoons overcapping their Eyes; Monks losing Greased Lightning, and etc. All of this makes the data pointless. Hence why you look at the higher end percentiles where these mistakes won't occur. This gives a far more accurate indication of what the actual strengths and weaknesses of each job is.

As for clear rates. Enough people have cleared the statistics average out. It won't make a difference if we evaluate now or two months from now. Red Mages aren't suddenly go up by a 1,000 DPS. In fact, the gap is likely to widen—and the stigma increase when Ultimate comes out.

Originally Posted by ForteNightshade

Does it ever get tiresome building all these strawmen?

You don't balance around lower tier parses because people aren't playing the jobs to their potential. Therefore, the data will be misleading at best or flat out useless. Look at say, 50%, and you'll see Black Mages dropping Eno-chan; Dragoons overcapping their Eyes; Monks losing Greased Lightning, and etc. All of this makes the data pointless. Hence why you look at the higher end percentiles where these mistakes won't occur. This gives a far more accurate indication of what the actual strengths and weaknesses of each job is.

As for clear rates. Enough people have cleared the statistics average out. It won't make a difference if we evaluate now or two months from now. Red Mages aren't suddenly go up by a 1,000 DPS. In fact, the gap is likely to widen—and the stigma increase when Ultimate comes out.

And judging only the higher end parses of groups which have been collecting gear and optimizing over the last 6 weeks, compared to the more casual base which doesn't care about "the meta" is indicative of.. what exactly?

I did some napkin math and will semi-concede on the disparity. At 25% percentile, which I know from previous investigations is about the bare minimum you can have as a group to clear content (I wondered in previous raid tiers whether a group of all grays could meet dps checks, they can't), the bottom 8 jobs (2 melee, 1 caster, 1 ranged) is about 500 dps short of meeting enrage on e1s, compared to the highest combination which is 2500 over the check.

So does that mean that they should be given a free pass for poor play? I don't really think so. Someone needs to step up above the bare minimum, preferably all of them. Additionally, perhaps the top 4 actually need to be nerfed a bit, compared to the bottom 4 being bumped up, because for the most part people would rather take a hand out instead of trying harder.

Bottom line is this. If you're a good player than it doesn't really matter what job you play, you can find a group and clear the content. Short of that all you're doing is looking for an excuse to justify either your lack of ability, the lack of ability of your group, or anything else in between - rather than looking at yourself. That doesn't mean SE shouldn't do anything, as I've stated repeatedly in my posts, but there are 2 sides to every story. If you can't complete the content it's not your job, or combination of jobs in your group. It's you.

Originally Posted by whiskeybravo

And judging only the higher end parses of groups which have been collecting gear and optimizing over the last 6 weeks, compared to the more casual base which doesn't care about "the meta" is indicative of.. what exactly?

What each job is capable of when pushed to its near full potential. How is this so difficult to understand? Those optimized runs are precisely the data you want because it's the most accurate representation of the jobs' performance. For argument's sake, let's pretend Black Mage's max potential is 17,000 and Red Mage is 15,000. If you balance around these figures, the bottom inevitably increases for Red Mage, thus both the lower tier and higher tier benefit. Conversely, if you consider the lower tier where several mistakes and other outside variables occur, you can get a clouded picture—like Black Mage may be underpowered because at 30% Dragoon pulls ahead. This approach leads to issue like we've seen in the past with how insanely overpowered Warrior, Bard and Summoner all were at one point or another. Or asinine remarks like "we don't consider Dragoon when balancing Bard and Machinist damage."

Originally Posted by whiskeybravo

Bottom line is this. If you're a good player than it doesn't really matter what job you play, you can find a group and clear the content. Short of that all you're doing is looking for an excuse to justify either your lack of ability, the lack of ability of your group, or anything else in between - rather than looking at yourself. That doesn't mean SE shouldn't do anything, as I've stated repeatedly in my posts, but there are 2 sides to every story. If you can't complete the content it's not your job, or combination of jobs in your group. It's you.

The "bottom line" is you need to stop strawmanning. No one is saying you can't clear content. We're talking about how certain jobs are widely inferior to others, thus demanding more effort from specific comps not due to the content challenging them but their preferred job simply being weak. There isn't two sides to this story because it's a dichotomy. Either the jobs are balanced or they aren't.

Originally Posted by SaitoHikari

But that's probably the big difference between you and me. My interest in this argument is from the standpoint of a designer. Your posts here so far mostly just consist of poking the beehive.

This wasn't directed at me, but I feel like I've been poking that beehive too. Good thing I'm not allergic to bees.

The context is that your party comp afforded you more mistakes. That's one of the biggest arguments in favor of this thread's existence.

Gear affords you more mistakes as well, yet no one is arguing to nerf or buff gear acquisition. If all you can think of is buffing the lower dps, what actually happens? If you don't buff them enough then nothing really changes (except people get free margin for error), and if you buff too much it simply replaces whoever is on top now. More or less a zero sum game, so there has to be more to the equation.

I think one of the major draws to this game's endgame before was that numbers were so crunched down and classes were so finely balanced that people could absolutely argue skill level was a bigger factor over class composition in determining clear rates. The uproar is so loud now because the balance has tipped to a point where for the first time in a long while, we can no longer definitively say that.

Kinda funny considering how there was nearly unanimous consent early on that SHB has brought the best balancing the game has ever had thus far.

The current state of the balance has shifted in favor of class composition, a problem that plagues many other MMOs that a good number of people in this thread likely migrated from. Even though skill level is still more important, the very threat of class composition overtaking personal skill level scares people, and most people obviously don't want this spiral out of control when there's absolutely nothing good about it for the long term health of the game.

This has literally always been the case. It's also always proven over and over again how that it only ever really matters to those obsessed with rankings.

Do people here want another story? One of my static members played Dancer throughout this raid tier, but switched to a minimum ilvl Monk for E4S. So he's got a wall of 85-95 percentiles from 1-3 on Dancer, and then an 8 for Monk in E4S. He tells the rest of us that his Monk still consistently did an average of 200 more rdps than his geared Dancer at each major checkpoint during the fight (and the gap I imagine is only going to increase, as the monk fists dropped last week).

Why don't you take a second to imagine what would happen if DNC did as much damage as MNK.

On a side note, I don't extensively play caster, but I'm still of the opinion that the raise tax on RDM and SMN is a slightly bigger problem than the situation with the three ranged classes. Of course, all these issues should be addressed at once, but the raise tax is more problematic from a design standpoint because - as I've said elsewhere - the whole party already gets taxed from someone dying in the first place, placing such a heavy tax on the two casters for simply possessing a skill (that's usually used by the healers first) that might reverse one wipe into a clear out of many dozens of failed pulls is absurd from a logic standpoint. There should still be a tax, or else who would take BLM - but it should not be as wide as a 1k DPS difference.

They're taxed for more than just having a raise, but I suppose that's a nice simplification.

Originally Posted by ForteNightshade

What each job is capable of when pushed to its near full potential. How is this so difficult to understand? Those optimized runs are precisely the data you want because it's the most accurate representation of the jobs' performance.

Exactly. The optimized groups are taking the optimal jobs. Are you really going to claim that there is 0 influence on BLM/MNK/DRG numbers when EVERY SINGLE SPEEDKILL COMP USES THEM?

Originally Posted by ForteNightshade

We're talking about how certain jobs are widely inferior to others, thus demanding more effort from specific comps not due to the content challenging them but their preferred job simply being weak. There isn't two sides to this story because it's a dichotomy. Either the jobs are balanced or they aren't.

Is that before or after you inflate the difference by 20 to 50%?

Originally Posted by whiskeybravo

Is that before or after you inflate the difference by 20 to 50%?

... Are you being willfully obtuse now or did you just not bother to actually read my post? The lower tier is irrelevant because the data provided isn't an accurate representation of the jobs' performance. You don't balance around a 20% or 50% Black Mage because that percentile range means they have made several mistakes either rotationally or mechanically. You balance at the top to remove such variables as it paints a more accurate picture. I really don't know how to dumb this down further for you.

Originally Posted by whiskeybravo

Exactly. The optimized groups are taking the optimal jobs. Are you really going to claim that there is 0 influence on BLM/MNK/DRG numbers when EVERY SINGLE SPEEDKILL COMP USES THEM?

And why are they taking them? Because evidence shows they are far superior to their counterparts. Optimized groups didn't pick those jobs out of a hat and decide to only play them. They test which jobs perform the best and adjust accordingly. You're essentially saying the current big three are only strong because speed killers run with them. That's putting the cart before the horse since it ignores why they chose those jobs.

Originally Posted by ForteNightshade

... Are you being willfully obtuse now or did you just not bother to actually read my post? The lower tier is irrelevant because the data provided isn't an accurate representation of the jobs' performance. You don't balance around a 20% or 50% Black Mage because that percentile range means they have made several mistakes either rotationally or mechanically. You balance at the top to remove such variables as it paints a more accurate picture. I really don't know how to dumb this down further for you.

I didn't say anything about 20% or 50% percentiles. I asked if whether that was before or after you inflated the disparity by 20-50%

Originally Posted by ForteNightshade

Tell you what. If you can explain to us what justification there is for Black Mage to pull nearly two thousand more rDPS than Red Mage or Dragoon to be a thousand above Bard, I'll admit this is all hogwash and we're overreacting.

"Nearly 2000" is an inflation of 20%. And 50% above the 1000 dps difference you see in lower percentiles.

Make sense now?

Originally Posted by ForteNightshade

And why are they taking them? Because evidence shows they are far superior to their counterparts. Optimized groups didn't pick those jobs out of a hat and decide to only play them. They test which jobs perform the best and adjust accordingly. You're essentially saying the current big three are only strong because speed killers run with them. That's putting the cart before the horse since it ignores why they chose those jobs.

That's not what I said at all, actually. I asked if you are really going to claim that them being predominantly found in optimization kills has no bearing whatsoever on the statistics.

And I'm the strawman lol

Originally Posted by Vendalwind

Fact: BLM is op.

The NIN calling the BLM op

:lulz:

Originally Posted by whiskeybravo

Gear affords you more mistakes as well, yet no one is arguing to nerf or buff gear acquisition. If all you can think of is buffing the lower dps, what actually happens? If you don't buff them enough then nothing really changes (except people get free margin for error), and if you buff too much it simply replaces whoever is on top now. More or less a zero sum game, so there has to be more to the equation.

Kinda funny considering how there was nearly unanimous consent early on that SHB has brought the best balancing the game has ever had thus far.

This has literally always been the case. It's also always proven over and over again how that it only ever really matters to those obsessed with rankings.

Why don't you take a second to imagine what would happen if DNC did as much damage as MNK.

They're taxed for more than just having a raise, but I suppose that's a nice simplification.

1) Gear affords you more mistakes because that's the entire freaking point of getting more gear in the first place. If they didn't, WHY would you even bother chasing after gear? Another irrelevant attempt at deflection.

2) Perception changes throughout an expansion. ShB looked more balanced at the start, but that was before people got comfortable with their new skills, the raid tier hit with actual enrage timers, FFLogs switched to rdps display, and people started to realize that what the developers were saying about balancing selfish DPS with party utility was actually a misleading statement at best.

3) And I'm saying that it's different this time because the disparity is now noticeably wide enough that you don't even need all this data to recognize that a problem exists.

4) No one is arguing for Dancer to match Monk damage. What we're arguing is that it's absolutely screwed up that, for all the party buffs they bring to the table, someone could actually just bring a Red Mage and (assuming both are roughly equal in percentiles) likely still have more total DPS contribution than the Dancer. Or bring one of the top five and still offer more contribution than the Dancer's party buffs (even with drastically lower percentile). That's two problems in one.

(Although I'm of the opinion that Dancer is probably one of the worst designed concepts for a MMO class I've ever seen, at least in terms of class balance. If they underperform as they are now, they'd be seen as a gimmick class that only looks good on paper. Bring them to the middle of the pack, and everyone below them will look even worse by comparison. And I cannot even think of an answer to this dilemma.)

5) I mean, they are taxed for more than having a raise, but what's your justification for keeping the gap as wide as it is? Seriously, I'd love to hear your thoughts on this.

So perhaps I should explain my actual stance in this thread: All I actually want is for the gap between the top 5 DPS classes and the bottom 5 DPS classes to be broken down, because no designer can really see that and say 'this is fine' with a straight face. This is either done by crunching the 1.7k gap (assuming 95th percentile) between Monk and Dancer towards something more reasonable like 1k-1.2k, and/or buffing the bottom 5 to close the gap between #5 Ninja and #6 Summoner from being a literal 600-700 difference to being a more reasonable 200-250. (That said, the developers did a good job with bringing up Ninja to help close that gap, that used to be 700-800 between Samurai and Summoner before.)

And those are lenient numbers - many others in this thread would argue for those gaps to be crunched down even harder. The numbers I stated are, IMO, enough for skill level to undoubtedly become the biggest factor once more. As it is now, a party consisting of 2/2 or even 3/1 of the bottom five classes need to collectively perform so much better percentile-wise to achieve similar results compared to a 1/3 party (or even to beat enrage in some cases), to the point where one cannot fault them for seeing how the relationship between skill level vs class composition has tipped. (And that's not including 4/0 or 0/4 parties, since the former would be a pure caster/ranged party, and the latter will only really happen if you bring two Black Mages or go triple melee, both of which won't really happen in a practical setting).

Originally Posted by whiskeybravo

Nobody cares because it discredits their entire argument. Fair enough I suppose.

That's OK. It's only been what 6 weeks or so since savage released? How much of the community has even cleared or attempting savage? Half? A third? A quarter?

I'm no more stubborn than anyone else. If you don't agree then you don't agree, doesn't change a thing.

So let me get this straight.

You think that people who can't even maintain a proper rotation are a perfectly viable metric for job balance, and that it would be perfectly viable to choose which jobs need buffs and nerfs based off of the most incompetent players? Because that's the point you seem to be making and defending.