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.

As others have stated where exactly did SE say they were addressing for example RM basically being weak AF?
They have not nor will they touch it until probably mid expansion or a few patches in. History repeats itself here....

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

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.

Originally Posted by Kabooa

And if we did have those lower jobs, -but no one died- we probably would have killed it too. Or if we had a little more tank damage. Or if the healer didn't die at the last minute of the fight. Context is important.

Yes. Re-read what you said. Repeatedly.

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.

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.

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. Especially in a vertical gearing progression MMO such as this one, where there's only three major pillars that contribute to your personal performance - skill level, gear item level, and class. All of that is compounded by the devs being historically slow to address the concerns of some of the classes that were in trouble last expansion. Even for the short term, there's the consideration that a new Ultimate is around the corner on top of that.

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).

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.

But that's probably the big difference between you and me. My interest in this argument is from the standpoint of a designer. If you came in here with an actual purpose, then enlighten us: What, exactly, should be done about the current state of the balance?