Thread: 5.08 Patch - DPS still not balanced.

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?

Originally Posted by Kabooa

More mistakes than who?

If we had a different party comp, would we have made those mistakes?

Does gear not also cover mistakes?

What's the arbitrary amount of mistakes a party should be allowed to recover from, regardless of composition or performance?

Are certain jobs more prone to mistakes than others?

Are we to balance jobs around how many mistakes they should be able to make?

Is a mistake only death?

How much should each job be able to contribute in recovering from the mistake?

None of these questions are relevant to the point Saito brought up. But I’m sure you know that.

If you had been on RDM over BLM, and if your team had performed exactly as they had in your clear (performing with the same mistakes: deaths, damage downs, rotational errors), you would not have cleared. If you had been a 55th percentile RDM, you would not have cleared. Currently, a 50th percentile BLM sits at 13,175 rDPS for E4S. A 50th percentile RDM sits over 1,000 rDPS below that at 12,073. Up that just a teeny bit for a 55th percentile.

The entire point of bringing this up is that some jobs and some compositions allow for things like multiple deaths, damage downs, and rotational errors; and others simply do not. Sure, better gear can also mitigate and provide wiggle room, but not as much as the job disparity we currently have can.

Originally Posted by Kabooa

Sorry for the delay. I'm trying to get another clear I ultimately don't deserve.

gdi

No one is arguing that you don't deserve the clear, that's not this is about. The whole point of the exercise was just to bring up that in the current state of the balance, taking specific classes more than ever before has become a factor into tipping an enrage wipe into a clear and vice-versa. That's something people want corrected above all.