upcoming rdm changes?

[Adventica6]

It pays way too much for it's utility for the damage that it deals, plain and simple. Either remove vercure and increase it's damage or remove verraise and increase it's damage, we don't need both.

Rdm's in FFXI were way, way, superior to what we have here, by leaps and bounds.

A jack of all trades does not mean do everything poorly, it means do everything decent, please follow your own job identity that has been in place since 1987.

[Archwizard]

It pays way too much for it's utility for the damage that it deals, plain and simple. Either remove vercure and increase it's damage or remove verraise and increase it's damage, we don't need both.

In fairness, Vercure does have a mechanical benefit to RDM as a means to proc Dualcast on-demand when targets aren't available.

But if your point is already that its damage cost for its utility is too high, wouldn't another solution simply be... reducing the cost of its utility, thereby bypassing any need to remove anything at all? Your argument hinges on the damage costs being disproportionate, not on the utilities themselves being worthless.

[Duelle]

It pays way too much for it's utility for the damage that it deals, plain and simple. Either remove vercure and increase it's damage or remove verraise and increase it's damage, we don't need both.

Limiting Verraise use in combat would be more than enough to remove that excuse from the table. That Verraise a) can be cast at any time and b) interacts with Dualcast is largely the problem there. The only content where Vercure makes or breaks things for RDM is palace of the dead, but it doesn't make as much of a difference in other content (especially content with tight DPS checks where every GCD counts).

Rdm's in FFXI were way, way, superior to what we have here, by leaps and bounds.

A jack of all trades does not mean do everything poorly, it means do everything decent, please follow your own job identity that has been in place since 1987.

Having recently played XI's RDM, that version of the job doesn't do anything inherently well or even passably well aside from certain gimmicks (lolenfeebles which are borderline useful and refresh which is stat independent). The only reason XI's RDM was able to get away with as much as it did was because gear swaps allowed it to do things it would never be able to do in most other MMOs. Seriously, do a thought experiment of situations with XI's RDM and remove the ability to swap through the MND, INT, MAB, MDB, PDT, MDT, STR, DEX and +Attack sets that a RDM is expected to carry around. Your stats end up either spread too thin or you're basically stuck with a MND set and forced into healing (since RDM lacks the multiple MAB traits to pump up its damage and is very far behind everyone else in terms of melee gear selection, to name two).

[RylaBee]

Gruntler is IMO correct, that how the job is viable for prog is one of most important pieces in balance puzzle for PVE.
Speedruns and "optimal" runs affect incredibly small percentage of playerbase.

RDM can rezz good and Vercure can be that critical heal, that will keep fershly rezzed person from being immediately downed by incoming AoE. It is stronger utility than people like to admit.

If the RDM was *very* close in dps to more pure-dps jobs, It would see very high uptick in being used.
So the key is to boost it with very light touch, I feel.

[Mansion]

Gruntler is IMO correct, that how the job is viable for prog is one of most important pieces in balance puzzle for PVE.
Speedruns and "optimal" runs affect incredibly small percentage of playerbase.

RDM can rezz good and Vercure can be that critical heal, that will keep fershly rezzed person from being immediately downed by incoming AoE. It is stronger utility than people like to admit.

But that's the opposite problem then. You can't put too much weight on progress performance and tax RDM's overall damage output because it can raise and/or sometimes save someone with a miraculous VerCure, when this part of RDM isn't that valuable 85% of the time when you are back in weekly clears.

Snip

I don't know if you misread my post or you're getting a bit flamed by the discussion, but we do agree in principle. My post cleary says that progress has to be considered too, and I said "look mainly at optimal play". Mainly. That does not mean just one parse, one extract of data, or one percentile in particular. In fact, I don't really agree on the 95+ logs because I'm not even sure that's how the devs look at numbers on their side. But you have to consider optimal play too because as I said, it's a question of trickling down on how the job performs in different players' hands.

Reading back your reply, you're making things deliberately harder than they actually are (beside the contemptuous tone).

[SaberMaxwell]

That face when Red Mage wasn't even used as a prog mage in Ultimate. World first clear was SMN+BLM. It's also worth noting that the opportunity cost of verraise (and yes, vercure) is compared to Resurrection. Most if not all Red Mages who have cleared TEA are career Red Mages, my own group's Red Mage included, and yes verraise is more or less useless throughout the fight (although we had good results with raising pre-wormhole, for fairness' sake, just to practice the mechanic itself). Vercure is laughably weak, it heals for less than SCH's physick and I can count on one fist the number of times a physick was the difference between wiping or not. At least Summoner's healing support is passive, meaning it doesn't pay anything to be a regen on the party where RDM has to sac a large amount of potency for such a weak heal.

Is it supposed to be the prog mage? If so, why isn't it objectively the best (ie, loses the least for raising, has the best healing support, etc) at prog? Why does Summoner dance all over it? If you're gonna hoist a job up as a progression mage, then make it the best darned prog mage one could possibly get. Otherwise it should be in line with its peers; not over, but not as far under as it is either.

[Jollyy5]

Since there seems to be some confusion when it comes to data used for balancing:

90+ or 95+ percentile is used to see what the balance between classes is like, and to make adjustments, because at those high percentiles each class' kit is used to their fullest potential and gives us an idea what kind of DPS a class can conceivably put out, there's not much value in looking at low parses because there these kits are not fully utilized, and in some cases some skills are used wrong, or not used at all.

And I would argue that high percentile does matter during progression, because while you may cancel a cast or miss a GCD otherwise to focus more on mechanics, you'll still be trying to use your tools the best you can, especially after seeing a mechanic a few times.

[Gruntler]

Excluding the mistakes and missteps that make parses go lower to address balance means you've excluded the part of balance that includes a kit's vulnerability to mistakes and missteps.

Here, let's explain it better so you can understand.

The question 'Which data set is the best to look at for balance?' is the problem. You shouldn't be asking which data to best exclude, you should be looking at ALL the data, and then using the data as a WHOLE and asking 'what does this mean? What does this mean?' and so on.

The alternatives are ludicrous; they're suggestions by people who don't understand how data works and want to ask the most banal question and call it 'balance' instead of looking at -everything- and coming to a better, fuller, more well rounded conclusion.

It's like deciding what the best healer duo would be by looking only at the best parse; it doesn't tell you anything. On the other hand, if 60% of all the top 100 parses are the most played healer duo, you might actually find out the most played is not the best--if it's played 80% of the time, for example, it would be underperforming -tremendously- and it would indicate another healer duo, or even both, are outperforming it, even if the top 5 parses were all the most popular duo. This is data that you don't pull from percentiles, but rather by looking at the top 100 parses of everyone, and comparing to usage. No percentiles taken! See? ALL THE DATA, and a question you can't get an answer from by looking at percentiles.

Looking at median data can give you -actual- expected production, because the median is the production you can expect from a given unknown player. Looking at the range and standard deviations in the top end to the median can tell you what the return for further investment and mastery in the job is--more information staring at one data point, the 90th percentile, will not tell you.

Looking at low end data can tell you how capable the job is at the intangibles in clearing--the worse it performs at lower percentiles, the worse it can perform and still claim a kill. This is also valuable for balance.

See? There's information at -all- the data points that relate to balance. If there is information that relates to balance, there is no need to exclude it. Staring at one set of data permits you to make a single statement: 'This job seems to have the potential to do X damage in a capable hand.' This is a valuable statement, but it is not the only one that matters in balance, a much larger, broader question. So you need other information. Not 'can use.' NEED. Thinking otherwise is greyparsing in statistics.