How we determine balance and its flaws.

[Vendalwind]

The largest problem FFXIV is facing is the fact that we have so many party-wide buffs flying around that the jobs based around having those can't reasonably be powerful without outright deleting selfish dps. Ranged physical dps can't become strong because combined with other jobs with dps utility, they'll start outclassing the selfish. We can't balance the physical ranged around having better personal dps either because then atleast half the melees will feel invalidated due to them having to work more for uptime, and casters will feel shafted due to, you know, having cast times.

Pretty much the entire game would require a rebalance if we want "real" balance, so the party shackle bonus if the best we've got for now, quite frankly.

Though I would personally prefer living as a bowmage for the time being if that's what it takes. I like playing as a Bard because of the snazzy fukkin outfits, the bow and the "job fantasy" associated with it, atleast let me be powerful if you're going to take away the fantasy.

Very true! I feel tho that generally party wide buffs are better than specific buffs (such as the old terrible DRG BRD event) and they do make the game more interesting. That being said one thing I would LOVE is if those buffs were designed in such a way that they couldn't compound on top of eachother. I know that would likely be a homogenization, but it would be a good idea. It would limit the value of properly aligning things too in fights... making tactical unity less important, but i do think it would be healthy for The balance.

Alternatively (although it would require some serious recoding) all manuever could stay the same but be designed to keep dmges separate. I.E. if NIN trick attack is up and a Crit Boost from some source is up the game could be aware of whether the crit would have occured without the crit buff, and if so Trick augments the damage, if not that bonus crit dmg does NOT hit for the 10%. To do this code would have to be written something like follows during the damage calculation (very psuedo code):
New Var $BONUS DMG
If($dmg.type == 'buffed')
{
new var $Base dmg
New var $Buff damage
$Buff damage = $dmg/buff.type
$dmg = dmg- $Buff damage
$BONUS DMG += $Buff damage
}
Run that per each buff with some refining (would need to also be occuring i the portion of the function where buff is applied) and you could pool all singular additive effects from buffs into the bonus dmg so they don't compound.

I could make this better obviously. I do code work myself. this is very rough so i can go to sleep don't get mad at me if my sleepingess made this terrible I'm just showing it could be done.