The Failure of the ranged Physical balancing

[Crushnight]

I do not agree that an average melee dps is ahead, Please read the follow.

Legend : Job : Minimum DPS - Maximum DPS, ( " = - " Skill Ceiling Disparity ) N= Number of fights, Data-pool, E5S-E8S, All RDPS

SMN 15,613.84 -18,277.44 = -2,663.6‬ N=25,678
SAM 15,493.26 -18,238.72 = -2,745.46‬ N=22,991
BLM 15,533.46 -18,232.88 = -2699.42 N=13,234
MNK 15,198.62 -17,758.58 = -2,559.96‬ N=12,881
DRG 15,054.07 -17,588.03 = -2,533.96‬ N=27,996
NIN 15,157.65 -17,527.45 = -2,369.8‬ N=17,170
RDM 15,027.03 -17,464.81 = -2,437.78‬ N=14,067
MCH 14,875.23 -16,622.81 = -1,747.58‬ N=17,821
DNC 14,237.44 -16,573.73 = -2,336.29‬ N=16,270
BRD 14,303.41 -16,188.50 = -1,885.09‬ N=15,770

Afraid to say that data proves no matter what if you can play at least 50 percentile on Smn, Sam or Blm you will beat a 100 percentile Mch, Brd or Dnc. (Context - halfway through the range on the numbers above Smn would have 16,945.64, Sam would have 16, 865.99 and Blm would have
16, 883.17 which all trump all 3 physical ranged at their best again with the data shown above. )

The question though is that fair?, personally no it is not, I think melees and casters need to be 80+ percentile at least to beat a 100 percentile physical range.

If the dude who can play perfectly cannot out dps the dude who forgets DoTs or dies then their is a balance issue, no job should be allowed a 'free death' and still come out on top of a perfect player in the Dps role.


Also for added fun I decided to look at mnk,drg, nin and rdm using that data and yea they all trump brd when played at 50 percentile, brd according to that data is stupidly underperforming. But that is using that data only, plenty of other data out there but it is late and i cba to go looking.

[Vendalwind]

Afraid to say that data proves no matter what if you can play at least 50 percentile on Smn, Sam or Blm you will beat a 100 percentile Mch, Brd or Dnc. (Context - halfway through the range on the numbers above Smn would have 16,945.64, Sam would have 16, 865.99 and Blm would have
16, 883.17 which all trump all 3 physical ranged at their best again with the data shown above. )

The question though is that fair?, personally no it is not, I think melees and casters need to be 80+ percentile at least to beat a 100 percentile physical range.

If the dude who can play perfectly cannot out dps the dude who forgets DoTs or dies then their is a balance issue, no job should be allowed a 'free death' and still come out on top of a perfect player in the Dps role.


Also for added fun I decided to look at mnk,drg, nin and rdm using that data and yea they all trump brd when played at 50 percentile, brd according to that data is stupidly underperforming. But that is using that data only, plenty of other data out there but it is late and i cba to go looking.

I agree with most of your analysis, BUT a death will typically drop most melee into sub 40th percentile if not lower.

[Crushnight]

I agree with most of your analysis, BUT a death will typically drop most melee into sub 40th percentile if not lower.

According to that data both smn and sam can dip to 40 percentile so if a death did that then they are still good to beat all physical range playing at 100 percentile Blm is barely below mch very very tiny difference.

The other melees and rdm nope they can't dip that low but the point still stands every other role in the Dps category is allowed a lot more leeway to mess up and still be perfectly ahead of the best mch/dnc/brd.

[Renkei]

Afraid to say that data proves no matter what if you can play at least 50 percentile on Smn, Sam or Blm you will beat a 100 percentile Mch, Brd or Dnc. (Context - halfway through the range on the numbers above Smn would have 16,945.64, Sam would have 16, 865.99 and Blm would have
16, 883.17 which all trump all 3 physical ranged at their best again with the data shown above. )

The question though is that fair?, personally no it is not, I think melees and casters need to be 80+ percentile at least to beat a 100 percentile physical range.

If the dude who can play perfectly cannot out dps the dude who forgets DoTs or dies then their is a balance issue, no job should be allowed a 'free death' and still come out on top of a perfect player in the Dps role.


Also for added fun I decided to look at mnk,drg, nin and rdm using that data and yea they all trump brd when played at 50 percentile, brd according to that data is stupidly underperforming. But that is using that data only, plenty of other data out there but it is late and i cba to go looking.

Bard is under-performing and i do agree that ranged is having an issue, but it's not just ranged, there is no reason there should be such a huge disparity in between all jobs to begin with, all ranged should be within 500 minimal dps of melee, and it shows jobs like SAM and SMN, and BLM, have a higher lower skill floor meaning you can play worse and still out damage someone who is 90% BRD or DNC, which is insane, mainly because the lack of penalty in their kits, and the front loading of only reward. (the penalty is not finishing a cast but that is it)

Another thing weird is that BLM and SMN don't relay heavily on boss positioning but more on ally positioning while melee suffers from damage penalties from miss positioning of the boss. (Samurai not so much, Samurais biggest damage penalty is from not using third eye on AOE Damage.)

I don't agree with how regression has been occurring with game balance, i know people hated Bow-Casting, but it is the only solution to this issue, they should of just increase the cast rate from 0.75 to 0.5 to alleviate it, or add an ability that makes it so the next 4 abilities require no cast time with 2 charges.

[Akiudo]

i know people hated Bow-Casting

honestly everyone i know or talked to about this (and yea i know, thats anecdotal) including myself did not hate "bow casting" per se, but more the fact that it just didn't work with bards toolkit. Look at the casters, they are designed around casting, thats why they have tools to mitigate the need to cast and an amount of ogcd skills that can be reasonably worked with. in bards case however they simply slapped on cast bars to a class never designed with cast bars in mind, mch by comparison actually flowed quite well. that however is the other side of the coin, you cant just slap cast bars on the 3 physical ranged, for it to work you would need to redesign the classes in a way that works with cast bars, something heavensward bard simply did not do.

if one liked heavensward mch or not is a completly different discussion, but if you played it you could see how its toolkit was actually designed with gauß barrel in mind, when you played bard all you could see was how some developer decided that "mch has cast bars, bard needs them too." and then just hastily decided to copy gauß barrel without thinking for 5 seconds what makes gauß barrel or the mch toolkit in general actually work.

i for one would love a bard actually designed around castbars, if only to put this discussion to rest, but the key point is designed around it not just hastily slapped on, bards toolkit in heavensward simply was not working. it may have been effective, but it was clunkier than any class currently in the game, and i mean WAY worse.


edit: just food for thought, but why does everyone talk about bowmage, not "gunmage" or whatever you would have wanted to call mch ? fact of the matter is, heavensward mch was also disliked, but that was mostly because it started way to weak compared to bard, literally no one cried about the cast bars on mch, thats the difference between a class designed around something and one that isn't

[SaitoHikari]

i for one would love a bard actually designed around castbars, if only to put this discussion to rest, but the key point is designed around it not just hastily slapped on, bards toolkit in heavensward simply was not working. it may have been effective, but it was clunkier than any class currently in the game, and i mean WAY worse.

Yeah, bowmage was objectively a hot mess, and I say this as someone that was alright enough with it back in Heavensward to main Bard then. You knew things were screwed when you took Feint to double-weave everything you needed during an opener, or had to delay turning on Wanderer's Minuet until around halfway into your opener. Turns out having 4-5 oGCD buff skills on classes with cast times is a terrible idea.

Machinist actually had controlled ways to ignore the cast times. Bard did not outside of cross-classing Feint, all we had was a 20% proc chance Straighter Shot from Heavy Shot usage.

(It's also a fundamental reason why Apex Arrow is considered more of a liability for Bards rather than actually interesting, due to the extreme variance in when you can optimally use it.)

[Renkei]

Yeah, bowmage was objectively a hot mess, and I say this as someone that was alright enough with it back in Heavensward to main Bard then. You knew things were screwed when you took Feint to double-weave everything you needed during an opener, or had to delay turning on Wanderer's Minuet until around halfway into your opener. Turns out having 4-5 oGCD buff skills on classes with cast times is a terrible idea.

Machinist actually had controlled ways to ignore the cast times. Bard did not outside of cross-classing Feint, all we had was a 20% proc chance Straighter Shot from Heavy Shot usage.

(It's also a fundamental reason why Apex Arrow is considered more of a liability for Bards rather than actually interesting, due to the extreme variance in when you can optimally use it.)

I think a lot of Bard players feel the same way about that, it felt like Machinist was built around it, and then Bard had it forcefully slapped onto their class instead, That's why I'd like to see if return with a new ranged ability that gives you instant "Casts" in order to compensate for it, or fixing it by compressing abilities, the casts shouldn't be more then .5 seconds, it would probably be in their best interest to get it right though, back tracking on their design instead of fixing core issues wasn't a good idea, maybe perhaps only some abilities should be Casted, i do like the idea of combos with new ranged classes instead of being proc based and reactionary. (like how MCH is now) It's really unfortunate that Bards are getting marginalized in this fashion, a 1% buff was kind of an insult.

[BloodRubyXII]

Why do people think Bard is underperforming because of it's RDPS? Compare it to the other jobs you share a static spot with in the same role instead of jobs from other roles.

[Crushnight]

Why do people think Bard is underperforming because of it's RDPS? Compare it to the other jobs you share a static spot with in the same role instead of jobs from other roles.

Problem is that static spot is barely worth the 1% stat increase so much so double melee + double caster is very viable. So the physical ranged role is under more pressure to be top percentile, something that is out of reach of a lot of players, and bed is the worst performing job of the worst performing role unless fights have large amounts of time with multi targets ala TEA or E7S

[Miminming]

while i agree ranged is underperforming, the 1% worth it so much that nobody gonna take double melee and caster ignoring ranger, its not only dps theres also LB and hp etc etc the 1% is bigger than you think.