Thread: The potential problem with low level Roulettes in 6.0

Originally Posted by Quintessa

I've come from fast paced games. .and this game's combat doesn't bore me at all, and to think, I'm a tank, which is supposedly the most boring job/class in MMO history according to people here. I got 15 days left on my free trial(or whatever it is) and gonna start my sub at the end. Can we stop speaking for everyone?

I don't think we are speaking for anyone.. Its peoples personal opinion. Its a forum and people sharing their ideas.
If you are not bored its good. Game certainly needs more new players.
But offline day count 100+ players with under 50 level jobs exist in every FC which implies there is a problem at low level content.

Originally Posted by AngelCheese77

EverQuest 2 does this. Essentially all the skills are kept but the damage is significantly lowered to the player they mentor to. But I don't know how this game deals with skills, so it may be difficult to even do that.

Potency for abilities is generally unchanging (unless some trait changes the ability itself and replaces it with a version with different potency or something similar), but how that potency maps into actual damage is based on gear stats. That's how the damage is 'lowered' when synching into lower level content: by lowering the stats of the gear.

Unfortunately, the level sync math is already somewhat broken, given how gear is synched down. In some cases at high-end content it can leave people undergeared to a point where they should not have been able to queue, and in many other cases at low-end content it trivializes it (hence why people can faceroll so much early content, even synched down).

Specifically, my understanding—and someone please correct me if I'm wrong here—is that a given piece of gear which exceeds the ilevel maximum will be individually synched to that ilevel by removing all materia bonuses (i.e., taking only the base stats of the gear), then scaling down by an amount based on the difference in ilevels. But because stats have gone up from expansion to expansion at a higher rate than the ilevel has, synching ilevel 500 gear to ilevel 100 will give you gear with considerably better stats than any actual ilevel 100 gear has.

And since potency -> damage/healing power is based on those stats, that "better than actual gear of this level" situation means the damage/healing output will also be higher than you could actually get at that level, contributing to the "even synched to level 50, we can faceroll Crystal Tower raids" scenario; even with abilities and traits from later levels missing, the base stats that go into those calculations are still a lot higher than they would actually be at level 50 in level 50 gear.

This is also how it can backfire at the high end; let's say someone has their level 80 ilevel 430 weathered gear and wants to queue into a level 80 dungeon that takes ilevel 435 minimum and syncs to ilevel 445. They go and get two ilevel 480 accessories, because the accessories are the cheapest and it will raise their gearset average to around i439; that's enough to make the ilevel check, since that's done as an average. But once they get into the dungeon, those i430 pieces are left untouched but the i480 accessories are synched down to i445. And since this is level synching within an expansion, the scaling down is actually fairly likely to end up being roughly equivalent to real i445 gear. Now they may be insufficiently geared to survive the dungeon effectively; their effective average ilevel is now about i432, which would not have let them queue into the dungeon in the first place.

The upshot of which is "scaling consistently without having to have synched-down stats manually set for each piece of gear—or manually mapping it to some equivalent gearset at the target level—is hard, which contributes to existing balance issues."

Much as it pains me when I see my hotbars turn to a sea of disabled icons when Roulette dumps me in Sastasha, I suspect that letting me keep level 80 abilities in there would exacerbate an already-unbalanced level synching situation. For it to work, level synching would probably need to be rethought first.

Originally Posted by Quintessa

I've come from fast paced games. .and this game's combat doesn't bore me at all, and to think, I'm a tank, which is supposedly the most boring job/class in MMO history according to people here. I got 15 days left on my free trial(or whatever it is) and gonna start my sub at the end. Can we stop speaking for everyone?

Some of the DPS literally go 30 levels with less buttons than a baby tank would have to press. ARC from level 1 to 30 only has 4 skills it presses: one filler (Heavy Shot), one being an oGCD every 15 seconds (Bloodletter), one self buff every 80 seconds (Raging Strikes), and the other being a DoT they press every 30 seconds (Venomous Bite—they get Windbite right at level 30 after completing the ARC storyline, so I don’t count it here). It used to have more to it (e.g., Hawk’s Eye, more oGCDs like actually-dealt-damage Repelling Shot and Blunt Arrow), but they’ve trimmed skill sets down from when I started that low level ARC is so monotonous.

Originally Posted by PyurBlue

Will all jobs have the exact same multiplier? No, but using the same one for all jobs in a role is pretty reasonable. If that didn't work it would mean that classes were very imbalanced. Also keep in mind that in leveling content perfect equality isn't a requirement. As things are now, in a given dungeon one class might have AoE while another doesn't. One player might have role skills while another doesn't as these don't get synced. A common multiplier for all DPS, all healer, and all tanks is perfectly reasonable.

Using his MNK example, what if the MNK in question is only 40? Applying a universal multiplier to bring down a level 80 MNK would make a level 40 MNK deal close to half the damage of a level 15 MNK, even playing absolutely flawlessly. "nerfing damage" is far from a simple concept, as it requires a huge amount of balancing, analysis of toolkits at literally every level that a job gains a new part of its toolkit, and would be a logistical balancing nightmare; you'd literally be getting weaker in older dungeons as you leveled up then when you were at that level, quite the oxymoron.

Unless they go dungeon by dungeon, job by job, meticulously nerfing damage by EXACT amounts for EACH instance in the game, damage nerfs will always either:

1) cause the 80's to still be overpowered if they balance around the 80 not doing an optimal rotation, meaning any 80 doing an optimal rotation will still utterly shatter any level 15 out of the park.
2) cause the 80's to have to perform flawlessly to match the limited toolkit of a level 15 if they balance around performing a near optimal rotation to keep up, meaning by far and large with the skillbase of FF14's players, instances will become longer/harder for basically no reason.

And how do you balance tanks and healers? Think About it. a lvl 29 GLD will never have Hallowed Ground from a level 80 synced PLD. a 22 MRD won't have the lifesteal of a level 80 WAR with Nascent Flash. A level 80 synced WHM would have benediction; where the 43 WHM wouldn't. You think they're going to spend and take the time editing & balancing ALL those skills at EVERY level too?

And if you'd have to do ridiculous changes to these abilities to the point they're no longer the same ability (Like doing something absurd like turning Hallowed Ground into 1% mitigation, or Benediction into 10% heal), then...what was the point?. If you have to utterly gut these abilities to make sure balance is upheld to the point they may as well not exist or no longer resemble the real ability, then it's not the same toolkit anymore, and completely invalidates the point of trying to create a system that lets you use all your fancy new abilities at lower levels.

There are far too many variables, far too many things to keep track of for any 'simple' nerfing solution to work if they want to maintain balance. Heck, some jobs simply won't even have AOE at level 20 whereas the same jobs synced down from 80 would, meaning your dungeon literally takes longer because you had a low level character in your group.

Oh, and the fact that each expansion basically invalidates all this balancing meaning they'd have to do it AGAIN for every expansion. Yeah, I can only imagine how wonderful that sounds to the devs.

There's simply no chance they're going to allow skills while synced, since they've made it clear they want every 22 GLD to be on the same footing as every other 22 GLD, skill wise. An actual realistic scenario is an ability level squish, pushing more of the later abilities into lower level ranges. That way every player of the same job has equal access to the same skills, the amount of skills at lower level and thus the speed of combat is increased, only without an absurd logistical nightmare of balancing issues plaguing it.