Thread: The potential problem with low level Roulettes in 6.0

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.

Originally Posted by PyurBlue

A single value for the multiplier obviously won't work, which is why I suggested something different in the very first post that I made. Bosses are roughly the same difficulty through the leveling process with the exception of the first few that tend to die a little faster. If you graph boss health vs level you end up with a general idea of the what the multiplier has to be for any combination of true level and dungeon level. This isn't enough to perfectly match one level to another, but thankfully there is no reason to try to be that precise because level sync as it is now allows for a fair amount of variation in DPS (not to mention that there are factors that you can't control like player ability).

-But you know, it's less precise than what they have now so...why would they intentionally make it wonkier and place much heavier work on themselves when the system they have now functions perfectly fine for them? or an alternate system like the one I suggested that is basically their exact same system with only a few levels changed around? You severely underestimate how much devs love shortcuts and using Occam's Razor; it's how they meet deadlines, especially ones as tight as FF14's patch cycle.

Originally Posted by PyurBlue

Even if this was the case, I find it preferable. My current preference when it comes to level sync is to not even play the content. However, saying that a level 80 rotation needs to be played flawlessly is a significant exaggeration. Low level rotations aren't foolproof, like I mentioned earlier. The average potency for the low level GLA 1-2 combo is 250. Breaking that combo is at best 200 potency and at worst 100 potency. That's a possible 2.5 times penalty for messing up your Satasha rotation. That's equivalent to the difference between 10th percentile and 99th DPS percentile on fflogs in Copied Factory. The 50%-70% percentiles aren't flawless but they're much closer to perfect than the no combo GLA I mentioned.

-The thing about balancing in game design, especially in MMOs, is that you have to account for the extreme ends when designing systems, or you'll find your player base abusing and/or exploiting your system, or the system not acting the way you want it to (See: pretty much everything they've implemented, ESPECIALLY diadem & Eureka Anemos.) If they want to balance a system tightly (which should be extremely apparent is their intent in leveling dungeons), they have to take into account the highest echelons of player skill into these systems. If they keep the system too light in its adjustments, Actual good players will completely wreck and annihilate the balance of the lower dungeons, which is something they want to avoid.

Hence, they are forced to account for those skilled players and make the check much tighter when balancing it, leading to what I mentioned. It's a catch 22; no matter how they design it, it'll fall apart in a way they didn't want.

Originally Posted by PyurBlue

They already did it for Shadowbringers if I recall due to the tank stance change. Developing a game takes work, and I thank the devs for their efforts. Making this change won't be free but it also doesn't appear to be anymore costly than other changes made in the past.

-There was no 'change' to the actual content in regards to tank mastery & tank stance. The only thing they did was make the STR stats on Fending accessories equal to Striking/Maiming, which cancelled out the damage loss for 70 & below; Literally copy-pasting the formula for STR on Striking gear onto Fending gear. Done, took all of about 20s. For tank stance, backspace all the lines of code not relating to enmity, then change the enmity multiplier to 10, done, super simple. Again, see how much they love shortcuts?

They have however occasionally nerfed leveling dungeons, but those were always by global variables like 10%, which is also super easy. Change the variable in the enemy HP generator formula from 1.0 to 0.9; took all of 5s, and maybe in the enemy potency formula as well if they wanted to reduce damage.

Originally Posted by PyurBlue

Hallowed Ground lasts 10 seconds and you get to use it at most twice per dungeon. Sure it's huge mitigation but in the grand scheme of things it doesn't make much difference because most low level content doesn't need 100% damage reduction. The role skills that low level tanks give up (reprisal and arms lengths) in the current system are arguably worth more in the lower level dungeons in terms of overall mitigation because they have more uptime. The level 80 WHM's Benediction is weaker than the level 30 AST's ED which is a full heal up to about level 25-30 on a much shorter CD. Still I addressed these skills before, if they're going to be a problem they can be changed slightly with traits or something along those lines, like becoming 50% mitigation and 50% healing respectively. You'd be trying to match overall MPS (mitigation per second) and HPS in these cases, along with DPS.

-You realize the huge pulls a PLD could pull off with it due to how squishy lower level dungeon mob HP is? I could think of at least one pull per dungeon where you'd be able to annihilate 3-5 packs in the time it'd take to annihilate 1, saving multiple minutes off the run. 10s doesn't look like a lot of time, but it's HUGE for the healer to get those extra AOEs in to help melt the pack before damage is ever an issue. Especially in a system where synced from high players have access to their full AoE toolkits to melt said packs. The difference between a low level party and a synced one would be titanic in terms of potential kill-time efficiency. Take a look at the first mega pull of Mt Gulg vs the 5 separate pulls of the first leg of Mt Gulg to see just how broken a tank having all these CDs would look like in lower level dungeons, where the low level tank wouldn't stand even a slight chance at attempting the same.

Beyond that, again, there's simple things a 20 GLD would never be able to match, no matter what that would prevent the MPS & HPS from ever being even remotely equal without nullifying half of the PLD's toolkit to do so.

A 20 GLD has: Rampart, passive block.
A 80 synced PLD has: Rampart, Sentinel, Hallowed Ground, repriesal, passive block, shelltron, Clemency, Arm's length. Literally 5 more buffs & 1 super self heal tool more than the GLD. Unless you nullify all the others and make them 0% (which again, why bother in the first place then? Since that's literally contradicting the purpose of keeping your skills; there's no point if they don't exist or are so weak they may as well not exist.), that low level GLD will NEVER have even close to the same MPS as a synced 80 PLD, which could bust open low level dungeons and make super pulls utterly trivial.

Oh, and any < 76 WAR will NEVER have any lifesteal besides Storm's Path, while a synced 80 WAR could lifesteal for days with NF. Unless you want to nerf that down to 0% to make the HPS equal; which again, why bother in the first place if it contradicts the point of your system? Especially since NF is a crucial integral part of the job's identity at level 80 in how it handles pulls.

And what's your plan for raid buffs? Do the devs also have to account for the levels of everyone else in the party to make sure the extra % they give won't completely blow away packs in dungeons like a hot knife through butter?

Just showing that syncing is far from ideal; When you have to go and either nullify half of a job's kit to make its HPS/MPs equal, or add in 50 different traits, you've long since gone into the 'why are we even doing this when simpler options exist' territory.

And if they're going to be making abilities tiered with traits, why even bother with all that nonsense (especially since making them tiered with traits means they have to learnt the skills earlier anyway, basically just using my pitched system anyway but adding far more complexity to it.) when making them available earlier is an infinitely easier thing to program than spending time fine-tuning all these small gears and bobs, only for it to get completely broken each expansion and spend all that dev time doing it again? History of their development and their methods has shown time and again they're not going to do drastic overhauls unless they perceive some issue, then they go to the easiest solutions. Your syncing system has way too many moving gears and points to balance it's a logistical nightmare; there's zero chance they'll opt for it over simply moving skills back in level (or simply doing nothing, which is quite frankly the most realistic case) and spending that dev time on more important things. It's just being realistic.