A potential rework to the level-sync system.

[Hasrat]

The point of the level-sync system is to achieve some sense of balance between new and veteran players. There is almost no conceivable way to balance an end-game kit with an at-level kit.

I'm feeling lazy, so I'm just going to copy/paste the posts I made to this same topic when it came up last week.

Personally, think this system works fine as is. The difficulty with scaling abilities lies in scaling player skill. The point of syncing is to maintain some semblance of balance. There is much great difficulty in attempting to balance a level-cap job with an at-level job. The at-level job has very few buttons to press. The level-cap job has very many (usually). Worse, the scaling would need to be balanced at nearly every single level, to account for new skills and traits. Every job gets that final piece of kit at level-cap, so balance to that, but at level-cap-minus-1, you have very different potency, needing a different scale. Additionally, you run the risk of having bad/mediocre level-cap players not fully utilizing their kit. If the scaling balance is meant to take into account a certain expected skill level, and players fail to meet it, you will find duty progress severely inhibited.

These reasons and more, in much more detail, always come up when this idea is presented. Bottom line, it's a considerable amount of work that constantly needs checked and rechecked, and it's just not remotely worth the effort when the current system achieves the balance goal with much less trouble.

Additional point, I made my first post with a very DPS-oriented mindset. But previous post raises probably the winning point. There is genuinely no way to scale down a full-kit WHM to a at-level WHM with nothing but Cure and Medica. Tanks and healers especially all have (mostly) a wealth of oGCD skills for utility/weaving. It may very well be nearly impossible to truly balance most of those to be roughly equal to a synced/at-level player. Back to the WHM example, literally the entirety of the level 80 WHM kit would have to be scaled to equal a level 15-18 WHM in Sastasha, with nothing but Cure/Medica for heals, and Stone(II) and Aero for damage. How do you scale Benediction? How do you scale things like PLD Cover, Clemency, Hallowed Ground?

In theory, this miiiigght be possible. Big maybe. But it involves sorta... distributing the nerfs to potencies across the board. It's not enough to simple scale down potency numbers of everything equally. To balance for a oGCD damage skill, you'd basically have to work out its potency/second, and applying an appropriate nerf to the entire rest of the kit to compensate/balance for it. Might possibly be the same for AoE. And, back to previous point, these are balancing passes that would need to be done at every point where a skill is changed/added for every job.

The result is basically that, in low level duties, you're required to play your job much closer to perfectly, just to match up with a mediocre low level player. And a mediocre high level player will quickly find themselves to be dragging the group down.

BLM is coming up a lot (and it's one I'm most familiar with). I'm really bad about always using Sharpcast. But, Sharpcast undeniably adds some additional potency to the BLM rotation. To account for that, the rest of the rotation needs a small nerf, to keep me balanced. The more I neglect to use Sharpcast, the more I'm punished for missing potency I'm expected to be using.

Failure to balance/nerf in this way results in a much bigger gap between mediocre and skilled players than currently exists, which I would argue goes against the intended design. As is, playing a job at-level perfectly absolutely contributes more to the group, but the gap isn't so wide that mid-range players with under-utilized kits just start feeling useless. Yes, I should really be using Sharpcast and Swiftcast and Manafont and Triplecast more (and I don't always use Ley Lines on cooldown). But, the difference between me and someone playing BLM perfectly is only something I'd personally be worried about in Savage/Extreme content, which I'd argue is a bit outside the scope of this discussion (and is content I don't jump into much anyway).