Quote Originally Posted by Kabooa View Post
The primary wall I run into with Machinist is that all the buffs people want to put into it means I start destroying literally everyone but the max parses they refer to when pointing out how weak Machinist is, and frankly to me that feels wrong. Maybe it's stockholm syndrome, but I don't consider myself good at the rooty tooty run and shooty, just practiced, so even something that sounds mild like "Just removing the ranged tax" or "Increase to be the same as X melee" or something similar seems excessive, and grossly so.

Insert blah blah role system needs to be revamp blah blah shove the problem children into one role blah blah.
I think people just tend to forget that top-end balance, when some jobs are more difficult* than others, essentially obliges any less-skilled players towards playing whatever is easiest*, since there will never be a benefit for learning a more complex job as, even at the top 1%, they'll contribute equally.

* Though difficulty is idiosyncratic, hundreds of thousands of data points upon those idiosyncratic evaluations still creates... statistically relevant data. As such, yes, there are classes which are normally "easier". Those norms will not apply to every player (nor precisely to even a majority of players) but at the scopes which concern balancing decisions, they are wholly relevant.

I feel like a sensible general balancing paradigm, while perhaps difficult at times to calculate, shouldn't be that elusive:
  • Jobs should be balanced for around the 90th percentile when including the more difficult to calculate in-practice rDPS effects of utility that isn't mere a damage bonus (e.g., Mantra, Shield Samba, or the rare ability to lose less party damage to doing a mechanic by having a hypermobile role take care of it). Prior to these calculations, jobs without "non rDPS" utility would appear to outperform those with it, while in practice they would be tightly balanced given a party of equal skill (percentile) to the contributor.
  • Jobs favored below the 90th percentile should not also be favored above it.
  • Ideally, jobs with utility value that is greatly increased at lower party performance (e.g., rez) should be "harder" to reach a comfortable skill floor on --preventing them from being locked-in at lower percentiles-- insofar as does not step excessively step on the toes of "pure" dps classes whose gameplay concerns must come solely from rotational complexity. (I.e., Ideally, SMN and RDM would have a noticeably larger % personal DPS gap between the 60th and 90th percentiles than BLM as to compensate for BLM's offering nothing else at lower skill levels.)

Now, to be clear, choosing to balance around a given percentile does not mean that you cannot make design decisions to further tighten balance at any/every given percentile, but it does set a threshold around what error we consider to be more or less a function of kit complexity vs. irrelevant/transient (soon to be passed through learning) player mistake. The higher a percentile we balance "around", the more the lower percentiles are obliged towards easier jobs and job diversity is reduced below that point; the lower a percentile is targeted, the more the mistakes made on theoretically stronger jobs are overcompensated for, thus reducing job diversity above that point (as the likes of Monk and BLM get buffed to the heavens to compensate for their being harder to learn).

(So long as the gaps at lower percentiles, too, aren't so huge as to make harder jobs seem a burden, I argue for a higher percentile because as we descend from the top 10% or so, aesthetic tends to have increasingly guided our job choice anyways.)