Quote Originally Posted by Ransu View Post
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Jobs have been balanced around rdps for a few expansions now, so that is a non-issue. On Endwalker’s launch SAM was consistently leading in terms of rdps. After players complained about how ‘complex’ jobs didn’t have enough of an rdps advantage over ‘simple’ ones, we gradually moved to where we are now. Which is ironic, really.

The reason why the discussion around ‘complexity’ is flawed is because your awareness of a job’s nuances depends on your level of game experience. Someone who doesn’t spend a lot of time in raid content and plays a job that doesn’t bring its own raid buffs isn’t going to have much awareness around when to offload their pooled resources. So if you give them a job like RPR, they’ll press buttons as they light up like they do on their main job and then dismiss it as easy, blissfully unaware of how bad they are at it.

But I also think that this is a mark of good job design. You can play freestyle when you’re just starting out and are just learning the basics of the game, and if you want to improve your performance by pooling your resources and correctly setting up burst windows with double/triple Enshrouds, you can. It’s great seeing perceptions around a new job gradually change as people start to actually understand and refine their gameplay around it.

Players rarely admit to underperforming. If they’re good at a job that they main it’s ‘complex’, if they don’t it’s a ‘design flaw’. If you actually want to assess job difficulty, you’re better off looking at the IQR, which is a robust statistical measure of spread. That shows you how much variation in performance exists within that specific job. Ideally, all jobs within a specific role should have a similar IQR. Which is true for every role outside of caster dps, really.