Balance

[Hikuro_Kenshi]

Yeah I'm part of the MCH main crew cackling wildly and then sobbing uncontrollably in this thread.

DEVS, if you hate MCH so much, just tell us straight up. Stop giving us false hope of DPS increases in the form of little crumbs in each patch. They literally do nothing except make us weep when new endgame content comes out.

[MikoRemi]

I’m hoping with the other Machinists here that something can be done. Most I can offer is really my rework thread but yeah…job feel is the first pain, but also being pain in the numbers doesn’t help much.

Let’s not forget the amazing wonders of Lost Dervish…

I extend the courtesy of fixes to job feel and potential DPS issues where applicable to all jobs as well. /pray

[Wyakin]

Reaper is just one example of a job that needs work. To those people who are blind, it did not get weaker no. It got left behind by over buffing the rest of the melees to a point that its being excluded from things like ultimate and log groups for being a "hinderance". I do not for one minute think its bad to play, reaper is amazing

To those machinists, I feel you. I played ranged DPS for 8 years and gave it up because I got sick of SEs inability to balance the job role.

For that one person saying RPR is 3% less than a ninja etc etc. At the 95% and above, ninja does 400+ DPS more than reaper currently. Thats the low end of the scale. I'm not a mathmatician but thats more than 3% gap.

[CKNovel]

Reaper still brings a party heal over all the dps higher than it and the difference between Reaper and the highest dps is less than 3%. Reaper is fine.

To put it in an even larger perspective, the dps difference between Reaper and the Ninja right now is lower than the dps difference between Reaper and the 5 jobs below it.

Which has been nerfed.
Now there is quite the gap between RPR and the other melees, healing alone won't cut it, we can only expect SQEX fix it.

Look past dps.

And we already did. It's far more depressing.
MCH is perfect example, it only brings Tacticians but other ranged also have their own Tacticians on top of other utility.

[Stasya]

Balance. Doesn’t. Matter. Every job is viable. People whining about job balance (which literally doesn’t matter in everything except week 1 ultimate prog) is how we got to this abysmal state of job design with every job being identical give or take two or three abilities.

A balance matters week 1-2 even in savage prog. Ofc every job is viable since you probably only play when everything gets buffed with bandaid fixes and you get showered in loot that slightly lower ilvl than savage (alliance patches).

[Avenger]

Imagine if BLM was below SMN

It has happened before. Usually BLM comes back eventually though since SMN has more utility, etc..

Since all jobs can clear all content I am inclined to play the job I like rather than the job that someone else says is better.

BLM has always been something of a challenge in PvP but I like playing it anyway.

[Avenger]

A balance matters week 1-2 even in savage prog. Ofc every job is viable since you probably only play when everything gets buffed with bandaid fixes and you get showered in loot that slightly lower ilvl than savage (alliance patches).

The devs have explained that they test all content with all jobs to make sure that they are viable on day 1. Of course the dev team and testers may know more about the internals of the jobs and the fights than we do at the beginning at least.

Presumably the reason why Reaper and Sage were so strong out of the gate was to encourage people to play them (and to compensate somewhat for unfamiliarity.) Balance would have been counterproductive in both regards.

Now that the new jobs are well established and people know how to play them, it seems reasonable to balance things out a bit –which seems to be what they are doing.

[Wyakin]

Presumably the reason why Reaper and Sage were so strong out of the gate was to encourage people to play them (and to compensate somewhat for unfamiliarity.) Balance would have been counterproductive in both regards.

Now that the new jobs are well established and people know how to play them, it seems reasonable to balance things out a bit –which seems to be what they are doing.

the problem isn't having reaper be the weakest melee, the problem is they went overboard with the buffs. Leaving it behind siginificantly.

[xAFROx]

Yes, because Reaper being slightly weaker than other jobs is nowhere near as much of an issue as jobs feeling awful to play. Any content can be cleared by any job, whether you're doing 6000 dps or 6100 matters very little in comparison to your job feeling awful to play.

Job feel is also important. That's like if you were playing a fighting game and the best combo you could perform with a character was changed to no longer work, but everything else is still there.

Sure, that's not a big deal technically, but that's time and effort spent learning and memorizing a sequence that was rewarding to do.

I don't know if you were responding to the comment about SAM or RPR, but I think the analogy kinda works for both (but I'm really just throwing this here about SAM)

[Mikey_R]

the problem isn't having reaper be the weakest melee, the problem is they went overboard with the buffs. Leaving it behind siginificantly.

I don't know what you class as 'significantly', but I am not seeing that at all.

Going by the site that shall not be named, looking at rDPS across the whole of the first raid tier, Ninja is top at 8141 and Reaper is 7972, this is looking at the median DPS. That is ~2% less DPS and it is the same sort of story looking at the top parses as well.

So, the question then becomes, where did you expect to see Reaper? Or is it more of a case of, well, everyone else got buffs, what about Reaper? As it stands, reaper is in a fine spot, it didn't get anything, because it didn't need anything. I have also heard that Reaper is where they wanted to set the 'baseline' metric for the other melee jobs (take with a grain of salt), if it is the baseline, of course it isn't going to get changes as everything else should be confirming to it. As has also been stated, they do not like nerfing jobs and would rather buff others, I'm sure if reaper fell too far behind, it would also get buffs.