Balance

[CKNovel]

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.

I used to live by that logic, then I had enough of being extra work to the team because of the balance team.
Might as well play a job I like and that is useful.

[Wyakin]

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.

I hate to break it to you, but those figures are wrong. I don’t know what you was looking at but let’s look at percentiles where people can actually play. Ninja sits at around 9150 vs reapers 8850. It’s closer to a 4% gap than 2. Now it may not seem a lot, but as I’ve said before, being bottom dps is fine. Being 4% behind isn’t. Reaper is being excluded from log runs and in extreme cases ultimate groups. I’m not asking for the world, not even a huge increase.

[Stasya]

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.

After savage week 1 stuff and very late 6.08 buffs with later killing of sam in 6.1 i won't believe they test all content with all jobs(it shows with their useless band aid fixes prior ultimate release, you really TELL me they tested ultimate with sam in comp, when 4 classes no more have synergy with sam?????? or stuff like was bard tested in ultimate aswell???). And wtf is this logic: make reaper broken on release so people play them more?

Devs can also say that they care about job balance. 6.05 and SAM changes(might aswell include NIN) prove it otherwise.

[Mikey_R]

I hate to break it to you, but those figures are wrong. I don’t know what you was looking at but let’s look at percentiles where people can actually play. Ninja sits at around 9150 vs reapers 8850. It’s closer to a 4% gap than 2. Now it may not seem a lot, but as I’ve said before, being bottom dps is fine. Being 4% behind isn’t. Reaper is being excluded from log runs and in extreme cases ultimate groups. I’m not asking for the world, not even a huge increase.

I was looking at the median across all the fights, middle ground, so it should be a fairer comparison, I just went through again and, again, the highest difference is 2.5%. I suspect you are taking parses from a specific fight and using them to get your numbers. Whether intentional or not, it is not a good way to measure the dps. You need to have data over various fights, that way a boss that could heavily favour one job over another due to mechanics can be evened out, in this case, Ninja having access to Ninjutsu at range as opposed to Reaper having Harpe and one time use of Harvest Moon.

Also, I will take your word that it is being left out of groups as I do not know for certain, however, in the case of parse groups, if you are, as an example, boosting a Samurai, who would you rather take? the Reaper who has 3% damage buff every 2 minutes for 20 seconds or Monk who has 5% every 2 minutes for 15 seconds OR Ninja who has a 5% damage up debuff every 2 minutes for 20 seconds. Parse groups are taking the best comp to boost one member of the party, there are only 4 DPS slots, someone is going to be left out. This is not a case of Reaper not performing correctly, this is a case of it not providing enough of a buff to someone else to make it worth bringing.

[Dyvid]

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.

So you'll never ever have complete balance between 12 DPS classes, it's not going to happening. The best you can hope for is vary degrees of percentage. Now if RPR went from top to say, 15% to 20% drop then yea there is a big issue. However the data is showing 2%~3%. So exactly what percent are you looking for when alarm bells should be sounded? It's an honest question.

Snip.

Also lets not confuse balance with lazy job design or redesign I might say.

Snip.

I believe Job Roles need a redesign for balance more than individual jobs themselves. MCH is a fine example of this because Physical Range DPS has always buffed the party's DPS yet MCH doesn't. Caster should be design with high DPS output with the draw back of standing still, casting a spell and consuming mana yet SMN is nothing but instant cast and plays more like a PHY RNG DPS now.

[darkdyllon]

Just because all jobs can clear content doesn't mean there shouldn't be a balance. I want to point out the caster role for this. Right now there really isn't a real reason to take an smn over an rdm because smn does the same damage as an rdm but is worst for prog than rdm. Rdm can do everything an smn can but better since it's the better support mage. Meanwhile, you have this huge gap in the casters. There isn't a middle mage that offers higher dam and some utility/buffs at all now, you have the pure dps mage in BLM and the support mage in rdm but nothing in between since smn doesn't fill this spot anymore. The game might as well have just two casters now that they gutted smn. Either way, my point is if you don't have a balance among jobs it will lead to ppl denying party spots to jobs or ppl will just stop playing the weaker jobs to play the stronger ones. Balance is very important even if every job can clear fights.

you could bring an SMN for 1 simple reason, that BLM has nothing of and RDM in the middle.
movement.
an SMN is mostly an physical ranged now except for 2 hard casts (1 of which can be be made instant)
RDM is in an extremely good spot honestly, maybe make another button to replace the gap closer if you don't need it (kinda like just 2 melee hits like the disengage RDM has, but also an button that shares that disengage cooldown)
i main RDM this tier (1st time maining RDM) and i've been incredibly pleased, not only did i prevent entire wipes on my own (since i can easily rez 3 people in the span of 5 seconds) but if someone does go down i the rez ready in an instant, while being able to move quite a bit compared to the Turret Mage.

But SMN has the superior movement here, the only time you HAVE to hard cast is when you don't have swiftcast ready for 1 of the 2 mandatory hard casts, so from an point of view how versitile SMN is with movement it can be a game changer, on top that it does a lot of damage, you could run double caster and have the SMN take the 2nd melee spot without losing anything.

[Payadopa]

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.

Pretty much this. And people wonder why so many jobs play the same yet when one deviates it's back to complaining. I hope we get PvP-esque abilities in PvE. We don't need more [increase DPS by x%].

[Kniteroad]

Pretty much this. And people wonder why so many jobs play the same yet when one deviates it's back to complaining. I hope we get PvP-esque abilities in PvE. We don't need more [increase DPS by x%].

Jobs play the same because SE took the cheap way out by reducing the skill ceiling of each job thus reducing the variance in numbers and adjusting potency based on a more normally distributed range for each job. With the arguable exception of a few, each job has an easy rotation now and no matter how much effort you put into mastering a job, you are limited in what you're capable of. That's why the game feels crappy to play sometimes.

The best example was tanking in HW and balancing aggro vs dps. Could you sit in tank stance the whole fight and clear it? totally! Could you also work toward maintaining aggro with tanking stance off thus doing more dps and having faster clear? hell yes!!

[Payadopa]

Jobs play the same because SE took the cheap way out by reducing the skill ceiling of each job thus reducing the variance in numbers and adjusting potency based on a more normally distributed range for each job. With the arguable exception of a few, each job has an easy rotation now and no matter how much effort you put into mastering a job, you are limited in what you're capable of. That's why the game feels crappy to play sometimes.

The best example was tanking in HW and balancing aggro vs dps. Could you sit in tank stance the whole fight and clear it? totally! Could you also work toward maintaining aggro with tanking stance off thus doing more dps and having faster clear? hell yes!!

Yes and no. The skill floor got lowered, sure. But a lot of abilities were deemed superfluous by the very vocal minority. If it doesn't increase my DPS it might as well not exist kinda tone. Both are a reality.

[MrJPtheAssassin]

you could bring an SMN for 1 simple reason, that BLM has nothing of and RDM in the middle.
movement.
an SMN is mostly an physical ranged now except for 2 hard casts (1 of which can be be made instant)
RDM is in an extremely good spot honestly, maybe make another button to replace the gap closer if you don't need it (kinda like just 2 melee hits like the disengage RDM has, but also an button that shares that disengage cooldown)
i main RDM this tier (1st time maining RDM) and i've been incredibly pleased, not only did i prevent entire wipes on my own (since i can easily rez 3 people in the span of 5 seconds) but if someone does go down i the rez ready in an instant, while being able to move quite a bit compared to the Turret Mage.

But SMN has the superior movement here, the only time you HAVE to hard cast is when you don't have swiftcast ready for 1 of the 2 mandatory hard casts, so from an point of view how versitile SMN is with movement it can be a game changer, on top that it does a lot of damage, you could run double caster and have the SMN take the 2nd melee spot without losing anything.

See I disagree bc I believe the movement is really overrated with the current fight design in savage. Maybe in ultimates that movement is more valued but savage not really to be honest. This tier alone was really easy for melee to keep full uptime and casters now have more movement tools to adjust around the few mech they are forced to move. Even blm I believe dont really have that hard of time in this tier keeping uptime. Movement tax for phy range and smn is to high imo and I think its about time for the devs to rethink what they really want out of the roles. The fact smn has been pretty much made into a phy range but kept in the caster role is dumb imo. Either way, I just don't value movement as much as others do bc of how easy fights at the savage level are right now.