Should Level Sync better not remove skills?

[Supersnow845]

We know this in the same way that we know that complainers will come with a bunch of 'brilliant' schemes with little or no thought to the amount of work necessary to accomplish balance.

Almost as though they work for Activision/Blizzard or Bioware.

Square must struggle so hard to balance the classes when they are all just copies of each other.

They make their jobs easier by making our experience worse and yet still somehow we are expected to feel sorry for how hard they have it

[Ranaku]

Nope it would just ruin it for new players when everything around them just explodes in flashy aoes and all the stuff you get with lvl 90. Not to mention that balancing the jobs so they won't just blast through old dungeons on sync would be a terrifying nightmare for the devs. Since that way you need to also make the actions that are available at that level also weaker since the new players should be on the same powerlevel as you.

But if you want to use all your skills then don't do roulette and play current dungeons. BUT MUH EXP you would scream now. Doing roulettes is helping new players do old content, it is not designed for you to farm exp. That is the reward you specifically get for it, yes. So if you are unhappy with that nobody forces you to use this system.

[Sesera]

Yeah the new player quitting the game because he saw a black mage using Fire 4 instead of being "Wow its so cool I want to do that".

[Ranaku]

Yeah the new player quitting the game because he saw a black mage using Fire 4 instead of being "Wow its so cool I want to do that".

No new player quitting the game cause old players onehit the enemies and they can't play, cause having all your actions will never be balanced.

Edit: Just to give an example why this would be a balancing nightmare. Lets just take Ninja as an example here, they have huton which makes them attack faster, this is a buff that would also have to be taken into account cause it isn't just potency but makes you stronger overall. Same with all the passive buffs you get over time on your actions, SE would've to balance or negate them all too. Or just take party buffs, they make everyone stronger but that would mean to make the dungeons fairly balanced so your party doesn't just insta nukes the enemy that would have need of tuning all jobs down at that level since you also buff the new players which don't have all the actions available.

So yeah it would be an insane amount of work to tune and balance all of that so new players don't get their experience ruined by old players nuking enemies into oblivion in the starter dungeons. Maybe don't ruin the fun for new players just cause you find it "boring" to do old content through a system that was designed to help people sync on old content and for exactly going through that pain you get the rewards.

So my thought on this is, if SE does that please also take the extra exp you get from roulette away, just 20% of the stuff we get now cause if it gets easier and faster there is no need for such a high roulette reward.

[Rein_eon_Osborne]

I can agree to adding at least complete basic combo and at least 1 AoE by Sastasha. But full skillset? Hard pass.

There is no way you can balance the performance between a newbie GLD who only has Rampart vs PLD additionally have Holy Shelltron, Sentinel, Holy Circle/Spirit built in heals, Hallowed Ground, etc.
There is no way you can balance a CNJ who only has Cure I that heals about 50%-60% of the tank’s HP vs WHM who has access to all their overbloated healing buttons.

Additionally, Newbie Tanks & Healers do not see their fellow rolemates in duties until lv50. Only fellow DPS would theoretically get that “Wow I can be like that too!”-moment, or straight up walk away because it makes them feels useless.

EDIT:
One of the talks w/ a friend reminded me that perhaps we could’ve gotten some sort of “Unreal Dungeon” roulette instead to do daily. Meaning this roulette will pick just about any duties in the game and syncs whatever that dungeon is to lv90 scaling. But I imagine this oughta require -A LOT- to make it work. Who knows? :shrug:

[Packetdancer]

I really, really don't want to make a Google Slides presentation with the math about why this is a spectacularly bad idea, but every time this topic comes up I add a few more pages to the one I've been slowly constructing.

ANYWAY, that looming threat aside, let's just flood the forum with the extremely wordy explanation anyway, minus visual aids, because...

This is a good point. You don't just have to scale the level and item level like happens now, but the potency of the higher level actions.

...it's worse than that, even. Sure, we can assume that they fix the gear/stat scaling so that you actually can make potency a 1:1 match between the on-level player in reasonable gear and the person level-synced down. (I mean, they haven't so far, but let's assume that gets fixed.)

The thing is that even with the 1:1 potency map, so that 200 potency is the same overall damage for both players, the overall potency of the kit changes. And the hypothetical ideal potency of a proper MNK rotation at, say, 30... then at 50... then at 90? Those don't scale in a linear fashion.

(Honestly, they don't scale in any fashion that can be charted with a simple graph function.)

And even if you somehow miraculously come up with a formula that properly handles scaling MNK's kit, it would be different than BLM, and both would be different than GNB, and... that way, madness lies. Especially since any time the job is rebalanced you'd have to find a new formula.

What you could hypothetically do is try to calculate the "ideal" rotation at every level where a job gets a new skill/spell/ability or trait, and then programmatically calculate the "ideal" DPS in terms of potency rather than damage.

So, take WHM... it's supposedly a simple one, right? In general, you have the same attacks throughout: a single-target (Stone -> Stone II -> ... -> Glare III), a DoT (Aero -> Aero II -> Dia), and an Aoe (Holy -> Holy III), all of which just have increasing potency.

Except that Assize can be woven in there (and 400 potency of AoE damage with no falloff is nothing to sneeze at), and you can use lilies to heal and get Afflatus Misery -- which becomes DPS neutral in a single-target scenario, and a DPS gain in trash pulls. Add to that the fact that a WHM without lilies is giving up a GCD every time they cast a heal and not regaining the DPS, so every time you need to heal the gap between the two in the total potency of damage dealt increases.

In a single-target scenario (and leaving out complicating factors like Presence of Mind), the first five GCDs of WHM at 90 work out to 1700 potency of up-front damage and 600 potency of DoT (spread over 30 seconds), assuming you weave Assize in there. The first five GCDs of WHM at 49 are 810 potency of up-front damage and 500 potency of DoT (spread over 30 seconds).

This works out to be that the level 49 rotation does like... 56% of the damage, in terms of pure potency, that the level 90 one does. So you'd want to reduce the potencies of the level 90 kit accordingly.

But even still, that's a vast oversimplification; as mentioned, there's Afflatus Misery and the cost of GCD heals to account for across the entirety of the dungeon. Plus, in an AoE scenario -- and most of a dungeon's content is trash pulls -- Assize and Afflatus Misery quickly inflate the level 90 WHM's potential damage potency, causing an even bigger gap between the two kits.

So we have to establish an 'average' level of healing across the dungeon as well, and then figure out how many GCDs the level 49 WHM loses to needing to use GCD heals; the level 90 one can use entirely oGCDs or lilies (which eat a GCD but are DPS-neutral in a single-target scenario and a DPS gain in a trash pull, thanks to Afflatus Misery).

Plus, we don't want those healing options to be OP, so we need to figure out the average potency of healing and then scale things down accordingly for the potencies on all the level 90 WHM's healing options. The level 90 WHM is going to be using Asylum and going to heal as a side-effect of using Assize; that's a lot of freebie healing potency the level 49 WHM doesn't have, so to keep the overall potencies equal we're going to need to nerf the 90 WHM's liles and, for that matter, their Regen tick, etc.

Still, let's say we come up with a good 'baseline average' for how much healing a dungeon should require, and work that into our calculations. This is hardly a given, but let's run with it. Now we can come up with the potency ratio in an automated manner; you can calculate the hypothetical 'ideal total potency' for a level 49 WHM's kit and that of a level 90 WHM, and a level 84 WHM, and a level 76 WHM, and so on.

Given this, we can now calculate that the level 49 WHM will, playing optimally, do roughly X total potency of damage across the entire dungeon, while the level 90 one would do Y total potency of damage across the entire dungeon if also playing optimally with their kit. Which means you can now tweak things so that the level 90 kit used correctly does only X potency across the dungeon, just like the level 49 one, and thus the level 90 WHM doesn't just vaporize the content in comparison.

So if X is 30% of Y, then just chop 70% of all the potency off of every damage ability for the level 90 WHM. Yay!

Let's say the 30% is a real number -- it easily could be, given AoE calculations accounting for Assize and Afflatus Misery -- so the level 49 WHM's single-target Stone II does 190 potency of damage (being on-level and thus the reference value); because a lot of your damage is in Assize and Afflatus Misery (and you don't have to give up damage GCDs for every single instance of healing, as your level 49 counterpart does), your Glare III loses 70% of its potency and does only 93 potency of damage per cast.

That just feels bad, as now you hit like a wet noodle -- sure, you and the level 49 WHM can do the same total damage across the dungeon, but since you have a whole bunch more tools in your kit, spreading the same amount of damage across all of those tools makes them each individually weaker than the level 49 variants.

Moreover, you are now operating on an expectation that both players are playing optimally; as difficult as it is to come up with the potencies to compare with an ideal use of kit, it's at least hypothetically possible (albeit nightmarish). Trying to figure out the potencies for "how the average player uses this kit" is not something you could automate in any reasonable manner.

And "playing optimally" is not a given in roulettes. (Nor, honestly, should it be a requirement.)

Which means if the level 90 WHM is not using their kit properly, they're going to do worse in Aurum Vale than the level 49 one -- potentially way worse. If you don't use Assize at all... well, that's potency the scaling calculated that you would use that you aren't, so now you're doing less damage overall than the level 49 sprout is. If you're a curebot who doesn't use lilies, your cures are now weaker than the level 49 one's are -- because it's assuming you're using Tetra and lilies and so on in scaling potencies -- and you may not even be able to heal through the dungeon.

And this is with a healer; think about how stark the difference can become with some of the DPS jobs. Even if you can solve for scenarios like "one of the two has Triplecast and the other does not" -- a nightmare in its own right -- trying to imagine how much you need to nerf the level 90 Black Mage kit to make the ideal rotation do the same overall potency as the ideal level 49 rotation across the entire Aurum Vale is sobering.

And I'm not even sure how you account for things like WHM's Benediction or, say, tank invulns in terms of calculating the potency of defensive/healing/mitigation scaling.

And then there's weird content like the deep dungeons; obviously, if you kept your kit, solo runs of PotD with a level 90 job could potentially be far easier than with the on-level level 60 equivalent.

(And I'm going to just assume for the sake of everyone's sanity that, say, Ultimates still just sync you to the appropriate level's kit because that is a balance nightmare I don't even want to consider.)

I hate being level-synced down; I groan every time I end up in the Crystal Tower alliance raids in roulette, especially if I'm a healer (or god forbid, a NIN -- Armor Crush being at level 54 is just cruel). I run the roulettes regardless because I know it helps others progress their own story, but yeah, I agree that no one likes having their kit stripped away. My FC has a running joke of "Hallmark presents... Wait, I Can't Use That Here: A Leveling Roulette Story".

But I feel like this is one of those things where, if we actually got what we wished for -- even just in roulettes -- it would be a cursed wish that we would soon pray to undo, every time we saw a freestyle level 90 SAM in Labyrinth of the Ancients doing functionally no damage because all the potency on their attacks had been scaled down around the expectation that they were actually keeping their DoT up 100% of the time, using Ogi Namikiri, etc.

(Though on the other hand, the overall effect might make mechanics actually happen in those raids again, so I can see one potential positive?)

[DPZ2]

Square must struggle so hard to balance the classes when they are all just copies of each other.

SE doesn't balance any of the classes in leveling instances. What they'd have to do is ensure your level 90 Scholar can do no more healing/damage/mitigation with your level 90 action bar than a Scholar at level 32, 65 or 73. And do that same thing for every single job for every dungeon instance under 90.

As Packetdancer points out in their post.

snip

[Jeeqbit]

Yes true, the problem there is mostly having more abilities at high levels compared to having none in Sastasha. Syncing the GCD potency to be similar to all the others at that level would be one thing because all GCDs share a cooldown but it's more complicated for the others. Getting an overall potency for damage and healing over 60-120s each at that level and distributing it proportionally among all attacks is a good idea, but probably complicated when different attacks work differently, such as Dream Within a Dream, astrologian's cards, party buffs, Chain Stratagem, Trick Attack and Mug.

[Daeriion_Aeradiir]

It'll never happen, full stop. Given Yoshi-P has said countless times he wants everyone of the same job to be able to perform at the same output at any given level, there's far too many variables and problems to reconcile to make such a system possible without nerfing every single OGCD the job normally doesn't have at the level into dust that they might as well not exist. Take for example, hallowed ground. How do you reconcile the fact a level 30 PLD can't use it? Do you make it reduce damage by 1 so its non-existent to account for that fact? Keep in mind, Yoshi-P's requirement that two jobs of the same level must be able to perform the same, so letting the 90 PLD have it with any sort of immunity or even any sort of damage % reduction breaks that requirement.

This topic has come up again and again since HW. The devs have commented on it several times and saying no every time. The level sync won't ever change, full stop. It's too much of a hassle and a nightmare to balance when their current system works flawlessly for the purpose they want it to achieve in a massively tiny fraction of the effort, that also doubles as not needing to be changed expansion after expansion, whereas any formulas, scalings, etc would have to be adjusted any. single. time there's a change to any potency on any job, or radical toolkit changes each expansion. The devs know it'll be a colossal waste of their time to entertain giving people their skills back for even a nanosecond.

You're better off asking for an ability level squish. Give more tools to the player quicker. that way two jobs of the same level will be able to perform at the same strength due to matching toolkits in any instance, but everyone will have access to more skills quicker.

[Hasrat]

In short, these requests will always divide the players into two groups: Those that can see the math involved, even if only just a glimpse, and those that just see a jumble of numbers at best.