Should Level Sync better not remove skills?

[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?)