Job balance vs the 2 minute burst window and full uptime

[Saraide]

A lot of people take issue with how similar jobs feel and while I personally dont share that experience as much as others (I'm also not that good at the game) there is no doubt in my mind that this is a trend we are seeing. Now what would be the purpose of said trend? Especially the 2 minute burst window seems to be something of focus point that the devs are designing around, not only with jobs themselves but also with the raid design.

Well the obvious answer should be job balance. Naturally you make your time as a dev tasked with balancing easier if you make the jobs all very similar to each other, right? And yet job balance is very much not good right now. Paladin and Warrior are in much worse places than Dark Knight and Gunbreaker. Double melee combos beat out triple ranged by a lot. But that goes against the dev's goal of keeping every job viable. Skill level should matter far more than job choice.

Could it be that in an attempt to make balancing easier for themselves, they've actually just made it worse? If a fight isnt just designed around 2 minute burst windows and full melee uptime, you leave groups with (jank) ways of optimizing. Potentially enough to make up for slightly lower impact jobs on tight dps checks. If you have to work for your melee uptime, less damage on the ranged jobs is justified.

However if it is like last tier where bosses are either forced to stay middle or there is no reason to move them because of their giant hitboxes, you get fights where you have basically full melee uptime for free.

I recently experienced kefka savage and noticed how different that fight was in that regard. You rarely got uptime for free during mechanics, the hitbox was very small. This was a for fun group doing it on MINE and due to potency creep the dps, mit and heal checks were pretty obliterated. But still it felt like a completely different design philosophy compared to the likes of asphodelos.

[Jeeqbit]

It does seem they are making jobs similar so that they can balance them easier. Seeing how MNK has got a system similar to SAM now, I could anticipate DRG being made even closer to RPR with the planned changes. I can understand this because we are going to reach double the amount of jobs we had in ARR and it will only get harder to juggle them all, but it's a bit of a shift from the philosophy of every job being unique.

I do like having 100% uptime. Doesn't feel good when you have to stop as you approach your biggest attacks and watch them expire because the boss phase switched.

[Saraide]

It does seem they are making jobs similar so that they can balance them easier. Seeing how MNK has got a system similar to SAM now, I could anticipate DRG being made even closer to RPR with the planned changes. I can understand this because we are going to reach double the amount of jobs we had in ARR and it will only get harder to juggle them all, but it's a bit of a shift from the philosophy of every job being unique.

I do like having 100% uptime. Doesn't feel good when you have to stop as you approach your biggest attacks and watch them expire because the boss phase switched.

The boss becoming untargetable really is annoying but that's not entirely what I mean. What I mean is the boss still being targetable but it not being easy to keep melee uptime without it being extremely dangerous or requiring major strat adjustment.

[Rilifane]

It does seem they are making jobs similar so that they can balance them easier. Seeing how MNK has got a system similar to SAM now, I could anticipate DRG being made even closer to RPR with the planned changes. I can understand this because we are going to reach double the amount of jobs we had in ARR and it will only get harder to juggle them all, but it's a bit of a shift from the philosophy of every job being unique.

I do like having 100% uptime. Doesn't feel good when you have to stop as you approach your biggest attacks and watch them expire because the boss phase switched.

And yet that's exactly how they made it worse and more difficult.
Someone else said something in a really good twitter post and I share their opinion.

• Rigid 2min burst vs different buff timers

Before we had buffs on 60s, 90s, 120s and 180s which resulted in each class having different burst windows which were naturally misaligned but content was balanced around them being naturally misaligned as skipping a burst for alignment is a bigger dps loss. It was balanced around everyone using burst on cooldown.
This had several effects:

1) on a fight-to-fight basis, coordinated groups could decide to delay buffs to align with other buffs depending on kill time and phase transitions. A common example is delaying the 8min buffs to 9min if the kill time is below 10min. Another example is delaying 4min buffs to the 4:30 window which aligns them with 90s buffs and allows the use of an early 2nd potion, potentially giving the chance at a 3rd at the 9min mark

2) on a fight-to-fight basis and by accounting for rng proc in their rotation, players could decide to dump some resources during buffs of someone else without losing resources for their own/ a later buff window - a RDM could delay the combo by a few GCDs without overcapping mana to fit it into a raid buff, a DNC could dump feathers earlier during raid buffs, a BLM could minimize movement-Xenos to save them for raid buffs etc.

3) with the different burst windows, there was always someone bursting during a mechanic and a coordinated group was able to allow them to burst without interruption by adjusting strats for specific mechanics to their specific comp, e.g. placing a BLM mid with LL to cover both side cleaves while the rest adjusts around them, having a NIN briefly switch to a ranged spot with TCJ/ Raiton/ Suiton to let the RDM combo during spread mechanics etc.

All the things resulted in a higher indivudual and group skill ceiling which had a positive effect on how good balance has to be to allow for pretty much any comp to clear.
There were always jobs that were behind others of the same role in terms of dps, whether by a small or large marin.
But thanks to a higher indivudual and group skill ceiling, you were able to make up for the difference by finding ways to squeeze out extra dps during the different burst windows. A coordinated effort could easily make for a one class being 500 DPS behind another and more, allowing comps that include one or more "weak" classes. It gave the community plenty of room to indeed run their preferred comp and tweak things to make it work.

But what happens when everything is railroaded into a 2min burst?
You lose almost all of the abovementioned options. The optimum (the coordinated effort from before) now has become the standard as everyone bursts at 2min, leaving next to no wiggle room for improving performance through unsual means that are not factored in by the dev team. You can no longer adjust things because the game doesn't allow you to.
That means the only thing that decides party dps is the comp.

• Full uptime for melees/ casters and big no positional hitboxes

During prog it is normal to play it safer on melee and caster as dying is worse than dropping a GCD. We had many forced disengages and baits that had to be taken by a caster in addition to a ranged. SE accounted for these average GCD losses when balancing fights as they were the expected way to deal with them.
Which, again lead to several things:

1) it allowed for far more calculated personal greed to minimize the GCD loss throughout a fight

2) a party could agree on playing uptime strats and switching positions on a mechanic-to-mechanic basis to minimize uptime losses.
A melee could bait e1s orbs around the hitbox to let the BLM cast in peace; they also had the option to go for uptime strats that required more healing but were an overall gain like e6s uptime balls

3) hitting all positionals and keeping uptime often required the tank to pull the boss really well and turning it in time; melees were partly reliant on the tank but balancing did not expect to nail boss pulling/ turning every time

But if full uptime and positonals for melees and casters are practically guaranteed, it becomes the norm and is factored in as the standard for balancing dps checks. Because losing uptime on a boss like p7s on melee requires conscious effort.
And that results in another lack of skill expression for coordinated parties that could use it to make up for the lack of dps from weaker classes.

Both of the points made balancing more difficult, not easier. Because now you better nail it as parties have almost no room to make up for even relatively small differences.

And lastly:

• High potencies during 2min bursts

This is a huge problem that got worse over the years. Essentially every new skill classes get is a big nuke meant to get used during buffs. And now that everything has been railroaded to perfectly aligned 2min bursts and with buffs working multiplicative, the damage variance increased to extremely high levels. We now have several 900+ potency skills used during 5 naturally aligned raidbuffs as opposed to lower potencies getting used during 2-3 aligned buffs most of the time.
A crit on any skill during 2min burst leads to a much higher dps gain than ever before and having some auto crits fixed nothing.
The difference between overall low crit rng and average to high crit rng during 2min bursts is several % boss HP.
It's possible for rng to make or break a tight dps check even if everyone brings their a-game. Getting lucky could very well mean you still get the kill with deaths and damage downs while getting unlucky means you just wasted a clean pull on nothing.

Railroaded 2min bursts, increasingly high potencies during them and easy uptime mechanics are terrible for balance.
They crashed the group skill ceiling and now the pressure to perfectly balance classes is higher than ever before.

[Jeeqbit]

I suppose that is all true when savage is new. The other factor we can control after some weeks is gear so balance issues will be temporary regardless. Although it is desirable for it always to be possible at minimum item level.

I think that a problem they have is if they buff attacks that are available at lower levels, then it makes them overpowered for lower level content but they could fix that by making it a trait you get at a certain level.

[Rilifane]

I suppose that is all true when savage is new. The other factor we can control after some weeks is gear so balance issues will be temporary regardless. Although it is desirable for it always to be possible at minimum item level.

I think that a problem they have is if they buff attacks that are available at lower levels, then it makes them overpowered for lower level content but they could fix that by making it a trait you get at a certain level.

"Just wait till better gear lul" should never be a factor, though. Not when there are other options that not only allow for skill expression again (which we sorely lack since the EW changes) and make combat more dynamic while making balance more forgiving
Whether it becomes obsolete after x weeks does nothing before those x weeks passed. That is about as good as a bandaid fix as autocrits and demotivating for groups that enjoy the early tier challenge but don't enjoy being forced into very specific comps to even have a chance.

[Saraide]

I suppose that is all true when savage is new. The other factor we can control after some weeks is gear so balance issues will be temporary regardless. Although it is desirable for it always to be possible at minimum item level.

I think that a problem they have is if they buff attacks that are available at lower levels, then it makes them overpowered for lower level content but they could fix that by making it a trait you get at a certain level.

The image of good job balance is almost as important as good job balance itself or we will get into scenarios where certain jobs will be locked out of PFs.

[OgruMogru]

Idk man, I think week 1 balancing matters when people take time off of work to raid specifically on that first week. It's as problematic as when we got the delay for last tier and it meant a lot of people got their scheduling screwed over. This affects their real lives. This time it's not an understandable scheduling issue it's an avoidable numbers issue which now means that a large portion of players took time off for something that was either straight up impossible on week one or was reliant on rng.

[Payadopa]

All I see is jobs getting more and more boring and shallow, sadly.

[AmiableApkallu]

Naturally you make your time as a dev tasked with balancing easier if you make the jobs all very similar to each other, right?

Here's a hot take: The problem is the existence of raid buffs.

In a world without raid buffs, you can design the outgoing damage profile of each job in isolation from all other jobs, and you can make that damage profile whatever you want, from a relatively constant stream of damage to high/low phases. As long as each job within a role does roughly the same damage over N minutes -- where N can be as long as the expected time to enrage, for example -- then each job is "viable" from a damage standpoint. As long as each job within a role has roughly the same freedom of movement and action ranges, you can wave your hand and assume that they'll all be able to resolve mechanics to maintain uptime, either by moving around any "bursts" in their rotation or by coordinating with the rest of the party. There's room for variety between jobs, individual creativity, and group creativity.

The existence of even a single raid buff forces you to consider all possible party compositions, because there's no other way to evaluate the impact of a raid buff. Worse, you have to consider what the players will come up with in their inevitable quest to optimize damage. So, even if you could set a DPS check such that all party compositions pass it, you also have to ensure that there isn't a meta composition that's so much better than the rest that players start insisting on some jobs and excluding other jobs. After all, you can't claim a job is "viable" if no one wants you to play it.

The "obvious" way to deal with the possibility of meta compositions is to take away player creativity via homogenization: give (most) everyone an obligatory raid buff, force every job into a 2min burst, etc. But when you concentrate damage into short bursts, minor imbalances and random fluctuations become magnified beyond reason…