"Balance team tests the fights themseslves"

[Nizzi]

What was the point in putting in all of this effort to gut and homogenize almost every unique and interesting job, turning them into the same flavors of assorted gruel if the balance is still this bad?

If SE is going to give us this level of imbalance, can they at least make the jobs distinct again?

[Jeeqbit]

Response by Yoshi-P https://na.finalfantasyxiv.com/lodes...340b373870140b

[Ransu]

Response by Yoshi-P https://na.finalfantasyxiv.com/lodes...340b373870140b

Honestly I am surprised by this. That was a lot more detail than I'd expect a game producer to give out. Other MMO devs could learn a thing or two from Yoshi-P

[Iyrnthota]

Honestly I am surprised by this. That was a lot more detail than I'd expect a game producer to give out. Other MMO devs could learn a thing or two from Yoshi-P

I mean, he didn't say anything that most of us didn't already know or assume.
The only real thing of import is that they've doubled down on the "job balance is fine" stance they've taken, and given shoddy excuses with little to no reasoning for why.

[Saraide]

I mean, he didn't say anything that most of us didn't already know or assume.
The only real thing of import is that they've doubled down on the "job balance is fine" stance they've taken, and given shoddy excuses with little to no reasoning for why.

But then they dont fully take the "job balance is fine" stance, otherwise they wouldnt have buffed paladin and warrior. Instead they seem a bit undecided on what they should do going forward which makes it look like a lazy excuse. Especially with statements like this:

Attempting to ameliorate this by buffing certain jobs without making changes to the raid itself would have negatively impacted overall balance within each role, and likely resulted in disappointment for those whose jobs were already dealing sufficient damage for the raid and therefore received no adjustments. Unfortunately, adjusting all jobs in such a short period is also not feasible.

warrior and paladin were consistently behind in damage since the start of the expansion. Buff them up to the levels of drk and gnb (like they did now) doesnt have a negative impact on role balance, it has a positive.

[Iyrnthota]

Attempting to ameliorate this by buffing certain jobs without making changes to the raid itself would have negatively impacted overall balance within each role, and likely resulted in disappointment for those whose jobs were already dealing sufficient damage for the raid and therefore received no adjustments.

I dunno, this reasoning just seems super flimsy to me.
I don't think if I were playing a BRD, I'd be dissapointed that MCH got buffed and I didn't, but that might be just me.

[Xuled]

They do test the fights and they’ve admitted on several occasions that they’re worse players than the hardcore segment of the playerbase. All in all, it’s only a 1% HP reduction and if you haven’t cleared, it’s a skill issue. Git Gud.

[Liam_Harper]

Fair response and good they took the time, even if I don't agree.

We always add a little bit extra to the boss values before rechecking the fight and releasing it live.

There's something to learn from this. I don't think it was that their testing team had more time to learn the fight, but more that the fights are too easy to optimize and player skill isn't contributing enough. We have homogenized, easier jobs this expansion. We have 2 minute burst windows on everything. We have bosses with a massive hitbox that let you line up burst nicely. It's not surprising that a very good team is doing almost the same as a world first team. As long as you press buttons all the time, your rotation isn't a mess and you burst at 2 min, there just isn't much more that world first skill levels can add. There's nothing else to squeeze an extra few % from.

The top percentage of players are overwhelmingly better at the game than we are.

What they haven't learned is that this does translate to jobs too. They balance jobs around the advantages each might have in a specific fight, range, utility, burst potential, uptime, positionals and so on. But they don't seem to get that good players can easily compensate for downsides and narrow these disadvantages down to 1% differences from a job with an advantage. For example in fights where bosses had smaller hitboxes and mechanics forced you to move out, melee could optimize it down to only losing 2-3 GCD's over a 10 minute fight at most. This makes the advantage phys ranged have shrink drastically. They should be balancing around that. 10% gaps are just too massive. Good players aren't losing that much, nowhere close.

[Henji]

They really have no clue just how bad the job balance is.

[Packetdancer]

They really have no clue just how bad the job balance is.

I'm not 100% sure I buy that. I'm not entirely happy with job balance either, mind you, but I do suspect they have access to (quite a lot of) data we do not... and while they balance jobs around endgame fights, they do also need to take the much-larger casual playerbase into account. They could absolutely be aware of the problems and yet feel those downsides are outweighed by some other factor we're not aware of. For instance, if a job suddenly had its popularity in casual play plummet, even if endgame raiders are happy with the job I have little doubt the devs would still consider that a problem scenario to address.

We can armchair-quarterback their development process all we like -- Twelve know I certainly do enough of it in some threads -- but in the end, we really can't know with absolute certainty what factors went into their decisions.