Patch 6.21 - DPS Roles & the State of Endgame Balance

[Clayr]

Adding to the chorus of dissatisfaction in the wake of Patch 6.21: I'm writing to try and outline issues with how jobs in the DPS role are currently balanced; specifically how the encounter design throughout Endwalker has effected job performance and the issues it's caused. The focus will be tied mostly to Savage and Ultimate content released this expansion since these are the spaces in the Endgame where optimal play and party composition have the strongest effects on party success.


The Current State of DPS Balance
The following box plot illustrates the spread and skew of overall rDPS for several thousand successful boss kills within Abyssos (Savage) between Oct. 31st and Sep. 14th (today). For those who haven't heard of the term before: rDPS is a metric where additional damage created via party buffs is mathematically attributed to the player that provided said buffs.

The boxes show the bounds of the lower and upper quartiles of performance, the whiskers show the lower and upper limits, and the dots show extreme outliers in performance. Essentially: the boxes represent the performance of the average Savage player in that job while the dots more or less represent its maximum potential.

From this we can see that a fairly significant gap in performance between the melee and ranged jobs, save for Black Mage which bridges both and has the widest performance gap in the game. Red Mage and Machinist in particular are extreme underperformers, with the former having some of the lowest average damage output in the game amongst DPS jobs and the latter having the lowest maximum potential damage in addition to having no extra situational utility and less overall mobility than Bard and Dancer, the other two jobs within the Ranged Physical category.

[Clayr]

The "Mobility Tax" and Encounter Design
Part of this balancing gap appears to come down to design decisions by the dev team on how damage output should relate to supposed job mobility and utility. Generally jobs that have an easier time moving about during an encounter or that provide benefits not standard to their overall role have dealt less overall damage in the past two expansions. You'll see this referred to as the "ranged tax" or "mobility tax" by the community at times. Melee (and less mobile casters) generally hit harder with their movement restrictions and positional requirements supposedly hampering their damage output in fights and evening the field with jobs that may not hit as hard, but don't lose uptime during encounters.

The problem is that the current approach to encounter design renders all of that moot.

The developers have been altering how they design encounters to facilitate ease of play for melee jobs. Boss hitboxes have grown massively in size, with P7S even having an omnidirectional hitbox that covers over two-thirds of the entire arena. The strength of melee has remained largely the same as it had been prior while the actual difficulty of maintaining uptime has plummeted. What's stranger is that, despite not touching DPS balancing, the developers actually cited the new ease of maintaining uptime when explaining their intention behind the Paladin buffs in 6.21:



Where Things Stand
This situation leaves a lot of jobs in a weird place and forces a double-melee meta for anyone trying to do early Savage or Ultimate progression. RDM is weirdly underpowered, while player numbers for MCH have plummeted and it's become somewhat common for Savage PF listings in NA to forbid the job from joining parties (hell, the world-first Dragonsong's Reprise team even explained why they'd never bring MCH to serious progression in its current state in an interview).

It's difficult to provide a concrete solution given how unclear the FFXIV Job Team's design objectives are to the community at this point. However, if encounter designs are going to continue to be more melee friendly going forward then there needs to be serious consideration towards tightening the melee/ranged gap or doing away with the ranged/melee distinction entirely in favor of more granular balancing decisions.

[Aikaal]

The "Mobility Tax" and Encounter Design

Paladins deal bad damage because of ranged tax pepelaugh What's the reason for warriors?

Is "Ranged Tax" really gonna be the argument because right now it's clear Casters are the one losing damage from fights because they can't cast all the time while moving.

[ICountFrom0]

My 3 fav classes, right at the bottom.
And then add in that I've got insanely bad latency and ping, well...
Maybe someday I'll get out of the worst 10%... *shrug*

[MichiKyou]

Essentially as a MCH main this is how it feels, it feels a bit like we're redundant and I am having groups turn me away despire good parses, because theycould just bring a second melee and get superior damage for less effort.

[Absurdity]

Paladins deal bad damage because of ranged tax pepelaugh What's the reason for warriors?

Is "Ranged Tax" really gonna be the argument because right now it's clear Casters are the one losing damage from fights because they can't cast all the time while moving.

"Because of these design choices, the unique advantage of paladin's high sustained damage loses it's impact"


The reasoning shows either a disturbing lack of understanding in their own design or is simply disingenuous, because it makes 0 sense.
High sustain damage in combination with easier uptime should make paladin's damage have more impact and not less, since the whole point of sustain damage is more damage the more uptime you can keep to deal, you know, sustained damage.

The problem is simply that sustain damage isn't favoured in the party environment they themselves have created in the first place, namely putting all damage multipliers into 2 minute burst windows. But they probably just don't want to admit this.

[CKNovel]

I wouldn't be bothered by the DPS if MCH had utility to compensate for it.
Yet, it's under BRD who provided good utility and niche utility and far under DNC who provides massive, all rounder utility that can be equal to a Cure III every 60s and a 5% HP barrier every 120s.

These strong utility can lead to an increase of Healer DPS.

I just want to play MCH and not feel like I'm griefing my team for it.

RDM is also in a terrible spot, it has amazing utility but the more DPS you need, the less usefull its utility is. If you want DPS, you'll never res or use VerCure. It's a good thing RDM has Magick Barrier and Addle, but the job is, ironically, the least mobile of all casters.

[RyuuZero]

what a sec.. isn't this developer comment there because of the Samurai Backlash?!

so they decide to be silent about Samurai but talk about Tanks huh.. well.. damn..

but in all seriousness, Positionals will go away in 7.0

[ForteNightshade]

I'll put this here instead of making a new thread, however someone on the discussion reddit has a fantastic write up going into the Caster balance and why the mobility and raise tax have become too aggressive. They also bring up Range DPS on the whole.

State of the Casters

For my own thoughts, the whole shift towards catering to melee DPS with enormous hitboxes and omni-directional bosses has all but killed what little justification they had for this massive DPS discrepancy. If they want to force—or at least encourage—a double Melee meta, then so be it. There shouldn't be this wipe a gap though. Far as I'm concerned, an entire role's existence shouldn't be dependent on an arbitrary 5% buff the devs slapped on in Shadowbringers to keep the Prange DPS alive. Nowadays, Red Mage and Summoner are clinging to that same buff for relevancy. Even Black Mage of all jobs would barely have any justification existing without it. That alone is absolutely ridiculous.

[RylaBee]

I wouldn't be bothered by the DPS if MCH had utility to compensate for it.

MCH is clearly intened to be selfish DPS among phranged. Its what makes it different and very usefull in content, where there is no-one you can buff except yourself.
Why would you want to hang utility on it and get it taxed in aDPS?
What it needs are numbers and perhaps rotation rework.

DNC who provides massive, all rounder utility that can be equal to a Cure III every 60s and a 5% HP barrier every 120s.

These strong utility can lead to an increase of Healer DPS.

Curing Walts being "massive, all rounder utility that can be equal to a Cure III" is quite loaded statement.

I haven't seen the math lately, but it used to be healer potency for heals was point-for-point equal to about 1.9 dps potency. Thats is 90% difference.
Basically, stacked 300+300pt Waltz would heal about ~55% of 600pt Cure III (if someone has new numbers, feel free to update).

I really dont see healers forgoing healing, when whole party bleeds after new juicy raid-wides, because they are counting that DNC is here to save the day.

Mind you, its not *useless*, but the core of DNC utility is its Dance Parner buffing & Technical Finish (both included in rDPS).
Not its healing flavor.