Thread: Patch 6.21 - DPS Roles & the State of Endgame Balance

Originally Posted by Cetonis

... [DNC & BRD] scale dramatically with group quality. [MCH] does not care at all. The scaling jobs *have* to be better in absolute peak quality groups, as that's the only way that situation has a chance to be considered balanced at all.

You can fiddle with the "break-even" point, of course. That is, how good of a group/run do you need for DNC/BRD to catch up to MCH? But the answer right now is that you already need a pretty darn good group. MCH solidly outpaces the other ranged in duty finder content like NM raids, and would be the strongest pranged option for the large majority of statics and PFs...

I agree wholeheartedly with the initial premise. However, I feel it's worth pointing out that content like Normal Raids aren't a great place to draw from when trying to assess job balance (no enrage pressure/randomized comps/players often don't take it particularly seriously) and that Machinists are still under-tuned even given the buff/non-buff job dichotomy.

Dancers, for instance, should have higher rDPS variance than Machinist and be capable of a higher potential damage contribution as a result. When you pull Savage clear data from the last two weeks, however, you'll notice that it's not just the upper potential that's higher:

MCH & DNC Abyssos (Savage) rDPS Standings: Sep. 1, 2022 - Sep. 15, 2022

As it stands a competent Dancer in this context will out-perform a similarly competent Machinist at all skill levels. If you want to balance around buffs providing rDPS variance, then Machinist should have a higher median rDPS contribution than Dancer while still losing out to Dancers and Bards at the upper percentiles (which is actually how they used to compare to one-another during Shadowbringers).

This last bit is spit-balling, but I think part of this is that in addition to Machinist having slightly undertuned potency values, the 2-minute standardization pass the job team implemented with Endwalker made buff coordination easier and more impactful. In-turn this boosted the performance of the median player on said buff-centric jobs.

Originally Posted by Clayr

MCH & DNC Abyssos (Savage) rDPS Standings: Sep. 1, 2022 - Sep. 15, 2022

The combined savage numbers are not going to be a very good metric right now, because you're going to have a lot of gear and group skew going on.

10,000 of the parses being factored into DNC there are from P8S1 kills, while only 600 of MCH runs are. Naturally those DNC players are going to have better gear and better groups than the ones comprising almost the entirety of the MCH runs in that number.

As for normal raids, as you pointed out, NM groups are not that strong, which is exactly why those parses are a reasonable approximation of a job's performance with a suspect group. The factors you cite should apply equally to whatever job you might queue in as, it's not like MCH is magically going to be paired with stronger players who care more.


The group quality question is further complicated because we shouldn't conflate "50th percentile player" with "50th percentile group". They are not the same and what we actually care about is the latter.

One thing you could look at is the early fight nDPS gap - this essentially informs how much rDPS value BRD/DNC need to be getting to catch up to MCH. It's around 1300-1400, which is in the ballpark of what a Bard might get on a not-great run. Dancer appears to usually be a bit ahead of that, which might be reasonably explained by the early tier gear skew. Though there was that Devilment / Starfall buff, so perhaps both BRD and MCH could use a 1% catch-up or something.

In any case, it's not a melodramatically awful situation within-the-role if we're talking 1% tweaks. It feels like the volume of complaints and memes about MCH would be more appropriately aimed at RDM/SMN, or RPR.

Originally Posted by Cereaz

the last few days i am seeing several party finder queue not letting RDMs join p7s clears. As in they removed the RDM job slots.

I feel very alienated =(

I really hate saying this but I'm almost glad in a way. The dev team only seems to respond with meaningful change when the community as a whole finally gets so fed up they refuse to partake in their nonsense. Monk saw a complete rework largely due to the playerbase revolting after Shadowbringer's media tour when Yoshida claimed, "We're most proud of the changes to Monk" only to discover they did almost nothing. Machinist is now reaching the point where Savage clear numbers are a mere fraction of every other job. While both Warrior and Paladin were buffed after people wouldn't shut up about it.

For all the criticism WoW gets for ignoring player feedback, FFXIV is doing the exact same thing. The only difference is FF has more players willing to defend SE over any little thing. There's no excuse for the jobs to be this horrendously balanced two Savage tiers in. What's worse is we have an Ultimate on the horizon yet a handful of jobs will be locked out of it unless we see some pretty serious changes come in 6.3.