Damage "taxes" deserve serious reconsideration

[magzillas]

Acknowledging my bias as a RDM main and SMN secondary, I'd like to evaluate what I see as the three main "taxes" in the current state of dps balance, why I think they're problematic, and what can/should be considered in response.

Ranged Tax
Theory: Ranged damage-dealers, including ranged physical and casters (and paladins, apparently), should deal less damage because they are always able to hit the boss. Melee, by contrast, will have periods of downtime where the boss is out of reach.

Problems:

• By SQEX's own admission, recent encounter design has intentionally minimized melee downtime, and reduced difficulty with positionals.
• Ignores the inherent downsides of ranged jobs, such as lower hp pools, and for casters, hard-casting requirements
• Additionally questionable given that ranged players are in just as much danger (if not more, due to lower hp) when handling mechanics compared to melee, along with the fact that, at default, most ranged players operate within melee range to ensure they don't miss heals/buffs.

Commentary: With current encounter design, being "ranged" doesn't seem to have much meaning other than doing less damage. Casters in particular are further stung (perhaps less so SMN) because their damage relies on at least some periods of time where they have to stand still. The advantage of being ranged means very little when encounter design ensures that players can be functionally in melee range at all times.

Proposals: Either ranged damage needs to be increased across the board, or their ability to operate from range has to actually mean something to compensate for the damage inherently lacking in their rotation, compared to melee.


Utility Tax
Theory: Jobs which bring utility skills (raid buffs, defense, raises, etc.), should deal less damage to compensate.

Problems:

• Arbitrary valuation of one job's "utility" compared to another's
• Players who enjoy a job for reasons other than its utility can feel "punished" for having it available
• Obviously inconsistent application of this tax in the current scheme of job balance

Commentary: I'll never suggest that RDM should be doing more damage than BLM. But I'd also argue that the valuation of "utility" can be very murky. Does SMN having access to raise justify a 5-10% hit in damage? Should MNK be paying a tax for their party healing buff? Why is MCH doing some of the lowest damage, while having very minimal party utility?

Proposals: "Valuation" of party utility needs rethought across the board. Players shouldn't feel "punished" for wanting to play a class that happens to come with utility. I'd advocate for every class having its own thematically unique utility, but barring that, the numbers for the supposedly "selfish" MCH and BLM at least need a review.


(continued)

[magzillas]

Difficulty Tax:
Theory: If a job is harder to play, the player should be rewarded for doing it correctly with higher damage output. Conversely, easier jobs are "taxed" with lower damage output.

Problems:

• Again, players feel "punished" if they happen to enjoy a class that SQEX has dubbed, for lack of a better term, "easy mode."
• Disagreements over what constitutes "difficulty," or which jobs are actually the most difficult
• Disregards possibility that certain jobs may be easier/harder in certain encounters
• Potentially excuses lazy or uncreative development. E.g., make a half-assed rotation, call it "beginner friendly," and slap it with the difficulty tax.

Commentary: In my humble opinion, this shouldn't even be a thing. It's easier said than done, I know, but every job ought to be both approachable for newcomers, intricate enough to have a learning curve, and rewarding to those who master it. If a job has a "difficulty tax," to me, that's code for the job deserving another look at its fundamental design. But moreover, I think this tax is flawed for the simple fact that "difficulty" can be tough to gauge, especially across the wide variety of encounters in the game. As an example, most high-end raiders that I'm familiar with would argue that BLM is the hardest job to execute well in savage/ultimate content, and that evidently isn't reflected in SQEX's take. Does "difficulty" mean pressing more buttons? Positioning more precisely? How much damage you lose if you press the wrong key? I don't think this has an easy answer, which makes the prospect of "taxing" based on it even more questionable.

Proposal: If a job is being "taxed" for being too simple, I think it's deserving of another look at its design, not a damage penalty.

Conclusion
Respectfully, I believe all three of the main damage "taxes" discussed by SQEX have serious incongruencies either within themselves, or in context of the game's current design. I think all three deserve serious reconsideration in how they allegedly influence job balance.

Thank you for reading.

[TakumiHarada]

Totally agreed that these 3 taxes are laughable and outdated. I'm replying to push this thread up and hope devs will actually look at it.

Ranged tax, as explained by OP, isn't even a thing anymore due to the low downtime designs. They even made combos not break for melee to use ranged WS, but the result is that, ironically, no one needs to actually use them because of how melee-friendly the bosses are.
Looking at the jobs of WoL in the opening movies in different expansions, I think ranged and healer jobs are treated as nothing but second-class citizens, here just to provide support to our beloved heroes, our all-mighty tanks and melees.
Ranged DPS are designed to be bad at their jobs.

As for Utility tax, I get that damage should be adjusted based on damage buffs because of rDPS. But other utilities like healing abilities/raises? Really?
Based on how this game's contents all have one single metric, namely "damage output", jobs punished by the Utility tax will not be welcome in raid parties, again, by design.
If devs are genuinely pushing the game to a meta-pure-DPS-only direction, some reconsiderations are urgently needed before 6.4.

Difficulty tax is even more laughable because it means some jobs are intrinsically bad because they're made simple, with no higher ceilings to improve towards. These jobs are like sacrificed animals just for the sake of, dare I say, "noobs".
People using easy jobs, by design, free-load the party, causing harassment issues. Yes, this design actively causes harassments, e.g. being barred from certain contents, being called out, etc.
Not to mention "difficulty" is highly subjective and therefore shouldn't be a factor in the first place.

I admire the audacity of devs to openly admit these taxes, but the player base used these terms sarcastically to describe a problem since ShB. Admitting that they're true is not helping at all.

[Absurdity]

Proposals: Either ranged damage needs to be increased across the board, or their ability to operate from range has to actually mean something to compensate for the damage inherently lacking in their rotation, compared to melee.

This is what I'd put emphasis on, they need to stop the 2 minute meta nonsense, bring boss hitboxes back to what they were in Stormblood and reduce the completely free uptime for melees.
I say this as a tank who has to deal with melee uptime just as much, but this coddling of melee players needs to stop.

They deal the highest dps in the game, make them actually work for it and make proper tank positioning for melee uptime actually matter again, god knows we could use some more tank specific responsibilities besides pressing mitigation every minute or so.

It makes fights incredibly uninteresting when you essentially just whack on a target dummy for 8+ minutes.

[Lyth]

This is a well written OP.

I think that all jobs within a role (tank/healer/DPS) should have as tight of a rdps balance where possible. And no job should remain on top for an extended period of time, even by a small margin.

With regards to a 'ranged tax', I think that the real issue is that SE wants a 50/50 split of melee and ranged in encounter design, rather than letting you run a 'fake melee' that allows for safer spreads. The design of 'physical ranged' and 'magical ranged' is itself a bit arbitrary, and just guarantees that half of your spots will go to ranged by default. A dps tax isn't the solution, but they should simply erase the physical/magical distinction and just give you two melee and two ranged slots to allocate however you want.

Utility is a difficult one, but should never be balanced against rdps because it's an apples and oranges comparison. The vast majority of jobs have some minor way to contribute, and if Addle being more consistently useful than Feint is a problem, then the solution is just to adapt encounter design so that there are as many physical raidwides. The only really controversial form of utility is Raise, in part because it lets you recover from mistakes. Perhaps the solution is to make Raise universal across all ranged jobs, and then give your team a fixed number of such Raises per fight at a given difficulty. But it shouldn't really be brought into the rdps discussion.

'Difficulty tax' is probably the silliest of the lot, given how variable the player consensus is. We frequently see players who have no experience on a job shouting on how easy it is, and then that viewpoint sticks until later in the expansion, when players start actually playing it and recognizing its depth. At the start of this expansion, players were going on about RPR being too easy without having any understanding of how optimizations worked on it. Now the consensus on reddit seems to be shifting over to SAM and DRG as being the easier melee. And this largely comes down to the fact that we only have a finite amount of playtime, and the more time you invest into a given job, the more depth you'll see in it. And if there truly were large variations in difficulty, you'd see it in the job's IQR, because there would be a large performance difference between opposite ends of the percentile spectrum.

At the end of the day, it's in everyone's interests for the jobs to be similarly balanced in terms of rdps. Bring the player, not the job.

[Garten]

Agree on everything.

About the ress tax (i speak ad a Red main) i have to admit i dont do High End content so i can only speak about what i read in this forum or other ppls tell me.

Premise: i won't Say that ress (or chain ress) Is not to be taken in consideration, It COULD be useful.
BUT What i see Is some contradiction.
The same High End raiders that Say that "if Red does same DMG than blm, why bring blm if Red could ress", are the same ppl that then Say, "at optimized play ress do not matters cause 1) ressing Is already a dps loss, 2) people should not die (or at least not so much that a Red/sum has to ress oppose to an healer)"

So.. what are we even arguing about?? We all agree that Red/sum bring some utility but as you Said, this utility tax has to be HEAVILY REVAULATED.

PS i am sleep deprived and cant Remember if summoner Is sum or smn

[Aikaal]

What a nice thread to wake up on. Yes to everything. I recall Physical Ranged having a strong meaning in fights like Coil T7 or UCoB.

Just to reaffirm. Summoner is very much a Physical Ranged. The biggest stupidity is Ifrit has a melee combo and 2 long casts and deals less damage than Titan who is mobility free style.

Imho, Summoner's reworks needs a rework. It is too easy and nobody asked for that and Summoner mains saw their damage go lower because it is easy and falls under the difficulty tax. This isn't right and it's quite an abusive relationship SQEX has with their player base on the job.

[Garten]

I would like to point out another thing.. It Is bad to Say but as other Said "the only utility that matters Is DMG", so in case of smn/Red the utility that matters the most Is the DMG buff they bring..

Their barriers and healing are not counted in the fight (not necessary to clear), cause, if they were, those Jobs would be 100% needed. Maybe IF they allow the healers to DPS more then you can count them as utility (like if a whm now can cast 1 more glare instead to cast a medica, or a broil instead of a succor) but in the opposite case (in the case healers dont Need to gcd-heal) no, but this Is something i leave to discuss to ppls with knoledge in endgame fights.

[Garten]

(that does not mean i want utility that are not DMG removed, i LOVE my vercure, verraise ad magic barrier, Just wanted to point out that they are more job flavor than utility)

[Seraphor]

I would like to point out another thing.. It Is bad to Say but as other Said "the only utility that matters Is DMG", so in case of smn/Red the utility that matters the most Is the DMG buff they bring..

Their barriers and healing are not counted in the fight (not necessary to clear), cause, if they were, those Jobs would be 100% needed. Maybe IF they allow the healers to DPS more then you can count them as utility (like if a whm now can cast 1 more glare instead to cast a medica, or a broil instead of a succor) but in the opposite case (in the case healers dont Need to gcd-heal) no, but this Is something i leave to discuss to ppls with knoledge in endgame fights.

While damage utility is obviously the largest factor (it directly contributes to real dps output after all) I wouldn't say defensive utility counts for nothing.

It should definitely count for less that it seems to be valued, a caster with a Rez doesn't deserve to be as much as 10% behind a similar job, but defensive utility does by definition make a fight easier. Easier on the healers, which can potentially allow them to deal more damage. You mentioned that but you can't say for certain that it's not allowing the WHM to cast an extra glare. If a single GCD heal is used or there's any hesitation in the GCD, that's potentially having an effect.

It's not as quantifiable, and you could negate it by giving all jobs some form of defensive utility so that it cancels out any imbalance. Hell I suppose that's what Feint and Addle are for. But things aren't currently equal on that front so it does have some effect.

In the endn jobs can't all be equal, there will be some difference in damage output simply because jobs have different skills and rotations and it'd be impossible to standardise damage output without removing variety and flavour, and utility tax is as good a justification for that difference as any. It shouldn't be as impactful as it currently is, but it will always be there to a degree.