Damage "taxes" deserve serious reconsideration

[CKNovel]

Machinist:
- can create a barrier to reduce dmg

Every ranged has a "tactician like", it's basically like a role action. So in the equation of the ranged role you can rule this out.
As Second wind is also available on both ranged and melee DPS we'll rule it out of the equation for simplification of the argument.
Also please tell me the last raid where "The Warden's Paean" was useful.

But you forgot a few things! It's going to be my pleasure to help you:

Bloodbath on all melee DPS is very good and makes the difference when dealing with many mechanics.
Feint on all melee basically have the same effect as tactician(s) but half the effect on magical raidwide
Riddle of Earth (MNK) is ridiculous. 30s CD, 10s duration and 3 charges. The effect reduces damage taken by 20%. This can be used for every instance of damage taken.
Mantra (MNK) is insanely good as it also impacts the shields.
Shadow shift (NIN) is insanely good as it helps the healer to focus on other teammember that needs extra mitigation or shield.
Arcane Crest (RPR) is 30s CD, you need to point this out as it is a shield AND a heal on a very short CD. Before nerf, it was the strongest healing out of DPS. It short CD allows it to be present on every raidwide.
Third Eye (SAM) is a personal mitigation and like Shadow shift and Arcane crest, it's insanely useful as it allows the healers to focus on squishier targets. Short CD, can be used on every instance of damage taken.
Life surge (DRG) while mainly being used for DPS is still a healing effect.

Another point:
All melees are tankier, less likely to die from raidwides while Ranged&Caster are much more fragile.

A bonus point:
All melee DPS have mobility tools. All of them.
Thunderclap, Elusive Jump, Shukuchi, Hyaten&Gyoten, Hell's Ingress&Regress.

Do you can still talk of support when you compare SAM, a pure DPS, having bloodbath, Third Eye, Feint and natural additional defensive stats to a BRD that only brings Troubadour and Nature's minne while also hitting like crap?
We'll ignore The Warden's Pean because it's useful once in every expansion.

Or better, can we compare MCH and SAM, two pure DPS?

[TakumiHarada]

snip

You honestly know nothing about the jobs do you? Can you read the descriptions for all the jobs first?
What about Mantra? What about Arcane Circle? What about Feint? What about all the extra self-shielding and self-healing that melees have? (Self-shielding & self-healing = higher survivability & supporting healers)
And are you thinking in terms of rDPS? Because we know even in terms of rDPS, ranged DPS aren't gaining enough to make up for it.
I feel like we're just talking to someone who can't do any maths. At this point you feel more like a troll than having a constructive discussion here.

[Mithron]

snip

The problem is though, if the BRD/DNC/MCH offer less total DPS gains (even with their buffs) than simply having any of the melee (You forgot RPR also has party damage buff, as well as some other jobs), then why would I want a BRD who can buff my damage when I can just have another melee that makes the boss die faster and more reliably?

This is where rDPS and aDPS come into play. Even though MCH does more solo damage than some other jobs, it doesn't do enough to justify its lack of support even compared to BRD and DNC. SAM however does, so even though it offers no support, the flat amount of damage it offers outweighs all the buffs that BRD and DNC bring, so it's better to bring a SAM than a BRD/DNC.

[Urielparadox]

In your example is the biggest error:
Using minimum gear. Who would even try to do savage with minimum gear? That this doesn't work is clear as the day.

You forget a lot of things here, but you miss them later on too. So we will come back to that. The answer is a lot of people. Why is it not clear as day? Because people do it all the time in pf. Why else, well lets look below and then come back to this.

It is logical, that you have hard time with the lowest Equipment. That is even the case in normal content.

This statement ignores a few facts and "hard" is also subjective:

1) Currently in lowest ilvl jobs doing perfect may not be able to do the damage required to kill the boss in p8s. thats a big issue. If it was purely about skill that would be different.
2)

But, because of the gear. Instant of going week 1 into savage (or with the lowest ilvl), i would wait until i have around mid lvl (mean currently around 610-615).

Not all gear is equal and thus not ilvl. A rdm decked out in 620 ss gear is going to do less damage than a Penta melded/proper geared 610/620 mix rdm. Wpn damage significantly outweighs any other stats(except SS on blm sometimes). Yet has the same weight towards ilvl as gear. Gearing stronger is also about luck, and doing the fights your locked out of/kept out of for being x job. As well as winning the loot because it takes 1-2 months of not winning anything to get 1 item, which is way too long. If you literally can't get access to the gear you need to improve, you can't improve. Which is where balancing is so important.

3)Crafted gear is available right away and this time a week ahead, and you can wait on avg 4 days for prices to drop to affordable making u at least 10ilvls higher than the minimum for everything but 7/8.

4) Savage/ex(ultimate's are a set lvl their own thing), are tuned in terms of bosses hp, mechanic damage, frequencies of aoes/mechs. This all means at min ilvl gear in normal content actually goes extremely far compared to hard content. So while it might be "hard". A raid wide in normal content wont kill team members if its unmitigated with full hp at ilvl. In savage it will. This is a very big difference.

5) Normal content also has very few dps checks in it with looping bosses with no time limits. Just maybe progressive but usually static mechanics.

6)That most people never experience content at lowest ilvl and therefore the perception at what lowest ilvl means is off. Even if you are minilvl, your teammates are most likely not and that makes big difference in perception of ilvl/gear as people experience the game.

7) lowering the bosses hp of one fight did nothing to change the issues. I'm seeing triple melee locked p7s/p6s, 2 melee locked even for being i619 already with 630 weapon.

All of these differences give people a false perception of the over all difficulty in difference in fights between normal/hard/ex/and savage.

Even in week4 the amount of people I have showing up in p7 party's with i600 weapons/gear/no melds and think they are not in the reason the dps check is tight is insane. Most players have no idea how the gear and stats actually work in this game.

*1* dragonsong ultima, *2*the hair voidsent(barby?) with *4*615 weapons and *3* endsinger?
Are there this much problems to? Or are they all not important, because, they are not the last dungeon/ older content?

1) ultis gearing doesn't work that way.
2) Noticeable the fight is a skill check mostly, as it's an extreme. It actually has a really low hp/enrage for an ex. This doesn't change the fact that if your are farming it; leaving out mch,rdm, and smn. Will mean faster clears if all gear and play is equal. when u have to do a long fight 50 times, leaving out the currently weaker jobs will give u 1 more win per hour. because the balance is that off.
3) balance is the same, you will still kill it faster, which in this case is even more important because then u can skip the final hard mech. while I haven't gone back to endsinger, when the final mech becomes skippable, and you have to have certain job comps to do it. all the unbalanced jobs will be kept out because they can't "skip soar/quad jobs". Which is ironic because that's exactly the situation they used in the live letter as an example.
4) no week 1 or world first group was out there doing these savages, in anything less than 615 weapons. They were literally locked out, even having a weapon that is 1wpn dmg above what is supposed to be required. So in fact the jobs at minilvl could not do the rdps to clear the fight. If you try to say not everyone has windspet for savage. There was no reason to you had a whole week and the crafted options were weaker/more expensive. The only people in older weapons were/are the ones who don't understand how gear progression and ilvl properly.

[Dogempire]

Used to be that the tradeoff of playing a melee dps was having to worry about positionals and mechanics that would cause downtime that ranged jobs don't have. That was the tradeoff, melee did more damage in sandbag situations while ranged jobs did almost as much in fights where the boss hitbox was constantly unsafe.

Except now this tradeoff doesn't exist and ranged players are still doing reduced damage because of these systematic prejudices while melee aren't being taxed at all for the higher damage numbers they push on sandbag bosses. All bosses are designed as sandbags now and positionals are nearly nonexistent.

Right now melee dps have no tradeoffs and all the benefits and SE is too biased to see this

[magzillas]

Every ranged has a "tactician like", it's basically like a role action. So in the equation of the ranged role you can rule this out.
As Second wind is also available on both ranged and melee DPS we'll rule it out of the equation for simplification of the argument.
Also please tell me the last raid where "The Warden's Paean" was useful.

But you forgot a few things! It's going to be my pleasure to help you:

Bloodbath on all melee DPS is very good and makes the difference when dealing with many mechanics.
Feint on all melee basically have the same effect as tactician(s) but half the effect on magical raidwide
Riddle of Earth (MNK) is ridiculous. 30s CD, 10s duration and 3 charges. The effect reduces damage taken by 20%. This can be used for every instance of damage taken.
Mantra (MNK) is insanely good as it also impacts the shields.
Shadow shift (NIN) is insanely good as it helps the healer to focus on other teammember that needs extra mitigation or shield.
Arcane Crest (RPR) is 30s CD, you need to point this out as it is a shield AND a heal on a very short CD. Before nerf, it was the strongest healing out of DPS. It short CD allows it to be present on every raidwide.
Third Eye (SAM) is a personal mitigation and like Shadow shift and Arcane crest, it's insanely useful as it allows the healers to focus on squishier targets. Short CD, can be used on every instance of damage taken.
Life surge (DRG) while mainly being used for DPS is still a healing effect.

Another point:
All melees are tankier, less likely to die from raidwides while Ranged&Caster are much more fragile.

A bonus point:
All melee DPS have mobility tools. All of them.
Thunderclap, Elusive Jump, Shukuchi, Hyaten&Gyoten, Hell's Ingress&Regress.

Do you can still talk of support when you compare SAM, a pure DPS, having bloodbath, Third Eye, Feint and natural additional defensive stats to a BRD that only brings Troubadour and Nature's minne while also hitting like crap?
We'll ignore The Warden's Pean because it's useful once in every expansion.

Or better, can we compare MCH and SAM, two pure DPS?

Thanks for this summary - I think you captured much better than I did that in addition to their damage advantage, melee are just much sturdier and less likely to incur a death from raidwides or other incidental damage. I think it kind of further reinforces the point that if you have at least 1 melee, 1 ranged phys, and 1 caster (i.e., you have the 5% bonus for bringing one of each), there's essentially no reason to fill your fourth dps with anything other than another melee.

To paraphrase something that I think Xeno said - I don't think the game would be any worse if comps of 1 melee/2 r-phys/1 caster and 1 melee/1 r-phys/2 caster were comparably successful to 2-melee comps.

[Ivtrix]

You honestly know nothing about the jobs do you? Can you read the descriptions for all the jobs first?
What about Mantra? What about Arcane Circle? What about Feint? What about all the extra self-shielding and self-healing that melees have? (Self-shielding & self-healing = higher survivability & supporting healers)
And are you thinking in terms of rDPS? Because we know even in terms of rDPS, ranged DPS aren't gaining enough to make up for it.
I feel like we're just talking to someone who can't do any maths. At this point you feel more like a troll than having a constructive discussion here.

It’s blatantly obvious that the homie doesn’t participate or understand balance in the content is designed for.

[Ivtrix]

It's frustrating when you can play a melee job incredibly poorly and deal significantly more damage than Red Mage, Bard, MCH and Black Mage who all have to actually think, play optimally and like Renathras said burn every tool in their kits to keep casting uptime to come even close to having a scrap of damage the underperforming melee player can do.

I am that chinese meme

[Renathras]

Let them complain. Seriously. Just let it happen.

Developers need to stop being terrified of complaints from casual players and learn to differentiate between legitimate feedback on balance issues and empty whining. If someone is complaining about melee positionals, they can pick up a phys ranged. In most cases they'll keep playing their melee, be fine with it and it's just hollow grumbling over having to put in effort.

They also need to drop this ridiculous idea that every job needs equal participation rate. Even if some jobs have small utility or ease of play advantages over others, players will still play their favorite. When phys ranged used to do as much as casters or melee, some people still played casters and melee because they liked the gameplay of their job of choice. If rdps is balanced, you pick a job for gameplay.
It also doesn't matter if, for example, NIN had 5000 happy players and DNC had 15000 happy players. That's fine, there's no problem here. That's 20k happy people. Trying to force it to be a 10k/10k split just results in a good portion of those players no longer being happy and doesn't increase the size of the playerbase, it simply redistributes the existing playerbase. It makes no sense to destroy jobs for no gain.

I agree with pretty much all of this other than the "complaints from casual players" line: Most of these complaints aren't from casuals, they're from Savage raiders. Most balance complaints are from Savage raiders, as casuals often don't even do Savage raids, and many don't even do Extremes. (EDIT: To be absolutely clear, ACTUAL casuals don't get involved with theorycrafting, and many don't meld or know optimal rotations to begin with, nor do they use things like Balance or FFLogs to even start to have these conversations or an opinion on them. So they don't complain about stuff like this because they literally never encounter it and don't even think about it. No casual MCH is being denied a PF spot because many of them don't even know PF exists in the first place! I remember being hypercasual in HW and vaguely hearing something about raid groups breaking up in Alexander, but I hadn't even done Alex Normal at the time, didn't know something like FFLogs or Balance existed [did they even exist back then?], and wasn't aware of, much less on, the official forums or Reddit or etc game forums on FFXIV. Casual players that mainly run MSQ and roulettes for tome gear don't care about these issues because they aren't even aware of them in the first place, so they aren't the ones complaining about them.)

But with the concept as a whole, I do agree. Developers need to stop being terrified of complaints from elitist players and learn to differentiate between legitimate feedback on balance issues and empty whining. That very much is true.

[Keichi]

Every ranged has a "tactician like", it's basically like a role action. So in the equation of the ranged role you can rule this out.
As Second wind is also available on both ranged and melee DPS we'll rule it out of the equation for simplification of the argument.
Also please tell me the last raid where "The Warden's Paean" was useful.

But you forgot a few things! It's going to be my pleasure to help you:

Bloodbath on all melee DPS is very good and makes the difference when dealing with many mechanics.
Feint on all melee basically have the same effect as tactician(s) but half the effect on magical raidwide
Riddle of Earth (MNK) is ridiculous. 30s CD, 10s duration and 3 charges. The effect reduces damage taken by 20%. This can be used for every instance of damage taken.
Mantra (MNK) is insanely good as it also impacts the shields.
Shadow shift (NIN) is insanely good as it helps the healer to focus on other teammember that needs extra mitigation or shield.
Arcane Crest (RPR) is 30s CD, you need to point this out as it is a shield AND a heal on a very short CD. Before nerf, it was the strongest healing out of DPS. It short CD allows it to be present on every raidwide.
Third Eye (SAM) is a personal mitigation and like Shadow shift and Arcane crest, it's insanely useful as it allows the healers to focus on squishier targets. Short CD, can be used on every instance of damage taken.
Life surge (DRG) while mainly being used for DPS is still a healing effect.

Another point:
All melees are tankier, less likely to die from raidwides while Ranged&Caster are much more fragile.

A bonus point:
All melee DPS have mobility tools. All of them.
Thunderclap, Elusive Jump, Shukuchi, Hyaten&Gyoten, Hell's Ingress&Regress.

Do you can still talk of support when you compare SAM, a pure DPS, having bloodbath, Third Eye, Feint and natural additional defensive stats to a BRD that only brings Troubadour and Nature's minne while also hitting like crap?
We'll ignore The Warden's Pean because it's useful once in every expansion.

Or better, can we compare MCH and SAM, two pure DPS?

Ok, forgott mantra by the monk.
But, it doesnt chance the fact, that bardf and dancer has the most buff skills for the party.

I didnt mentioned the other things because: They are even role skills, so, that everyone from the role has it (like feint and blood bath).
Or, are only selfish boost. DNC and Bard has some selfish boost to, that i didnt mentioned.

My point was: They have the most support skills of the dd classes (support = buffing the group or at last one other player ior has other usefull things). So, they are supporter and supporter are making lesser dmg than the main attacker.
Otherwise, why would the people take classes without support, when the support make the exact same dmg + have the support skills for the others?