Damage "taxes" deserve serious reconsideration

[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.

[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.

[CKNovel]

There is one problem about making all DPS doing the same rDPS (more or less):
It's the ego problem.

Despite knowing they're more tanking, more mobile and their gameplay being the same as a physical ranged, some will complain because of "muh uptime", "muh positionals".
Any Melee DPS won't lose more than 10 GCDs even if they play extremely safe but the current gap makes looks like they have to AFK for a whole minute.

Yoshida pointed this "Some jobs who were doing enough damage will feel it as unfair".
Guys, we have to walk so that melee DPS can run while smiling. It wouldn't be fair if we could both run.

[Liam_Harper]

There is one problem about making all DPS doing the same rDPS (more or less):
It's the ego problem.

Despite knowing they're more tanking, more mobile and their gameplay being the same as a physical ranged, some will complain because of "muh uptime", "muh positionals".
Any Melee DPS won't lose more than 10 GCDs even if they play extremely safe but the current gap makes looks like they have to AFK for a whole minute.

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.

[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.

[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

[Aikaal]

Hi,

There's one thing that was missing and it's those:

Melee/Ranged have Second Wind to help healers for big hits like Ahk Morns.

As for Casters and that's pretty significant;

Black Mage have Manaward for self-mitigation. This is useful to sponge damage or just not move and hit a mechanic to keep your DPS high. (This is pretty handy in P8S)
Summoner have 2 Radiant Aegis. This blocks damage on demand if Carby is here. (This is actually really good in P8S on High Concepts and phase 2)
Red Mage have no self mitigation They have Vercure and it can be nice. It's main goal is a free instant caster after downtime but it has niche usages but you'll never use it when you can DPS.

Summary; as a RDM, I have died a few times from eyes in DSR being full HP because there was 1 mit used there and sometimes Scholar would miss it which is fine. But also sometimes my WHM would miss Benison on me there and I would get 1hko. We memed about it but there was a special RDM protection program in my static because I was the one more likely to die randomly as a caster DPS. Not Melee DPS.

[CKNovel]

Hi,

There's one thing that was missing and it's those:

Melee/Ranged have Second Wind to help healers for big hits like Ahk Morns.

As for Casters and that's pretty significant;

Yes, I intentially omitted them as the point was to prove that melees DPS also have very strong support mitigation that increased their already great survivability.
And that in some cases, it can reach ridiculous level of strength and flexibility such as MNK, RPR and SAM.

Thought, let's compare those personal mitigation to melees:
Manaward (BLM) is very strong it's a 120s CD for a shield of 30% BLM health. It's similar to shadowshift.
Radiant shield (SMN) is a 60s CD, two charges for 20% of the SMN life as a shield. But you can't use it during a summoning or the whole duration of Bahamut/Phoenix
Rekindle (SMN) is a very good heal with a HoT working like Excog. But is technically on a 120s CD and only usable within a 15 second phase.
Vercure is a VerJoke you'll never use unless prog and even then, it's not very good.

We're going to skip the role action since the only support ability is Addle and has been already talked about.

In comparison to BLM, NIN has shadow shift but also Bloodbath and Second wind.
SMN has very strong shield and healing capacity but they're limited. RPR has a 30s cooldown on its 10% shield of its bigger pool of max HP and its healing can rivalize with SMN.
RDM still has Magick Barrier which is a very strong cooldown. Man, RDM really got the short hand of the stick this expansion, less mobile and most squishy caster.

[Aikaal]

Yes, I intentially omitted them as the point was to prove that melees DPS also have very strong support mitigation that increased their already great survivability.
And that in some cases, it can reach ridiculous level of strength and flexibility such as MNK, RPR and SAM.

Thought, let's compare those personal mitigation to melees:
Manaward (BLM) is very strong it's a 120s CD for a shield of 30% BLM health. It's similar to shadowshift.
Radiant shield (SMN) is a 60s CD, two charges for 20% of the SMN life as a shield. But you can't use it during a summoning or the whole duration of Bahamut/Phoenix
Rekindle (SMN) is a very good heal with a HoT working like Excog. But is technically on a 120s CD and only usable within a 15 second phase.
Vercure is a VerJoke you'll never use unless prog and even then, it's not very good.

We're going to skip the role action since the only support ability is Addle and has been already talked about.

In comparison to BLM, NIN has shadow shift but also Bloodbath and Second wind.
SMN has very strong shield and healing capacity but they're limited. RPR has a 30s cooldown on its 10% shield of its bigger pool of max HP and its healing can rivalize with SMN.
RDM still has Magick Barrier which is a very strong cooldown. Man, RDM really got the short hand of the stick this expansion, less mobile and most squishy caster.

Agree on that. I would say Rekindle and Vercure have niche usages.

Vercure gives you instant casts on downtime. Vercure provide some supports in mechanics like High Concept and all the downtime of DSR.

Rekindle highly depends if it's needed or not. If you take a big aoe hit, jsut summoning phoenix gives a medica II. Rekindle usually is used on the tank as overheal. Phoenix needs to spawn when damage happens which isn't always the case. I will say, however, that on the second p8s boss it does shine well.

[FireMage]

Those taxes are on paper, valid, but with the exception of the difficulty tax they aren't being designed around, which is the problem