Let's redefine "damage taxes"

[Leiron]

Absolutely not. Proper balance would be ~5% from top to bottom of the ladder. What we have currently btw is ~11%. Ease of play absolutely matters, otherwise you are punishing harder Jobs

This was stated way back at page 6, but I would look to point out that a percentile discrepancy is not the end all, be all.
The highest I peeked at briefly was about 12687.
A 11% difference is about 1395 damage leaving 11,291 rounding down.
That isn't something to be concerned about, as there is no encounter currently where an 11% difference is going to result in a wipe due to lack of DPS.
If it does occur, it is usually due to errors in rotation, poor balance in boss HP (which SE is infamous for), or other factors.
Its exceedingly rare where such a difference will make any difference in end game content at the minimum ilvl.
So don't get so heated about it. It isn't worth it.
Mind you this is with aDPS, as you utilize rDPS and nDPS the numerical difference decreases.

Seriously, the percentile usage can be pretty deceptive because its the same as someone bringing up likelihood of cancer.

If smoking increases the likelihood of lung cancer by 50%, but the actual rate is .000000001%, it may be statically significant but it is meaningfully significant.

tl;dr It is a game, not your life, chill with the flaming.

DNC and BRD are also harder than MCH. Being lower satisfies proper balance and being close in potential satisfies viability. Imagine crying "utility" over Curing Waltz/Minne/Paean

That is bad balancing.
You don't balance around difficulty ever.
Difficulty is meaningless with competent players.

[FireMage]

Sorry but difficulty should never matter for a jobs DPS
it's not like the players chose for summoner to be braindead easy

It absolutely should, proper balance and all. Again, punishes harder Jobs

[fulminating]

The problem has two sides: the first that they balance according to difficulty and the second that they adjust difficulty according to balance. This has created a negative feedback loop on every job barring fisher and blue mage which aren't popular enough to be subject to the nonsense yet.

[UkcsAlias]

The problem has two sides: the first that they balance according to difficulty

There are 2 parts here, skill floor and skill ceiling. And while they themselve do not say anything about damage, they do still affect it.

A low skill floor generaly means higher output at less effort when being new.
A high skill floor means its generaly hard to start on that class.

In the middle ground it then barely matters, since most jobs show overlap anyway and the damage values can often be quite easily adjusted here.

But the skill ceiling is where savages matter, since in this case, if the skill ceiling is too low, players can reach that ceiling too easy. And the normal result is that it caps the output power. This instantly sets an upper boundary for usefulness. You can balance according to difficulty, but once you are reaching that upper boundary on a job, you already run into an issue. And the only way to resolve that is creating a higher skill ceiling on the job (introducing extra difficulty).

This cannot be done on dungeons/raids themselve, it can only be done on the job, since the job is simply capped at what its allowed to do.

But this is the issue of the top 1% of gamers anyway: gamers are excelent at optimizing fun out of a game. Sure, devs can introduce more fun to them (and idealy should), but there is a point where as dev you should stop as it will harm the normal player base.

In the MCH case, this means that any added complexity should not disrupt the lower skill levels too much. Sure, they can add some new mechanics to them that might require a bit more effort to get used to them. But for someone that isnt capable of learning those things, it should not instantly lock him out. And this is a very difficult balancing aspect (but the real issue of this all). Too much added complexity and it raises the skill floor after all, and you generaly want those to be low.

(note, in a healthy case, you can never truly reach the skill ceiling as there are too many factors that are too hard to manage. in an optimal game you can get close, but it should not be sustainable)

[Aurora428]

A job being easy only means anything if equally skilled performance on the "easy job" leads to higher outcomes than the same performance on the "hard job".

The logic simply fails there. It doesn't take nearly any effort to destroy your own performance on MCH as a SAM, even avoiding what little uptime optimization there is in EW content. If being easy provides quite literally no advantage, what is its value as a balancing metric? Its just an unquestionable flaw the job has that is holding it down at that point.

The only "tax" there should be is reasonable wiggle room for optimization between BLM, melee and ranged for the actual loss expected when transitioning from a practice dummy to a real fight. This number is not that big.

[Rithy255]

Difficulty is so subjective at this point, I get it certain jobs are deemed easier then others but not everyone's going to find the same job hard or easy.

I guess you could point to jobs such as Reaper or Summoner being pretty easy and 99% of people would agree, but who asked for those jobs to be easy? Especially summoner, I don't think anyone who really enjoyed old summoner wanted it to be significantly easier.

Also no job is really that so hard that it justifies any massive differences like we got now, I think it's fine to reward "harder" job with a little bit more but where do we draw the line on whats hard and whats not, how much of a reward should it be 1%? 5%? 10%? extra? at this point I rather they just ignore "difficulty" and focus on job balance, maybe they can slightly buff jobs later down the line that take more "skill" but right now theirs no trend towards skillful jobs performing better then "ez" jobs, why would samurai be so high, why would dancer be so high, why would drk be so high? it just makes no sense with current job balance.

[Avoidy]

It's always a RDM main on the forums calling other jobs too easy and then downplaying their own utility because they want to have a bad-faith argument about why them doing more damage than smn, and providing more utility than smn, is balanced while the current situation isn't. Protip: If the devs ever went full tilt and only balanced around ease of play, you'd still be dead last because these out of touch devs would probably say some bullshit like "yOu cAn rEs a LoT sO uR EaSy." I swear Barbariccia Extreme broke some people, and then the P8 door boss really drove home the emotional damage because wow, shock, week 1 tryhard groups wanted as much damage as they could get. You picked the highest utility caster job in the game and now you're mad that it's not pumping damage as well. Get a grip. Maybe RDM could use some love, but the moment its damage is even equal to SMN's, that's when SMN's viability goes out the window because now it's just a worse RDM in every single way. Think about it for like two seconds.

[Mithron]

You picked the highest utility caster job in the game and now you're mad that it's not pumping damage as well. Get a grip. Maybe RDM could use some love, but the moment its damage is even equal to SMN's, that's when SMN's viability goes out the window because now it's just a worse RDM in every single way. Think about it for like two seconds.

The argument here though is Searing Light vs. Embolden, then. "Utility" like raises shouldn't tax rDPS, only damage buffs, and every job should be within 1% rDPS of each other, otherwise there's no reason to ever bring low rDPS jobs. SAM has no raid buffs yet still is top rDPS. I think RDM should be below SMN but only slightly, because Embolden should be better than Searing Light for buffing damage.

[Avoidy]

I think RDM should be below SMN but only slightly, because Embolden should be better than Searing Light for buffing damage.

This is pretty much how I feel as well. RDM also gets a barrier that shields the group against magic damage (i.e. raidwides), while SMN gets nothing like this unless you count addle, which every caster gets as a role action anyway. I'm not sure why you aren't including this under utility, but I do and so do most people when they talk about this kind of thing.

Basically, I'm just tired. I agree that RDM could use some love, but the people talking about doing more dps than smn "bcuz its ez" clearly just want their job to be on top and don't actually care about a balanced game.

[Rithy255]

This is pretty much how I feel as well. RDM also gets a barrier that shields the group against magic damage (i.e. raidwides), while SMN gets nothing like this unless you count addle, which every caster gets as a role action anyway. I'm not sure why you aren't including this under utility, but I do and so do most people when they talk about this kind of thing.

Basically, I'm just tired. I agree that RDM could use some love, but the people talking about doing more dps than smn "bcuz its ez" clearly just want their job to be on top and don't actually care about a balanced game.

Summoner gets way more mobility, a Party regen and a strong targeted party member regen, I think that more then makes up for magick barrier personally, I generally think they should let rdm be ahead of summoner or you could buff its utility enough to justify being behind Summoner.