What even is the purpose of all those non melee/blm jobs?

[Mithron]

Its not even about burst meta.

It is scary that if what yoshi p said is true then every raid tier they released since maybe gordias/midas was like this: they barely kill last bosses only using meta comp and probably with tome gear aswell (so no pentameld only)
THEN they proceed to BUFF boss HP and release a fight they didn't cleared themself.

So basically every tier every expansion is a dice roll will it be a shitshow week 1 or not.

Thankfully their lazyness bite their ass with this tier, maybe they will think twice when they will work on next savage.

Then why did it work for Creator through Asphedelos? I think the devs are just saying whatever public facing statement they want to cover what actually happened with balance this raid tier while the two minute burst meta failed in class balance given there was up to 15% disparity between DPS. That's the real culprit here. You can definitely balance within 1% rDPS using two minute burst meta, but that wouldn't make it fun or good.

[UkcsAlias]

Its not even about burst meta.

It is scary that if what yoshi p said is true then every raid tier they released since maybe gordias/midas was like this: they barely kill last bosses only using meta comp and probably with tome gear aswell (so no pentameld only)
THEN they proceed to BUFF boss HP and release a fight they didn't cleared themself.

So basically every tier every expansion is a dice roll will it be a shitshow week 1 or not.

Thankfully their lazyness bite their ass with this tier, maybe they will think twice when they will work on next savage.

But as devs you can track quite a lot of things, just like blizzard, when they know a top tier group is playing, you can be sure they measure almost everything and store this information, and parse a lot of stuff out of that.

And as part of a few things they can measure, lets use dps uptime, dps values over time (basicly any portion of time) as examples.

They can then use this information and compare it to their own. If they end up with 20% less DPS (it doesnt matter if they beat a phase, as they can adjust the boss to have 20% less HP anyway so they still see all phases). They will use this information. So when they then make a new boss, they afterward can just buff its stats by 20%, and you are generaly going to be very close to what most likely will be the balanced value. Nerfing the boss by 1% afterward is not as much as an issue as buffing it 10% (because you couldnt clear it otherwise).

Now obviously, there are more factors here as for example healer uptime, mitigation capabilities etc will also matter. But in most cases, its expected that top teams are smoother in their gameplay, so their benchmarking is relatively safe to go for.

The hardest thing is speculating weaknesses. Because if you do something wrong, they might be able to skip a phase, or trivialize it. It might be extremely difficult to initialy come up with good tactics for these things, so they could for example expect more out of players. And while in most cases it works, it sometimes will fail (a famous example for blizzard was having all sorts of mechanics, but end up with a weakness from raw dps maximizing trivializing the entire fight).

Balancing things is hard, very hard.

[Stasya]

Then why did it work for Creator through Asphedelos?

Asphodelos? You mean a raid tier with only 2 melees reaper and monk? Even if first raid tiers are always easy intentionally it was bad still week 1, just not like p8s.

Balancing things is hard, very hard.

It's not, just get more people to actually work on game rather than spending time on side projects like ff15,ff16 ....

They ask for monthly sub to play a game yet it feels like they do nothing for couple months between patches then crunch in stuff they didnt finished before patch release

[Belaradra]

I can scarce picture how they would achieve optimal balance. Their DPS approach of Difficult>Easier, No Utility>Utility Melee>Range makes sense on the first glance, but they betray their own philosophy often.

On one hand, they want to keep harder jobs rewarding, but a difference of a few percent is simply not enough to make classes like Black Mage seem worth the effort, considering all the hassle. However, granting it the damage that would be appropriate (and it is far from that) is sure to anger others and make people want to pick other casters less.

The only solution would be to make the job easier to justify the lack of a relevant damage benefit, but dumbing down classes has never done good and would insult those who appreciate it for that reason.

The entire ranged tax and large boss hit box debate, I must not repeat.

A trifle.

[Lyth]

Balance means putting all jobs within a given role on a level rdps playing field. Claiming that one job 'ought' to do more damage than the others because it's supposedly 'hard' to play, has 'less utility', or whatever excuse you want to make for it, is imbalance by the very definition of the word. The only players who want their job to have a privileged status over the others are ones who don't feel that they can confidently compete when things are fair. So what if a fight happens to give you a small hitbox boss that keeps moving as melee? So what if a fight makes you get off the couch and actually move as a caster? Navigating fight design challenges should be a source of pride in your work, not an excuse to beg the devs for pity buffs. The community's mindset is backwards on this.

[Shurrikhan]

Balance means putting all jobs within a given role on a level rdps playing field. Claiming that one job 'ought' to do more damage than the others because it's supposedly 'hard' to play, has 'less utility', or whatever excuse you want to make for it, is imbalance by the very definition of the word.

There's going to be imbalance however you look at it, so long as there is a range of job difficulties.

If the easiest of jobs takes half the effort to reach in the same effect as the hardest of jobs, it quickly becomes the go-to for anything with dense encounter mechanics since it'd take that much more difficulty added atop its plate for it to lose any performance.

The only players who want their job to have a privileged status over the others are ones who don't feel that they can confidently compete when things are fair.

If in the sense of being allowed job X over job Y, sure. But that also wouldn't be an unfounded fear, given how quickly PF can narrow down what's permitted. Why take a BLM to a fight if a MCH cycling its 123 and hitting its CDs on CD will put out as much as a wholly optimized BLM and most players won't be able to fully optimize said BLM anyways, thus underperforming the easier option?

So what if a fight makes you get off the couch and actually move as a caster?

The "what" in between is the rDPS gap from movement that distinguishes one fight from another and one job from another. And that distinction is something we'd generally want, no?

Movement doesn't equally tax all jobs, nor does each fight have equal movement requirements. If a given caster is balanced for a given fight, they will underperform for whose movement requirements that tax their capacity more and overperform for those that tax them less.

Taking something like a BLM is therefore a doubled risk: First, will the fight's mobility requirements exceed what the job is balanced around? Second, how likely is the given BLM player to meet the kit's potential in that fight?

Which brings us back to the core problem:

If all jobs have precisely equal rDPS despite having varying levels of difficulty¹, any harder job provides greater risk for no reward.

If all jobs have almost precisely equal rDPS despite having varying levels of difficulty¹, any harder job provides greater risk for too little reward to exceed the likely loss to learning or external difficulties (mechanics, raid-leading, tilt, etc). In that position, even as difficulty decreases and would otherwise loosen strictures on what jobs are permitted, so too is the risk of taking of those jobs because of how much greater those jobs underperformance will likely be as those players take the steps to learn them.

¹ Let "difficulty" here refer to the effort required to master a job up to a point of diminishing returns that would be wasteful for a player running a particular form of content to exceed. (For instance, a MNK doing only Extremes at most wouldn't exactly need to have perfected Optimal Drift... while a MCH would have already capped out all there is to learn by that point, between selecting between a standard or delayed opener.)

Or, put more simply, unless the simplest jobs are un-gutted to be more on par in terms of depth, perfect rDPS parity between jobs would effectively just push any players attempting to learn harder jobs away from mainstream play, relegating them to off-meta 'ego picks'.

Given that no fight needs truly perfect performance, with anything past sufficient learning being basically 'post-game', all jobs having the precisely the same theoretical performance despite varying complexity to reach that performance would actually be more disruptive than current/former trends in balance.

Sure, speedrunners could now pick whatever they want while still competing for the best time on their hyper-optimized, but those still working towards their first clears --your more average players not going for speedruns and the like-- would have a smaller selection of jobs that they are pushed towards for them. Being able to as much for less is, especially in practice rather than merely on paper, an imbalance -- a worse one for most players than an imbalance in maximum performance.

Should that gap in maximum performance be shrunk a bit? Sure. But the difficulty in getting nearer to that performance should be a factor considered, too, or you'll just replace one imbalance with another that likely pigeonholes players more than the current one.

[Jirah]

The argument that “oh it’s just 1%” should be taken as lightly as it sounds. Why would I care about the 1%? And in turn why should you care about the difference between a BLM and a BRD? You shouldn’t it only matters maybe in one fight

[Lyth]

...

This all sounds nice in theory. It's nice when you're rewarded for performing at a high skill level. But you shouldn't be rewarded simply for picking a job that has a privileged status. Your damage output is intrinsically reflected in your uptime. Why should job selection ever cross-compensate for weaker uptime? If you're doing less dps on a so called 'hard' job, you're going to be also doing less dps on a so called 'easy' job because you have bad uptime and bad fundamentals. It's just an excuse for mediocre players to get into groups by selecting preferred jobs.

Difficulty is also incredibly subjective. Most of the time when players claim that their job is more 'difficult' than all the others, they really mean it as a humblebrag about their skill. Which is why it's doubly damaging when the dev team actually listens to their complaints, because now you're left with other jobs which are less valued, do less damage, less reward for effort, and are considered to be low skill. And if it's a job aesthetic that you're really passionate about and offers unique challenges, your only choices are to stick with it while both the devs and players alike rubbish it, or discard it and play a job that's just less satisfying to play. The problem is entirely with this community.

[Shurrikhan]

But you shouldn't be rewarded simply for picking a job that has a privileged status.

I never said anyone should be rewarded for picking a job that has privileged status. I'm asking for balance where and how that balance actually matters.

But that privilege is effectively what you're asking for if you want jobs that are easier to maintain full damage with to have the same maximal performance as a job that must work harder for the same output -- a "job that has a privileged status." You've merely swapped that privilege about so that instead of the top few percent speedrunners (those actually pushing maximal output) having their job choices narrowed down, everyone else is.

Your damage output is intrinsically reflected in your uptime. Why should job selection ever cross-compensate for weaker uptime? If you're doing less dps on a so called 'hard' job, you're going to be also doing less dps on a so called 'easy' job because you have bad uptime and bad fundamentals.

You're implying, if not outright stating, that uptime is purely a function of skill with "fundamentals" that apply equally across all jobs. It's not. A physical ranged will never have any reason for downtime beyond there being nothing to attack (and no Standard/Technical Step to prep)

It's just an excuse for mediocre players to get into groups by selecting preferred jobs.

It's not merely an "excuse", but an allowance. It's what allows for typical players to play what they want --because for them, the point is a clear in reasonable time, not a leaderboard record-- wherein it improves job selection for a jobs to have closer performance in practice, which is --until the 1%-- not the same thing as having close maximal performance on paper.

Should the physical ranged be neck and neck with BLM and the like at the 60th percentile (or, more importantly, the minimum relative performance required to clear an Extreme at minimum ilvl)? Absolutely. The existing gaps should be tightened. But there is no need for them to have perfect rDPS parity even at the highest levels of play, because --given varying difficulty / learning requirements-- that would mean lacking that parity all the way up to that point.

The highest levels of play are essentially post-game. They should not be our primary concern. Freedom of job selection for the average player should be.

Difficulty is also incredibly subjective.

And yet there are quantifiable trends surrounding how much a typical participant can get out of choice A vs. choice B. If relative output were to rise more slowly across hundreds of thousands of samples with choice A than for choice B, call that imbalance what you want, but it is nonetheless real.

Players will gravitate, towards, among other factors what is easier to them (what they can leverage more fully with a given amount of time/attention/effort), but unless you want all jobs, as averaged over a playerbase, to offer the same rates of growth in performance / require the same amount of time to reach some 80% or 90% or 99% of maximum theoretical output, that imbalance should be accounted for.

If there's to be a wider span of jobs that can better click with a range of players by taking less time to learn to effectively leverage while still retaining those jobs with higher skill ceilings, either the prior is going to slightly trend out of the highest levels of play or the latter will be pushed out of most everything else (and effectively, much of the high end, too, since those would be high-end users will be pushed away from prior learning opportunities). Better some imbalance at the highest end where the differences are relevant only to fflogs than to Extreme/Savage progression.

[Lyth]

It is quite difficult to allocate additional dps to a job on the basis of subjective 'difficulty'.

And uptime applies to physical ranged as well. It's not that a caster standing in place for an extra second is the issue. It comes down actually hitting buttons, which people forget to do oddly enough faced with less familiar mechanics, or when faced with a gaze or blighted bouquet effect. But offering a blanket statement that ranged is just automatically easier and should do less dps is a bad design approach, and it's one of the reasons why ranged players are feeling frustrated in relation to other dps subroles.

And on the subject of having a set of more 'accessible' (i.e. 'easier' jobs) that do less dps and a set of more elite jobs that do more, it's worth remembering that players often engage with MMOs over a very long span of time. Why dedicate yourself to playing a job with a White Mage or Machinist reputation for the long haul if you know that it will be invariably considered by others to be playing an easymode job that offers less value in every expansion from here on out? Why not put the same amount of time and effort into mastering a so called 'hard job' that's going to be perpetually dominant for progression-minded players? You're always going to grow stronger as a player over time if you're committed to it. Who wants to invest in something that just caps off in performance after a certain point?