Removal of Positionals

[Shurrikhan]

Listening to people trying to craft job damage hierarchies out of subjective difficulties hurts my soul.

Trying to pretend that subjective matters don't nonetheless form significant statistical clusters even when those assessing them are kept blind to others' opinions is likewise... not great.

Moreover, we can assign weights to different considerations and memorization and tracking requirements within the various jobs for pretty damn objective assessments of cognitive load by the average player that matches those various assessments gathered from any good survey.

That data is difficult to sharpen to clear findings, yes, but it's not something inherently unusable, especially when focusing on the findings coming from those who actually play all or even just multiple related jobs each to those they are assessing, and to a decent level, as to have bases for comparison.

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I'm sorry, but optimizing MCH really is easier for the vast majority of players than optimizing BLM is.

Of course, that's not a problem... except when people ask for MCH to nonetheless have the same maximum output as a BLM on the warrant that "difficulty is subjective anyways." That's not a decent warrant. They're already immediately adjacent to each other in Abyssos Savage, for instance, with MCH simply having a higher output floor and BLM having a higher output ceiling.

One could argue that the median performances of MCH and BLM should be slightly nearer to each other, but... for what tier of content? The only thing we have on offer above Savage is Ultimate, where MCH's median performance is already than that of BLM. (Having less complexity in one's job only gets more beneficial as other, potentially overwhelming, sources of complexity increase.)

Moreover, it's hard to ignore differences in their likely player. Which job is a the more skilled and ambitious player going to gravitate towards? The one that took them (half) an hour to master, or the one that has a significantly longer path and higher reward ceiling? (And yeah, players less interested in learning how to perform to the levels expected for higher-end content will tend also to be those who'd benefit more from an easier option.)

There is some, but not much, room by which to increase MCH's maximal performance on paper (i.e., in terms of striking dummy potency per minute) towards parity with potentially higher-performing jobs... without its outcompeting those jobs for 90% of players in practice and thereby reducing the actual breadth of choice players have.

It is absolutely not as useful to balance all jobs for the top 1% of players doing Ultimate speedruns, such that even they may go MCH without a penalty to their speed if that is their aesthetic preference, than it is to balance in the interest of choice for the majority of players instead, with an focus especially on initial progression, lest taking a job most players will find more difficult to optimize becomes, for them, simply griefing since there's no possible reward at all for taking on that vulnerability.

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In either case, regardless of whether we prioritize balance on paper or in practice...

...for progression (where movement/uptime optimizations aren't yet perfected and not having to optimize those things is a hefty advantage) or farms (where most is solved anyways), for the best of players (all jobs same on paper and for the best, but perform very differently in practice for everyone else) or the majority (harder jobs do more on paper but, for that majority, each job is competitive with each other for the likes of Savage progression), etc....

... is irrelevant to what was written earlier, which had only to do with rDPS vs. DPS:

SAM would deserve the highest DPS simply because there is no other way to achieve any sort of overall performance parity from SAM, the sole melee to lack any raid buffs. That's all.

Anything beyond that simply pointed out that there is no basis for giving SAM higher rDPS than other melee (if that, instead, was what was meant by "DPS"), since even an argument for a greater need for on-paper performance to shore up a weakness in practice due to greater complexity, if that argument were made, would fall short. SAM doesn't have any such unique weakness affecting its rDPS.*

* That is, so long as its DPS is higher, in turn, and one remembers that exploitation is half the merit of buffs, even if the credit goes solely to the buffer in rDPS metrics and solely to the exploiter in DPS metrics. Which, admittedly, many forget.

[Ransu]

But why should samurai be the top melee? They’ve had all their interesting mechanics removed. No more gauge management, no more merciful eyes to gain dps from taking damage, no more disengage for increased potency enpi when fighting for uptime (melee get perfect uptime in all mechs now), no more kaiten, no more directional aoe, auto crits. I know this issue goes beyond positionals, but where’s the skill expression or difficulty in playing melee at this point? What’s the incentive to play blm/rdm where you need extensive fight knowledge and split-second improvisation to compete with a role that has none of these concerns. Hitting a positional is like the last brain cell left for melee, they can’t take that away from them or they’d better have something good in the design works to make melee engaging again.

I don't generally care about how difficult a job is to play and think it should only have minor consideration in potential dps output, but that's mostly because I don't really think any job is all that difficult to play.

I don't like current SAM, but it doesn't change the fact that SAM is a purely selfish DPS with no raid buffs. If they didn't bring more DPS than the other melee there would be zero point into bringing them into a raid. Their tribute to the raid is their damage, same as BLM. I only say BLM should do potentially a bit more than SAM because their complexity does make people less likely to bring them into statics over other casters that bring raid utilities.

[Oizen]

in 7.0 they should remove every dps job and add some omni-job that can do everything but only has to click 1 button to do it.

Then the game will finally be balanced.

[Valence]

Trying to pretend that subjective matters don't nonetheless form significant statistical clusters even when those assessing them are kept blind to others' opinions is likewise... not great.

Nobody is arguing that some jobs have more galaxybrain complexity than others, skill floors or skill ceilings. It's actually great to have a compilation (and big enough sample) of feedbacks to gauge what players have trouble with and what they don't and get a feel, but more importantly the mechanical depth a job can have or not.

But this fundamentally doesn't solve the problem as long as jobs won't have balanced skill ceilings (and skill floors for accessibility to a lesser extent, since those also concern the lower end of the spectrum of results).