Concerns Regarding DPS Balance: Physical Ranged, Red Mage, and Summoner

[PercibelTheren]

Man, I wish as a rphys player I had PCT's utility tools. Oh right, I have tactician? PCT has tempera grassa which is just as good. And it can party heal. I have dismantle? Oh right, they have addle too. This job has utility on the level of freaking DNC. And the damage of a melee.

Where is my sustained damage and support yoshi? All casters but BLM are starting or outright have better support than us.





Not gonna lie and I don't mean this in a bad way because I agree with you, but it's something to read melees being afraid of getting the rphys treatment and being relegated to the 1% party bonus..

This is exactly it. It's hilarious when people claim the utility of PCT is "no big deal" when Physranged players have been told for years that their utility is the reason they barely deal more damage than tanks. Same with mobility - SMN is right there (it's creeping up on RPhys levels of utility, too, by the way) and PCT isn't exactly immobile, either. At this point, there has ceased to be a reason beyond "it's just that way" and that's annoying.

[Aco505]

Man, I wish as a rphys player I had PCT's utility tools.

Which is why I said some posts ago that the role of p.range must be reconsidered as a long-term solution. If they're going to be support, then give more to them. If it's going to be something else, then clarify it.

Not gonna lie and I don't mean this in a bad way because I agree with you, but it's something to read melees being afraid of getting the rphys treatment and being relegated to the 1% party bonus..

That's not what I'm saying. There's nothing to be afraid of here. What I mean is that often discussions on the damage gap center on making meta comps go from double melee to caster or both but that the possibility of double p. range comps is rarely considered in the equation.

[mallleable]

I've been thinking about jobs on a sliding scale between generalists, and specialists. Generalists are good in any situation, and specialists spike in power depending on their situation. The melee role is a generalist damage role while there are a lot more specialists in the caster, and ranged roles. PCT, and BLM are balanced as generalists while the rest of the ranged jobs are being balanced as specialists. RDM, and SMN are being balanced as resurrection specialists, and BLU is so specialized that it is excluded, and has limits. Every job in the physical ranged role is being balanced as being kind of free movement, uninterruptable uptime specialists. Why are there so few (2/7) ranged generalists? Why is there specialty overlap between the available specialists (2 rez/3 mobility)? Why are there no specialists in the melee role?

[Lyth]

I think in an ideal world, it would be nice if every job had its own set of little tricks to make everyone's performance indirectly better in a non-quantifiable way (and using movement tools to generate uptime is my favorite example of this). But DPS absolutely matters to DPS players, and there's no escaping that fact.

I also think that nobody would play melee if there wasn't that risk trade-off that exists around melee uptime. Ultimately, that means that under full melee uptime conditions, a melee job necessarily should deal more damage, or else everyone would swap to ranged because it just does more damage under all conditions. But fight designs with large hitboxes and wall bosses are also fundamentally unsatisfying to play on melee. It's only when you're challenged around uptime through melee disconnects that the gameplay becomes engaging. Every fight should be designed around this principle of disconnect challenges, with ranged jobs naturally pulling ahead on fights which are more technically demanding on melee.

The same is true for consistent DPS. Why would you ever play a job with a flatter burst profile and a strong uptime focus (i.e. BLM) if burst always reigns supreme? That's why you design consistent DPS jobs with higher damage at baseline, so that when you have downtime periods and intermissions, burst doesn't pull so far ahead. This is just common sense. And the problem with PCT comes down to the fact it just cannot co-exist with this type of gameplay, which is why job designs like BLM are being rapidly driven to extinction.

...

What makes melee disconnects interesting is what happens at the moment of the disconnect. It's really about understanding the cut-off point in the castbar where you disengage and re-engage, as well as the tools and resources that you use to do so. It's perfectly fine to have lots of little moments that individually test the player's timing and movement toolset. It's also great to have lots of little moments that give players a choice of either a risky high-precision movement vs. a safer movement that generates downtime. That's one of the big draws of playing melee.

Temporary disconnects are a skill differential. Sustained downtime is just a DPS penalty for the sake of it, which is why it's poorly received. A good fight designer understands the difference between the two. If you don't like to be challenged in this way, then you just don't pick a role that plays in melee range. I don't think there are two camps here. Either you can do it or you can't.

2/2/2/2 design is a natural barrier to additional jobs in melee range. No self-respecting tank or melee will take a ranged slot. Least of all a job with the highest positional counts in the game.

As far as PCT is concerned, it's worth noting that many other jobs have asymmetric burst on their openers because you need uptime to build resources. That's one of the features that prevents burst-focused jobs from being completely dominant (it also potentially generates some interesting considerations around potion usage). There are lots of directions you could go with this, either in terms of shifting some potency off to motifs themselves, or in developing a resource dependence using the palette system. But purely time-gated burst that is completely disconnected from uptime is a bad idea. Resource systems are what link uptime to burst. You have to earn your burst.

[Carighan]

I think in an ideal world, it would be nice if every job had its own set of little tricks to make everyone's performance indirectly better in a non-quantifiable way (and using movement tools to generate uptime is my favorite example of this). But DPS absolutely matters to DPS players, and there's no escaping that fact.

Yes, and this is the crucial issue with MMORPG job design. We don't need to look at just FFXIV as a specific game, the genre is big. And for the few games that survived their formative years, as they age, their unique aspects get removed slowly, further and further. Casters get more mobile as raid designers need to use harsher and harsher movement checks, non-utility jobs get more and more utility as the need for more and more new abilities expands in subsequent expansions, melees get more and more ways to manage uptime both from new abilities and a faster combat flow to keep old players engaged.

But without wanting to also equalize DPS, you can easily keep everyone feeling very unique, simply by not working with unique non-performance tools, but in fact, performance tools. But this goes against something else: As the game grows older, players have more and more classes at their disposal. So as soon as a fight favors X, the fight designer needs to assume that the role will be filled entirely by X, simply because enough can now do this - something they could not do back in the first year of DAoC when they played someone else and it took months and months to level a single class. They barely had one to bring, nevermind all of a role!

But later in a game's life, you cannot do that any more.

But this does not make DPS parity a positive. It is just about the most egregious, toxic, limitating factor to intelligent combat and class design in MMORPGs. It's ability to be seen and analyzed by players is the crucial part of why combat is restrictive, boring and formulaic. Why fights tend to be copy-pasted with no real variations. The few positive examples are usually loved in hindsight, but hated at the time (remember the boss that you had to heal to 100% to win in WoW, not kill? with Shamans healing 2x as much on targets at low health?).

Necessary as it might be as a reality of how design of MMORPG works, don't mistake it for a positive goal. DPS-parity is the enemy that you begrudgingly have to accept after you're hopefully done doing actual class design. Which FFXIV has not done yet, so I find it extremely unnecessary to even talk about parity. Plus keep in mind that if we assume this is a necessary thing (so you were to say that output has to be balanced) then "modern" jobs like Picto are going to be the model job, as in, ultimately all jobs ought to be designed like it, with a mix of mobility and immobility and a freeform combat flow. It's very noticable how it's not as outdated as the other designs - Summoner also shows this to a degree but much less so. But it's important to keep in mind that if we are to assume DPS parity and design unification as a necessary evil and also want to solve it now, Picto is not "the enemy" it is "the result".

[mallleable]

The same thing can be said about casters as well in exploiting the holes in an enemy's attack patterns so you can just plant yourself, and keep casting. It's just fun, and makes you feel clever by rewarding you for being observant even if they are there by design. And it's why I'm generally frustrated with the phys ranged role because there just a lack of opportunities for clever gameplay in the job's toolkits. The only ways to change up how a phys ranged might approach a fight is to force down time by either removing their target or by taking control away from away from the player with things like stuns, and forced marches. But these situations affect everyone.

[Eraden]

Mao gonna chimes in here because Mao thinkings is importants to remember the core of the job problem. There is some jobs whats valued WAY less than others in same categorys to the point where thems is played far FAR less and even discriminated against when building groups for certain activities. Mao wonderings why Devs go to such troubles to make so many jobs if some of thems efforts is so devalued that those efforts might as well has been flushed down the toilet. ALL jobs whats are in game should be valued. Is not need be absolutely equal but should be similar enough that can find healthy populations of each job in all activities.

To make all jobs be valued, two things are needed. First, jobs must have depth in complexity. This means low skill floor and high skill ceiling. Second, fight designs need to be more complex and feature challenges for every job. Mao thinkings DDR-style fights are probably not the way to go. Mao would like see fights with lots more random elements such as boss not being tethered to center. Current design keeps pushing for more DDR-style fights and more job simplifications. Mao thinkings this will eventually wreck game. Mao probably won't be around to see when this happens because Mao too old to sit around and wait for game to crash and burn in order for Devs to start rebuilding jobs and fights to be interestings again.

[Carighan]

As a further food-for-thought, consider how in an "idealized" world but set in the current overly restrictive framework of job and fight design a better balance would even look, in particular Lyth who keeps bringing up things such as Picto as if there's any easy solution.

Let's look just at the 4 casters for a second, and assume that none of them can have:

* Party utility (this belongs to the physical ranged DPS as per the thread)
* Mobility except in minority edge cases (this belogns to the physical ranged DPS as per the thread)

Now we have 4 casters. How would they differentiate from one another. More so, as Lyth keeps saying, DPS parity is supposedly important. How do they differentiate if none of them can have party utility, none of them can have more or less mobility, and their DPS needs to also be exactly equal? Could it be we're only talking about one job here, not four?

Lets for example assume they're all fully casting, Black Mage style (nevermind how little Black Mage casts with all their modern tools, we're assuming they lost them all as they increase mobility!). But what makes a Red Mage unique then? They can't have a heal or a rezz, that's party utility. Do they still attack from melee range every so often, but even those have a cast-bar now so they're not mobile like other melees?

Hey that'd be a solution, right? Red Mage attacks from melee every so often, Black Mage stands fully at range!

But oh no! Now Red Mage is weaker on fights with lots of moving out of melee range, they need to move more often anyways, and also need to be able to contact in melee at defined points. Now we can't have people leave melee range at all any more in our fight design, or casters are no longer balanced in DPS!

(and it goes on like that for every single possible solution you might think of, they cannot be balanced in actual fights)

[Lyth]

They clearly don't balance around APM. PCT is the most powerful job in the game, but has less than half the APM of the fastest jobs in the game.

More so, as Lyth keeps saying, DPS parity is supposedly important.

Not really sure what your posts have in relation to mine. I am confused on this point, though. Do you think that DPS is unimportant? If so, I doubt that we will ever be able to have a meaningful conversation on this topic. The playerbase of this game values DPS above everything else, and that's just a fact of life. Game designers have to play the hand that they're dealt. You don't have the luxury of redesigning the playerbase.

[Carighan]

Do you think that DPS is unimportant?

Not unimportant, but less important. That is, mechanical design and lore and fantasy come first. These create the components that afterwards can be numerically balanced to provide close-ish DPS.

However, any non-trivial gameplay or mechanical design will always create natural imbalances based on context. A very simple version of this we all think is entirely normal is melee vs ranged. Melee will naturally deal less damage when having to be at range. This is just one such example, and a crass one, but this would naturally prevent any "true" balance across all types of design. Nothing can ever truly be equal despite being fundamentally different. Still, it's important to design gameplay and mechanics first simply because otherwise any modification to these would naturally invalidate all numerical balance, so you want to get it perfected first.

But my point was that (and I'm sorry I quoted you, it wasn't aimed at you I just needed you because you keep mentioning DPS parity) true DPS parity won't work because then you might as well just have "DPS job" as a single job and remove all other ones.