Help me understand why dps can't be closer in damage output

[Reginald_Cain]

1. I don't think the 3 subroles of dps have much identity after shadowbringers. They all exist purely to deal damage and mechanics meant for specific roles to handle can usually be handled be other roles. Look at the extra viper used for m6s gimmie cat instead of phys range.

2. Jobs within the same subrole have their personal damage output balanced around if they have team wide damage buffs or other utilities like reapers regen. This makes jobs like samurai and viper have high personal damage and jobs like ninja and dragoon be a bit lower but the dps they contribute to other's personal damage is supposed to (but not always) make up for it.
3. Melee has been overly catered to over 3 expansions. They have the most jobs and consistently have higher damage while bringing just as much utility as the other jobs in other dps subroles. Is there any reason for black mage, pictomancer or machinist to not be more inline with Melee with the current encounter design? The 4th dps slot should be a flex spot for any role not just melees 99% of the time. We had picto being a viable choice until people cried for nerfs because it dared overshadow their precious Melee mc complex. Shadowbringers removed resistance down from jobs with the purpose of less restrictions for team building but ironically that made every comp 1 phys range 1 caster 2 Melee. In stormblood you could see stuff ranging from dragoon, bard, machinist and summoner to double caster with summoner and black mage.

This may not sound like a big deal but it exasperated certain jobs getting locked out of their role slot. When machinist is strong nobody brings bard/dancer and machinist personal damage is t high enough to bring it to the flex slot anymore. Machinist is selfish and would love to use the buffs the other phys ranged brings but it literally can't. The casters had 1 window where red mage picto was strong but now that's gone and we're back to melee walker. The current role restrictions on party comps is going to make certain jobs always feel problematic.

My proposal would be to normalize the rdps of ALL the dps or throw out the current role restrictions. Double ranged shouldn't suck for no reason.

[Valence]

The stated reason from the devs has always been that they do balance jobs around effort vs damage output. They do consider ranged physical jobs, jobs on training wheels because they do not have to deal with uptime considerations and that they also bring more party utility than others, yet do not want to give them more involved rotations or class mechanics to make up for it. They also do consider SMN through a similar lens (since SMN is a rphys in disguise). Then they start adding more arbitrary considerations notably for RDM that's widely considered those days one of the hardest casters to play, especially since the BLM simplifications, where they justify that the job brings too much value with raises and heals for it to compete directly on damage with BLM and PCT.

Why are jobs like VPR at the top even though they require zero effort? Idk, you tell me. It's just the devs being ultra conservative and biased in their choices if anything. Sometimes they feel completely out of touch with things, much like when they thought adding gil to the rare chests in OC had somehow any value, so that's pretty much the vibe they've always given me with this as well.

[Raikai]

The stated reason from the devs has always been that they do balance jobs around effort vs damage output. They do consider ranged physical jobs, jobs on training wheels because they do not have to deal with uptime considerations and that they also bring more party utility than others, yet do not want to give them more involved rotations or class mechanics to make up for it. They also do consider SMN through a similar lens (since SMN is a rphys in disguise). Then they start adding more arbitrary considerations notably for RDM that's widely considered those days one of the hardest casters to play, especially since the BLM simplifications, where they justify that the job brings too much value with raises and heals for it to compete directly on damage with BLM and PCT.

Why are jobs like VPR at the top even though they require zero effort? Idk, you tell me. It's just the devs being ultra conservative and biased in their choices if anything. Sometimes they feel completely out of touch with things, much like when they thought adding gil to the rare chests in OC had somehow any value, so that's pretty much the vibe they've always given me with this as well.

I'd fully expect RDM to be on top of the DPS charts in 8.0 if we follow their logic and if they make Phoenix Down availabe to the rest of the duties, lol!

I was shocked how BLM became easier than RDM and PCT, and yet it's often the best DPS in the charts according to the log sites. Even in AoE dungeon scenarios now that you don't usually have to use the High aoe spells anymore.

[aiqa]

BLM and VPR completely invalidate the difficulty argument. It always seemed like a weird reason for the design, but it's now completely obvious they just used it as a post hoc argument.
And even if they wanted difficulty based performance, I don't see a good reason why only rotation and ranged related difficulties should count. If you want top parses for BRD/DNC your whole team needs to perform well, and you need a specific composition. For SAM/VPR/BLM you just need yourself. That is an added difficulty layer. If they want difficulty based performance, that should count too... but doesn't.

In modern fight design, melee is not in significantly more danger than ranged classes.

And caster classes have a lot of mobility options these days.

Resurrect on casters is now less useful than ever, and there is a clear path towards completely removing that anyway.

So imo, there is no good reason for the different damage tiers inside the dps role.

[Shyxx]

Because they have some kind of arbitrary "difficulty tax" saying VPR for example is harder than BRD because its melee which is ridiculous. I have a friend who wants to play DNC but cant because he cant keep track of procs while doing harder fights. Difficulty is subjective and balancing around it is dumb which is why no other game does that

[Carighan]

The problem is not that they cannot be closer, they are. I don't get the request. We're currently looking at +/-6% damage output, which while not perfect (5% was a common variance to aim for in WoW for many years) is also not far apart at all, giving a maximum 14% between top and bottom. Which is given how FFXIV fights are designed far far far below the DPS check. That's the other thing, DPS checks in FFXIV are... mild, to put it, well, mildly. DPS output balance is nearly meaningless comparing other MMORPGs because it's tested so rarely. It's always a huge deal when it matters as a result, but that's more because it's so rare.

However, separate from the "why isn't our output closer", I guess we should ask "Why are the three sub-roles of DPS designed so badly as sub-roles?" to which I'd answer: think bigger, no class or role in FFXIV is well-designed, on account of the long GCD + significant netcode delay prohibiting good design and hence the devs opting to shove gameplay design into the encounters, not the classes.

It could be improved, but can you imagine the tear-floods if melees lost significant uptime like in older MMOs because being in melee reach is genuinely dangerous, or casters constantly lost 30%-50% of their casts to movement, having virtually no tools to continue while moving (their whole deal)? And in return, when standing still both did 50%++ more damage than others? Imagine how unbalanced that would be for any individual fight, and that's what MMOs used to be like before due to constant player feedback about "Muh damaaaaaage!!!" every edge got sanded off and class/role identities largely eroded.

I play long enough to know when you swapped DPS ideally for every fight. Of course most did not, but you could significantly lower the difficulty of fights if you went from 15 of class X to 10 of Y + 5 or Z for the next one, etc etc. Far more because there wasn't such a small +/- 6% gap, there was often a 50%++ damage increase from one class to the other. And some classes also worked mechanically different, for example in some older MMOs it was assumed that pet classes would not be brought to large AoE-fights because well, their pets took full AoE damage and were not affected by most heals or defensive skills and you had to manually maneuver them around GTAoEs anyways. This was just part of the expected design until WoW reduced pets to external DoTs with model graphics that also fired abilities every X seconds like some form of autoattack. You could trivially remove them at that point at no loss of functionality, but that stuck, see FFXIV now having done the same with Summoners and Scholars. Was this good? IMO no, but I can totally see why the previous design was also disliked by many people, if you were a pet class, good luck doing a whole slew of fights.

[Carighan]

Why are jobs like VPR at the top even though they require zero effort? Idk, you tell me. It's just the devs being ultra conservative and biased in their choices if anything. Sometimes they feel completely out of touch with things, much like when they thought adding gil to the rare chests in OC had somehow any value, so that's pretty much the vibe they've always given me with this as well.

Because the devs for some reason consider VPR much tougher to play than we players do - or than it is.

Or alternatively, it might be that they considered that you can't be too apt if you think the "dude with 2 swords"-design is in itself "cool" so they had to plan the job for that?

[Keichi]

Arent the dps very close in dmg?
Its a while, that i looked at a table. But, isnt the difference of the top to the bottom only around 1 to 3%?
Its seems allways for me much closer, as in many other mmo.

[aiqa]

Arent the dps very close in dmg?
Its a while, that i looked at a table. But, isnt the difference of the top to the bottom only around 1 to 3%?
Its seems allways for me much closer, as in many other mmo.

Easy to check really. Just go to fflogs and look at the recent savage tier. People generally use upper quartile as a good way to look at job performance.

Top is for "all bosses" is DRG at about 33.2k rDPS
Bottom is DNC at about 29.8k rDPS

So DRG rDPS is about 11% higher than DNC. That is to big difference in my opinion.

[Carighan]

So DRG rDPS is about 11% higher than DNC. That is to big difference in my opinion.

It's 5.5%, when I checked yesterday it was closer to 6% (keep in mind imbalance is done from the median where everyone would ideally be, not from top to bottom).

It's a bit high, but it's also still quite close, in particular given the comparatively high number of damage classes this game has. Other games have specs and the like, but they generally do not balance except for a "target spec", GW2 in particular is extreme about this with millions of possible specs for a single class but the devs only look at a handful of particular traits and abilities to even balance at all, nevermind balance against other classes.

WoW for a long time aimed for a 5% imbalance or less, in which case yeah, this is too much. I agree in that regard. OTOH in any game before WoW and its massive success of modern-day inclusive raiding where all classes can participate instead of some being intentionally designed for different content, anything below a 50%++ difference would be "eh, close enough!". There was in fact a funny moment somewhere early WoW Cataclysm where the community started focusing on <3% imbalance instead of <5%, and the devs were caught off-guard by it.