What makes a GOOD JOB, BAD in a Savage Raid?
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- čas přidán 2. 07. 2024
- Why is it Warrior, Paladin and Machinist, who all are excellent jobs in their fields of mastery, have issues in Savage Raids? Let's talk about it!
Now, I am of the opinion that all jobs ultimately are viable in all content. In fact, I have a video on the specific subject of the minimum requirements to do Savage Raiding, which you might enjoy after this one:
• How strong do you need...
I post reminders about new videos on my twitter, alongside other things occasionally:
/ caetsuchaijich
Music Used:
FFXIV: Shadowbringers - Neath Dark Waters
#ffxiv #endwalker
Chapters:
00:00 Introduction
01:13 Warrior Introduction
02:15 Warriors Problems
04:02 Suggestions to make Warrior Desirable
04:44 Mandatory Utility Options is a problem too
05:15 Warriors issues in Summary
05:42 Paladins Introduction
06:11 Paladins Problems and Solution Suggestions
08:29 Paladins Issues in Summary
09:05 Machinist Introduction and Problems
10:26 How big is the DPS difference
11:07 Problem Exacerbated by Gear Distribution
11:27 Why do MCH have to be weaker than BLM/SAM
13:21 Why MCH SHOULDN'T be weaker than BLM/SAM
14:13 The Ranged Tax
16:03 Suggested Solution for Machinist
16:34 Conclusions
17:34 Fun Fact - Hry
It’s a tricky situation conceptually, because realistically you want classes to be good at different things. You want classes to feel unique to each other and have situations where individual classes can shine (like, say, how MCH does very well at POTD where BRD isn’t as good). That implies that for any given situation, there will always be a best class or set of classes for that activity. That’s unavoidable if all the classes are going to have their own unique identity. This is just the first time since, like, Alexander where the content was so strict in its DPS requirements that certain classes weren’t welcome. The good news is that this is a game where you can easily play multiple classes on one character. I know it’s not the answer that people want to hear, but if you want classes to be unique, you may have to get comfortable with the idea that you need to level different classes for different situations. Not a clean answer, I know, but either everyone is uniformly good at one thing, or everyone is good at something different, and should be brought to those situations where they can shine.
That is a very good way of saying it yes.
Some jobs have to be better at the simple discipline of dishing out the most damage on a single target in the exact way that Savage Raids like it.
Indeed, this problem can be solved, at least partially, by the player making use of multiple jobs, which should almost be assumed a possibility since it is a part of the game!
I wouldn't try to compare the tanks damage based on rDPS, since none of them provide external raid buffs to the other classes. Comparing aDPS is much better since a large part of tank damage comes from how much damage they can do when under other party raid buffs. Looking at it through those lens you see PLD does even less dmg than WAR, and WAR still is off by 500 dps from GNB. Pretty bad utility tax for a tier that doesn't really have any benefits to said utility.
That makes sense, I used aDPS for comparing the selfish dps, but I didn't consider that tanks are also selfish in their damage.
At least aDPS only further underlines what I wanted to say, as you do: very heavy utility tax!
Great vid! I love these discussion vids. Gives a perspective to the game.
Glad to hear it! Thank you! 😄
This is a great video about the balancing issues the dev team faces, and how paladin's and warriors extra utility doesn't particularly matter in savage raids
There is something I disagree with though, and that's the idea that buffing one job would make another job less attractive. This is somewhat true, and would impact the people that play the meta. But some job is always going to be more meta than another job. If warrior replaced gunbreaker as being one of the meta picks, then does that matter to most people? Not really. The majority of people, even hardcore raiders, just want to play the job they have the most fun with. If jobs are within a good range of each other in terms of damage that "low damage" picks won't result in a dps check being substantially harder than imo that's all that really matters.
One job is always gonna be more meta than another job. Its just a mathematical inevitability. In my opinion, which jobs do the most damage doesn't matter at all. What matters is the gap between the highest damaging job and the lowest in a given role. So long as that gap is small such that enough "low damage" picks in a party don't make dps checks significantly harder, then ultimately people are going to be content. Some people might grumble that their job "deserves" to do more damage because its harder to play or whatever reason, but so long as that gap is small, the grumbling won't be a big deal because people can play the game how they want. Which is playing the jobs that they enjoy the most. That imo should be the number 1 thing that the game balancing enables. Sure, there might be some more granular things to worry about, but in terms of player experience, having fun is ultimately what matters, even to hardcore raiders.
Thank you for your very detailed and thoughtful comment, Envinyon!
I absolutely agree that the most important thing should be that all jobs do close enough to the same damage, and I will admit that in this video I am almost outright saying that the weakest job in a given role (regardless of how little the difference between strongest and weakest is) would imply that the job suddenly is "unviable"!
As you say, this is only really a factor for the players that play the meta. However, if a raid leader plays the meta, it is not unusual for them to force the meta upon the raid team as a whole, whether it be a static or a party finder group, which is how I believe the whole "Warriors, Paladins and Machinists (and almost Red Mage) are not strong enough for P8S!" thing came about. In the first two weeks from the data I could find, Warriors and Paladins genuinely were about 4% dps behind a gunbreaker. But at that time, Sage and White Mage did 6% less than Astrologian and Scholar (Probably mainly due to less representation, and gear), but because of the under representation of healers in Party Finder, people couldn't reasonably require the healers to be specific, and so they didn't.
As a player that tends to play the jobs that score lower on the DPS rankings because I enjoy them more, I absolutely agree with you that it isn't entirely about the meta, but I think what may have happened is the sheer difficulty of P8S (in this example) caused people to look for things to blame, for things to micro optimize. The Meta Players presumably are also the players that need that first/second week clear, which also puts a time pressure on them, which makes them more likely to take desperate measures like these.
Long story short: The world first racing top Statics will always try to use whatever is strongest, that is inevitable, but when content becomes "too difficult", the players chasing right behind them will try to emulate this behaviour as well! The vast majority of the player base just wants to have fun though, which is a huge relief!
@@CaetsuChaijiCh Yup, I think P8S was kind of a perfect storm. It's not just that some jobs were far behind, but also there was very little to optimize in terms of uptime, raid buffs now just naturally align with every other raid buff, most people had the best gear they could get already, and by the devs own admission, the fight was overtuned.
Its one of the reasons I think fights having so much free uptime and raid buffs naturally aligning is somewhat bad for the more casual raiders. When there's really nothing within the fight you can do to squeeze out more damage, and more damage is what you need, the only option is just switching jobs. When you have "extra damage" that can be achieved by utilizing certain strategies, or lining up raid buffs in a particular way, that means the fight will be balanced around not necessarily needing that extra damage. But it's something you can try to strive for if, say, your party comp has several low damage jobs in it.
This is exactly it! Back in Shadowbringers and even before that, Raid cooldowns tended to be genuinely challenging to line up - especially before Shadowbringers - so there was a lot of optimization you could feasibly do. And because bosses didn't really try to let the DPS keep uptime as much, there was a lot of potential in figuring out where you could sneak in an extra hit or two. A lot of small opportunities to optimize for damage that is now just there by default! :-)
i also see people complain about RDM DPS as well, but they are also a class with a strong utility kit that makes them more then just a DPS.
Indeed! I personally know multiple raid teams that prefer to have a Red Mage in their team for progress raiding since it can cover over a lot of major mistakes and give more opportunities to learn a fight! In a similar fashion it can also cover over mistakes when re-clearing so that benefit doesn't disappear.
At the peak of this DPS concern situation, which in my experience was just before the P8S nerf, I was starting to see people point fingers at Red Mages in the same light as Machinist, but I think at that point it was more a matter of people getting desperate to get their weekly clears perhaps! 😅
Many week 1, 2, and 3 p8s parties that were going for a clear on even just phase 1 would deliberately exclude WAR, PLD, RPR, RDM, and MCH from joining, it was a rough tier for sure for job balance.
Oh Reaper was having problems too? Checking the logs that does sort of make sense, but this is certainly the first I hear of this! Thank you for sharing this!
I think it was healthy for giving the balance team time to think, to nerf the final boss slightly to bring it in line!
@@CaetsuChaijiCh This was mostly a pf issue, and weekly tome gear upgrades as well as the boss nerf eliminated this eventually, but for players who were going for that satisfying early clear who exclusively only played those jobs, it must have been very painful to be denied that chance simply because of poor balancing. I didn't see how EU or JP servers were taking it, but NA parties were mostly all like that sadly :c
@@zephyas1699 From my perspective in EU, it was certainly a thing that people were aware of. I am not 100% certain on how many players got denied party invites based on their jobs, but I am pretty confident there were a significant amount that did - From what I saw, it was Warrior, Paladin and Machinist that were having trouble, where Red Mage was about to be put on the chopping board too when the patch came!
@@CaetsuChaijiCh The one saving grace is that with most gear except weapons being job type vs actual job specific, you can theoretically have 2 of your preferred job type that you can swap between based on content. Not 100% true due to specific melding requirements for a few classes, but mostly so.
Don't get me started on Paladin at level 70 ultimates
In UCoB bosses can still crit you, and crit overrides block. And since Paladin doesnt have an extra self meti like camoflauge or thrill then for a tank buster they used rampart and shelltron on the crit would make it as if shelltron was never used and they just ramparted. Killing you if the healers didnt shield you before hand or if the TB is just that strong like flatten crit.
Paladin in UCoB feels like a squishy bubble with an inconvenient invuln, while Warrior feels like it can just solo entire phases of the ultimate. And Warrior will forever be relevant because aside from this one rare exception of a savage tier that only impacted week 1 clears (week 2 you can have the shittiest comps and still clear) Warrior has been amazing every raid tier and ultimate for their metigations and capabilities that no other tank can accomplish realistically.
First DSR clear had a Paladin with neverland, with how similar tanks are right now you can clear any content with any tank as their differences are negligable outside this very rare abyssos scenario.
That is a very interesting fact about Paladin versus UCoB! Is this still a problem now? Or can Paladins at least still beat the encounter without being too handicapped by it if it is there?
And yeah, when a boss fight is in line in terms of tuning, then all jobs can participate, and you are probably right that Abyssos was a rare case that we haven't seen in years, which is what makes it so extraordinary!
@@CaetsuChaijiCh The closest enrage to Abyssos that was this challenging was E8S and even if you didnt play the meta jobs you had strats to maximize uptime so you could still clear
The UCoB problem still exists but Paladin can clear regardless, not because Paladin is amazing in that fight rather its just the expansions kind of nerfing lvl 70 ultimates
@@thesparrow1116 Thank you so much for sharing this information! It is unfortunate that Ultimates end up being nerfed(Even indirectly) at the end of the day though!
One more thing I'd like to add is that rDPS isnt an accurate metric for judging "selfish" dps jobs (samurai black mage machinist the tanks and white mage sage)
aDPS would be more valid because thats the actual damage they're capable of dealing, where Machinist would be higher than both ranged and even summoner red mage. The issue isnt that Machinist lacks in selfish DPS rather that they cant take good use of 120 buffs.
The direction the game is going hurt Machinist and Paladin moreso than the job itself did. And the new raid design provides max melee uptime invalidating their ranged benefits. Even if Ranged did Samurai numbers it wouldnt realistically change anything because of how you have max melee in Abyssos anyways.
That is correct - I forgot to include any comparison between the tanks in terms of aDPS, but I do briefly bring up the aDPS rankings for DPS to showcase the difference (Around 11:10 ) but I decided to mainly focus on rDPS because it is the metric most players are familiar with as far as I am aware, and the point was still clear enough with rDPS I felt 🙂
Hopefully in the next raid tier, it will be less trivial to get very good uptime as a melee, so ranged gets some value again! And, since the devs have gone out of their way to make the big raid burst exactly every two minutes, it would be fun if they started making fights less optimized around that (If they aren't already), to help jobs that are less optimized for 2 minute burst windows and such. Thats just some thinking out loud ideas, though!
I feel like Reaper doesn't do as much dmg overall as other dps in savage raids.. why is that? I am perfecting my rotations and yet I'm almost at the bottom of the list. And my gear is like 617 something. Is it the job?
Hmm, according to log statistics, Reaper is supposed to be the lowest amongst the melee DPS, residing just below Dragoon. The reasoning is probably explainable in a similar fashion as you see in the video - Reaper has an incredible defensive cooldown in Arcane Crest simply because of how freely it offers healing to the raid. Reaper also has their teleports and Harvest Moon for mobility situations. Of course you also have Arcane Circle as a raidwide damage boost.
However, despite all this, I can't explain why that would make Reaper deserving of being at the bottom, unless the reasoning is based on the Arcane Crest thing alone, because that really does stand out amongst the Melee DPS jobs!
My best guess is that I believe Reaper was very very strong earlier in the expansion, and perhaps other jobs receiving buffs around it, or Reaper just not scaling as well with gear might cause it to drop off a bit. Ultimately, I think the best explanation is that Reaper possibly needs some help.
TL;DR: It might be the job, but don't let that deter you, assuming you play as well as you can, your DPS should be just fine for savage raiding. 🙂
@@CaetsuChaijiCh Thanks so much for the reply, it makes total sense, I'll continue to play it simply because I love it and love buffing everyone with dmg increase xD let's hope they give reaper some love in the future
@@CaetsuChaijiCh But I have to say, reaper is absolutely insane in dungeons xD almost always on top of the list, and that's just an awesome feeling
@@bluemangood7199 This is a really good point! Logs tend to focus solely on what does the most single target damage, since that is necessary for the very hardest content, but there are so many other things in the game, too!
Biggest issue with Triplecast being considered a "mobility" tool is one major issue: Fire 4 takes rougly 0.2-0.3 seconds LONGER than your GCD to cast. This means that swiftcasting, OR TRIPLECASTING, Fire 4 makes them come out faster and also even allow you to weave in one extra Fire 4 before having to refresh using Paradox/Fire 1. End result? 2 stacks of triplecast, 60 seconds each, 120 second ley lines... and it all lines up with the Burst window. That "mobility" is not mobility at all, it's sacrificed for DPS, because we are the selfish dps and HAVE to prioritize damage numbers. Our true mobility comes from Xenoglossy. Not amplification. That, too, is 120 seconds and is designated as "burst mode". But BESIDES that, every 30 seconds we get ONE spell instantly casted, every 60 seconds we get a swiftcast, and every.. roughly 22 seconds or so? We get half a spell cast to move, using blizzard 3 / fire 3 to swap elements. If our rotation is literally flawless and was never interrupted once, we also get another instant cast in our Thundercloud refresh procs. But we don't get to DECIDE when that happens.
The truth is, sacrificing DPS for range is the biggest hit of coping lies we've ever been fed. I've heard it over and over again, thought it was true as a caster, then this tier I played Reaper. And then I leveled Samurai. And then I tried Monk. I realized pretty quickly... it's not true. The amount of free uptime you get on a boss means that you have 99.98% uptime, if not more. Even in P4S phase 2 act 2, you could maintain 100% uptime. The more that crit and direct hit is being buffed, the slower classes get as skill speed, det, and other options are less and less prioritized. Reaper has a 2.5 second GCD, and harvest moon is a DPS gain that has 20 yalms of range. Plentiful harvest, also ranged. Communio, also ranged. Dragoon has 3 different jumps and gap closers, and can backflip at the last second, completing a mechanic without a SNEEZE of uptime loss. Samurai has it the worst, being that his dash away and gap closer costs meter, but seeing as how they removed a way that he was required to spend meter and made everything else cheaper he always has meter to spare and the gap separator can at times be a DPS increase!!! DOING MOOORE damage for leaving melee range! With clever positioning, I can't imagine it isn't easily possible to take 4 melee dps into a savage tier and still have... maybe 3% uptime loss? But that doesn't make sense for the fact that the BUFFING melee dps deal about 3%-5% MORE dps than a black mage... so even if they DID lose it, they'd STILL be more valuable. There's a reason every party finder says "One ranged, one caster, two physical." It isn't because we NEED two melee with higher HP totals, which they DO get, along with the singlemost overpowered survivability tool in the game for a DPS, Bloodbath, and it isn't because suddenly bringing 2 ranged BREAKS mechanics. It's because melee DPS are overtuned. Flat and simple. The only reason ANY non-melee class is brought along is because you lose % DPS for not having a varied party composition, which they specifically implemented because of Heavensward's Bard+MCH+Dragoon+Ninja super-buffing nonsense, that was immediately followed with Stormblood's dragoon+monk+bard+ninja (lol red mage, no you don't count), immediately followed by Shadowbringer's samurai+dancer+ninja/dragoon+anycaster.. and now it's Samurai+Ninja+Dancer+Whichevercasteritdoesn'tmatterwejustneed1%DPSbuff. The composition has ALWAYS BEEN, and always WILL be, "the ranged dps that buffs the melees + as many melees that we're ALLOWED to bring before the game starts physically punishing us through arbitrary means." Melee DPS survive more AoEs. Melee DPS do more DPS. Melee DPS heal themselves more, and easier, because I dare you to find ANYTHING that can compare to 40,000 Healing in one bloodbath use. Melee DPS have to MITIGATE LESS, because they have higher hp totals and also armor that makes them take less damage.
If they wanted to say that you have to sacrifice DPS for range... they would have made everyone simply do more damage the closer they are to the boss. They already have a mechanic that checks that, they know they can. It was never about range. It was about the simple fact that melees make better poster boys, so it's better marketing to show them off more. Samurai. Dark knight. Paladin. Monk. Warrior. Reaper. Dragoon. There's a reason we never get an expansion trailer where it features derplander as a black mage main job. Yoshi-P likes black mage. No one else on the dev team does.
and before anyone replies with a "ahuhuh well ackshually, you said that it's always all melees and one ranged buffer, but you admitted yourself there was 2 melee 2 ranged in heavensward haha checkmate idiot" The reason why that was the case was because dragoon used to apply a Piercing Damage debuff, making all piercing damage deal more damage. The only 3 classes in the game that did piercing was bard, dragoon, and machinist. So you'd bring bard because of the amazing buffs, dragoon for the great buffs but amazing single-target dps (we don't talk about their aoe back then), and ninja because you'd need the smokescreen shadeshift aggro management and also ninja's trick attack was cracked.. and the fourth slot was just open for whatever DPS you wanted to bring... so they'd bring Machinist, who also benefits from the piercing debuff and dismantle used to deliver a mini-trick attack that followed ninja's trick attack for even more damage. Oh, and tactician used to be a machinist-only thing, so it was pretty good. It was still "The ranged that buffed the melee + the two melees that mattered (monk was ATROCIOUS back then, and sam and reaper didn't exist) + whatever else."
While using Triplecast for damage is a DPS increase in a vacuum. If you use it for damage, and that leads to you missing Triplecast for movement later, the DPS you gain from sneaking in an extra Fire 4 in raid cooldowns by spending all of your Triple- and Swiftcasts is significant yes, but if you have to stop casting for just a second or two, all that gain is pretty much lost immediately. So the difficulty of mastering Black Mage is both in knowing where to stand when, planning your movement carefully, but also concluding whether you can or cannot use Triplecast for the raid buff window, or you may need it for movement in a bit. When a Black Mage has perfectly optimized a specific fight, then yes, of course, they might not need Triplecast for movement at all, but that is also a matter of optimization :)
How Melee can keep almost 100% uptime, keep in mind that a lot of the time, this is also partly because you only bring 2 melee for the Party Bonus reasons. If you brought 3 Melee, you would start finding times where the melee would have to deal with a mechanic designated for a Ranged, which means they sometimes will happen outside of melee range and result in more severe uptime loss. Its not that huge in the grand scheme of things, but it is also a reason why Ranged is important to bring to a raid. As an example, Samurai being able to "gain DPS" from their jump back is also a bit of a misunderstanding, because it simply reduces the severity of the damage loss, and in some extremely niche cases, the Samurai can plan around it, since Yaten->Enpi is one of their filler options not to get too technical, but it means they could step away from melee range for 1 GCD without losing DPS.
The tankiness of melee DPS is a factor, but it is a bit more complicated than just Defence, as mages have more Magic Defence.
And regarding feature jobs in expansions, I'd say in every expansion they have chosen something that makes sense. Given what is happening in the Main Quest now, there is a chance a mage will fit for the next expansion
Passage of arms stays for 5sec and can be weaved without dmgloss
Yes that is true! N E V E R mentioned this too! As I told them, the reason I did not include this fact is because I wasn't sure on how prevalent and helpful this use of the ability actually is! ^^
These issues have basically always existed in 14. Maybe not to the extent they are now, but class balance has never been perfect. The main thing is fights were always designed around this. Hence the meme "every job is viable for all content." P8S being overtuned just highlighted the issue for all to see.
Yes, the tighter the dps requirements are, the harder it is for ALL jobs to be equally viable. Based on how much trouble people had with P8S I was at least a little surprised they only nerfed it by 1%, although it seems it did the trick!
Haha, actually if you'd believe it, the balance issues used to be faaaar worse. You used to HAVE to manage your own aggro, and the more damage you deal the more aggro you'd gain! Tanks used to LOSE damage for being in tank stance, so they'd turn it off almost immediately after pull! For that reason, Ninja was a *MUST HAVE* for all parties, a bring-or-disband, solely because they had an ability, smokescreen, that reduced aggro generation on something like a healer or a black mage, and they had an aggro manipulating ability, shadeshift, where all aggro they would generate would go onto the main tank. This was VERY toxic, as the ninja became a "god" character, deciding who lived and died. Was the white mage talking too much smack? Smokescreen warrior, shadeshift white mage, haha oops I hit the wrong buttons and now you get a tankbuster to the face. Black mage wants to DPS at the beginning and doesn't have quelling strikes? WELL if you want me to smokescreen you, trade me 50,000 gil.
On TOP of that, dragoon used to give a piercing damage potency boost, which buffs exclusively the ranged DPS. So it would be Ninja + Dragoon + Bard, because bard was the best support back then, and mage's ballad used to restore EVERYONE'S mana to full, by a lot and a half, no healer mana issues at all. The only 2 classes that wouldn't get the mana are BLACK MAGE, because fire stance stops all mana, and DARK KNIGHT, because mana regen was stopped when darkside was on (darkside used to be a toggleable stance, and Dark Arts was the button you had to press to activate it). Because of this, you DID NOT want a dark knight or black mage. Oh, and TP used to be a thing, and that alone made Monk useless. So it left either summoner or machinist... and people saw that we already got a piercing debuff from dragoon and picked machinist. For AGES, the party finder would be "Need 1 WAR 1 PLD 1 WHM 1 SCH 1 DRG 1 BRD 1 NIN 1 MCH, Skip Soar or Disband", over and over and over again.
Yeah I believe part of the reason why they decided to simplify how you deal with enmity in Shadowbringers is because in Stormblood (And before that), if not the whole party worked together on it, it would go wrong, and often in more casual groups, the tank would get blamed, regardless of whether it was in fact the tank or someone else who was at fault. Some people enjoyed this much more involved style of enmity management, but I think far more players found it just tedious.
The same could be said about how they removed all the "Damage type up" debuffs like Piercing/Blunt/Slashing damage up, because it heavily limited what you could bring to a party. Overall, while I sort of miss the more brainy tanking style with the enmity, I think the game is better for getting rid of both of these aspects :-)
I agree with these points. But ill add for paladin's passage of arm:
You dont have to lose damage for using it if you weave it in. Even if you just flash passage of arms, everyone behind you keeps that defensive passage buff for 5 secs. The real issue with it is the requirements neccessary for most people to get the buff. That being that they must be behind you and the fact that due to using passage and keeping your rotation means that the pld sacrifices his own defense to keep his damage
Thank you for adding this detail! I have seen Passage of Arms used this way but haven't seen it used regularly enough to feel like I could confidently speak for how powerful this trick ends up being in practice! But you are right, that is a way to circumvent the whole "Cant do anything while channeling" issue!
I don't agree that Jobs doing (more or less) equal damage would have everyone go to the same Job. That's never been true in any game it's happened in. Ultimately, people are interested in things like aesthetics.
My main issue is that damage is the only metric people care about in FFXIV ultimately in terms of the meta, which is what trickles down to people doing content the meta isn't even relevant for or to whom the meta shouldn't matter at their own performance levels. But, because that perception exists, it has to be controlled for.
My personal belief is "harder" Jobs are their own reward for people who enjoy greater complexity. "More of an essential thing" shouldn't be their reward, because the essential thing is essential to everyone. If "harder" Jobs are rewarded at all, it should be with extra utility, not extra damage, since the community as a whole clearly does not value utility or see it as essential like they do damage.
All Jobs should be able to do the essential things that matter - this is survivability and threat for Tanks, healing for Healers, and damage for everyone. Each role should be roughly balanced on those parameters. Anything ELSE is where the distinctions should be. BLM is harder to play? It gets Expedience and the combat Raise instead of SMN and RDM. PLD is harder to play? It gets Cover and Hallowed Ground to make dealing with mechanics easier.
The important point is utility in this sense makes dealing with mechanics easier, not Enrages easier. That's the dividing line. Playing a harder Job makes mechanics more difficult, so the reward is utility to somewhat counteract that effect. Playing easier Jobs means mechanics may be natively easier to deal with, but as a result they are not rewarded with that boost to themselves and their party. But all members of all roles can do the essential jobs of damage/survive/threat for tanks, damage/heal for healers, and damage for damage dealers.
That's my two cents, anyway.
I think that is a very interesting point of view, and making all jobs somewhat equally balanced in terms of damage would resolve this damage imbalance issue we are facing now because, as you pointed out, a lot of people can't stop themselves from focusing on this DPS comparison between jobs and nothing else.
I also agree with you that the vast majority of players would not care one bit whether Machinist did the same damage as Samurai if they enjoyed playing Samurai more - this is ultimately only something the world first racing top, and those right on their heels, and those that want to be like them, will be caring about.
If the balance team managed to make all DPS jobs do the same damage, and all tanks do the same damage, and all the healers do the same damage - or more precisely, add the same damage to the raid team as a whole of course - then we would completely eliminate this DPS ranking issue.
Utility is a far more difficult thing to measure against each other: Is being ranged better than having Bloodbath to heal yourself with? It depends on the fight, and at the end of the day, the individual raid team wont be able to gear their party so well, and master jobs so well, that they would efficiently be able to adjust their entire raid team based on each individual fight.
However I do believe there is a significant probability that the top players would still eventually find out which is better between being ranged or having Bloodbath on average, and we would see this reflected in the world first races.
The reason I keep circling back to the world first races is because this is typically the time the light is shone brightest on "what is best at the moment", and is often what gets the discussion going on what is suddenly not good. At least from my perspective.
Thank you for the comment, I think you propose a very interesting solution, SubduedRadical! :-)
@@CaetsuChaijiCh It is a very complicated problem, to be sure.
Ultimately, the question is: "What is balance?" Or, perhaps more accurately, "What do we consider contributes to balance?"
This depends on the game. For example, some old school games have abilities that would be considered useless in FFXIV. I think Star Wars Galaxies had a Bard-like class that could sing for parties and it would increase their experience gain from combat. This is useful in a game like SWG, FF11, Everquest and so on where a large portion of the game was gaining exp, and where dying would have an exp loss so even end-game characters would have reason to continually gain exp (for example, if you died in a raid and lost 100,000 exp, you would need to "relevel" after the raid before next week, which can happen in Eureka). A Caster (originally just BLM) Sleep AOE spell could be very useful crowd control...in a game that had crowd control. But in FFXIV, the standard model for content that has many enemies (4 man dungeons) is to gather them in a clump and quickly AOE damage them down. The only cc that is useful is WHM Stun from Holy since it reduces damage taken by the Tank and does not break on the enemy taking damage.
But how useful is that in FFXIV, outside of Eureka? It is not because MSQ, Armory Bonus, Roulettes, PotD/HoH, and FATEs make it very easy to level. Is that utility? Yes, but it is utility with no value in FFXIV.
For FFXIV examples (I am a Healer main, so I can speak best to that, though Healers are the most streamlined), SCH's Expedience and being able to place Eos and heal remotely/totem heal the party (in case a mechanic has you running far from the party) is useful. It is valued. ...but Chain Strategem is valued more by most parties. For Tanks, Holmgang is valued by raiders in tiers where it has many uses, but as you say, very high end players find other solutions so they do not need to use it. It was very useful for Titania Ex because it was already read for her tether mechanic, but for high end raiders, because they have other solutions they come up with, it is not valued as highly as damage.
Because the world first race is focused on beating Enrage in low ilevel gear - and I agree the world first is what shines the light on any imbalance issues - damage is the key focus.
But we also want to ensure that Jobs are not merely homogenized copies of each other, only different by visual effect, like comparing a WHM/SCH/AST/SGE damage right now which is just 4 color/visual/sound versions of Glare + Dia + 1 extra on a CD of some kind.
I personally enjoy games with utility spells - I don't play it anymore, but used to play WoW, and found abilities like Mage free food/water, Teleport/Portal spells for travel, Shaman Farsight spell, Hunter party move speed before mounts could be bought or where mounts could not be used, and so on to be useful utilities - but in FFXIV, they just have far less value because of the differences in how the game works.
So unless utility is more needed - when then as you note runs the risk of it being ESSENTIAL and shifting to Jobs who do not have it being the ones excluded instead - I think the best answer is to balance Jobs within a role based on damage, and then give the utility to the more difficult to play ones as compensation.
With this solution, if the utility really IS valuable, people will still bring those Jobs for the added utility. If the utility is not valuable, people who enjoy playing those Jobs will still bring them, because doing the same damage, they at least do not suffer a penalty. I think there was a world first team that brought a BLM and when asked why, the answer was "Because our Caster player likes to play BLM."
I feel like that is what the answer should always be - "Because our player likes playing the Job", not "Because we need that Job or we fail Enrage checks".
But I agree it is a very difficult problem. Sorry for the lengthy reply, but yes, I agree it's a complex problem, even with this seemingly "simple" solution, it would still be tricky to do it correctly.
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EDIT: To be clear,
I would love it if FFXIV's community/players was NOT all focused on damage. I like old school MMOs where they have those other things considered important.
But sadly, that is not true at this point in time, so we have to work with what we have, I suppose.
That was a very inspiring read, thank you!
A lot of the points you bring up are things I absolutely agree with.
How would you make all jobs equally balanced in terms of DPS? Make their rotations almost identical, that is the only way to be absolutely sure all jobs end up doing approximately the same DPS. You could almost argue this is where we are headed, what with how more and more cooldowns are made to conform with the 1/2 minutes cooldown system. I believe there was a time in WoW where people started talking about how specializations lost their unique identities with the aim of balance. Specs became too similar, everyone had access to most utility and so on. I've played WoW myself for years and years so I saw it too.
Another thing you mentioned is how in other RPGs different classes have each their own utilities, both in and outside of combat. Most of the things that could be helpful are in some way made redundant by how FF14 is designed as you said. In some capacity, a lot of jobs in FF14 even lost or missed out on utilities they could have had, but was removed due to being unhelpful in certain contexts. For instance, Dark Knights used to have access to a blind, so did Paladin, and indirectly Warrior did too through the cross class system. But Blinds never work on bosses because if it did, it would be overpowered, so eventually it got phased out entirely.
I really love that you added this quote about a world first racing raid team that decided on a specific composition because they enjoyed that more. That is how it really should be at the end of the day.
I also wish the community wasn't so focused on maximizing DPS, but at some point, FF14 players, or gamers as a whole you could say even, realized that the best way to minimize the damage you take, is to make the fight shorter. The only way to make players sway from that course, is by forcing them to: You NEED to use more defensive tools. Your tanks NEED to have more tenacity on their gear to survive, and so on. It is an interesting problem, because it is not at all a FF14 specific issue. Just the other day I saw a video discussing the exact same problem in Monster Hunter. A vocal part of the community always focusing on maximizing damage, and viewing skills that don't boost damage as practically useless, even if defensive skills could make the fight far easier and safer. A slightly different playing field, but the exact same represented problem!
16:04
…..shades of Heavensward, but current iteration of PvP Mch is what I also think the dev team should lean in to as far as buffing PvE Mch going forward
and also add Bard PvP ‘positionals’ to Mch as well - some skills/abilities do less or more dmg depending on how close/far you are
The ranged potency would be a terrible idea on pve.
Yeah the stand still casting Machinist sounds gruesome! But I do think the walking for certain attacks would be decent for PvE and not too damaging to the Machinists gameplay overall.
I think having attacks adjust damage based on distance would be problematic in PvE because it would ultimately force Machinists to stand at a specific range to bosses. I know that sounds a bit excessive, but players in PvE tend to try to perfectly optimize their damage, so the Machinists would be at a huge disadvantage if the boss at any point required them to move in close or far away depending on where they need to stand to maximize their damage! It *might* be able to work, but I think it would be far too difficult to make it balanced in a way that doesn't cause issues! :)
@@CaetsuChaijiCh …not overthinking the close/far positionals too much
I was just thinking it would be something else they could give Mch to justify a proper dmg increase to above the typical stuff we are seeing from Phys Ranged….along w/ the uninterruptible but short cast times
"Paladin has the best immunity in the game - Hallowed Ground"
HAHAHAHAHAHAHA
That's the biggest fucking joke I've heard all year.
Now if only we got to use it more than once every seven minutes right? 😉
@@CaetsuChaijiCh Yeah, that's usually the reason why people don't consider it "good" even though it is straight up "I take no damage, and no one in the party has to assist me". In terms of which one is best if you can only use it once in the fight PLD is hands down the most powerful.