A big part of the problem with balance this tier (and expansion) is that they've significantly increased potential melee uptime. Hitboxes are much bigger, and there are only a handful of mechanics where melee lose uptime to execute them properly. As a result, melee damage is up, and the natural advantages of playing ranged aren't being felt. This is compounded by the 2 minute burst window change, which tend to benefit melee jobs more than casters due to how their rotation plays. They either need to start designing fights in such a way as to reduce the melee uptime, or not penalize ranged as much for the utility of mobility and maximum uptime. With the expansion being what it is, there is no good reason Samurai should significantly outperform Black Mage. And this is coming from someone who plays those two jobs as their mains. It is easy in many fights to have 99%+ uptime as a melee this tier in most situations. In fact, it's generally easier to maintain uptime on a melee vs a Black Mage because the ranged advantage is almost nonexistent. ALL of that said, the balance is still laughably better than in WoW historically, and a lot of the people complaining are just upset because they've probably never experienced rejection from groups based on job before. The current problems with FF14 can be fixed with a philosophy change on fight design by making fights less melee friendly, or a numbers tuning to buff ranged. I assume the reason the team hasn't overreacted and buffed the ranged jobs is that they're still having this conversation internally and haven't committed either way yet.
First of all was the wow comparison really nessiary? Second of all...I mean true but wow in recent years has been pretty good at making sure evreything is viable from what I've seen
@@scorpiowarrior7841 I think it was necessary. It wasn't just to take a pot shot at WoW or kick it when it's down. It's to create perspective and point out expectations. FF14 players are used to the idea of being able to bring any job they want to any content, be it ultimates or world first prog in savage Bring the player not the job. WoW has never even pretended to have that expectation. A meta gets established in the PTR, and anyone seriously playing the game at a high level plans their comps accordingly. And that's why it feels so much more egregious to the FF14 community, vs the WoW community who would just blacklist the garbage job until it's changed based on the meta.
The 2 minute burst window design I think is warping balance because it disproportionately rewards jobs that play into it, especially because damage buffs in FF are multiplicative which means for every additional buff you bring, ALL your buffs get stronger. How do you balance that against "selfish" jobs? Do you balance on the assumption a group has 1-2 buffs or 5? It also means that groups which are good at buff alignment significantly outperform those which aren't, even if individually the players are roughly equally skilled at their rotations. I think this is part of what is contributing to the huge disparity between ranged jobs. DNC is getting a significant portion of their DPS from the melees which are themselves too strong in Abyssos because of overly generous uptime. Groups are also funnelling gear to the melees for this same reason, which then shows up as part of the DNC's rDPS. It feels like in their quest to standardize the game and do things they think the players will like (having everything line up nicely, minimal downtime for melees) they've actually caused more problems than when jobs were less homogenous. I'm curious to see how they will handle the issue of melee uptime going forward. Will they shrink hitboxes again, or adjust output (either nerfing melee or buffing ranged) so the disparity is not so large? Personally I think the enormous hitboxes and guaranteed uptime is antithetical to the gameplay of melee. Sure it's convenient not having any downtime, but it also removes skill expression through uptimes strats and greeding. And frankly, it's just plain stupid looking when you're punching the boss from 50 feet away.
Eden was the opposite. The second tier of Eden was anti melee to be honest. This tier just feels like an over compensation. At the same time other classes are just not in the same output level.
As a filthy casual,I had never watched prog and I never understood how people could find sth like RTWF interesting. Being a fan of Preach and seeing him check your progress on stream on day 1 I somehow became quite invested and followed every stream with fingers crossed for the team. I watched literally all streams and found it so enjoyable. After you were done with Savage, I now continue to follow your ffxiv streams as you talked with Sfia and levelled RDM and SMN and I got to say - keep up the great work! It's very interesting to watch you explore ffxiv content and listen to your thoughts as someone in the highend scene, something I didn't think I would find interesting as sb who just does normal modes for the story. Also the interviews/podcast style things with people in the community are a great idea, I really enjoyed that and you did a proper in-depth conversation. Thanks for this!
You should definitely read Momo's statement about MCH (if you haven't already), he explains why the job suffers because of its identity issue - he explains quite well why the job is hard to balance "right"
The problem is partially job balance, but how fights are designed this tier make the ranged tax obsolete. Melees get purg and fourfold for free, while BLM and RDM have to put in tons more effort to maintain any sort of consistency. If you balance melees around somewhat substandard uptime, why wouldn't the devs adjust potency when each fight has hitboxes 3-4x the size of the boss? For p7s you need to completely shut your brain off to even get to max melee range, let alone lose uptime. It's incredibly frustrating to put in more than twice the work and planning for certain mechanics while melees are coddled. How are casters rewarded for the extra effort? BLM is maybe around RPR damage, while RDM is in the basement. Maybe logs are skewed right now due to gearing, but you can't fault me for feeling a bit disheartened this tier.
I think you hit on it. The balance has been bad since Endwalker's release, but it has been covered by the lack of such a tight DPS check. This just uncovered the issue, which is a good thing. I have some issues with some of their response, but at least they're talking and thinking about it.
So if Scripe is curious. Unreal is a difficulty mode that hard caps the item level of gear/player. Been like that since the beginning. What did change from the first fight, Shiva, was that there were no form of locks between who completed unreal or who didn't. There was no way to prevent new players from joining a group of people who have cleared it. Players complained about this and the devs included the ability for "farmers" to prevent new players from joining. What also increased was that players started to add in pointless item level lockouts that were higher than what the unreal item level reduced you to. For example, there were parties that wanted players to be at item lvl 400 when the unreal reduced item lvl to 375. Players will always form stupid meta even when it doesn't matter. So even "if" a job performance is improved, a player will always find the "weaker" jobs and not include them for any reason they can. Yes, I have tried to reach those item level bs meta rules for unreal and have had more successful runs from party finder randos then those who had stricter rules on item level.
@@neobahumuth6 I know he is. I am pointing out that the ffxiv raid scene will add in extra steps to join a party even when it is unnecessary to do so. I do mean unnecessary.
It's very telling that they have forgotten that Machinist truly needs some love. The change to the Queen didn't do anything for the job since the first 4-5 seconds of popping Queen is spent with it just standing up then finally charging your target. It's meant to be the greedy dps of the physical range yet CBU3 doesn't seem to actually want it to be like Samurai or Black Mage. As a Machinist main, it hurt a bit getting turned away from parties for the job I love to play because the party didn't feel like it was worth bringing.
agreed the rest of the whole 'balance' discussion imo is pretty much bullshit though. Dps and "skill tax" is all entirely relative to the boss's HP. end of story. it does not matter if you have lower dps than another job if you can clear with good execution of your job. This is one of the rare times where the boss's hp was too high and now we need to address MCH having the smallest pp.
If Machinist's rotation difficulty doesn't warrant bigger numbers, they just need more utility. Give them a Mug effect so that retain their offensive identity in comparison to Bard and Dancer. Bind it to Wildfire, and done. Sure, it would require testing and number tweaking, but the principle is : Machinist need more utility.
The entire point of machinist is to have NO utility for having the highest DPS out of the ranged classes. Just up its potentices and fix the rotations a bit BUM its good. Giving machinist utility is exactly what they shouldn't do. It would kill Bard as the utility + DPS hybrid of the ranged classes.
@@brosephstinson1297 Problem is that the dev team also takes rotation difficulty in account. Let's be clear, whatever you think, Machinist's rotation does not justify them having the same numbers as, say, Black Mage. The only way Machinist having bigger numbers would make sense would be an entire job rework, and I'm not sure anyone wants that, because Machinist gameplay feeling is awesome. Also, Dancer didn't kill Bard, like Red Mage doesn't kill Summoner. Ideally, Machinist would get a little bit of both, being the highest DPS out of ranged, but still lower than BLM, and bringing just a little bit more utility than currently to incentivize picking it in prog content.
@@myhr2320 I agree with this. As someone who enjoys Summoner and Black Mage, there is no scenario in which the damage after accounting for buffs should be similar. There are significantly more issues with executing mechanics while keeping uptime as a Black Mage vs a Summoner, who just has to plan for Ifrit and everything else is free. The skill tax applies similarly to Machinist. It's the easiest RPdps to play, and arguably the second easiest job to play aside from Summoner. Even as a pure dps, it's numbers should be nowhere near Black Mage and the melee. At most it's numbers should be comparable to Dancer, and even that is a stretch because personally I feel like Dancer is harder to play (although not by much, both are quite easy.) I feel like Machinist really needs a rework, and if the player community wants output comparable to the other selfish dps, then it needs a more complex rotation to make up for it.
@@myhr2320 nah fuck that, if machinist gets utility the entire reason of machinist is dead. I'd rather have it get bigger numbers and thats it. Also machinist is pretty easy to play in general. Bard openers and rotations are much more fucky, so having utility is justified as its damage is also not THAT high.
Scripe is basically right. Job balance is not significantly worse than it has been historically. In fact it's almost identical to how it was in Asphodelos. The reason why people are SAYING it's terrible now is because this time we have (had) a DPS check tight enough for job balance to matter. For the first time in a long time people have had to seriously consider the job DPS output when building a party to clear, and now those differences that are normally insignificant suddenly have very outsized importance. You might say that any job can (and did) clear, and that is true. However even if you can clear with say a MCH that parses 99, if you can do the same damage output by parsing 40 as DNC then it makes absolute sense to exclude MCHs from your group because the chance of finding a DNC who can parse at least 40 is MUCH higher than the chance of finding a MCH that can parse 99. If that kind of thing matters for the clear, then it's only fair to take it into account. On the other hand I think people should consider if the idea that ANY comp should clear week 1 is actually valid. "Play what you want" is broadly true in FF, but if you are world racing or going for super early clears then obviously minor differences matter. You wouldn't expect to clear in a comp with no healers, so is it reasonable to expect to clear with the 8 bottom DPS jobs, on the hardest DPS check in the game, with no extra gear? IMO no. Just because you CAN play whatever you want, doesn't mean that you can make any kind of group or play however you want with no restrictions and expect to get the same results. For that to happen there would have to be no differences between jobs at all. The more reasonable solution is what the devs actually did: tune the content so the differences don't matter so much. Although MCH is clearly not in an ideal situation balance wise.
This is basically how I feel. Job balance overall is fine. It's just that the final boss of this tier was a bit overtuned to the point where the differences mattered more than usual. And I agree about the week one thing. If you're playing that hardcore in any game, you're going to take whatever is best because every little bit matters for something like WF or early clears. That's just how playing at that high of a level goes. Just like you said, the only way to be able to take whatever you want at that level, everything would have to be exactly equal, which is impossible.
Job balance isn't worse than Asphodelos, because it was already shit since Asphodelos. It's just that the tier was so god damn easy it didn't matter at all. But with this tier, everything are incidentally brought to broad daylight by another mistake. So people can clearly see what is wrong with the game. And to make the matter worse, YoshiP came out & said that they didn't tune the fight according to new bis gear for the delayed week, making everyone think that the dps check were gonna be so easy, & people went in with little to no preparation or meta comps. Even the WF team didn't bother farming their 450 tomes before going in. Many other groups were caught off guard & didn't save for tome weapons, failing their week 1-2 clear goals. It didn't just affect the world prog teams, & it'll still have prolong effect on many teams for the next few tiers to only stick to meta comps to prevent further shenanigans from the dev, until people feel comfortable again. Also, tuning the content so the differences don't matter much is not a solution, thanks to the new homogenized 2min buff window. The dmg from buff windows is so massive that there is a big gap between meta comps that rely on buffs & non-meta comps that can't make the most out of buffs. So if you tune the fight for non-meta, then WF groups who almost always would run with meta will decimate any dps check with ease. The game is literally becoming easier & easier for hardcore groups, while harder & harder for casual players who just play whatever they want.
As someone who played healers, ranged phys and casters in savage, the whole 'ranged tax" is stupid this expansion. Also, disagree that RDM should do less than SMN, when SMN also has a res and has the most braindead rotation in the game. The reason why SMN is so popular is no cast times, easy rotation that barely changes since level 20 and brings utility.
Scripe is a literal textbook example of why Yoshi P has to constantly clarify shit. you take information and infer your own meaning from it. Nowhere in that statement does he admit they didnt get a boss kill nor that they used a "meta comp".
What? It is literally stated in the post: "We regret not stating this more clearly in the previous explanation, but said premise is the reason why we do not release content tuned precisely as it was when the battle team’s balance testers cleared it." even more zoomed in if you are still missing it: "we do not release content tuned precisely as it was when the battle team’s balance testers cleared it."
They did kill the boss, and he agrees that they killed the boss. What he's saying is they don't kill the boss exactly as it is when it's released because after they clear the boss, they raise the HP by 1-2% before releasing it. Therefore, while they did kill the boss, they did not kill the same boss as the one that is released.
"We always add a little bit extra to the boss values before rechecking the fight and releasing it live." It says right there, that after they add the 1-2% HP more, they test it again before releasing.
@@Scripe They do say they recheck it. What exactly that means idk. But at the same time, what do you expect? They admit they're not as good as players, they obviously can't play as much as the players do. So if they want to give the players a good challenge, they have to tune it up a bit for them. And this is their usual way of doing things, and it's worked for a long time. The only reason this time was a problem was because they put in more testing than usual.
You say that Scripe is a literal textbook example of this when he's the only person who said this and he's not even huge in the FFXIV community, at least not like Preach (yet). And he's right too! Meanwhile, you have an overwhelming number of people in the community constantly doing things you're accusing Scripe of: you take information and infer your own meaning from it. Literally, the most recent example is how much of the fandom was memeing on "the dev team was better than the players" after Patch 6.21 notes were released. You know what Yoshi-P had to clarify to the point of bolding and using red font on the entire sentence? THIS. Stop being so bias and look at the fandom for once.
tbf i still think it is good enough to have a raidfight test team being able to overcome the full boss fight and then up it by 1-2% afterwards than a "raid testing team lol" that goes in there with godmode praying that the mechanics work properly and nothing breaks then hires some rats to test their new hamsterwheel for them in real action in a overtuned as frick situation called PTR/Beta and then release it on good measure from that to find out almost every single time it isn't tuned good enough and then have to add in 23543425324523 different nerfs to the individual bosses until it is "playable" by your major playerbase. So if you ask me: Yes i take the FF14 raid test team over the WoW Copium andies that "test" their fights "internally" anyday. Tyvm :p
Casters can still put some damage out so theyre not completely negigable. But we are getting to the point where we might phase out an entire class because they dont have any real advantage over others.
you look at dps graph in a wrong way. Because it does not start at zero difference is visually much bigger that it actually is. DPS check on P8S p1 is 61.6k (p2 is tricky because raid buff phase). Take "worst" comp WAR_PLD RPR_MCN_RDM_BRD AST_SGE and make a sum of all median damage from fflogs and you will get 59.961 DPS. Just 1.6k short of a clear. And that with only 1 melee! Another one will add 800-900 dps You will say - well, that is clearly a problem! But it's not, because doing median amount of damage according to fflogs is relatively easy, especially considering how many pull it takes and how you perfect all your actions long before a clear.
@222ckc Btw I want to add that even at week 8 is still hard as heck to clear a boss for the first time by the simple fact that anyone that has good gear is not going to clear parties anymore, you're still getting ppl with low ilv and doing greys all over the place on their first clear. I started playing FF again 2 weeks ago so I'm behind in gear, I got to p7s like last week on the 17th. Even my first kill had 4 ppl with grey 3 with green and 1 with purple and we saw the boss doing the enrage cast, ppl were potting and all (and we only got 1 chest cause we had a couple of ppl that had cleared before, probably the greeens/purple in the party).
Summoner been the most unbalanced this entire expansion for no reason. They did the rework on summoner and a job that used to be around the top 3 to top 5 now is on the bottom. To make matters worse the discourse that Summoner have utility is laughable, they can: 1) shield themselves (blm can too and all melees have heal on hits plus self heal), 2) raise ppl once every minute (which RDM can just basically spam after any spell they use) 3) No control whatsoever when to heal ppl with phoenix because its part of your rotation and you cant exactly stop doing damage to hold your phoenix to heal a group or a tank in a big damage situation (meanwhile RDM can use a mitigation shield on everyone when they feel like it and their heal ACTUALLY heals instead of the 300 (total) heal from summoner). But the biggest unbalance this xpac have been casters. All 3 of them used to be around the same level-ish of damage during fights as the other melees (with maybe the exception of RDM that used to trail behind). BLM used to be a legit choice for top dps in several fights. Now its laughable how the hardest and most unforgiving job (BLM) is a middle of wagon damage dealer losing to basically all the DPSers which are insanely more easy to do damage AND if you miss your rotation you're not majorly punished trying to fix it like BLM is. There are several other problems and minor things that contribute to this unbalance, like I even forgot how MCH is laughable too atm. But the problem there, and you can even see on the video is that huge gap between Reaper/BLM into the Long Range Physical and other Casters. Is basically extra headaches bringing 2 casters in the party atm (something that used to be able to clear with 3 casters 0 melees back in Eden tier 1) This is possibly the biggest unbalance atm with casters vs melees since the major changes back in Stormblood (I will not count before that cause it was basically a different game) but even then its still better balanced than like WoW.
Tbf I actually loved the first reply :D mainly because the only people who would rage from that would be mainly toxic fuckers anyway. From what I’ve seen. The overwhelmingly majority just replied with a LOL/Kek
Machinist is phys ranged taxed, now utility taxed. They are the selfish DPS of phys ranged, but because it's phys ranged, it can't be as potent as SAM for melee DPS. Therefore it's forever cursed.
@@epicadventureturtle1363 This. MCH has always been in this weird place where it's hard to balance because of it's role clashing with it's archetype. It's not new.
@@epicadventureturtle1363 It's because this is the first time in a long while that the balance difference has been notable enough to where the class was banned from comps.
People already talked at length about the issue, very apparent. So what about the solution ? I think they need to roll back. Ironically people used to dislike all jobs not syncing their raid buffs because it used to be in SHB, there were comps that complemented 90s raid buff compared to the 2 min raid buff. So, these 2 groups only sync well when the fight started and you used to want to delay the 90s to sync with the 2 min or vice versa for a huge reopener on fights with known length. But still, just make jobs not all tunneled into this shitty bursty 2 min window that if one misses it, the entire fight is scuffed for them. Some jobs have damage steroids / burst window at 1 minute, so just backload the raid buffs to 1 minute, and it would be much less of a detriment. And make the boss hitbox not as big as the entire room, so melee tax actually exists and is justified, cuz rn there isn’t any - all fights are “striking dummies” for melee cuz full uptime. I won’t comment on individual job balance cuz Idk any better, only ever play tanks seriously for raids
I certainly don't remember there were this many MCH defender back in Stromblood which the situation was much worse. Make me wonder if the fact that RDM fell off meta has something to do with the increasing complains about job balance, and MCH was merely a pretext 🤔
That really is the issue with Red Mage. Everyone points so "The rez they rez they can rez like 4 people!!!" Yeah and then they all have weakness and you can't finish the fight anyway on top of LOSING damage by swiftcast rezzing. It might as well be a wipe. So if RDM's only use is to progress but not kill the boss, then it hardly has a use outside of being a stepping stone. It really shouldn't be like that.
Even in prog RDM isn't that good, since people will tend to rely on veraise instead of actualy learning the mechanincs. I'm just afraid we'll get a situation like in tier 1 where RDM and SMN were replaced by BLM in clear/farm pugs. Hell, by the way this is going i wouldn't be suprised if pugs start replacing RDM/SMN with a third meele
@@joaoteixeira8349 Pretty much yeah, and relying on being raised like that means you're relying on failure. I'm not sure how things might end up going, but they really should tune up RDM and SMN some. As much as Verraise helps occasionally in normal content, it's not like balance is FOR normal content in the first place. The team should reevaluate how much several rezzes really are worth in the grand scheme of things. If anything, just make it cost more mana. They could even balance it around it eating into white mana while something else eats into black mana. Just something to allow it not holding back all of RDM's damage
It isn't just about ressing people for clears. Being able to res people so you can keep going to progress more per attempt, even if you still wipe, is very valuable. "So if RDM's only use is to progress but not kill the boss, then it hardly has a use outside of being a stepping stone. It really shouldn't be like that." That's how utility and healing work out in any game like this. It's useful while you still make mistakes, but less so once you're good at it. It's why speed clearers take the two highest dps tanks. All tanks can do the mechs, so any of the tanks that are better at mitigating or whatever aren't as useful as more dps in a speedrun situation. There's not really anything you can do about that. That said, nobody is doing something like refusing RDM because they don't need the utility, especially in PF where you have less coordination than a static. Just like how nobody is refusing the lower dps tanks unless you're a speed runner.
If I may Scripe, balance in this game was never perfect as ppl want to think, it was ok at best, but like casters were never well balanced and tbf this might the first time where caster raise gets taxed correctly. Honestly it was more that checks were in that fine line of being light enough that player skill could offset it. Then again the change to 2 mins raid burst has the problem that it makes you missing a burst window extremely punishing now
@222ckc that is true only for RDM and SMN, one of which is meme'd to be a phys range and RDM has a warranted penalty for the raise. Job balance is not just for how much dps a job can do
@222ckc RDM raise was never correctly taxed before and even now you can clear most fights with alot of deaths. One fight balance doesn't dictate the whole job balance
@222ckc bro......BLM was used because melee were weak, ppl didn't want BLM in the caster slot, if they could choose they would prefer SMN/RDM over BLM. If you think that's fine you are delusional. You Infer stuff without even looking at the biggest picture
Right now, the classes in WoW are more balanced than in a long time, and FF14 going through growing balance pains. Just hope they don't dumb down content as a *fix*.
As an absolute ffxiv boomer, one major source of frustration is homogenization. Compared to how jobs were before ShB (or even during ShB) every job now feels practically identical. Every job has a burst every minute and a reopener ever 2 minutes. Every tank now has identical mitigation. Every healer has identical damage kits and is bloated with healing actions. Healers are so bad that there are actions that are literally never used outside of the last fight of a savage tier or ultimate. Melees feel similar overall. Casters and phys ranged feel okay to play (sans summoner) but are horrifically undertuned. ZhephZaeora has a thing on twitter really going into it and I recommend reading it. People would be more forgiving about balance being this off if jobs were more unique. In Stormblood and Heavensward every job felt insanely varied and though balance was far worse back then, it didn’t make as much of an impact because every job had totally unique skill kits and there were just more elements in the game the devs could design around. Since stormblood they’ve removed the cross class system, TP, enmity, healer rotations, random mini tankbusters, boss crits, they’ve nearly removed positionals, multiple unique job mechanics, they’ve practically removed MP management, they’ve made AoE’s spammable, the list goes on. They have removed so much from each job that going into detail about that would take too long. They’ve also made boss hit boxes so large that melees (who are balanced around having X amount of downtime btw) have nearly full uptime which makes them that much harder to balance. They also admitted that they balance each job respective to its role around its difficulty. The problem is that there’s no way to quantify difficulty. What one person may find effortless, someone else may not be able to figure out. They’ve designed themselves into a corner in the name of accessibility and it’s backfired.
I kinda feel like is it really that bad for world first raiders to have to be a bit more meta? Playing it not in the first week with some gear like most it wouldn’t be so off. We usually shoot for week 2 or week 3 full tier clears.
It trickles down to pf experience too. If world first has to flex jobs for dps check then what do you think it's like for pf of 8 randoms? It's hard enough to get a clean no death run so what happens when the run is clean but you can't beat enrage? Salt flies 100% of the time. People end up also feeling pressured to switch jobs or just skip the tier. P5S, P7S, and P8S already have reputation for being meme trains just on mechanics alone. What's going to happen when the wall is damage? Last tier the main meme fight was P3S. If that fight was so tight dps-wise that single death will wipe off meta comp I think genuinely people would have rioted. I did maybe close to 300 pulls last tier and there already was a lot of salt.
The job classification needs a complete rework if he’s going to balance jobs base on skills then he need to classify those jobs as separate categories like a support role and balance them base off each other. Cause machinist being the selfish range dps can’t even come close to a ninja or dragoon or monk who all have support skills that buff the party. A machinist needs to do as much dance as a black mage and samurai who are all selfish dps
A big part of the problem with balance this tier (and expansion) is that they've significantly increased potential melee uptime. Hitboxes are much bigger, and there are only a handful of mechanics where melee lose uptime to execute them properly. As a result, melee damage is up, and the natural advantages of playing ranged aren't being felt. This is compounded by the 2 minute burst window change, which tend to benefit melee jobs more than casters due to how their rotation plays.
They either need to start designing fights in such a way as to reduce the melee uptime, or not penalize ranged as much for the utility of mobility and maximum uptime.
With the expansion being what it is, there is no good reason Samurai should significantly outperform Black Mage. And this is coming from someone who plays those two jobs as their mains.
It is easy in many fights to have 99%+ uptime as a melee this tier in most situations. In fact, it's generally easier to maintain uptime on a melee vs a Black Mage because the ranged advantage is almost nonexistent.
ALL of that said, the balance is still laughably better than in WoW historically, and a lot of the people complaining are just upset because they've probably never experienced rejection from groups based on job before. The current problems with FF14 can be fixed with a philosophy change on fight design by making fights less melee friendly, or a numbers tuning to buff ranged. I assume the reason the team hasn't overreacted and buffed the ranged jobs is that they're still having this conversation internally and haven't committed either way yet.
First of all was the wow comparison really nessiary? Second of all...I mean true but wow in recent years has been pretty good at making sure evreything is viable from what I've seen
@@scorpiowarrior7841 I think it was necessary. It wasn't just to take a pot shot at WoW or kick it when it's down. It's to create perspective and point out expectations. FF14 players are used to the idea of being able to bring any job they want to any content, be it ultimates or world first prog in savage Bring the player not the job. WoW has never even pretended to have that expectation. A meta gets established in the PTR, and anyone seriously playing the game at a high level plans their comps accordingly.
And that's why it feels so much more egregious to the FF14 community, vs the WoW community who would just blacklist the garbage job until it's changed based on the meta.
The 2 minute burst window design I think is warping balance because it disproportionately rewards jobs that play into it, especially because damage buffs in FF are multiplicative which means for every additional buff you bring, ALL your buffs get stronger. How do you balance that against "selfish" jobs? Do you balance on the assumption a group has 1-2 buffs or 5? It also means that groups which are good at buff alignment significantly outperform those which aren't, even if individually the players are roughly equally skilled at their rotations.
I think this is part of what is contributing to the huge disparity between ranged jobs. DNC is getting a significant portion of their DPS from the melees which are themselves too strong in Abyssos because of overly generous uptime. Groups are also funnelling gear to the melees for this same reason, which then shows up as part of the DNC's rDPS.
It feels like in their quest to standardize the game and do things they think the players will like (having everything line up nicely, minimal downtime for melees) they've actually caused more problems than when jobs were less homogenous.
I'm curious to see how they will handle the issue of melee uptime going forward. Will they shrink hitboxes again, or adjust output (either nerfing melee or buffing ranged) so the disparity is not so large? Personally I think the enormous hitboxes and guaranteed uptime is antithetical to the gameplay of melee. Sure it's convenient not having any downtime, but it also removes skill expression through uptimes strats and greeding. And frankly, it's just plain stupid looking when you're punching the boss from 50 feet away.
Eden was the opposite. The second tier of Eden was anti melee to be honest.
This tier just feels like an over compensation. At the same time other classes are just not in the same output level.
yeah black mage should at least be on par with sam due to how hard the class is to optimize.
As a filthy casual,I had never watched prog and I never understood how people could find sth like RTWF interesting. Being a fan of Preach and seeing him check your progress on stream on day 1 I somehow became quite invested and followed every stream with fingers crossed for the team. I watched literally all streams and found it so enjoyable. After you were done with Savage, I now continue to follow your ffxiv streams as you talked with Sfia and levelled RDM and SMN and I got to say - keep up the great work! It's very interesting to watch you explore ffxiv content and listen to your thoughts as someone in the highend scene, something I didn't think I would find interesting as sb who just does normal modes for the story. Also the interviews/podcast style things with people in the community are a great idea, I really enjoyed that and you did a proper in-depth conversation. Thanks for this!
Makes me very happy to hear, thanks!
You should definitely read Momo's statement about MCH (if you haven't already), he explains why the job suffers because of its identity issue - he explains quite well why the job is hard to balance "right"
The problem is partially job balance, but how fights are designed this tier make the ranged tax obsolete. Melees get purg and fourfold for free, while BLM and RDM have to put in tons more effort to maintain any sort of consistency. If you balance melees around somewhat substandard uptime, why wouldn't the devs adjust potency when each fight has hitboxes 3-4x the size of the boss? For p7s you need to completely shut your brain off to even get to max melee range, let alone lose uptime. It's incredibly frustrating to put in more than twice the work and planning for certain mechanics while melees are coddled. How are casters rewarded for the extra effort? BLM is maybe around RPR damage, while RDM is in the basement. Maybe logs are skewed right now due to gearing, but you can't fault me for feeling a bit disheartened this tier.
I think you hit on it. The balance has been bad since Endwalker's release, but it has been covered by the lack of such a tight DPS check.
This just uncovered the issue, which is a good thing. I have some issues with some of their response, but at least they're talking and thinking about it.
Now im curious whats gonna be adjusted from machinist because they did "something" to pld already
Lmfao "They killed it, but congrats". Actually the perfect way to put it
Literally laughed out loud when Scripe said that 😂
So if Scripe is curious. Unreal is a difficulty mode that hard caps the item level of gear/player. Been like that since the beginning. What did change from the first fight, Shiva, was that there were no form of locks between who completed unreal or who didn't. There was no way to prevent new players from joining a group of people who have cleared it. Players complained about this and the devs included the ability for "farmers" to prevent new players from joining. What also increased was that players started to add in pointless item level lockouts that were higher than what the unreal item level reduced you to. For example, there were parties that wanted players to be at item lvl 400 when the unreal reduced item lvl to 375. Players will always form stupid meta even when it doesn't matter. So even "if" a job performance is improved, a player will always find the "weaker" jobs and not include them for any reason they can.
Yes, I have tried to reach those item level bs meta rules for unreal and have had more successful runs from party finder randos then those who had stricter rules on item level.
he's talking about e8s
@@neobahumuth6 I know he is. I am pointing out that the ffxiv raid scene will add in extra steps to join a party even when it is unnecessary to do so. I do mean unnecessary.
It's very telling that they have forgotten that Machinist truly needs some love. The change to the Queen didn't do anything for the job since the first 4-5 seconds of popping Queen is spent with it just standing up then finally charging your target. It's meant to be the greedy dps of the physical range yet CBU3 doesn't seem to actually want it to be like Samurai or Black Mage. As a Machinist main, it hurt a bit getting turned away from parties for the job I love to play because the party didn't feel like it was worth bringing.
agreed the rest of the whole 'balance' discussion imo is pretty much bullshit though. Dps and "skill tax" is all entirely relative to the boss's HP. end of story. it does not matter if you have lower dps than another job if you can clear with good execution of your job. This is one of the rare times where the boss's hp was too high and now we need to address MCH having the smallest pp.
King of the Maw, PotD and HoH class
I'm happy for gangos theme played on the background
If Machinist's rotation difficulty doesn't warrant bigger numbers, they just need more utility. Give them a Mug effect so that retain their offensive identity in comparison to Bard and Dancer. Bind it to Wildfire, and done. Sure, it would require testing and number tweaking, but the principle is : Machinist need more utility.
The entire point of machinist is to have NO utility for having the highest DPS out of the ranged classes.
Just up its potentices and fix the rotations a bit BUM its good.
Giving machinist utility is exactly what they shouldn't do. It would kill Bard as the utility + DPS hybrid of the ranged classes.
@@brosephstinson1297 Problem is that the dev team also takes rotation difficulty in account. Let's be clear, whatever you think, Machinist's rotation does not justify them having the same numbers as, say, Black Mage. The only way Machinist having bigger numbers would make sense would be an entire job rework, and I'm not sure anyone wants that, because Machinist gameplay feeling is awesome. Also, Dancer didn't kill Bard, like Red Mage doesn't kill Summoner.
Ideally, Machinist would get a little bit of both, being the highest DPS out of ranged, but still lower than BLM, and bringing just a little bit more utility than currently to incentivize picking it in prog content.
@@myhr2320 I agree with this. As someone who enjoys Summoner and Black Mage, there is no scenario in which the damage after accounting for buffs should be similar. There are significantly more issues with executing mechanics while keeping uptime as a Black Mage vs a Summoner, who just has to plan for Ifrit and everything else is free.
The skill tax applies similarly to Machinist. It's the easiest RPdps to play, and arguably the second easiest job to play aside from Summoner. Even as a pure dps, it's numbers should be nowhere near Black Mage and the melee. At most it's numbers should be comparable to Dancer, and even that is a stretch because personally I feel like Dancer is harder to play (although not by much, both are quite easy.)
I feel like Machinist really needs a rework, and if the player community wants output comparable to the other selfish dps, then it needs a more complex rotation to make up for it.
@@myhr2320 nah fuck that, if machinist gets utility the entire reason of machinist is dead.
I'd rather have it get bigger numbers and thats it.
Also machinist is pretty easy to play in general.
Bard openers and rotations are much more fucky, so having utility is justified as its damage is also not THAT high.
@@brosephstinson1297 ...so you want big numbers and easy rotation...okay...
Scripe is basically right. Job balance is not significantly worse than it has been historically. In fact it's almost identical to how it was in Asphodelos. The reason why people are SAYING it's terrible now is because this time we have (had) a DPS check tight enough for job balance to matter. For the first time in a long time people have had to seriously consider the job DPS output when building a party to clear, and now those differences that are normally insignificant suddenly have very outsized importance.
You might say that any job can (and did) clear, and that is true. However even if you can clear with say a MCH that parses 99, if you can do the same damage output by parsing 40 as DNC then it makes absolute sense to exclude MCHs from your group because the chance of finding a DNC who can parse at least 40 is MUCH higher than the chance of finding a MCH that can parse 99. If that kind of thing matters for the clear, then it's only fair to take it into account.
On the other hand I think people should consider if the idea that ANY comp should clear week 1 is actually valid. "Play what you want" is broadly true in FF, but if you are world racing or going for super early clears then obviously minor differences matter. You wouldn't expect to clear in a comp with no healers, so is it reasonable to expect to clear with the 8 bottom DPS jobs, on the hardest DPS check in the game, with no extra gear? IMO no. Just because you CAN play whatever you want, doesn't mean that you can make any kind of group or play however you want with no restrictions and expect to get the same results. For that to happen there would have to be no differences between jobs at all. The more reasonable solution is what the devs actually did: tune the content so the differences don't matter so much.
Although MCH is clearly not in an ideal situation balance wise.
This is basically how I feel. Job balance overall is fine. It's just that the final boss of this tier was a bit overtuned to the point where the differences mattered more than usual.
And I agree about the week one thing. If you're playing that hardcore in any game, you're going to take whatever is best because every little bit matters for something like WF or early clears. That's just how playing at that high of a level goes. Just like you said, the only way to be able to take whatever you want at that level, everything would have to be exactly equal, which is impossible.
Job balance isn't worse than Asphodelos, because it was already shit since Asphodelos. It's just that the tier was so god damn easy it didn't matter at all. But with this tier, everything are incidentally brought to broad daylight by another mistake. So people can clearly see what is wrong with the game.
And to make the matter worse, YoshiP came out & said that they didn't tune the fight according to new bis gear for the delayed week, making everyone think that the dps check were gonna be so easy, & people went in with little to no preparation or meta comps. Even the WF team didn't bother farming their 450 tomes before going in. Many other groups were caught off guard & didn't save for tome weapons, failing their week 1-2 clear goals. It didn't just affect the world prog teams, & it'll still have prolong effect on many teams for the next few tiers to only stick to meta comps to prevent further shenanigans from the dev, until people feel comfortable again.
Also, tuning the content so the differences don't matter much is not a solution, thanks to the new homogenized 2min buff window. The dmg from buff windows is so massive that there is a big gap between meta comps that rely on buffs & non-meta comps that can't make the most out of buffs. So if you tune the fight for non-meta, then WF groups who almost always would run with meta will decimate any dps check with ease. The game is literally becoming easier & easier for hardcore groups, while harder & harder for casual players who just play whatever they want.
As someone who played healers, ranged phys and casters in savage, the whole 'ranged tax" is stupid this expansion.
Also, disagree that RDM should do less than SMN, when SMN also has a res and has the most braindead rotation in the game. The reason why SMN is so popular is no cast times, easy rotation that barely changes since level 20 and brings utility.
Scripe is a literal textbook example of why Yoshi P has to constantly clarify shit. you take information and infer your own meaning from it. Nowhere in that statement does he admit they didnt get a boss kill nor that they used a "meta comp".
What? It is literally stated in the post:
"We regret not stating this more clearly in the previous explanation, but said premise is the reason why we do not release content tuned precisely as it was when the battle team’s balance testers cleared it."
even more zoomed in if you are still missing it:
"we do not release content tuned precisely as it was when the battle team’s balance testers cleared it."
They did kill the boss, and he agrees that they killed the boss. What he's saying is they don't kill the boss exactly as it is when it's released because after they clear the boss, they raise the HP by 1-2% before releasing it. Therefore, while they did kill the boss, they did not kill the same boss as the one that is released.
"We always add a little bit extra to the boss values before rechecking the fight and releasing it live." It says right there, that after they add the 1-2% HP more, they test it again before releasing.
@@Scripe They do say they recheck it. What exactly that means idk. But at the same time, what do you expect? They admit they're not as good as players, they obviously can't play as much as the players do. So if they want to give the players a good challenge, they have to tune it up a bit for them. And this is their usual way of doing things, and it's worked for a long time. The only reason this time was a problem was because they put in more testing than usual.
You say that Scripe is a literal textbook example of this when he's the only person who said this and he's not even huge in the FFXIV community, at least not like Preach (yet). And he's right too! Meanwhile, you have an overwhelming number of people in the community constantly doing things you're accusing Scripe of: you take information and infer your own meaning from it. Literally, the most recent example is how much of the fandom was memeing on "the dev team was better than the players" after Patch 6.21 notes were released. You know what Yoshi-P had to clarify to the point of bolding and using red font on the entire sentence? THIS. Stop being so bias and look at the fandom for once.
tbf i still think it is good enough to have a raidfight test team being able to overcome the full boss fight and then up it by 1-2% afterwards than a "raid testing team lol" that goes in there with godmode praying that the mechanics work properly and nothing breaks then hires some rats to test their new hamsterwheel for them in real action in a overtuned as frick situation called PTR/Beta and then release it on good measure from that to find out almost every single time it isn't tuned good enough and then have to add in 23543425324523 different nerfs to the individual bosses until it is "playable" by your major playerbase. So if you ask me: Yes i take the FF14 raid test team over the WoW Copium andies that "test" their fights "internally" anyday. Tyvm :p
Damn you really called their method for adjusting the dps check beforehand.
Casters can still put some damage out so theyre not completely negigable. But we are getting to the point where we might phase out an entire class because they dont have any real advantage over others.
you look at dps graph in a wrong way. Because it does not start at zero difference is visually much bigger that it actually is.
DPS check on P8S p1 is 61.6k (p2 is tricky because raid buff phase). Take "worst" comp WAR_PLD RPR_MCN_RDM_BRD AST_SGE and make a sum of all median damage from fflogs and you will get 59.961 DPS. Just 1.6k short of a clear. And that with only 1 melee! Another one will add 800-900 dps
You will say - well, that is clearly a problem! But it's not, because doing median amount of damage according to fflogs is relatively easy, especially considering how many pull it takes and how you perfect all your actions long before a clear.
added: this was dps check before nerf, it's even lower now
@222ckc well, if you have data from week one i welcome you to present them
@222ckc Btw I want to add that even at week 8 is still hard as heck to clear a boss for the first time by the simple fact that anyone that has good gear is not going to clear parties anymore, you're still getting ppl with low ilv and doing greys all over the place on their first clear.
I started playing FF again 2 weeks ago so I'm behind in gear, I got to p7s like last week on the 17th. Even my first kill had 4 ppl with grey 3 with green and 1 with purple and we saw the boss doing the enrage cast, ppl were potting and all (and we only got 1 chest cause we had a couple of ppl that had cleared before, probably the greeens/purple in the party).
Summoner been the most unbalanced this entire expansion for no reason. They did the rework on summoner and a job that used to be around the top 3 to top 5 now is on the bottom. To make matters worse the discourse that Summoner have utility is laughable, they can: 1) shield themselves (blm can too and all melees have heal on hits plus self heal), 2) raise ppl once every minute (which RDM can just basically spam after any spell they use) 3) No control whatsoever when to heal ppl with phoenix because its part of your rotation and you cant exactly stop doing damage to hold your phoenix to heal a group or a tank in a big damage situation (meanwhile RDM can use a mitigation shield on everyone when they feel like it and their heal ACTUALLY heals instead of the 300 (total) heal from summoner).
But the biggest unbalance this xpac have been casters. All 3 of them used to be around the same level-ish of damage during fights as the other melees (with maybe the exception of RDM that used to trail behind). BLM used to be a legit choice for top dps in several fights. Now its laughable how the hardest and most unforgiving job (BLM) is a middle of wagon damage dealer losing to basically all the DPSers which are insanely more easy to do damage AND if you miss your rotation you're not majorly punished trying to fix it like BLM is.
There are several other problems and minor things that contribute to this unbalance, like I even forgot how MCH is laughable too atm. But the problem there, and you can even see on the video is that huge gap between Reaper/BLM into the Long Range Physical and other Casters. Is basically extra headaches bringing 2 casters in the party atm (something that used to be able to clear with 3 casters 0 melees back in Eden tier 1)
This is possibly the biggest unbalance atm with casters vs melees since the major changes back in Stormblood (I will not count before that cause it was basically a different game) but even then its still better balanced than like WoW.
Everyone was saying “DEVS SAID GIT GUD OMEGALUL” and now yoshi p gotta make a statement 😂
Tbf I actually loved the first reply :D mainly because the only people who would rage from that would be mainly toxic fuckers anyway. From what I’ve seen. The overwhelmingly majority just replied with a LOL/Kek
Very good video. Easily digestible.
Machinist is phys ranged taxed, now utility taxed. They are the selfish DPS of phys ranged, but because it's phys ranged, it can't be as potent as SAM for melee DPS. Therefore it's forever cursed.
Which has been this way since machinist release, so it's weird that suddenly the game is terrible and unbalanced and everyone is mad.
@@epicadventureturtle1363 This. MCH has always been in this weird place where it's hard to balance because of it's role clashing with it's archetype. It's not new.
@@epicadventureturtle1363 It's because this is the first time in a long while that the balance difference has been notable enough to where the class was banned from comps.
People already talked at length about the issue, very apparent. So what about the solution ? I think they need to roll back. Ironically people used to dislike all jobs not syncing their raid buffs because it used to be in SHB, there were comps that complemented 90s raid buff compared to the 2 min raid buff. So, these 2 groups only sync well when the fight started and you used to want to delay the 90s to sync with the 2 min or vice versa for a huge reopener on fights with known length. But still, just make jobs not all tunneled into this shitty bursty 2 min window that if one misses it, the entire fight is scuffed for them. Some jobs have damage steroids / burst window
at 1 minute, so just backload the raid buffs to 1 minute, and it would be much less of a detriment. And make the boss hitbox not as big as the entire room, so melee tax actually exists and is justified, cuz rn there isn’t any - all fights are “striking dummies” for melee cuz full uptime.
I won’t comment on individual job balance cuz Idk any better, only ever play tanks seriously for raids
I certainly don't remember there were this many MCH defender back in Stromblood which the situation was much worse. Make me wonder if the fact that RDM fell off meta has something to do with the increasing complains about job balance, and MCH was merely a pretext 🤔
Cant exactly compare because before theres less job and less abilities.
Theres also accuracy stats so all jobs are hard to play to begin with.
That really is the issue with Red Mage. Everyone points so "The rez they rez they can rez like 4 people!!!" Yeah and then they all have weakness and you can't finish the fight anyway on top of LOSING damage by swiftcast rezzing. It might as well be a wipe. So if RDM's only use is to progress but not kill the boss, then it hardly has a use outside of being a stepping stone. It really shouldn't be like that.
Even in prog RDM isn't that good, since people will tend to rely on veraise instead of actualy learning the mechanincs. I'm just afraid we'll get a situation like in tier 1 where RDM and SMN were replaced by BLM in clear/farm pugs. Hell, by the way this is going i wouldn't be suprised if pugs start replacing RDM/SMN with a third meele
@@joaoteixeira8349 Pretty much yeah, and relying on being raised like that means you're relying on failure. I'm not sure how things might end up going, but they really should tune up RDM and SMN some.
As much as Verraise helps occasionally in normal content, it's not like balance is FOR normal content in the first place. The team should reevaluate how much several rezzes really are worth in the grand scheme of things. If anything, just make it cost more mana.
They could even balance it around it eating into white mana while something else eats into black mana. Just something to allow it not holding back all of RDM's damage
It isn't just about ressing people for clears. Being able to res people so you can keep going to progress more per attempt, even if you still wipe, is very valuable.
"So if RDM's only use is to progress but not kill the boss, then it hardly has a use outside of being a stepping stone. It really shouldn't be like that."
That's how utility and healing work out in any game like this. It's useful while you still make mistakes, but less so once you're good at it. It's why speed clearers take the two highest dps tanks. All tanks can do the mechs, so any of the tanks that are better at mitigating or whatever aren't as useful as more dps in a speedrun situation. There's not really anything you can do about that. That said, nobody is doing something like refusing RDM because they don't need the utility, especially in PF where you have less coordination than a static. Just like how nobody is refusing the lower dps tanks unless you're a speed runner.
just give us high heels yoshi ffs enter 2023!!!
If I may Scripe, balance in this game was never perfect as ppl want to think, it was ok at best, but like casters were never well balanced and tbf this might the first time where caster raise gets taxed correctly. Honestly it was more that checks were in that fine line of being light enough that player skill could offset it. Then again the change to 2 mins raid burst has the problem that it makes you missing a burst window extremely punishing now
@222ckc that is true only for RDM and SMN, one of which is meme'd to be a phys range and RDM has a warranted penalty for the raise. Job balance is not just for how much dps a job can do
@222ckc RDM raise was never correctly taxed before and even now you can clear most fights with alot of deaths. One fight balance doesn't dictate the whole job balance
@222ckc sure thing bro, it was so well taxed that everyone could play BLM without being mobbed
@222ckc bro......BLM was used because melee were weak, ppl didn't want BLM in the caster slot, if they could choose they would prefer SMN/RDM over BLM. If you think that's fine you are delusional. You Infer stuff without even looking at the biggest picture
SHB job balance was far superior
only if wildfire actually does damage like in reality 🥶
Good insight
Machinist is like that 1 child that's forgotten by his parents and family :(
Right now, the classes in WoW are more balanced than in a long time, and FF14 going through growing balance pains. Just hope they don't dumb down content as a *fix*.
As an absolute ffxiv boomer, one major source of frustration is homogenization. Compared to how jobs were before ShB (or even during ShB) every job now feels practically identical. Every job has a burst every minute and a reopener ever 2 minutes. Every tank now has identical mitigation. Every healer has identical damage kits and is bloated with healing actions. Healers are so bad that there are actions that are literally never used outside of the last fight of a savage tier or ultimate. Melees feel similar overall. Casters and phys ranged feel okay to play (sans summoner) but are horrifically undertuned. ZhephZaeora has a thing on twitter really going into it and I recommend reading it.
People would be more forgiving about balance being this off if jobs were more unique. In Stormblood and Heavensward every job felt insanely varied and though balance was far worse back then, it didn’t make as much of an impact because every job had totally unique skill kits and there were just more elements in the game the devs could design around. Since stormblood they’ve removed the cross class system, TP, enmity, healer rotations, random mini tankbusters, boss crits, they’ve nearly removed positionals, multiple unique job mechanics, they’ve practically removed MP management, they’ve made AoE’s spammable, the list goes on.
They have removed so much from each job that going into detail about that would take too long. They’ve also made boss hit boxes so large that melees (who are balanced around having X amount of downtime btw) have nearly full uptime which makes them that much harder to balance. They also admitted that they balance each job respective to its role around its difficulty. The problem is that there’s no way to quantify difficulty. What one person may find effortless, someone else may not be able to figure out. They’ve designed themselves into a corner in the name of accessibility and it’s backfired.
I kinda feel like is it really that bad for world first raiders to have to be a bit more meta? Playing it not in the first week with some gear like most it wouldn’t be so off. We usually shoot for week 2 or week 3 full tier clears.
It trickles down to pf experience too. If world first has to flex jobs for dps check then what do you think it's like for pf of 8 randoms? It's hard enough to get a clean no death run so what happens when the run is clean but you can't beat enrage? Salt flies 100% of the time. People end up also feeling pressured to switch jobs or just skip the tier.
P5S, P7S, and P8S already have reputation for being meme trains just on mechanics alone. What's going to happen when the wall is damage? Last tier the main meme fight was P3S. If that fight was so tight dps-wise that single death will wipe off meta comp I think genuinely people would have rioted. I did maybe close to 300 pulls last tier and there already was a lot of salt.
based take on based clarification
Oh, Scripe has a need to be right. Interesting.
"i have no clue what im talking about but i still decide to make a 15 minutes about it"
The job classification needs a complete rework if he’s going to balance jobs base on skills then he need to classify those jobs as separate categories like a support role and balance them base off each other. Cause machinist being the selfish range dps can’t even come close to a ninja or dragoon or monk who all have support skills that buff the party. A machinist needs to do as much dance as a black mage and samurai who are all selfish dps