As a fighting game player, the way I look at balance is this. If you want to have characters (or in this case, jobs) that feel distinct from each other in any category apart from aesthetics, there will always be situations where one shines and another struggles. A grappler is almost always going to have a losing matchup against a zoner, a caster will always have to stand still to cast spells, so while balance is important, what is more important is making sure everything is fun while keeping everything viable.
The main issue with balance in XIV is the relentless homogenisation. If you try to make every class (or job) do the same thing, then a 1% difference in damage output makes one objectively better than the other. When the classes bring unique things to the table, minor differences in damage output can be ignored because there will still be a reason to bring different classes. Blizzard already figured this out 20 years ago. It's pretty mindblowing that SE is still oblivious. WoW has never been a perfectly balanced game but do you know what the optimal Battlegrounds comp was in vanilla WoW? It was 1 of each class because they all had unique buffs and abilities that made them useful.
@@mosley3485 yeah exactly, utility in XIV is pointless since all the cool utility stuff is removed, BRD could help with MP regen, NIN had enmity reduction ability for teammates, all the damage resistance debuffs and jobs having slows or stuns was impactful since enemies (even some bosses) could be slowed or stunned which is wild, now everything is removed so the "utility" in XIV is just mitigation or healing, there is nothing else, in WoW rogues have AOE stealth, some classes have bloodlust, Hunter has misdirection and traps, warlock has summoning and demon gate warp, it has all kinds of cool utility and reason to bring each one. and its not only the utility that makes the classes better in WoW than jobs in XIV, its also the gimmicks and fun of them, like outlaw rogue, you literally throw a dice and get random buffs each time, rolling again gives you new buffs but you lose the old ones, so its a fun minigame of you rolling the dice and seeing what buffs you get, you get high dopamine when you roll well and its not awful feeling when you roll badly either since its designed so well for the enjoyment, does that mean outlaw is bad? no, its not the best spec but its not horrible, you can get keystone master with it in M+, you could probably clear raids with it, people in WoW constantly whine about balance, but they have it so good when the class and spec designs are so fun and unique still while keeping it somewhat balanced, meanwhile XIV jobs are homogenized beyond recognition of what they were in early expasions, all utility and game mechs have been removed and the balance STILL manages to be absolute shitshow
People complain about job homogenization, then they complain about outliers from the damage balance, but I think this video proves that you CANT have both without accounting for *every single possible scenario*
You cannot have both indeed, though it's worth stating that it isn't exactly a zero sum game either. Anyhow, plenty of people who understand this dichotomy specifically expect that the trade off between job design and balance "pays off" so to say. In exhange for more homogenized job design compared to some other MMO:s one would expect to have very good job balance compared to other MMOs. Hence standard for what is considered "balanced" in FFXIV is so much higher than elsewhere. And when one or more jobs are not considered balanced enough by these strict standards, people are going to feel miffed because the aforementioned trade off between job design and balance is not paying off at that moment.
You could easily make FF14 perfectly balanced by turning every fight into the 2nd boss of Bardam's Mettle. Just remove the boss HP bar and healing, and just make it so avoiding all mechanics to the end makes you win. It is how combat works already just with the fiddly uncessery bits taken out that complicate it. Something tells me people will complain if they did that though.
That would certainly be a brave move! "we've decided that attacking in Combat is sort of meaningless, so all fights are now beaten by simply dodging enemies until they get tired!" 😂
FFXIV is already reaching that garbage state. Most if not all boss fights are basically doing repetitive & stupid dance routines on a square or round platform
Also a thing that a lot of players tend to disregard is when certain jobs having advantages over others is under the assumption that skill level is normalized for, so if you're not equally proficient with those jobs then it will most likely still be a dps contribution loss on average compared to if you played the "inferior" job that you're way more comfortable with. Unless as you said that all jobs played exactly the same which would be extremely boring in my opinion.
for me balance has always just been "can i do this with any character/job available" i mean sure there are better options but that's fine. i don't go to an ice cream shop and complain because one flavour is more popular. as long as they're all available that's what i care about
I think in general the community focuses too much on things being 'balanced', rather than the game being fun. FFXIV isn't release Wrath, where Death Knights are miles ahead of every other class. I do think the removal of elements such as TP, damage type debuffs (of course came with its own issues of homogenizing party comps), and in general decreasing the difficulty of playing your class has had an impact on what we value in a class. rDPS has always been the end-all be-all metric for raiders, but the less utility is required/helpful (as you mention) the more people will stare at charts. Of course, Heavensward and Stormblood had a lot of unnecessary complexity which just felt bad - like how giving MNK arrow was more of a nerf than a buff - so I do think most changes have been for the better, but I do also think it would be nice if utility (apart from swift rez) had more of a purpose.
yeah exactly, there will always be people who whine about balance or difficulty but you just need to ignore them somewhat, the thing with current XIV tho its just that its already homogenized to the point where this amount of imbalance is not acceptable really, like for real the balance of jobs is almost WoW level bad, yet WoW embraces the fun and gimmicky aspect of the classes and specs while still keeping the game moderately balanced. also the BIG problem with XIV is that there is no real way to go back, devs try and keep old content "relevant" meaning that it must be clearable no matter how old the content is, the shift from complex stormblood to homogenized shadowbringers was easy, since content that was designed for the gimmicky stuff like enmity, TP and unique utilities are easier when the gimmicks are removed, but they can NEVER bring back old enmity or TP, why? because doing current savage and ultimates would be probably impossible, imagine doing TOP with old mitigations, people would keep dying left and right, or imagine doing DSR P7 with old enmity, a phase that requires constant tank swaps and failing it once means wipe, its just not possible
I appreciate the deep dive into this as I agree that perfect balance is impossible. For the most part, I am fairly happy with the balance of the game outside of the outlier that is PCT. I have always told anyone that you should play the job you feel comfortable playing on - your comfort level will mean you will naturally play that job at a higher performance than a meta job that you don't enjoy as much - unless luck happens to be on your side and your favorite job is also the meta job of the season. It's also why I dislike players who push for full meta compositions as forcing someone off their comfort pick can easily lead to a lower overall performance despite the potential performance ceiling being much higher. The only people who should heavily care about composition and performance should be those whom are challenging the most bleeding edge of content and are trying to compete with each other for those coveted positions (fastest speed kill, world first, etc.). For most of us rank and file players, enjoy the role and job you like and diversify your job pool if you feel like you want to try - do not diversify if people are forcing you to do so as it will just leave a bad taste in your mouth more often than naught. [Edit] Also, don't forget that you put the math out that Perfect Balance is mostly perfectly imbalanced at level 50 MNK, lol [/edit]
Absolutely. I also give the advice to focus on a job you enjoy as all jobs are capable of beating all the content, and choosing a job you like is most likely to lead to a better performance from you! 😊 (and indeed, monks perfect balance is ironically not perfectly balanced!)
You are a fellow mathematician!! That just... makes so much sense. Maybe you have said it before and I just simply wasn't paying attention. But I feel so represented, my thought process that is, on these kind of videos and I appreciate your detailed explanaitions on the myth buster series and those like them. Thanks for all your work!
@@CaetsuChaijiCh ah, again logical. I'm, as some may say, a youtube frog. I don't, or can't, watch twitch/streams regularly. No need to thank, you deserve all the praise for the analysis you bring to the ffxiv topics.
@BlueQmas i do stream here on RUclips though in case you'd give it a try! You can also check some of the Vods if you can't wait for a Livestream! Many of my regular watchers praise the fact we often discuss various topics on stream which sometimes can get mathy too! Although I do understand Livestreams aren't for everyone! 😊
I think what I'd want out of balance in this game is for every role and job to feel meaningful in some way. The ways this can be achieved are different of course. I like playing healer but often feel meaningless when a warrior is around since I often don't need to do anything for a large part of the duty. I like playing phys ranged but often feel meaningless because my advantage of free movement isn't really used in fights nowadays, so it feels like I'm innately at a disadvantage for no reason. I can imagine some black mage players also feel meaningless in FRU because picto is so much better that bringing black mage may feel like a detriment. I don't think perfect dps balance is what's necessary, but rather job meaningfulness. If the free movement or the interrupts of phys ranged got way more use, the jobs could do less damage and still feel very meaningful as an example.
Your point #1 was adjacent to what I was going to jump into the comments and say before watching the video: The fact that players are aiming at LITERAL perfection, and aren't content with "better balance than every other available mmo." The other thought that floated across my brainpan was that the imperfections are a natural result of the same variance in play style and rhythm that everyone claims they want. I saw a recent discussion on how a huge part of Marvel Rivals' success right now is BECAUSE it's unbalanced. The characters all feel and play totally different from one another, and people love that. The push toward perfect balance bumps up against people's desire for their favorite job to feel unique and special.
That is exactly right! And also precisely what I was going for with the gradual move towards all jobs being the same just to reach perfect balance! 😅 The way these kinds of very imbalanced games reach a point where things still make sense is of course that one option is better in certain situations, and another is better in others, which I suppose is where ffxiv sort of falls short at the moment, given how crucial "most damage" has become! 😅
Perhaps that would suggest another substantial reason why PCT is decried is because it's somewhat more fun than a lot of jobs currently are...? (Looking at you, DRK/WAR/SMN/any healer).
This is exactly it! I’ve been seeing tier lists recently about Rivals and one of the things they always mention with Damage characters is “why would I play this one DPS that has to use their ability combos to kill when I could just play Hela?” And my answer is always “I don’t wanna fuckin *play* Hela.”
Human nature is the thing that makes the talk of perfect balance. We are imperfect beings that strive towards perfection, even though we know absolute perfection is unattainable. And if it could attained, then what? Well, there's simply nothing left.
18:00 regarding this. I have been thinking a lot about WHY the strongest dps composition is so much better than the weakest one in something like FRU where you more or less see every mechanic regardless of how much dps you can do, and I think it comes down to being able to compensate for deaths. Because deaths have a minor overall effect on your raidwide dps, even 1% increase to your overall damage from say picto instead of black mage, can give your the leniency to die maybe 3 or 4 times instead of 1 or 2 times within the fight. A death takes away 25% damage from one member for like. 2 minutes. Which feels bad in the moment, but over a 20 minute fight and with 8 players is relatively insignificant. I don't have any perfect solutions but my initial thoughts are that for this very high end content maybe mistakes should be more severely punished but the actual dps check lessened so that, regardless of party comp, 1 mistake in a phase lets you hit the next phase but 2 will not. Something like deaths healing the boss, or damage downs persisting after raise.
I suppose another way could also be bosses imposing some sort of inability to raise party members as frequently. This would weaken certain jobs (RDM, SMN), but would also give justification for buffing them as a result! 🤔😊
Great deep dive into the most important part of this "balance" equation - the player psychology and how they make choices. This is a discussion at the very root of everything, what makes us to choose one thing over the other, and especially when complete strangers are involved.
I will say here what I said to someone a few months ago in a subreddit about this: Game's need to get more sloppy again because everything is just devolving into extreme optimization of tools and functions. Not just MMO's, all of it. Fighting games, FPS, Battle Royals, get dirty and sloppy with all of it. We're circling this drain of needing every aspect of everything balanced the entire way to the singular point of all the uniqueness or fun is just sapped out. It all becomes nothing but a uniformed sequence of moves and results without deviation because to do anything else is unoptimized and a fail state. I don't know why game design has become this in today's world, but it all feels like the space of fun is getting smaller and smaller as more gets this overtuneing pass ripping all the fun to be found out.
I agree whole heartedly. The big problem i think is that even if everything was completely out of whack unbalanced, players might still just pick the best options, because to me it feels more like how players approach games, than how the games are. However, as observed, making things more balanced doesn't change much anyway because the players that really care about everything being perfectly balanced may never be truly satisfied! 😅
@@CaetsuChaijiCh to your last point, I get players are going to seek whatever perfection looks like in whatever the game, but leave that to the player(s) and not the devs accommodating that practice. For some reason it feels like game devs have just given in and given that person all the functions to excel at that practice to the determine of everything; other players, the flow of the game, the action in the game. Just, stop giving in to it and let thoses that seek that perfection do what they want, but not twist the entire thing to suit them and it.
There's a lot of good discussion points here, and I think there's a lot to be said for allowing jobs to have their advantages, like cleave damage and downtime gains, but at the same time not allowing those advantages to be particularly massive. We can nitpick about cleave damage and NIN/SCH in alliance raids, but in the current balance of the game, I don't personally think that any job other than Picto has such a massive advantage in a certain scenario that it actually warrants addressing.
I'm a player that has barely a week in gameplay, and with all the classes in the game, I'd rather them be different, so the identity of the class is the most important part. I want my favorite job to be fun, not to be the best. And it seems like some people can't handle the latter.
That is the best way to look at it, and that is indeed also the kind of point I'm aiming for: we could have everything be equal, but it'll probably be very boring! 😅 Also welcome to the game! I hope you have a great time!
The chase of perfection leads to the death of flavor. I get that XIVs raid scene is highly motivated by having strong competitive numbers and thusly the devs are encouraged to not let classes shine by design. But man would it feel to have classes like ninja hit a bit weaker personally for the benefit of reigniting some 1m group bursts again. I get why it’s been done away with. Doesn’t change that it would be fun to me tho!
I think it'd be cool if we saw some of these niches through party comps rather than individual jobs though we've seen the extreme of that too. There's gotta be a fun middle ground there.
The problem with pct is that yes, having unique advantages and downsides is great for variety in the game BUT the trouble with pct is that it just doesn't have any downside. It has everything - raid buff, HUGE pad into the raid buff, huge gains from downtime but also shines with dps in full uptime, party utility that's better than anything the other casters have, dash which gives movement speed, on demand instant casts, and it's relatively easy to pilot for what it brings to the table. The ONLY thing it doesn't have for a full sweep is a rez and let's be honest that just doesn't balance it out. If you want pct to have insane gains from downtime that would be just fine but why is it also shining in literally every other deparment?
if everything damaged, mitted, and healed exactly the same, then it would only be 1 WAR, 7 WHM and one button spam, completely trivializing the entire game, and making even ultimate raiding feel unaccomplished
Completely balanced classes make for a boring game. Classes should be 'around' the same level but each class should have something that makes it stand out in a specific way. Unbalanced is more fun, when every class is overpowered in a certain way, it makes for a way more fun game. The devs seem obsessed with balancing the game strictly around the super hard content and savage raids, the thing that only a small portion of the playerbase even touches, which limits encounter design and makes classes so boring.
In my opinion only 2 examples of unacceptable balance in recent years has been 6.0 PLD and current PCT. Everything else has been whatever, like NIN and SCH in Chaotic. Outside of those its never really made a huge difference in job selection. PCT I don't think needs an explanation, currently in any fight featuring downtime it has a far greater advantage to generate resource and destroy its competition with several "nuke" skills that cost it virtually no downsides. I think PCT shows some cracks in the way jobs are designed during downtime. This alone makes not bringing a PCT into FRU a handicap. Likewise PLD in 6.0 was a victim of the start of the 2 minute meta, it's potency was drawn out much longer than just a 20 second burst and suffered from the time it took to build momentum, same reason we ended up with pre-pull FoF at 18s to go straight into goring blade and Requiescat. In 6.0 for the week 1 kills I remember having to switch to DRK for P3S and above just because of the crazy damage discrepancy, the exact opposite of PCT in FRU currently. They reasonably fixed it by 6.1 through potency adjustments, but the 6.3 rework was what it really needed to get up to standard.
Indeed, another way both of these extremes can be viewed, is that pictomancer is the perfect answer to the bursty design of combat in ffxiv, which is even more emphasized in fights with downtime. Meanwhile old paladin was the sustained damage tank, with the smallest peaks in damage. So not only was it not REALLY great at utilizing the burst windows raid buffs provided, but it was more heavily impacted by downtime. In some ways, you could almost say viper is a more modern take on this super sustained attacker, where it is at least kitted with *a* burst button it can use on the fly to circumvent its weakness. I also do agree that some imbalance is probably fine! Just not all the way! 😅
@CaetsuChaijiCh The comparison of old PLD to current VPR is actually a really good connection, a modern day sustained damage job which unfortunately came out at the same time as PCT... which just emphasises just how poorly it performs compared to the burst jobs in content where it matters. A real shame if you ask me!
@wildinstinct1585 i specifically recall as a bystander seeing first paladin getting excluded. Then machinist. I believe warrior also started to get weird looks alongside red mage. In some part, the real problem was that the fight was insanely difficult and very slightly over tuned. But it did have this effect where players decided to look at other ways to "fix it". At the time I actually made a video on the concept of good jobs being bad. It focuses a bit on the idea of "a fish will be stupid if it is judged on its ability to climb a tree", because jobs like machinist are great in the specific contexts they excel at (take deep dungeons for instance), but those properties mean nothing in savage raiding! If you are curious about the video I'll put a link here, but it IS from a while back so I will sound very different 😅 ruclips.net/video/33xY6xxuFjI/видео.htmlsi=K65AP5jO8-8UJVl1
i think the issue isn't as much balance with ff14 as it is that....party finder is very gatekeepey about stuff and people feel like they are forced to play 'the best' not all PF parties do that but it's a common enough issue
Oh that is definitely also a problem, and is indeed a knock on effect of the whole "Billy black mage" example! Fortunately it doesn't apply to all groups thankfully!
I saw someone say that World of Warcraft is better balanced than FFXIV because there's more of an even distribution of classes in high end content. Completely ignoring that to change class in WoW, you have to make a whole new character, and people might be a bit attached to their main after playing it for 20 years.
I don't understand job complaints in FF14 only because you can play all jobs on one character. If you want to do the best in [insert role] and [insert job] is the best well just play that. Never, ever, let the meta be the reason you don't play the job you want. If you can't get invited to statics, make your own static. All the content is designed to be beaten with all jobs and wouldn't you rather prove you can do it even with a lesser job for an even greater claim of difficulty?
My static were struggling on FRU P1 dps check, but then I switch to PCT (from MCH) and we meet dps check easily (in p1 doing around 24k rdps as MCH, around 38k as PCT, the difference is absurd). I much prefer playing MCH but SE really hates MCH this expansion. The balancing in this game is in a sad state when job composition is the difference between whether you can clear content or not (or making it significantly easier) & you end up being forced into playing specific jobs - a lot of statics/PF groups are requiring PCT. Something needs to change, I don't really know what, and I don't think we'll see it until 8.0, raiding in Dawntrail is just going to continue to be a disappointing experience for us people forced into playing PCT. People commonly say "content in this game is designed to be cleared by any job composition" but you also have to keep in mind how much time you'll spend. A party learning FRU without a PCT is going to spend so many more hours progging than a party with a PCT because PCT provides more leniency, you can have several people get damage downs or die and still meet DPS check while without PCT you'll have to wall it whenever someone makes a mistake, and you all have to be playing absolutely perfect to meet DPS check.
18:00 Bardam Savage let's go! I think the root of the problem, for lack of a better word, lies in that the only form of progression in XIV is gear score and the only way to raise gear score is raid bosses. So the only metric that jobs are measured by is how well they do in the 8-man raid boss setting (and possibly now 24 man, pending how frequently we get Chaotic fights). My personal wish (read: dream) to approach the issue would be for different relevant fights/content that allow enable the different strengths of jobs to shine. By "relevant", I mean these theoretical fights could be used to acquire BiS gear. Put the gear and upgrade materials in the high floors of a Deep Dungeon and range physical has a reason to exist besides the 1% main stat boost, for example. And yes, I know this will never happen, that's why I said it's a wish/dream.
If they made Criterion give out the same level rewards as Chaotic and Savage then it could balance things out a little, in a dungeon setting WAR is the best pick for a tank because they are basically immortal when fighting packs where as DRK is a lot better for Raids with its high dps and TBN working a lot better for predictable boss attacks than the consistent dmg of trash packs.
Personally, I'm very okay with trading some more numerical balance for more stuff that lets players make more choices and express more skill. Paladin abilities like Clemency, Cover, and Passage of Arms are perfect to me. PCT is, ironically, TOO well designed. A flexible caster with a raid buff and a personal defensive that can become raidwide that also rewards you with a lower CD for effective use. The fact that it has a lot of control over where its damage goes makes it the logical conclusion of the 2m burst structure that permeates the game and allows it to transform downtime into uptime. It is a perfect job, and that reveals problems inherent to the very structure of the game. The way my friend puts it is that "Pictomancer is the only job playing Dawntrail. Every other job is stuck in a previous version of the game." I am VERY curious to see what the next raid tier will look like given that they have gone out of their way to talk about how much effort they put into encounter design this expansion and how that will primarily start manifesting in the second wing of the Arcadion. I have so far been decently satisfied with the Chaotic Alliance Raid as a new type of battle content and hope they continue to add encounters that highlight the individual strengths of certain jobs.
I'm so disappointed in this video before I even watch it this is so sad. I can't believe that already in the thumbnail my annoying and obvious joke was ruined. Clearly Caetsu hates their comment section.
Need better downtime abilities if we're keeping PCT around, really wish i can set ultimates to any caster but nope, PCT is basically required unless everyone in the group is a 85+ gamer.
@@kampfh7150 check top 100 and you'll find lots of green (even the top 10 every single group has at least 1 gray/green). Yes it's expected to play at higher level but sometimes the crits just arent in your favor. Main point is: of the top 200 teams only 1 doesn't have a PCT. It's that broken.
That sounds like a nightmare! 🤣 Fun fact: at the start of endwalker, ninjas raiju (which is available after raiton) was a two step combo, and BOTH of them were gap closers! Meaning that in a burst situation, ninja would essentially super glue to the boss for 6 or so gcds 😂
Vincent the Viper and Billy the Black mage are based damn xD Jokes aside,perfect balance is not possible and can never be achieved, and the more unique job design is implemented the less balanced the game will be. Best example is Picto,being unique in its down time options and design it eats downtime heavy fights like breakfast,in comparison to full uptime it’s almost mediocre now lol. That specific design makes it also pretty difficult to nerf Picto. Could remove its Raidbuff at least,and just change it to a big lay line which unlocks Rainbow drip. Good video btw:)
That's exactly right. Truly taking that advantage away from pictomancer likely will remove what makes it special (or at least make things like motifs feel almost pointless!) Even if it is perfectly possible to make it "perfectly balanced"! 😅
@@CaetsuChaijiCh I mean I’m just glad that I don’t need to balance it xD Gonna be interesting if the dev team has plans for Picto or not in coming patches. I ready my popcorn lol.
back in my wow days (warlord of draenor) i played BeastMaster Hunter. which i believe was mid to low on the dps charts. We did just fine through normal and early heroic difficulty. Trust me the dps checks werent our problem XD we werent great at dodging aoes
Perfect balance for me means that every job has a reason to be played in at least one piece of difficult content Asking "is blm or pct the better job?" should be as difficult to answer as "is blm or whm the better job?" You bring them for different reasons. It just doesn't feel like blm has that reason, or a few other jobs either
Game balance favouring some jobs slightly = good balance, favouring some jobs heavily = unbalanced, in most cases so long as the highest dps doesn't bring 15-20 % more dps than the lowest dps job it should be balanceable through utilities and varying raid scenarios that is until I see PCT dps vs MCH dps in fflogs 😂
It all comes back to encounter design where everyone is expected to perform a certain very strict choreography (especially in hardcore content), and because of that, you CAN'T have jobs dancing to their own beat otherwise they start looking more and more like a nail that needs to be hammered down or worse, they literally can't do the content at all because the fight completely wrecks them, or players actively avoid bringing that job because it's a penalty in their eyes. A perfectly good example of this is MCH, where people keep clamoring for it to be turned into a buffbot like BRD & DNC because it's obvious Square-Enix isn't going to give it more personal DPS to actually make it "selfish". The greatest damn irony is that players keep asking for this, and then in same breath complain about jobs being too "homogenized" but in ALSO constantly asking for harder fights, they necessitate jobs becoming samey or one pulling ahead when it doesn't have to deal with the things other jobs do. Recall how people seemingly liked that Dawntrail was harder, and then turned around and acted shocked when certain jobs, mostly notably BLM, became more mobile and such. Square-Enix knew Chaotic was coming, and what it would entail, and they felt pre-Dawntrail BLM wouldn't be able to manage it, and so here we are. It's not the same anymore, and PCT's design allows it to dunk it further in certain fights. It could be resolved by what you suggested; Make additional encounters designed around jobs and what they uniquely bring, but this is a game where they dropped job-specific quests because it was "too much work" so expecting them to design entire boss fights around jobs or even certain themes (like say, a dungeon where every mob has physical or magical immunity so jobs have to switch up target priority/DPS has to provide other utility on certain mob packs) feels like an impossible ask, moreso given the nature of how roulettes work and where it wouldn't do good for a job to randomly end up in the worst possible dungeon for them and be forced to leave, whether by kicking or taking the 30 minute penalty. At best, it might be possible to do it via a completely different piece of content deliberately centered around making players give all their job crystals something to do, but I also suspect it would be something solo, like some kind of expansion on the Duty Support/Squadron/Trust systems where you're purposefully putting together a party composition to take on a specific challenge the same way you might adjust your Blue Mage spellbook for the Masked Carnivale. Incidentally, we ARE getting Beastmaster this expansion... so it's possible we do get something that makes you pick and choose your little teammates for an encounter, but it's going to be side content instead of how the main game works.
Whatever happened to having fun in games like this? Ik many people do, it's just like let people play what their gonna play if they play it well. I'd prefer a good monk over a dragoon that has little experience with it in high lvl content. That's just me tho
For the majority of the game people should be happy with current balance. Extremes and chaotic there is no reason to care. Criterion maybe caring and I dont do savages but at least to my understanding it shouldnt be too bad outside of cases that are really rough like 2/3 tier in EW that people said were brutal. Ultimates are where I get people want the game to be as balanced as possible and in that case why not just…. Pull a frontlines and nerf/buff specific jobs to match the others as best as possible. Picto too strong? Nerf it 3% just for FRU alone and lift it the next patch. WAR lacking? Buff it 6% for FRU and remove it next patch. Its something I think only should be done for the newest ultimates but I think its a good idea
Let’s just put it in to context like this. You have a job like summoner and red mage that are very low DPS because they have a raise. When you’re doing criterion dungeons and some other content, you can’t do the raise and the jobs are not then given a buff while doing the content therefore that is making those jobsnearly unusable and way weaker than all other jobs doing that content. This is just the tip of the iceberg.
It's generally accepted that NIN's raid buff was moved from trick to mugh to pre-emptively nerf it in DSR, which makes the picto in FRU situation even funnier because nin wouldn't have even been as close to as strong as picto is rn
While I do agree with the broad strokes, the current balancing has some... problems, mainly the question is not "should utility be taxed" but "how much should utility be taxed". From what I see historically, the RDM/SMN rez tax varied, they always been lower than BLM but end ShB BLM looked like mid-top of melee while SMN/RDM were bottom of melee, in EW and DT, BLM is still mid-top of melee but RDM/SMN were demoted to physical ranged. Now you have a balance where within a single role, switching jobs gives you an extreme leg-up in DPS, to the point where a PCT/BLM/Melee that dies once still matches or outDPSes a RDM/SMN. I personally experienced this in both Savage and FRU as I went RDM for Savage and switched to VPR for reclears (after it accumulated enough gear) and started FRU as RDM and switched to PCT after P1 prog (now am about to clear). I experienced the DPS difference first hand my self. When I started out VPR in Savage, I was crap, I died once or twice during initial reclears, I didn't fully optimize my rotation correctly, I got green and blue parses... but the damage I contributed to the group was the same or even higher than my purple/orange parsing RDM the previous week (rDPS mind you, not just aDPS). Like really think about it, you can put in a lot of effort into optimizing a lower DPS job like say RDM, or you can press one button to switch jobs, do 'okay' or even slightly bad as a melee/PCT and outDPS a high-end RDM. In FRU, switching to PCT allowed some of my groups to clear phases with a DPS player damage down/death, while on RDM even a healer DD/death is almost too much. I recalled MrHappy saying this about PCT in FRU in I think Grinding Gear's podcast "what is a pictomancer with Weakness? A summoner". I don't think the utility tax should be this high to the point where a perfectly played rez caster/phys ranged loses to a melee/PCT that died. In a perfect world I would like to see a balance state where the current (Savage) rankings are maintained (except maybe MCH is higher, and BLM should be top) but the ranged/rez casters are given a significant boost so that the huge gap between them and the melees/PCT/BLM is much less. A dead/bad melee/PCT shouldn't be outDPSing a good RDM/SMN/Phys Ranged.
![Felix "Unfair" | [Stray Kids : SKZ-PLAYER]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/Oswujxm2Ag0/mqdefault.jpg)
As a fighting game player, the way I look at balance is this. If you want to have characters (or in this case, jobs) that feel distinct from each other in any category apart from aesthetics, there will always be situations where one shines and another struggles. A grappler is almost always going to have a losing matchup against a zoner, a caster will always have to stand still to cast spells, so while balance is important, what is more important is making sure everything is fun while keeping everything viable.
The main issue with balance in XIV is the relentless homogenisation. If you try to make every class (or job) do the same thing, then a 1% difference in damage output makes one objectively better than the other.
When the classes bring unique things to the table, minor differences in damage output can be ignored because there will still be a reason to bring different classes.
Blizzard already figured this out 20 years ago. It's pretty mindblowing that SE is still oblivious. WoW has never been a perfectly balanced game but do you know what the optimal Battlegrounds comp was in vanilla WoW? It was 1 of each class because they all had unique buffs and abilities that made them useful.
And this is why they ruined summoner and bard because they got tired of balancing dots
@@mosley3485 yeah exactly, utility in XIV is pointless since all the cool utility stuff is removed, BRD could help with MP regen, NIN had enmity reduction ability for teammates, all the damage resistance debuffs and jobs having slows or stuns was impactful since enemies (even some bosses) could be slowed or stunned which is wild, now everything is removed so the "utility" in XIV is just mitigation or healing, there is nothing else, in WoW rogues have AOE stealth, some classes have bloodlust, Hunter has misdirection and traps, warlock has summoning and demon gate warp, it has all kinds of cool utility and reason to bring each one.
and its not only the utility that makes the classes better in WoW than jobs in XIV, its also the gimmicks and fun of them, like outlaw rogue, you literally throw a dice and get random buffs each time, rolling again gives you new buffs but you lose the old ones, so its a fun minigame of you rolling the dice and seeing what buffs you get, you get high dopamine when you roll well and its not awful feeling when you roll badly either since its designed so well for the enjoyment, does that mean outlaw is bad? no, its not the best spec but its not horrible, you can get keystone master with it in M+, you could probably clear raids with it, people in WoW constantly whine about balance, but they have it so good when the class and spec designs are so fun and unique still while keeping it somewhat balanced, meanwhile XIV jobs are homogenized beyond recognition of what they were in early expasions, all utility and game mechs have been removed and the balance STILL manages to be absolute shitshow
People complain about job homogenization, then they complain about outliers from the damage balance, but I think this video proves that you CANT have both without accounting for *every single possible scenario*
That is exactly the problem indeed!
You cannot have both indeed, though it's worth stating that it isn't exactly a zero sum game either.
Anyhow, plenty of people who understand this dichotomy specifically expect that the trade off between job design and balance "pays off" so to say. In exhange for more homogenized job design compared to some other MMO:s one would expect to have very good job balance compared to other MMOs. Hence standard for what is considered "balanced" in FFXIV is so much higher than elsewhere.
And when one or more jobs are not considered balanced enough by these strict standards, people are going to feel miffed because the aforementioned trade off between job design and balance is not paying off at that moment.
You could easily make FF14 perfectly balanced by turning every fight into the 2nd boss of Bardam's Mettle. Just remove the boss HP bar and healing, and just make it so avoiding all mechanics to the end makes you win. It is how combat works already just with the fiddly uncessery bits taken out that complicate it. Something tells me people will complain if they did that though.
That would certainly be a brave move!
"we've decided that attacking in Combat is sort of meaningless, so all fights are now beaten by simply dodging enemies until they get tired!" 😂
FFXIV is already reaching that garbage state. Most if not all boss fights are basically doing repetitive & stupid dance routines on a square or round platform
@@tinyblackmageyou know, you don’t HAVE to play a game you see as “garbage”
@ already did ;)
@tinyblackmage it's always been like that lad. It's not "turning" into it. It was always a choreographed dance. All the way from 2.0.
“When given the chance, players will always find ways to optimize the fun out of a game.”
Also a thing that a lot of players tend to disregard is when certain jobs having advantages over others is under the assumption that skill level is normalized for, so if you're not equally proficient with those jobs then it will most likely still be a dps contribution loss on average compared to if you played the "inferior" job that you're way more comfortable with. Unless as you said that all jobs played exactly the same which would be extremely boring in my opinion.
That is exactly right!
So often, difficulty of jobs, and experience with them, are simply assumed to be a non issue 😅
for me balance has always just been "can i do this with any character/job available" i mean sure there are better options but that's fine. i don't go to an ice cream shop and complain because one flavour is more popular. as long as they're all available that's what i care about
This comment section is rather well behaved. I'm kinda impressed actually.
this video is so well made and thought-out. i agree 100%
I think in general the community focuses too much on things being 'balanced', rather than the game being fun. FFXIV isn't release Wrath, where Death Knights are miles ahead of every other class.
I do think the removal of elements such as TP, damage type debuffs (of course came with its own issues of homogenizing party comps), and in general decreasing the difficulty of playing your class has had an impact on what we value in a class. rDPS has always been the end-all be-all metric for raiders, but the less utility is required/helpful (as you mention) the more people will stare at charts.
Of course, Heavensward and Stormblood had a lot of unnecessary complexity which just felt bad - like how giving MNK arrow was more of a nerf than a buff - so I do think most changes have been for the better, but I do also think it would be nice if utility (apart from swift rez) had more of a purpose.
yeah exactly, there will always be people who whine about balance or difficulty but you just need to ignore them somewhat, the thing with current XIV tho its just that its already homogenized to the point where this amount of imbalance is not acceptable really, like for real the balance of jobs is almost WoW level bad, yet WoW embraces the fun and gimmicky aspect of the classes and specs while still keeping the game moderately balanced.
also the BIG problem with XIV is that there is no real way to go back, devs try and keep old content "relevant" meaning that it must be clearable no matter how old the content is, the shift from complex stormblood to homogenized shadowbringers was easy, since content that was designed for the gimmicky stuff like enmity, TP and unique utilities are easier when the gimmicks are removed, but they can NEVER bring back old enmity or TP, why? because doing current savage and ultimates would be probably impossible, imagine doing TOP with old mitigations, people would keep dying left and right, or imagine doing DSR P7 with old enmity, a phase that requires constant tank swaps and failing it once means wipe, its just not possible
Not going to lie. My first thought was this was going to be about Monk's perfect balance at lv 50
I knew it! 😂
Same. I'm happy that others have done that calculation.
I appreciate the deep dive into this as I agree that perfect balance is impossible. For the most part, I am fairly happy with the balance of the game outside of the outlier that is PCT. I have always told anyone that you should play the job you feel comfortable playing on - your comfort level will mean you will naturally play that job at a higher performance than a meta job that you don't enjoy as much - unless luck happens to be on your side and your favorite job is also the meta job of the season.
It's also why I dislike players who push for full meta compositions as forcing someone off their comfort pick can easily lead to a lower overall performance despite the potential performance ceiling being much higher. The only people who should heavily care about composition and performance should be those whom are challenging the most bleeding edge of content and are trying to compete with each other for those coveted positions (fastest speed kill, world first, etc.).
For most of us rank and file players, enjoy the role and job you like and diversify your job pool if you feel like you want to try - do not diversify if people are forcing you to do so as it will just leave a bad taste in your mouth more often than naught.
[Edit] Also, don't forget that you put the math out that Perfect Balance is mostly perfectly imbalanced at level 50 MNK, lol [/edit]
Absolutely. I also give the advice to focus on a job you enjoy as all jobs are capable of beating all the content, and choosing a job you like is most likely to lead to a better performance from you! 😊
(and indeed, monks perfect balance is ironically not perfectly balanced!)
You are a fellow mathematician!! That just... makes so much sense. Maybe you have said it before and I just simply wasn't paying attention. But I feel so represented, my thought process that is, on these kind of videos and I appreciate your detailed explanaitions on the myth buster series and those like them. Thanks for all your work!
I may have mentioned it on stream and such! 😂 Thank you so much! 😄
@@CaetsuChaijiCh ah, again logical. I'm, as some may say, a youtube frog. I don't, or can't, watch twitch/streams regularly. No need to thank, you deserve all the praise for the analysis you bring to the ffxiv topics.
@BlueQmas i do stream here on RUclips though in case you'd give it a try! You can also check some of the Vods if you can't wait for a Livestream! Many of my regular watchers praise the fact we often discuss various topics on stream which sometimes can get mathy too! Although I do understand Livestreams aren't for everyone! 😊
another mathematician reporting in!
One of the nice things about avoiding high-end content is you can play whatever job you like and never worry about balance.
I think what I'd want out of balance in this game is for every role and job to feel meaningful in some way. The ways this can be achieved are different of course. I like playing healer but often feel meaningless when a warrior is around since I often don't need to do anything for a large part of the duty. I like playing phys ranged but often feel meaningless because my advantage of free movement isn't really used in fights nowadays, so it feels like I'm innately at a disadvantage for no reason. I can imagine some black mage players also feel meaningless in FRU because picto is so much better that bringing black mage may feel like a detriment. I don't think perfect dps balance is what's necessary, but rather job meaningfulness. If the free movement or the interrupts of phys ranged got way more use, the jobs could do less damage and still feel very meaningful as an example.
Oh, you're a mathematician? No wonder I like you and your videos so much. :D Physics here, but thought experiments are more or less the same.
Your point #1 was adjacent to what I was going to jump into the comments and say before watching the video: The fact that players are aiming at LITERAL perfection, and aren't content with "better balance than every other available mmo."
The other thought that floated across my brainpan was that the imperfections are a natural result of the same variance in play style and rhythm that everyone claims they want. I saw a recent discussion on how a huge part of Marvel Rivals' success right now is BECAUSE it's unbalanced. The characters all feel and play totally different from one another, and people love that. The push toward perfect balance bumps up against people's desire for their favorite job to feel unique and special.
That is exactly right! And also precisely what I was going for with the gradual move towards all jobs being the same just to reach perfect balance! 😅
The way these kinds of very imbalanced games reach a point where things still make sense is of course that one option is better in certain situations, and another is better in others, which I suppose is where ffxiv sort of falls short at the moment, given how crucial "most damage" has become! 😅
Perhaps that would suggest another substantial reason why PCT is decried is because it's somewhat more fun than a lot of jobs currently are...? (Looking at you, DRK/WAR/SMN/any healer).
Where is that video essay about why ffxiv need “perfect balance”? I can’t find it.
This is exactly it! I’ve been seeing tier lists recently about Rivals and one of the things they always mention with Damage characters is “why would I play this one DPS that has to use their ability combos to kill when I could just play Hela?”
And my answer is always “I don’t wanna fuckin *play* Hela.”
Human nature is the thing that makes the talk of perfect balance. We are imperfect beings that strive towards perfection, even though we know absolute perfection is unattainable. And if it could attained, then what? Well, there's simply nothing left.
18:00 regarding this. I have been thinking a lot about WHY the strongest dps composition is so much better than the weakest one in something like FRU where you more or less see every mechanic regardless of how much dps you can do, and I think it comes down to being able to compensate for deaths.
Because deaths have a minor overall effect on your raidwide dps, even 1% increase to your overall damage from say picto instead of black mage, can give your the leniency to die maybe 3 or 4 times instead of 1 or 2 times within the fight. A death takes away 25% damage from one member for like. 2 minutes. Which feels bad in the moment, but over a 20 minute fight and with 8 players is relatively insignificant.
I don't have any perfect solutions but my initial thoughts are that for this very high end content maybe mistakes should be more severely punished but the actual dps check lessened so that, regardless of party comp, 1 mistake in a phase lets you hit the next phase but 2 will not. Something like deaths healing the boss, or damage downs persisting after raise.
I suppose another way could also be bosses imposing some sort of inability to raise party members as frequently. This would weaken certain jobs (RDM, SMN), but would also give justification for buffing them as a result! 🤔😊
Great deep dive into the most important part of this "balance" equation - the player psychology and how they make choices. This is a discussion at the very root of everything, what makes us to choose one thing over the other, and especially when complete strangers are involved.
I will say here what I said to someone a few months ago in a subreddit about this: Game's need to get more sloppy again because everything is just devolving into extreme optimization of tools and functions.
Not just MMO's, all of it. Fighting games, FPS, Battle Royals, get dirty and sloppy with all of it. We're circling this drain of needing every aspect of everything balanced the entire way to the singular point of all the uniqueness or fun is just sapped out.
It all becomes nothing but a uniformed sequence of moves and results without deviation because to do anything else is unoptimized and a fail state. I don't know why game design has become this in today's world, but it all feels like the space of fun is getting smaller and smaller as more gets this overtuneing pass ripping all the fun to be found out.
I agree whole heartedly. The big problem i think is that even if everything was completely out of whack unbalanced, players might still just pick the best options, because to me it feels more like how players approach games, than how the games are.
However, as observed, making things more balanced doesn't change much anyway because the players that really care about everything being perfectly balanced may never be truly satisfied! 😅
@@CaetsuChaijiCh to your last point, I get players are going to seek whatever perfection looks like in whatever the game, but leave that to the player(s) and not the devs accommodating that practice. For some reason it feels like game devs have just given in and given that person all the functions to excel at that practice to the determine of everything; other players, the flow of the game, the action in the game.
Just, stop giving in to it and let thoses that seek that perfection do what they want, but not twist the entire thing to suit them and it.
There's a lot of good discussion points here, and I think there's a lot to be said for allowing jobs to have their advantages, like cleave damage and downtime gains, but at the same time not allowing those advantages to be particularly massive. We can nitpick about cleave damage and NIN/SCH in alliance raids, but in the current balance of the game, I don't personally think that any job other than Picto has such a massive advantage in a certain scenario that it actually warrants addressing.
I'm a player that has barely a week in gameplay, and with all the classes in the game, I'd rather them be different, so the identity of the class is the most important part.
I want my favorite job to be fun, not to be the best. And it seems like some people can't handle the latter.
That is the best way to look at it, and that is indeed also the kind of point I'm aiming for: we could have everything be equal, but it'll probably be very boring! 😅
Also welcome to the game! I hope you have a great time!
The chase of perfection leads to the death of flavor. I get that XIVs raid scene is highly motivated by having strong competitive numbers and thusly the devs are encouraged to not let classes shine by design. But man would it feel to have classes like ninja hit a bit weaker personally for the benefit of reigniting some 1m group bursts again. I get why it’s been done away with. Doesn’t change that it would be fun to me tho!
I think it'd be cool if we saw some of these niches through party comps rather than individual jobs though we've seen the extreme of that too. There's gotta be a fun middle ground there.
The problem with pct is that yes, having unique advantages and downsides is great for variety in the game BUT the trouble with pct is that it just doesn't have any downside. It has everything - raid buff, HUGE pad into the raid buff, huge gains from downtime but also shines with dps in full uptime, party utility that's better than anything the other casters have, dash which gives movement speed, on demand instant casts, and it's relatively easy to pilot for what it brings to the table. The ONLY thing it doesn't have for a full sweep is a rez and let's be honest that just doesn't balance it out. If you want pct to have insane gains from downtime that would be just fine but why is it also shining in literally every other deparment?
if everything damaged, mitted, and healed exactly the same, then it would only be 1 WAR, 7 WHM and one button spam, completely trivializing the entire game, and making even ultimate raiding feel unaccomplished
Completely balanced classes make for a boring game. Classes should be 'around' the same level but each class should have something that makes it stand out in a specific way. Unbalanced is more fun, when every class is overpowered in a certain way, it makes for a way more fun game. The devs seem obsessed with balancing the game strictly around the super hard content and savage raids, the thing that only a small portion of the playerbase even touches, which limits encounter design and makes classes so boring.
I don't care for potency, gauge changes, etc
All I want is Magick Barrier on RDM to either be a 90 second CD or last for 15 seconds
That would be nice! I was actually surprised it is only 10 seconds!
Perfect Balance is being uneven, as it is in life. Perfect Balance is boring having hicups is what makes it fun
In my opinion only 2 examples of unacceptable balance in recent years has been 6.0 PLD and current PCT. Everything else has been whatever, like NIN and SCH in Chaotic. Outside of those its never really made a huge difference in job selection.
PCT I don't think needs an explanation, currently in any fight featuring downtime it has a far greater advantage to generate resource and destroy its competition with several "nuke" skills that cost it virtually no downsides. I think PCT shows some cracks in the way jobs are designed during downtime. This alone makes not bringing a PCT into FRU a handicap.
Likewise PLD in 6.0 was a victim of the start of the 2 minute meta, it's potency was drawn out much longer than just a 20 second burst and suffered from the time it took to build momentum, same reason we ended up with pre-pull FoF at 18s to go straight into goring blade and Requiescat. In 6.0 for the week 1 kills I remember having to switch to DRK for P3S and above just because of the crazy damage discrepancy, the exact opposite of PCT in FRU currently.
They reasonably fixed it by 6.1 through potency adjustments, but the 6.3 rework was what it really needed to get up to standard.
Indeed, another way both of these extremes can be viewed, is that pictomancer is the perfect answer to the bursty design of combat in ffxiv, which is even more emphasized in fights with downtime.
Meanwhile old paladin was the sustained damage tank, with the smallest peaks in damage. So not only was it not REALLY great at utilizing the burst windows raid buffs provided, but it was more heavily impacted by downtime. In some ways, you could almost say viper is a more modern take on this super sustained attacker, where it is at least kitted with *a* burst button it can use on the fly to circumvent its weakness.
I also do agree that some imbalance is probably fine! Just not all the way! 😅
@CaetsuChaijiCh The comparison of old PLD to current VPR is actually a really good connection, a modern day sustained damage job which unfortunately came out at the same time as PCT... which just emphasises just how poorly it performs compared to the burst jobs in content where it matters. A real shame if you ask me!
I don't know if this counts, but the Machinist was excluded from PF during P8S or even that tier, I think due to very poor damage
@wildinstinct1585 i specifically recall as a bystander seeing first paladin getting excluded. Then machinist. I believe warrior also started to get weird looks alongside red mage. In some part, the real problem was that the fight was insanely difficult and very slightly over tuned. But it did have this effect where players decided to look at other ways to "fix it". At the time I actually made a video on the concept of good jobs being bad. It focuses a bit on the idea of "a fish will be stupid if it is judged on its ability to climb a tree", because jobs like machinist are great in the specific contexts they excel at (take deep dungeons for instance), but those properties mean nothing in savage raiding!
If you are curious about the video I'll put a link here, but it IS from a while back so I will sound very different 😅
ruclips.net/video/33xY6xxuFjI/видео.htmlsi=K65AP5jO8-8UJVl1
I remember Machinist back in 4.4 and how it was both terrible DPS and extremely clunky and unintuitive to play.
i think the issue isn't as much balance with ff14 as it is that....party finder is very gatekeepey about stuff and people feel like they are forced to play 'the best'
not all PF parties do that but it's a common enough issue
Oh that is definitely also a problem, and is indeed a knock on effect of the whole "Billy black mage" example! Fortunately it doesn't apply to all groups thankfully!
I saw someone say that World of Warcraft is better balanced than FFXIV because there's more of an even distribution of classes in high end content.
Completely ignoring that to change class in WoW, you have to make a whole new character, and people might be a bit attached to their main after playing it for 20 years.
I don't understand job complaints in FF14 only because you can play all jobs on one character.
If you want to do the best in [insert role] and [insert job] is the best well just play that.
Never, ever, let the meta be the reason you don't play the job you want. If you can't get invited to statics, make your own static.
All the content is designed to be beaten with all jobs and wouldn't you rather prove you can do it even with a lesser job for an even greater claim of difficulty?
That is indeed how I prefer to approach it too, but unfortunately a lot of players care more about what is optimal than what they enjoy playing 😰😅
My static were struggling on FRU P1 dps check, but then I switch to PCT (from MCH) and we meet dps check easily (in p1 doing around 24k rdps as MCH, around 38k as PCT, the difference is absurd). I much prefer playing MCH but SE really hates MCH this expansion.
The balancing in this game is in a sad state when job composition is the difference between whether you can clear content or not (or making it significantly easier) & you end up being forced into playing specific jobs - a lot of statics/PF groups are requiring PCT. Something needs to change, I don't really know what, and I don't think we'll see it until 8.0, raiding in Dawntrail is just going to continue to be a disappointing experience for us people forced into playing PCT.
People commonly say "content in this game is designed to be cleared by any job composition" but you also have to keep in mind how much time you'll spend. A party learning FRU without a PCT is going to spend so many more hours progging than a party with a PCT because PCT provides more leniency, you can have several people get damage downs or die and still meet DPS check while without PCT you'll have to wall it whenever someone makes a mistake, and you all have to be playing absolutely perfect to meet DPS check.
BLU is perfectly balanced
Even Chess is not 100% perfectly balanced. Why? Because its turn based and some1 goes first. So how is a game like FFXIV gonna have a chance?
Very true indeed! 🤔😊 That is a good point!
18:00 Bardam Savage let's go!
I think the root of the problem, for lack of a better word, lies in that the only form of progression in XIV is gear score and the only way to raise gear score is raid bosses. So the only metric that jobs are measured by is how well they do in the 8-man raid boss setting (and possibly now 24 man, pending how frequently we get Chaotic fights).
My personal wish (read: dream) to approach the issue would be for different relevant fights/content that allow enable the different strengths of jobs to shine. By "relevant", I mean these theoretical fights could be used to acquire BiS gear. Put the gear and upgrade materials in the high floors of a Deep Dungeon and range physical has a reason to exist besides the 1% main stat boost, for example.
And yes, I know this will never happen, that's why I said it's a wish/dream.
If they made Criterion give out the same level rewards as Chaotic and Savage then it could balance things out a little, in a dungeon setting WAR is the best pick for a tank because they are basically immortal when fighting packs where as DRK is a lot better for Raids with its high dps and TBN working a lot better for predictable boss attacks than the consistent dmg of trash packs.
Vsauce jumpscare 11:41
Personally, I'm very okay with trading some more numerical balance for more stuff that lets players make more choices and express more skill. Paladin abilities like Clemency, Cover, and Passage of Arms are perfect to me.
PCT is, ironically, TOO well designed. A flexible caster with a raid buff and a personal defensive that can become raidwide that also rewards you with a lower CD for effective use. The fact that it has a lot of control over where its damage goes makes it the logical conclusion of the 2m burst structure that permeates the game and allows it to transform downtime into uptime. It is a perfect job, and that reveals problems inherent to the very structure of the game. The way my friend puts it is that "Pictomancer is the only job playing Dawntrail. Every other job is stuck in a previous version of the game."
I am VERY curious to see what the next raid tier will look like given that they have gone out of their way to talk about how much effort they put into encounter design this expansion and how that will primarily start manifesting in the second wing of the Arcadion. I have so far been decently satisfied with the Chaotic Alliance Raid as a new type of battle content and hope they continue to add encounters that highlight the individual strengths of certain jobs.
Melee should probably have some form of ranged rotation so the ranged tax is less
I'm so disappointed in this video before I even watch it this is so sad.
I can't believe that already in the thumbnail my annoying and obvious joke was ruined.
Clearly Caetsu hates their comment section.
I'm too fast and quick! 😂
It is not that fdifficulty to nerf pictomancer, the balance is not the issue, the devs' phylosophy is
Need better downtime abilities if we're keeping PCT around, really wish i can set ultimates to any caster but nope, PCT is basically required unless everyone in the group is a 85+ gamer.
It's either that, or all the dps with less downtime advantage must win on sustained damage, but even then, that just means things get even weirder! 😅
Tbf, someone being a purple parser sounds like a reasonable expectation for PF'ing Ultimates
@@kampfh7150 check top 100 and you'll find lots of green (even the top 10 every single group has at least 1 gray/green). Yes it's expected to play at higher level but sometimes the crits just arent in your favor.
Main point is: of the top 200 teams only 1 doesn't have a PCT. It's that broken.
I am not good at this balancing stuff, but what if every melee attack was a gap closer? That'd make things balanced I'm sure!
That sounds like a nightmare! 🤣
Fun fact: at the start of endwalker, ninjas raiju (which is available after raiton) was a two step combo, and BOTH of them were gap closers! Meaning that in a burst situation, ninja would essentially super glue to the boss for 6 or so gcds 😂
Vincent the Viper and Billy the Black mage are based damn xD
Jokes aside,perfect balance is not possible and can never be achieved, and the more unique job design is implemented the less balanced the game will be. Best example is Picto,being unique in its down time options and design it eats downtime heavy fights like breakfast,in comparison to full uptime it’s almost mediocre now lol. That specific design makes it also pretty difficult to nerf Picto. Could remove its Raidbuff at least,and just change it to a big lay line which unlocks Rainbow drip.
Good video btw:)
That's exactly right. Truly taking that advantage away from pictomancer likely will remove what makes it special (or at least make things like motifs feel almost pointless!)
Even if it is perfectly possible to make it "perfectly balanced"! 😅
@@CaetsuChaijiCh
I mean I’m just glad that I don’t need to balance it xD
Gonna be interesting if the dev team has plans for Picto or not in coming patches. I ready my popcorn lol.
back in my wow days (warlord of draenor) i played BeastMaster Hunter. which i believe was mid to low on the dps charts. We did just fine through normal and early heroic difficulty. Trust me the dps checks werent our problem XD we werent great at dodging aoes
Perfect balance for me means that every job has a reason to be played in at least one piece of difficult content
Asking "is blm or pct the better job?" should be as difficult to answer as "is blm or whm the better job?"
You bring them for different reasons. It just doesn't feel like blm has that reason, or a few other jobs either
Game balance favouring some jobs slightly = good balance, favouring some jobs heavily = unbalanced, in most cases so long as the highest dps doesn't bring 15-20 % more dps than the lowest dps job it should be balanceable through utilities and varying raid scenarios that is until I see PCT dps vs MCH dps in fflogs 😂
i never played wow, so i like it unbalanced.
that's why bozja and eureka is fun.
use the tools to get big damage.
I’d rather have more job uniqueness and creatively implemented abilities than perfect balance (not the ability)
It all comes back to encounter design where everyone is expected to perform a certain very strict choreography (especially in hardcore content), and because of that, you CAN'T have jobs dancing to their own beat otherwise they start looking more and more like a nail that needs to be hammered down or worse, they literally can't do the content at all because the fight completely wrecks them, or players actively avoid bringing that job because it's a penalty in their eyes.
A perfectly good example of this is MCH, where people keep clamoring for it to be turned into a buffbot like BRD & DNC because it's obvious Square-Enix isn't going to give it more personal DPS to actually make it "selfish". The greatest damn irony is that players keep asking for this, and then in same breath complain about jobs being too "homogenized" but in ALSO constantly asking for harder fights, they necessitate jobs becoming samey or one pulling ahead when it doesn't have to deal with the things other jobs do.
Recall how people seemingly liked that Dawntrail was harder, and then turned around and acted shocked when certain jobs, mostly notably BLM, became more mobile and such. Square-Enix knew Chaotic was coming, and what it would entail, and they felt pre-Dawntrail BLM wouldn't be able to manage it, and so here we are. It's not the same anymore, and PCT's design allows it to dunk it further in certain fights.
It could be resolved by what you suggested; Make additional encounters designed around jobs and what they uniquely bring, but this is a game where they dropped job-specific quests because it was "too much work" so expecting them to design entire boss fights around jobs or even certain themes (like say, a dungeon where every mob has physical or magical immunity so jobs have to switch up target priority/DPS has to provide other utility on certain mob packs) feels like an impossible ask, moreso given the nature of how roulettes work and where it wouldn't do good for a job to randomly end up in the worst possible dungeon for them and be forced to leave, whether by kicking or taking the 30 minute penalty.
At best, it might be possible to do it via a completely different piece of content deliberately centered around making players give all their job crystals something to do, but I also suspect it would be something solo, like some kind of expansion on the Duty Support/Squadron/Trust systems where you're purposefully putting together a party composition to take on a specific challenge the same way you might adjust your Blue Mage spellbook for the Masked Carnivale. Incidentally, we ARE getting Beastmaster this expansion... so it's possible we do get something that makes you pick and choose your little teammates for an encounter, but it's going to be side content instead of how the main game works.
I really want to play 14 again
Whatever happened to having fun in games like this? Ik many people do, it's just like let people play what their gonna play if they play it well. I'd prefer a good monk over a dragoon that has little experience with it in high lvl content. That's just me tho
If all average perfomance dps are within around 5% of each other and can clear all content then it should be fine.
For the majority of the game people should be happy with current balance. Extremes and chaotic there is no reason to care. Criterion maybe caring and I dont do savages but at least to my understanding it shouldnt be too bad outside of cases that are really rough like 2/3 tier in EW that people said were brutal. Ultimates are where I get people want the game to be as balanced as possible and in that case why not just…. Pull a frontlines and nerf/buff specific jobs to match the others as best as possible. Picto too strong? Nerf it 3% just for FRU alone and lift it the next patch. WAR lacking? Buff it 6% for FRU and remove it next patch. Its something I think only should be done for the newest ultimates but I think its a good idea
Let’s just put it in to context like this. You have a job like summoner and red mage that are very low DPS because they have a raise. When you’re doing criterion dungeons and some other content, you can’t do the raise and the jobs are not then given a buff while doing the content therefore that is making those jobsnearly unusable and way weaker than all other jobs doing that content. This is just the tip of the iceberg.
as always the problem is people, people succ in a whole lot of ways
Hi you can creating one vídeo ninja job?
I already made a guide for ninja 😊 here is a link! ruclips.net/video/K-cvuYT7g1k/видео.html
@@CaetsuChaijiCh where the best ninja or viper?
@Lusitano- they are close enough. Play the one you like better. 😊
@@CaetsuChaijiCh and caster who most easy sry boring
It's generally accepted that NIN's raid buff was moved from trick to mugh to pre-emptively nerf it in DSR, which makes the picto in FRU situation even funnier because nin wouldn't have even been as close to as strong as picto is rn
While I do agree with the broad strokes, the current balancing has some... problems, mainly the question is not "should utility be taxed" but "how much should utility be taxed".
From what I see historically, the RDM/SMN rez tax varied, they always been lower than BLM but end ShB BLM looked like mid-top of melee while SMN/RDM were bottom of melee, in EW and DT, BLM is still mid-top of melee but RDM/SMN were demoted to physical ranged.
Now you have a balance where within a single role, switching jobs gives you an extreme leg-up in DPS, to the point where a PCT/BLM/Melee that dies once still matches or outDPSes a RDM/SMN. I personally experienced this in both Savage and FRU as I went RDM for Savage and switched to VPR for reclears (after it accumulated enough gear) and started FRU as RDM and switched to PCT after P1 prog (now am about to clear). I experienced the DPS difference first hand my self. When I started out VPR in Savage, I was crap, I died once or twice during initial reclears, I didn't fully optimize my rotation correctly, I got green and blue parses... but the damage I contributed to the group was the same or even higher than my purple/orange parsing RDM the previous week (rDPS mind you, not just aDPS). Like really think about it, you can put in a lot of effort into optimizing a lower DPS job like say RDM, or you can press one button to switch jobs, do 'okay' or even slightly bad as a melee/PCT and outDPS a high-end RDM. In FRU, switching to PCT allowed some of my groups to clear phases with a DPS player damage down/death, while on RDM even a healer DD/death is almost too much. I recalled MrHappy saying this about PCT in FRU in I think Grinding Gear's podcast "what is a pictomancer with Weakness? A summoner". I don't think the utility tax should be this high to the point where a perfectly played rez caster/phys ranged loses to a melee/PCT that died.
In a perfect world I would like to see a balance state where the current (Savage) rankings are maintained (except maybe MCH is higher, and BLM should be top) but the ranged/rez casters are given a significant boost so that the huge gap between them and the melees/PCT/BLM is much less. A dead/bad melee/PCT shouldn't be outDPSing a good RDM/SMN/Phys Ranged.