It would be amazing if all options were equally good, but why is that not possible?
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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!
No going to lie. My first thought was this was going to be about Monk's perfect balance at lv 50
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.
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:)
this video is so well made and thought-out. i agree 100%
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.
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!
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 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.
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.
I ultimately don't feel like there's any need to "fix" anything other than taking ahold of the FFlog Andys and SHAKING them really hard
If all average perfomance dps are within around 5% of each other and can clear all content then it should be fine.
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.
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.
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.
i never played wow, so i like it unbalanced.
that's why bozja and eureka is fun.
use the tools to get big damage.
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.
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?
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
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.
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
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.
Perfect Balance is being uneven, as it is in life. Perfect Balance is boring having hicups is what makes it fun
I really want to play 14 again
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]
Melee should probably have some form of ranged rotation so the ranged tax is less
I don't agree with a lot of your points here.
1:08 How much of a difference there is between jobs does matter to people. Yes there are one or two people who only look at ranking, but what most people look at is the comparison between the difference skill makes vs the difference the job makes. 0:55 When most people complain about balance they are largely complaining about how base job potency differences overpower their skill differences. People take pride in their jobs and want to feel that their skill matters more than the inherent differences. This even applies to party utility. The difference between a job with sustain and a job without is zero if you can't use the sustain due to knowledge/skill. 3:17 In my experiences with Party Finder as well, 99% of the time no one cares what you go in as or the party comp. They just want to finally have a group of players who can do their job. With the exception of PCT recently… because the damage difference overshadows skill differences.
While non-offensive actions do take a role in balance, you CAN account for them and the devs are perfectly capable of providing an exact potency difference for those actions alongside an explanation that players can contest. "Since X tank has X% more mitigation, we gave them X potency." And the community could provide feedback to whether they feel it's justified or not. This is still balance.
6:16 It is entirely possible for all jobs to do exactly the same DPS. rDPS and aDPS would have to be accounted for separately, however with simple spreadsheeting you can perfectly balance jobs. You would have to assign an rDPS potency difference per aDPS adjusted potency to account for party composition, however like with non-offensives the devs can perfectly account for that potency and provide reasoning that the community could contest. 14 is uniquely capable of this because of the GCD–oGCD and cooldown system, where everything is either "filler," or a CD based free potency, or a CD based opportunity cost GCD. Compare that to other games where animation locks, skill paths, resources gauges, gear effects, weakness/resistances all make it much more complex to balance to the point of impossibility.
Fundamentally the issue is job identity in the fantasy of the game, not job performance. "Easy answer: I like Viper" is the only answer that fundamentally should matter in this game. It used to matter far more and people had far more of an attachment to their jobs, but now as we get more jobs and we get less non-combat identity (and less (zero) content that allows expression of identity) the attitude towards jobs has completely changed. 13:32 People will play hard jobs. People will find hard jobs easy and easy jobs hard. People will seek out their preferences on their own without intervention. The idea that the "easiest" job would end up ostensibly better isn't true. Most people don't care about "easier" what they care about is their personal experience with it. And as I said before, most other people also only care about other people's experience with a job than the job's inherent ease, because that is a larger indicator of their performance. And fundamentally, if SKILL is the only thing determining your performance, then that job is perfectly balanced regardless of how easy or difficult it is. That is what we want.
The fact that when thinking of "which job you should play" when everything is perfectly balanced, the first thought was "ease" is more of an indicator of the fundamental issues with job design in the game right now than it is the impossibility of job balance. Because in almost every personal discussion I've had about which jobs people should pick, it hasn't been about ease at all. It's been about the job quests, the design, the feel, the aesthetics, the SFX. "You should pick up Ninja so you can move around faster." "You should pick up a healer/SMN/RDM so you have access to a raise." "You should pick up SMN/SCH so you can level two jobs at once." "You should pick up DRG/DRK/PLD for story reasons." Jobs need to exist in the game outside of combat so that performance is not the only measure of a job, which allows us to go for perfect balance without any of the mentioned hypothetical downsides.
Just because you can't untie damage and utility doesn't mean that you can't assign a value to them and perfectly balance them accordingly. Downtime, cleave damage, out-of-combat time, disengagement, healing and mitigation, substat variance, all of these can be given a potency equivalent and accounted for precisely. And if we did people would be able to more freely pick jobs based on other criteria that personally reflects them.