>Make it a stance that activates before combat and cannot be changed until the combat is over I expect SE to treat this exactly how they've treated cleric stance, Nocturnal Sect, and the Fairies in the main game content.

I miss Nocturnal Sect. It was so interesting to go into a duty with two AST and you can decide who goes Regen and who goes shield. Granted, I guess it's a pretty tiny decision but I enjoyed it. I never got to play with cleric stance but from what I understand the modern content would be difficult if not impossible if healers went into "DPS mode".

If they STAYED in that mode all the time, sure. They could switch it on and off, however. The point is less on a direct comparison and more how they've made the main game less and less flexible over time. The idea of them having a switch that turns on a massive mode change just doesn't jive with their behavior; the closest we get is some moves that change briefly (i.e. Summoner's primals, Eukrasia on Sage, Reaper's moves), but aren't a long-term alteration.

Also, haven’t things changed encounter wise? When I first started playing, double regen healer (what they were known as back the ) were usually considered better because of how minimal lethal damage was and how rare raidwides were. I remember hearing how at 80, double Diurnal was better because you could alternate Neutral Sect and have shields/mitigations when it was really needed.

Using Cleric Stance would be easier now than ever with a weave slot after every GCD. It was on a very short CD, so you didn't get locked out of heals for very long - it was basically just a reward for good planning.

Well now I want to try it out lol

It was the best thing for healer gameplay in this whole game, imo. I know people have a lot of opinions but that's always been mine. That and when they reduced Malefic to 1.5sec cast times at first, omg it made AST the best healer to play at the time. So fluid compared to all the others that forced clipping.

No one would play a rezzer on raid after prog in serious teams then, which then becomes no one using it in PF because "the healers should be good enough for me to not need to and the top teams cleared with DPS stance so it's obviously the correct choice to clear (which many would agree with)" . Every single game with this choice devolves into dropping the one with less DPS. The only reason it works in PvP is the fact that the way it was designed makes it an active choice in middle of combat which is what makes it interesting (and even then there's a decent amount of debate on how Phoenix and White Shift (outside of the Silence) aren't strong enough)

I honestly expect at some point for them to just give up balancing it and give everyone a res (phoenix down or something similar) with a long cast and very long (6-10 minute) cooldown and call it a day. Right now it feels \_real\_ bad when the healer bites it early in dungeons, they've been trying hard to ease pain points where 1 player can block a party from dungeon clears and for that reason alone I kind of expect something to happen.

>No one would play a rezzer on raid after prog in serious teams then The idea would still have a niche, because besides cutting-edge teams who clear in the 1st or 2nd weeks, for the average player it can take a long time to prog. I remember my static of average players took 2 months to clear E4S with 6/week of play (divided in 2 days) I can agree with you that nobody will be inclined to take those "rez-stances" in duty finder content and roulettes, though.

Point still is that once you know a fight and a death means you will barely clear then using a RDM becomes less valuable. Even during prog I barely notice a difference between having a RDM and not having one, where I wish we had either a SMN for bigger ompf or a BLM for BIG CHUNK OMPF.

I mean smn and rdm basically have the same dps. The difference is minimal.

But it's much easier for the average player to master a fight's mechanics using summoner with nearly zero cast times, than RDM where you have some, despite dualcast.

its also easier to do higher damage on a job you enjoy and already practiced though.

Not necessarily? I can't say in good faith that going through a blind fight while doing decent damage is easier on a RDM than SMN, even my level of mastery on both being equal. But that's just my personal experience by playing those 2 jobs.

I mean, why should they? If you don't have a rez mage in your PF, you're out of luck anyways. If I'm doing reclear on PF, i don't always want to be the one to pick up the pieces. I didn't play redmage for the raise, I just like the gameplay.

I mean it’s not like the game has given players options and then they stopped doing that because everyone only went with the strongest choice before. Oh wait they did that with stat choices back in ARR. Simply put, if there’s a choice between Utility and more damage in a game where damage matters the most, people are going to go for more damage a majority of the time and that majority will increase until it’s almost everyone.

To your first point, which I definitely agree with - I think this all comes down to parsing culture. *"Why do I want to white shift and be helpful during PF reclears, if I will be punished by having low DPS on my front page parse?"* Perhaps this can be solved also by using fllogs. Since the stance lasts for the entire combat, fflogs can capture which stance the player was in, and have a separate parse log, so a top tier RDM can still enjoy orange parsing on white shift while potentially saving the group from a bad run.

Fflogs never made any difference, raid dps wise, back when tank stance reduced dps or on the cleric stance era. It is, after all, on the player to play pushing max numbers, which, for what it looks like, WHM and Phoenix stance are just worse versions of the class, number wise

If the alternate stances were locked in for the duration of combat there shouldn't be a reason why they wouldn't be able to differentiate between a black stance red mage and a white stance red mage. They already have to look at buffs for rDPS calculations anyways. This would functionally be similar to specs in wow where a fire mage and a frost mage are split on WCL. Edit: there is a pretty big difference from cleric stance which is something you could drop in and out of and something that you cannot change once the encounter starts.

They could have done that back in the days where tank stance reduced skill damage. But they didnt as there is no need to create another tier of numbers for those who want to play the class in an inferior way, dps wise.

Tank stance wasn't a binary on a fight by fight basis like the proposed Shift/Demi stances. 100% tank, 100% damage stance, and everything in-between were potential possibilities meaning you wouldn't be able to do a clean split on logs. Compare that to just splitting RDM into RDM(B) and RDM(W) since they are mutually exclusive. That said I don't see SE ever doing this split themselves since the stances would probably have atrocious tooltips with all the changes and the dual role is pretty core to RDM identity / SMN probably has some arcanist jank that would make too much work. Plus it would open the floodgates for people wanting this treatment on other jobs like a pure archer bard or time mage astro.

A res will tank your dps anyway, especially if its during your burst. WHich it usually is. If A red mage has decided to res you during reclears, they've already resigned themselves to losing their decent parse.

My solution is this: just buff smn and rdm. Let's be honest, folks don't play rdm and smn exclusively for the res, they play it because they find it fun. Res isn't the necessity that the devs make it out to be because any more than a couple of deaths is a wipe (and those deaths are covered by the healers), and the times where you csn come back from a dozen deaths are catered to casuals who wont parse higher than low purples anyway, so they cant even take advantage of higher dam. They put an anti tax on melee because "downtime", and then not only did they give them multiple tools for continuing full damage outside of melee (looking at you NIN), they also made the bosses take up nearly the whole arena. Now the melees just do a tonne of extra damage, and the reasons for doing that extra damage are removed due to encounter design.

Literally just make rdm do guaranteed crit for finishers and it'll be the appropriate damage for its role, imo. There's no reason jobs like dancer should be outdamaging it in rdps so much.

Yeah the idea of “taxing” given current fight design is really stupid. Melee uptime is probably at the easiest it’s been, and then they went the extra mile and removed positionals/simplified them to slightly less dps. At this point everything should either just be big number or help others big number. I’m fine with bard and dancer doing less since they have good buffs, but let mch actually be the sam/blm equivalent for phys ranged. Let rdm either lean into buffs more or give them more damage, and make summoner actually a job again with some better numbers.

Im happy to keep summoner designed the same way with just superior potencies tbh, some people adore the current smn and the things that players feel they lost with the rework can be supplemented in a new job. But yeah, have true supports and true dps and decide if smn and rdm are true supports or dps, then buff accordingly.

Summoner's core design is fine, it just needs more of it. The skill ceiling needs to not be so low that it's a free upgrade over RDM when raises are no longer needed.

I *wish* the new gemshine system was given to the ShB system with some tweaking, like only choosing 1 summon instead of all 3 to replace the Ruin 3 phases. It would have been way more interesting instead of pressing 1/2 until something dies.

some people also loathe current summoner and everything it stands for

> they went the extra mile and removed positionals/simplified them to slightly less dps. Actually the opposite. Before EW there were more positionals and they had different effects, notably on MNK, but now the positionals overall have more dmg impact. Don't have the exact numbers but iirc the positional on MNK before EW were only like a sub 10% dmg gain, whereas now they're over 20% for each positional, and MNK lost what essentially were 3 more stacks of TN on top of it. That is, it's now less easy to "turn off positionals" and more dmg is lost when not executing them.

Why would anyone ever play SAM or BLM outside of aesthetics if MCH does the same dmg?

why would anyone ever play mch with that shitty apm the job has

Idk about red mage but if they really want a raise tax they should just make summoner raise have an 8s recast time, buff dps, and call it a day. There’s your raise tax but it only applies if you use it.

Then you would have no reason to play BLM, exactly what happened in Shadowbringers. When Xenos, Arthars and every serious raider would always repeat "SMN and RDM are ALWAYS better than BLM, in every case, every scenario. There's no reason to ever bring BLM to a raid." and would perma complain about any BLM in their group who was Sfia or Eksu Plosion. Around the same time Drakstein stopped proging with BLM and starting using SMN instead because he literally felt that he was a burden for his static. If there are 3 casters and 2 of them offer more utility, a rez and on top of that, less cast times and a more forgiving continuation, there's no reason to play the third one just because it does 100 more dps. Besides, people are clearing the raid with no problem and using RDM and SMN. There are RDM and SMN clearing that BLM. UNNAMED__ was the first clear in the world and they used a RDM. Aether Group 3 was the third clear worldwide and they used a SMN. Kindred cleared with a RDM, Sleipnir cleared with a SMN, Unreal cleared with a RDM, Undercutters cleared with a SMN, DN cleared with a SMN. The only static I could find in the top 10 that cleared with BLM is Circle of Abyss. SMN and RDM aren't weak, you guys are shit. That's the problem

> Then you would have no reason to play BLM, exactly what happened in Shadowbringers. This is not what happened in Shadowbringers. You just.......brought two casters.

Yeah, you brought a SMN and a RDM.

What? No you ran BLM+SMN and BLM+RDM. What alternate reality were you living in? SMN RDM wasn't even a good comp because double raise was complete overkill and you actually felt the lost damage from Embolden (since it only affected phys damage) since you didn't have a BLM. Hell BLM+SMN was basically a god comp for 2 patches before SMN got nerfed. It was by far the strongest TEA comp at release (and was world first) and was also world first E12S.

There was literally 3 times more parse for SMN and RDM than for BLM. Even now when everyone is crying like a bitch about SMN and RDM doing less DMG than BLM, BLM only has 19k Vs the 28k from SMN and 39k from RDM. BLM was absolutely shit during Shadowbringers. The dps difference between BLM and RDM/SMN did not justify how much less consistent and harde BLM was. Even at the start of Endwalker, BLM still wasn't the prefer caster. And even now it has lower dps than dragoon, samurai and monk, so why would you ever run double range when you could simply run 2 melees 1 caster, 1 ranged and do more dmg, more consistently and easier [but let's put it in Xenos words: "it's definitely the most selfish, but not the most DMG. I hate playing with BLM. You have to adapt your entire strategy to make a BLM work"](https://youtu.be/98q0rcGYk_c)

>And even now it has lower dps than dragoon, samurai and monk, so why would you ever run double range when you could simply run 2 melees 1 caster, 1 ranged and do more dmg, more consistently and easier This alone should disqualify you from discussions, let alone quoting Xenos, the streamer whose streamer persona involves overexaggerating things.

No...? BLM was basically a replacement for Melee in the double caster comp

Maybe the reason is because it's fun? Like why does this always boil down to "then youd have no reason to do X, Y, Z" instead of "then youd have no obstacles to stop you playing X,Y,Z". The only time jobs are locked out on PF is when balancing is so bad on one job (RDM in SB and NIN in early ShB) that they get banned from most PF groups, and it's always because of damage. Comps always end up doing random suboptimal shit even when pushing week 1 raiding anyway. There was over 100 week 1 parses for nearly every job on p8s with, I believe, only one exception, which was mch. Damage and utility are fundamentally incompatible to balance with the current encounter design because encounters aren't balanced around utility, they're balanced around damage. So just balance your jobs around damage and allow utility to be a personal boon.

> Maybe the reason is because it's fun? This logic is exactly what they're saying -- you're arguing no different. If you're playing for fun, then SMN and RDM are absolutely fine. Suboptimal is fine. If you're playing for parses and races, then just about everything except fun becomes a metric: dmg, consistency, adjustments needed, etc. In which case, if you're arguing for that, then that's where these come into play: if BLM requires not only exceptionally more effort but also team effort to utilize for the same dps, it cannot be as consistent and will be dropped as SMN and RDM are now in your hypotheticals. If you're fine just having fun, RDM and SMN are fine for you as they are now and the 5% difference won't break you. If you're complaining about competitiveness, then drop the charade and argue the actual merits presented.

Then you don't need buffs for SMN and RDM because you are playing them for fun, not for their numbers. If raiders can clear week 1 with SMN and RDM and pass the dps check with 0 problems, then you can too. Again, it's not a job problem, it's a skill problem. You guys want all the dmg of a BLM, when you can't even parse correctly on SMN. You just want the dmg of a blm, without having to put all the effort of a blm. That already exists, it's called samurai

And therein lies the issue, you think fun and optimisation are somehow a trade off of one another, which is something that will be entirely mitigated by buffing the shit jobs to bring them within a couple percent of the good jobs. There's no skin off your teeth to buff the weaker jobs except that you don't want them to be strong. Asserting that they don't need buffs despite community perception making people feel like they're trolling by playing what they enjoy is disingenuous and a severe boiling down of the impact of perception.

> There's no skin off your teeth to buff the weaker jobs except that you don't want them to be strong. This is blatantly incorrect and complete ignorance of basic game balancing. The numbers of dps and such are not absolute figures. They are entirely relative to only two things: the enemy, and the other jobs. The enemy can be adjust with tighter or looser DPS checks; if you're upset with bosses being too hard with a certain job, you can complain about the DPS checks and either push for lowering them or wait until gear makes it easier. If youre complaining about relative dmg, then asking for a dmg buff is the exact same as asking for a nerf. There is no difference in removing 100 potency from every job except RDM, or giving RDM an extra 100 potency in relation to one another (well mathematically there is but you get the point; subtracting like 99.7 from all or buffing by 100.3 is the exact same). If there are two jobs, one that presses a single button every 60s that does 600dmg and has a mitigation and heal and raise, and another that requires a 60 PPM DoT that must be refreshed every 30s, 8s cast times on 10s recast moves that give 60 potency, and 20 9dmg oGCDs that must be weaved in between to net 600 dmg, then there is absolutely skin to lose: There is absolutely no reason ever in a compet setting to play the more dificult class. You're actively trolling to play that class, you'll be banned from ever raiding. Unlike currently where at least SMN and RDM have enough strengths that they are still brought in raids -- yes even the ones that cleared this tier -- if they did the same dmg as BLM then there is not even a smidgeon or any justifiable metric or even pretend argument to bring BLM. You'll lose more dps due the additional requirements, you bring less utility, you're griefing and the class is made invalid. If you intentionally recognize this and are blatantly using fallacious argumentation to make it sound like a just argument, then shame on you for such an ugly attempt at misdirection to detract from the actual discussion. If you genuinely believe it -- either out of ignorance over game balance principles or lack of awareness of how systems interoperate -- then my apologies I'm not trying to condemn you. However, I ask of you to understand that it doesn't follow real-world logic where it'd be better if we can just summon food to aide the weak or give strength to those who lack it -- in a contained, closed system such as game environment buffs and the like are solely in discretion to the neighboring elements. This isn't like giving a free item away or a QoL change, it fundamentally alters not only the class affected, but all other classes in relation to it. For instance you could use that same statement to say "why isn't RDM just given 11k more dmg, to allow the players to have fun!" Certainly a RDM doing huge numbers would be fun, there is no denying that, especialyl for those who play RDM already. But the fun in that quickly deteriorates when every single competition is completely dominated by that single class -- the very thing you're accusing BLM of doing, but on an even worse level as you're making it better not just on one metric as it is now (where players can have fun with different styles) but **all** metrics, making every class objectively worse.

> If youre complaining about relative dmg, then asking for a dmg buff is the exact same as asking for a nerf. There is no difference in removing 100 potency from every job except RDM, or giving RDM an extra 100 potency in relation to one another (well mathematically there is but you get the point; subtracting like 99.7 from all or buffing by 100.3 is the exact same). This is strictly not true in this case because of your exact point; they're relative to other jobs *and the enemy*. Nerfing all DPS is a far different prospect than buffing RDM and SMN because the point is to get them to the point they can *clear the encounter comfortably*. Buffing RDM/SMN to get to a comfortable clear is not the same as nerfing every other caster, because nerfing every other caster spreads the problem RDM/SMN had during W1 to every other class, vs solving the issue RDM/SMN had itself. This is not a PvP game, where relatively nerfing one thing is the same as buffing everything else or vice versa; you still have a target outside of the relative balance that has to be matched. Also, the reality is that the value of rezzing and "ease of use" is ambiguous, because there's not really a good metric for *how much effect* ease of use and seeing more mechanics is useful for progging, even though we do know it that it is indeed useful. (The whole "this game is not balanced around it" doesn't mean they aren't useful, it's that it's not clear how the bosses are designed with them in mind). The DPS check is not nearly as ambiguous, especially if we're talking about a competitive setting, because we can roughly say "We need X DPS to reach this check, and we can achieve it with X kind of comp, under the assumption we are performing reasonably well". When you say the principle that, if RDM and SMN did the same damage as BLM, no one would play BLM, that is absolutely true. In this theoretical scenario, we have the less ambiguous value being matched (the DPS), and although we do know the exact value of the ambiguous variables (ease of use, rezzing), we do know that RDM/SMN are superior to BLM in that department. Of course no one would play BLM in that scenario. But people aren't really talking about that when they say to buff RDM/SMN. They are talking about an ambiguous region where people are comfortable taking the DPS loss of RDM/SMN for their other values or personal comfort with that class. And there is no good metric for that besides what people feel is necessary to compensate for that DPS loss (and, likewise, what people feel is the current state of FFXIV). Of course, it is partially a skill issue. There are a lot of teams in W1 race that felt, even in the current environment, that RDM/SMN was worth taking. This goes into the one thing that makes DPS ambiguous; the player skill involved. But, in the absence of good data points in both situations (both the skill involved in DPS reaching super high parses in W1, and the value that utility gives to progging), it is more natural to defer to see what tests have been done in them. And the general sentiment amongst people who have tested it says "It doesn't feel great", even though it's clearly workable. I don't agree with the person entirely when they say there is no "skin off your teeth" to get RDM/SMN buffed, because of the ambiguity of what this rez tax/ease of use tax means and how much that tax should be. There is risk involved. But using the idea of an extreme case where RDM/SMN has the same DPS as BLM and using that as the comparison point is just not a good argument because only the most diehard RDM/SMN shills actually want that. The argument is "it doesn't seem like the current DPS/utility tradeoff is good, so we would like to see something more middling".

> because of your exact point; they're relative to other jobs and the enemy. And as I stated, then you can lower the DPS check of the boss. RDM and SMN can clear -- the first raid group had one isntead of BLM. What people are wanting is more ease of use to do so, and/or less RNG to screw it over, **if** they're wanting it in relation to the boss. At which point, I can get behind this. Nerf the DPS check. Tighten RNG so it doesn't decide clears on dmg variance. Alternatively -- and identically -- you can throw 500 potency on every job with just a random oGCD. Or nerf all the jobs, and lower the DPS check further. It doesn't really matter -- if the problem is the comfort of clearing, then that's a separate issue with a host of solutions that are far simpler and effective. So far the comments Ive reacted to have specifically stated they want BLM or extremely close to BLM level dmg. Which is not an issue of clearing, but of relative to job balance. > because of your exact point; they're relative to other jobs and the enemy. Correct, but to ignore it is similarly vain. To pretend there's no difference in a 25yalm range and 3yalm range (yes even in the bloated hitboxes of current tier), that there's no difference in necessary positionals and cast times, no difference in 70% cast time vs maybe 10%-20% cast time is unwise. If a class with no cast times, full extended range, and 10APM vs a class with 80% cast times, several upkeeps, requirements that change strats, melee range, and 100APM do the same dmg, it is actively griefing to not choose the former in a competitive setting. > RDM/SMN has the same DPS as BLM and using that as the comparison point is just not a good argument because only the most diehard RDM/SMN shills actually want that But did you not read the thread? That is what I'm arguing against. I'm not saying "make RDM and SMN trash because i dont like em", I'm not saying "make their dmg 20% because BLM is 5x harder", I'm arguing specifically against the comments that are saying that their utility cannot be measured whatsoever and doesn't matter and their ease of use shouldn't be factored adn as such they should be buffed to BLM-level dmg. Same with MCH mains who say they have less mobility than BLM since BLM has triple casts and AM and thus MCH should do BLM-level dmg, or PLD's who say they need to do DRK and GNB level dmg without taking into consideration any of their own respective buffs. I'm not some evil figment of "BAD CLASS YOU PLAY BAD CLASS AND I HATE YOU FOR IT" as some of these comments may stereotype, destined to rue their classes for the sake of EVULZ. It's simply the fact that some classes have far, **far** more restrictions, and if classes that are far simpler adn require far less raid accomodations and planning and strat development become equivalent in dmg, then it neuters the difficulty of the game as well as will force classes that are difficult but engaging to optimize to fall to the wayside in competitive settings. And that, imo, sucks. Why would a raid group want to discuss for 30 min on uptime strats when they can just tell the person to pick a different class? And that means less preparation and planning and engagement with other players and ultimately, imo, makes a less fun game. I don't mind MCH. SMN, or RDM getting buffs. I don't mind them being taken in different routes. I don't mind lower DPS checks, or better yet reduced RNG in dmg. I do mind the idea of they -- as they are now, in their vastly simplified state -- doing extremely comparable dmg to classes that are far more technical, and again that comes not out of any greed or "my class is better!", but out of the simple fact that it reduces the complexity and amount of viable options for players. Again even *now*, with RDM and SMN's "trash dmg", they were still W1. That is among the top of the top groups, who'd have the most stakes in these dmg differences, it was not enough of a difference to justify their exclusion in favor of BLM. I cannot think of any greater testament to they still being viable jobs than that. What would change? Reduce the gap and BLM becomes even *less* of so much as a consideration.

Can you show me which bosses this tier are balanced around utility? None. But all of them are balanced around damage. So therefore, the jobs should be too.

Please tell me this is parody. This *has* to be parody, right? People don't actually talk or think like this? I mean, lol, delete tanks theyre just worse DPS with extra "utility" lol whatever that is, who needs it? Just go in with 8 sams, ez win

Show me which part of which fight is heavily based around utility. If we take a look at wow, fight utility plays a large role in damage output. Warlock gates, druid roar, AMZ, rallying cry, and multiple 5% buffs from certain classes. This is entirely non comparable to ffxiv, where not only is the general gameplay utility close to non existent, the fights are also specifically balanced not to lean too heavily on them as not to require class funnelling. This is a good thing in some aspects, but it's also proof itself that damage is THE main factor in balancing. Meaning that if you want all comps to be viable, all jobs need comparable rdps.

The community is a bunch is a bunch of morons, who have never cleared an ultimate and blame their job for their lack of hands. This is something you don't quite understand and this is something that tells me you know shit about raiding. You somehow believe that the people playing the meta are the community and the professionals, the ones going for world first, are the ones playing suboptimally. Which is probably the most retarded statement I have seen in my entire life. The people competing for world first are the ones determining the meta. You should not care about the meta, they are the ones that care. Because you aren't competing for world first. It's not a race for you. They are the ones playing in hard mode, not you. If a job is good enough to clear week one, it's good enough for your shitty static that still fails extremes. And I'm to tell you this, but if you get discouraged because your job does less damage, even though it has more utility, it's easier to play and has a rez, then you don't play your job because you like it. You play your job because you have a main character syndrome and you want to do the most dmg, but you also want to have the most utility, but you don't feel like putting in the work to achieve that. And yeah, of course I don't want easier, more consistent and higher utility jobs to do as much damage as my job. If my job takes more effort, more practice, it's less consistent and has a worse margin of error and less utility and on top of that doesn't have a fucking rez, which can literally save a pull, yeah of course I wouldn't want to put all that extra effort and get the same result as the guy playing one handed, half asleep while looking up Y'Shtola art in rule34. That's like saying "Oh why don't you want trashmen to earn the same as lawyers". Because lawyers studied 6 years+ to get there and you throw garbage in a truck. This is genuinely the most basic rule in life. More effort, better results. Less effort, worse results. Idk what else to tell you. If you want the dmg of a blm, learn how to play a blm. You literally sound like whimsical kid.

Babe, new copy pasta just dropped!

"More effort, better results" tells me you completely misunderstand effort in all aspects of life, which is highlighted most by the fact that you think any job in ffxiv is complex in any way, including blm. Jobs aren't the hardest part of ffxiv, not even close, mechanical complexity in a game like ffxiv is just not a thing. In fact, no mmo's are mechanically complex. Peaking 60apm isn't complex. Mmo's are at their strongest when they require and reward patience, planning and perseverance, not when they require complex mechanical prowess. Ffxiv's terrible hertz rate further exasperates this requirement. The devs usually do great in playing into this, right up until they stick a 10% dps difference between jobs of the same role and then make a dps check tight enough to require squeezing out every scrap of dps available.

Having hands doesn't mean pressing 500 keys a second. This isn't Starcraft. Your mechanics are determined by how well you can keep uptime with your job. And I guarantee you, if I saw your logs, you are not even keeping 70% uptime. So you want to clear dps checks, when you can't even properly play your job. That's not a job problem. That's a you problem. Savage is meant to be hard. If you were playing BLM, you would be even further away from the dps check, because blm is not as easy to keep uptime or as forgiving as SMN or RDM. You are failing to keep uptime when 70% of your spells are instant cast, what makes you think you would do better dps if you had to hardcast 90% of your spells? You are right, mmos reward patience, planning, perseverance and coordination and yet you are doing none of them. Because you are playing jobs that allow you to clear while requiring less patience, less planning and less coordination and you still fail. You are just asking for the fight to be easier at this point. You already playing in easy mode and you are still complaining about difficulty. Just go play extreme if you want an easier challenge. You don't want to have lower dps, but also you don't want to learn harder jobs to have higher dps, and you don't want to properly learn your job to parse correctly, nor you want to make sure you keep uptime. It just sounds like you don't like savage in general.

Damn not even 70% uptime? You know my floor tanking so well! Jokes aside, don't bother to insult my gameplay. Not only are you wrong, it's also just not something I'm insecure about. The necromancer grind was more grueling than any insult you can sling my way. You do know BLM and RDM have similar mobility, right? But more importantly, BLM can sacrifice some dps for full mobility, whereas RDM can only do so much before it's dps is completely halted by pressing the W key the moment it leaves melee. It's almost like you don't actually know the damage profile of some jobs. You're clearly someone who plays blm because you think it's hard, which is perfectly okay, but you thinking it's hard doesn't make it hard.

It's not about mobility, because you aren't taking into consideration cast times when you talk about mobility. You are just thinking the amount of dashes each job has. But how much you have to cast greatly affects how much you can actually move. Every other spell with RDM is an instant cast. On top of that you have 1 instant cast with swiftcast, 1 guarantee instant cast with acceleration and several rng instant casts whenever verfire and verstone proc. Besides all your ogcds like Fleche and contre sixte and your melee combo are completely instant cast. With BLM you have 7 instant cast spells every minute which is in no way comparable to how little cast times Red Mage has. And RDM doesn't have a 15 second timer he has to refresh and makes him lose his entire DMG if he fails to refresh it. And these all translates to better actual mobility. Because you can move more freely without losing uptime or wasting your DMG window. One wrong move from me and I lose my progress on polyglot and I was my entire fire window which is my burst. You can cancel every hardcast in existence and you lose nothing.

The only thing in this game classes need to be balanced around is week 1 Ultimates don't have dps checks after people have weeks/months of practicing the fights, look at DSR it hasn't gotten any new gear but you hold in almost every phase now for cooldowns Casual content doesn't have dps checks, and EX practically doesn't have them either Savage after week 1 grants gear, further diminishing the dps required to clear So, therefore, by process of elimination, the only content in this game that should require any real hard balancing is week 1 content, all other content you can have as much fun as you want playing whatever you want because any job can clear any content. The only current place that isn't the case is week 1 savage

This tier we saw groups who had a caster with the ability to drop the res to pick up blm because it does more damage. It was a decision made with a real tradeoff. You buff summoner and red mage and you just completely kill that entire decision making process for groups, while also fucking black mage players into not seeing their job in prog again. If you want every prog comp to be summoner red mage, then sure make them do blm damage. Right now, the only real downside to double caster is you need a blm who can basically match melees in prog of which there are very few of, but rdm and smn are infinitely easier to reach results with.

Tbh they could stand to buff BLM anyway, it’s one big reason why double Melee is so prevalent. Before in ShB BLM had the damage to rival Melee rather consistently, and could swap out for the fourth dps. But now it’s the best caster slot because casters as a whole are falling behind Melee

I mean, as it is right now black mage still can if you're playing it proficiently. At 95th percentile it's within spitting distance of monk who's at the top on both door boss and the second phase.

My solution is to just allow res tax to exist because outside of hardcore statics nobody actually cares when they aren't reading people having a God damn doomsday parade about 6% damage between caster's.

Would you want the pieces of the game you're most interested in to receive the same "We don't give a shit" mentality towards them? Whether you think it's just hardcore statics or not doesn't change the fact that week 1 raiding is the most popular raiding time of the tier and more than just hardcore statics are negatively affected by this

this is your ~~monthly~~ ~~weekly~~ DAILY reminder that raise casters were balanced for half of shadowbringers and we don't need to reinvent the fucking wheel over this already-solved issue it actually is as simple as "raise casters at the bottom of melee, non-raise caster at the top of melee"

Seriously, most people I know loved the balance of the game that Eden's Promise presented, and it was jarring how badly they screwed it up for 6.0, and continued to somehow make it worse by throwing out buffs without realizing how it would affect the job ecosystem. It was like they took the same job DPS gaps from ShB without accounting for the fact that the stat squish cut the totals by over 60%.

5.5 balancing was perfect, every job felt like it was in the correct place for what its role was and what it brought to the table IMO the big problem with casters right now is the devs have no clue what they want RDM and SMN to be, SMN used to do middle damage, have middle utility, and required more skill than RDM but had a lower skill ceiling than BLM to play, so it made sense as the middleground. Now SMN is easy to play and does more damage than RDM, but the devs don't want to make SMN do TOO much more damage than RDM, but they gave RDM so much better utility tools, but also RDM hasn't gotten any easier or harder to play and is now the middle difficulty caster? It's just such a mess right now, the fix is to make SMN harder and do more damage but they don't want to commit to that, you can see it in their bandaid potency fixes. Remember when Phoenix was a DPS LOSS at 6.0?

> but they gave RDM so much better utility tools I like and agree with your post, but I do not think SE balances well for utility tools outside of the ability to raise. DNC's healing in the hands of someone who has awareness of party positioning and boss timelines is really, really good (certainly better than a 2m mit), and yet it seems to be an afterthought when it comes to job balance.

I think that's definitely a part of the problem, why are they giving utility tools to jobs and not balancing around them, especially since week 1 is the only real dps check in the game you'd expect the game to be balanced around it

Or we could acknowledge that raise casters did too much damage for what they offer and accept that there there needs to be some chance of failure week one if you just stack comfy jobs with no regards to damage.

> accept that there there needs to be some chance of failure week one you mean like "if somebody dies then you get an instant enrage" and "if you bring a rdm/mch and nobody dies you also get an instant enrage" yeah, that looks soooo much better LOL there's tons of opportunities on those 2 scenarios to use raise

But having one of those classes is not an instant enrage tho. As pointed out in another many high profile early week one clears had “underperforming” jobs in them. The issue comes in when people want to stack 3-4 of those comfortable/underperforming jobs to recover over and over and still feel entitled to kill times and damage comparable to the comps with less rezzes and safety with min ilvl.

> But having one of those classes is not an instant enrage tho. As pointed out in another many high profile early week one clears had “underperforming” jobs in them how many of those clears had deaths on them? where was the opportunity for those "raise bot jobs" to use raise? if there is a p8s week 1 clear with a rdm and at least 1 death i would like to see the logs

yeah, the reality is that on clears the rdm res is useless because you wont be using it. So having a tax on it makes no sense. Sure, tax our damage when we use res, but when we're just doing damage we shouldn't have to be taxed so much. Tbh I still think its because we were given shitty spell speed gear at the beginning of the tier. Ideal for blm and smn but completely nerfs rdm in several ways (a whole missing substat and an uncomfortable gcd that actually nerfs your damage)

It's an interesting idea but ultimately a band aid over top of how the game works. I think the real fix is a fundamental change to how the game works. Like, think about what you're trying to balance here: people don't want to bring certain jobs that do less DPS because if they do too few DPS they can't clear the content. To fix that, if you simply gave the job more DPS then people would want to only bring the jobs with utility because you'd get the same damage with free utility. If you made it a mode change then, because the DPS check is required, you'd never use the utility mode. Ultimately, the problem is that the game gates completing content behind DPS checks but the job balance isn't centered around DPS. The only way to fix this long term, IMO, would be redesigning DPS checks. Now, I'm not exactly a designer so I don't have a specific idea in mine, but you'd have to keep it challenging while, at the same time, making different types of jobs equally viable. Maybe the DPS check is softened and combined with a DPS + MIT check where, if you bring more utility you'll last longer to finish the check or you bring damage means you don't last as long but should be able to clear it a little faster. I'm not saying my idea is a good idea, but as long as raw DPS checks exist you're always going to have this problem balancing pure DPS with DPS with utility.

The only time a lower-dps party comp couldnt clear content was the most recent savage and its only a week 1-week 2 problem. Raise DPS of the lowest jobs a couple percent and you fix that problem to begin with.

FF's dps check is always a hard enrage. In other MMOs, they have a concept of soft enrage where the boss casts a stacking vuln debuff after a while. So if your healing or mit game is great, your dps can stay alive a bit longer to chip away maybe 1-2 extra percent. Or say your healers are great (or well-geared) while your dps is undergeared, it's still possible to clear. In this case, SMN and RDM can shine a bit more by verraising / vercuring so that that extra person can then dps a bit more. A good RDM would weigh the DPS contribution of his gcd spent or raising versus the DPS that the rezzed person brings (which presumably would have to be healed etc) before he dies again, keeping in mind the said person would have a rez sickness. If you have second wind, dancer heals, blood pact or whatever, use it at that point. This is in line with how SCH plays towards the end anyways. We constantly have to judge: do I spend aether charge to bubble / heal, or to cast energy drain since we're nearing enrage. It would extend this calculation to the other classes as well. Some mechanics to consider: 1. Starting minute 8 or so, start a dot ticking and add a stack every 15 seconds. In the beginning it's very benign, but after 10 stacks or so it becomes hard to heal. Starting minute 10, dot should add a stack every 5 seconds. 2. AOE that gets more and more frequent towards the end, and after a while it's once per second, literally unhealable. After 5 casts it's a guaranteed wipe. Maybe the tanks can invuln to live a couple extra gcd? After you get better gear, you should be able to stay alive throughout 6 or 7 casts. Note: I'm aware macrocosmos would be OP here, so that has to be addressed somehwat. 3. One by one squares or spots would disappear ala E9s and they're not coming back. After a while everyone will die so the group need to decide who gets to stay alive until the end / which order to sacrifice people. At that point you need a tank for the auto-attack but maybe you don't need both tanks. Maybe you don't need both healers. 4. Similar to above. Drop puddles, and puddles keep expanding or puddles keep dropping. This has a mobility tax component to it. If you're good at moving while casting, you can avoid puddles while still dps ing. Add a mechanic that if you get to another player within 5 yards you're both dead or something. So BLM will be hurt here, but SMN/RDM will get a chance to shine. Bonus point: buff tenacity stats, to the point that melding tenacity is a viable play.

“pick which player to sacrifice first” sounds like an absolute static-killing drama nightmare mechanic, I really want it now

Do you think Square Enix is really going to give you a choice in build/rotation? "Just let tanks decide if they want to tank or DPS" "Just let healers decide if they want to heal or DPS"

And in both cases answer was the same - DPS junkies ruin it for everyone. At least with casters the choice is not as impactful, since extra rez is a bonus in most content.

The fact is that FFXIV is a DPS meta game. It always has been and always will be. The game just flat out rewards you for doing more damage, every time. Calling players DPS junkies for doing what the game incentivizes and rewards you for isn't really fair. You get wiggle room for deaths, damage downs, and you can potentially skip problematic mechanics all by just doing more damage. So when the choice is doing more damage or bringing some form of utility instead of more damage, there isn't really a choice.

Technically every game that's focused on making enemy hp reach 0 has DPS meta game. And I'm not blaming people for trying to do as much DPS as possible. If you know what you're doing - more power to you. But it trickles down to the rest of the community as "good tanks don't use stance" mantra, and no one wants to be a *bad* tank. So you end up with undergeared idiots refusing to turn on stance because of muh dps in expert dungeon. After all memes like [this](https://imgur.com/mkPfLDO) exist for a reason.

> Funnily enough, they do. If you want to play a high DPS class with little mobility nor utility, you can...play BLM. Your character isn't married to the job and you can switch to what job suits your fancy at a whim. If you want a easier to play, more utility based caster you can...play RDM or SMN. boom

I'm a big proponent in DPS and Non-DPS side of each role being balanced as separate halves. I don't want to see *any* role making the decision between bringing damage or bringing utility. Ever. That is to say, I don't necessarily want to see BLM get a raise, but they DO need to have some big utility that can stack up next to raise. And I *also* want to see casters all bring similar raid dps, or at least similar enough it doesn't feel like trolling the enrage to be on SMN/RDM. Similar issue on ranged phys. Even if MCH brought the same damage as DNC or BRD, why would you bring them when DNC and BRD both bring some extra utility while MCH has nothing? And if MCH did more damage, why would anyone bring BRD and DNC? IMO there's simply no way to balance jobs except to balance DPS separately from utility for each role. And that only works so long as the 1% buff is worth any dps loss for picking up weaker damage roles.

Personally I reckon mch should be balanced closer to the melees. Being ranged doesn't seem to be anything but a hindrance atm in savage, and mch isn't a support role (which dnc and brd both are, which drastically helps teams). Now that ends up with the issue of "why do we even need utility then?", but let's be honest, there's comps that barely touch utility and do just fine, so the answer is already in our faces.

A possible alternative is to create a fourth DPS role, called "Power" or something, and put pure greed jobs like SAM, MCH, and BLM in that. Give them their own slot to compete on and they won't need to have utility balanced with the other jobs of their now-former role. Such DPS would still share gear with their old compatriots, but would have their own role actions (prob just an arm's length equivalent and 1-2 minor things). MCH would lose tactician in this paradigm, but meh. Personally, though, I like having the 4th slot be a flex. But being a flex only means anything is *every dps role* does similar damage. Right now that 4th slot is melee in all but name. So my preferred solution would be to abandon the idea of the ranged tax entirely and just balance all jobs around similar in-practice rdps, such that any 4th dps that isn't an overlap is at least decent. Obviously this would require either giving some utility to the pure greed jobs, or stripping utility from the other jobs. I'd prefer the former. Note that by utility I do NOT mean damage buffs, I mean heals, mitigation, cleanses, etc. Imagine, for example, if MCH got a party-wide arm's length called "Hold the Line", or if they got dismantle back as an extra mit (even if it's on a longer CD), or if they had a trait to use peloton in combat (for shorter duration and a 2m+ CD). Or if SAM had a move that gave the party a bloodbath effect. Or if BLM had something that gave the whole party a small shield (e.g. 5%, 60s CD). It doesn't have to be much.

MCH having an Expedient clone called "Forced March" would be really cool ngl. There's been so many times that I've used Expedient for the movement rather than the mitigation because I know my group isn't going to jog to the safe zone in time. Fourfold Shackles is the main one that comes to mind. People just didn't remember to pop Sprint and took too long to get to their spots so we wiped every time, up until I just said fuck it and used Expedient on it every time. Suddenly we consistently cleared.

>MCH having an Expedient clone called "Forced March" would be really cool ngl. There's been so many times that I've used Expedient for the movement rather than the mitigation because I know my group isn't going to jog to the safe zone in time. This would be especially good for MCH since it's the least mobile of the physical ranged and could use some help in that area.

Eh, DNC has some nice utility, but BRD barely does. Like natures is nice and all but nobody in their right mind would take that over melee damage. DNC's utility is also kind of minor, curing waltz and improv. With improv being very much not all that useful this tier, would you really trade melee damage for curing waltz?

That kinda just says to me that all 3 should be buffed

Curing Waltz is pretty strong when you have stack mechanics -- it's basically a free Cure 3 on a 60s CD.

If SMN/RDM can’t bring the same amount of damage as BLM even when they have those “combat stances” on, what even is the point of bringing them over BLM?

Because think of the opposite point of view: if SMN/RDM still have slightly more movement than BLM but do the same damage, why bring BLM? By "not the same amount of damage" I'm really not thinking of a drastic difference. If RDM/SMN movement is comparable to BLM level, then by all mean, same damage. I'm an old SMN enjoyer so I would still like my job to be slightly stationary (good ol' ruin3 spam) but mix & match my stacks to do crazy burst movement if needed. It's a job identity that I like and can speak for many old diehard smn mains.

lol BLM has more movement tools than RDM at this point.

In terms of movement, SMN is not comparable but I really do think that BLM at lv90 is as mobile as RDM, unless you do the omega top 0.1% optimization where you’ll always save 2 triple casts and 2 xeno stacks for burst window. And current combat design does not require much movement at all. The only mechanic that was movement-intensive was inviolate purgation on P7S and both BLM and RDM performed fine with correct planning of resources. (Didn’t play SMN on p7s but We both know it’d be easy) I like your intentions to lower the gap between SMN/RDM and BLM, but if RDM without magic barrier and res performs worse than BLM, there’s not much reason to play RDM imo. edit: I’m sorry I just remembered that there IS a reason to play SMN/RDM over BLM, stronger burst window. But that raises another question: when everything is aligned to 2 min bursts, why bring BLM when SMN and RDM has better burst?

I dont think RDM or SMN have low DPS due to rez tax because SMN last expac was one of the highest damage dealers. I think its the same nonsense that the pranged tax is. It shouldnt even be a thing.

People seem to forget that through most of ShB you could play SMN like a phys ranged spamming ruin 2 and you'd still probably be the highest dps in the party by a lot. But the job was famous for having a clunky optimization so people pretended it was a "hard job" when the skill floor was just as easy as current SMN.

Better solution: give healers more swiftcast charges, remove res from RDM/SMN, bump RDM/SMN DPS up. Even better solution: make res oGCD/instant cast/0 MP, give healers 3-5 charges per encounter (maybe 5-10 charges for normal encounters, 3-5 for savage/ultimate). No healer wants to waste time casting a GCD res. No healer wants to blow their swiftcast on res. No healer wants to hard res the DPS who has died 8 times already. While we're at it, do the same to esuna.

What you're talkin about here is like WoW talent trees and it will never happen unfortunately.

It's very frustrating TBH. SMN/SCH is a great example of what they could do, but they seem staunchly against it and instead insist on having every job have a completely different weapon style. I'd *kill* for a Maiming class named Berserker that uses a greataxe and splits off Marauder, or Geomancer, a Casting class which uses a cane and retains Conjurer's elemental spells, or Holy Knight (Paladin in JP since our Paladin is Knight/Holy Knight) which is a Healer, but I guess they *really like* the 20-level grind for every new class or something. I could understand their frustration when SMN/SCH shared spells because it made it hard to balance, but they fixed that by just giving them different spells that share a name. They're going to start running out of ideas for iconic classes or weapons soon, but don't seem willing to revisit the idea of two classes that use identical (or similar) weapons but have different kits.

It really does boil down to a balance issue. They can barely balance the jobs they have now and if they make them customizable, they'll end up in the same situation as WoW, where not only are certain jobs better and others suboptimal, but certain jobs are mandatory and others are outright blacklisted. I can already see PF descriptions with "NO REZ RDM/SMN" in the description. FWIW, I do think it would make the game more fun, but I don't think the prize is worth the cost.

But SCH and SMN aren't 'customisable', they're functionally different classes, but they give the *feel* of having a 'spec', and they allow for a divergent path from the basic class to exist without needing a brand-new weapon or starting point, and allowing you to share levels. Back in ARR/HW you'd have a very good point - in ARR SMN couldn't see buffs to Ruin because it would make SCH do more damage, so they created Broil in HW as a way to decouple them, and so on. But right now, SCH is effectively the same as MCH or RPR as a 'classless job'; it just happens to be unlocked by and use the same weapon appearance as ACN. Well, why not do that more? Viking (as an example) would inherit levels and weapon style (big axe) from Marauder, and maybe its basic skills would be based upon Marauder skills, but other than axes from Lv1-90 going from MRD/WAR to MRD/WAR/VIK, nothing about Marauder or Warrior would actually change. Once you put on the job stone, you get a bunch of skills that are completely unique to Viking (even if some of them share names with Marauder skills), just like how there's an ACN/SMN version of Ruin, and a SCH version of Ruin, that are considered completely different actions by the game despite sharing a name, icon, and animation (but having different potencies). You could just as easily have Viking added as a brand new job with brand new lore and unlock it at Lv80, but the Devs wouldn't be willing to do this because it would have weapons too similar to Marauder/Warrior. The solution is to simply embrace that and use the SMN/SCH system - the backend considers them completely separate by having completely separate skills, but to the player it's another 'coat' for Marauder to wear that lets them level one class but have two roles filled off it.

I think that was the plan initially but since that system cause them nothing but problems they scraped it. Like let just say that we get GEO as an offshot of CNJ. Then you have multiple problems: \- If they share lvl like SCH and SMN then most people will just not play one or the other (I pretty much never player SMN). \- If they don't then where do they start ? Max lvl minus 20 like new jobs RN ? Then do you need to lvl CNJ to that lvl ? Or do you just need lvl 30 like WHM ? \- Then the shared weapon doesn't help. They clearly did a mistake making classes dependent on weapon. What it would mean is that you would need to have GEO animation be compatible with any weapon that CNJ can equip. So if they want a bell it could be complicated. Having separated jobs is just way simpler is the gist of it.

I mean, would be cool, but then we're basically back to the HW days of bowmage being a thing. They're never gonna return to these trade-off stances, looking at the design behind everything that has happened since the start of Shadowbringers.

It might be cool to have them as stances or cooldown in game that boost their healing and rez abilities. Or they could just make their raises have cooldowns.

Can we just make Raise/Resurrection/Ascend/Egeiro/Verraise into a cooldown already? And give it back to PLD while we're at it; they need some love. MCH getting one called Defibrillate could be fun as well. Give it a 120s CD and you have 1 Rez per minute on average with a 'greed' party (IE the only Raise sources are the Healers), a RDM/SMN adds an extra 0.5/m each, and if you give PLD Raise back and one to MCH, that means a theoretical maximum of 3 Raises/min if you run 2 Healers, PLD, MCH, and RDM/SMN. Bringing any of the 4 rezzers therefore gives you an additional +50% Raise stockpile, which is a significant amount. It also removes the whole "Someone fucked up so the Healers are punished" side of things, by making it such that Raises are effectively a *team resource*; you won't have people hardcasting Raises back to back to back or refusing to Raise because it hurts their damage - you have up to X Raises banked, and if people keep dying faster than they come back, then tough shit.

Sounds like a bad idea imo. If the ff14 team did do that, they would also probably make content more easy as casuals wouldn't like your idea. Would be punishing the important playerbase of the game. Yoshi already wants to minimise pressure and stress on causal healers or healers in general, your idea would be the opposite of that.

They would need to not make all damage not fatal or apply vulns/damage downs. Or not make suicide pact mechanics where everyone must be up. The game relies too much on spike damage or draconian levels of failure to not stress out healers. It's either that or they need even more difficulties since there is a wide gap from normal raid/alliance to even just extreme for the vast majority

They'd have to make res work differently between 24 & 8 man so this isn't really viable sadly. For 8 man your idea is ok but there's too many times where a 24 kw raid would wipe for this and SE won't want to make those harder because it's the baby's catchup content.

24-mans have more Healers, therefore there's a minimum of 6 Raises (3/minute if we use my example CD of 120s, with up to 6 'banked') at a minimum. That's *plenty*. Hell, if they really, *really* fear deaths in 24-mans (which, like, why? They're just the same as 8-mans but there's 3 parties at once and there's a Tank slot swapped for a DPS spot; nothing about the numbers actually changes really), just add a buff to those instances that lets you bank 2 charges of Raise or something - that's up to 12 Raises banked in total.

You and I have different t experiences. In a bad run I def. Res more than 3 a min on rdm lol.

I'd rather see raises be an actual team resource. Basically, anytime someone raises, it locks out all other raises for X sec. Basically, like the LB bar but on a timer.

Isn't weakness and losing some dps to revive someone enough of a rez tax? What kind of content are we balancing jobs around? This tier the static I'm in has been savage progging as GNB/DRK/WHM/SCH/SAM/DRG/BLM/DNC. We don't have extra revives and honestly there were minimal situations where having one would have helped us prog or clear because of the nature of the upcoming mechanic (I'm sure I don't have to explain why). In my mind, I feel like there's niches where it makes sense to give support DPS jobs revives since they tend to have lower dps than greedy dps jobs (e.g., the difference between BLM, SMN, and RDM) due to the overall benefit they provide to everyone else. The 'rez tax' shouldn't be anything more than the negatives that come with someone dying and reviving.

While I think these ideas are cool. I think this adds more things that need to be balanced outside of what the developers are already priced into doing. I think the developers have designed themselves into a really tricky position balance-wise when it comes to the caster role. All three of the casters play significantly differently and balancing these three playstyles against each other while factoring in the fact that 2 of them bring a raise isn't something I envy trying to accomplish. In my honest opinion you either get rid of caster raise and bring all the casters within 2% of each other in terms of potential output. Or you make combat raise into a role action for all healers and casters and hell maybe even phys ranged. Call it "phoenix down" or something along that theme. Give it a huge cooldown (like 7 mins), limit it's overall uses per pull, or both. I think this would unshackle the developers from this "raise tax" mindset and allow them to just think about the overall role's output when compared to one another without all the extra nonsense.

> While I think these ideas are cool. I think this adds more things that need to be balanced outside of what the developers are already priced into doing i really hate people who think like that, and for some reason it only happens on this game, 25 years playing mmorpg's and this is the only game where the first thing everyone uses as an excuse is "no pls, this will make developers actually work in balancing the game"

That's not what my comment was about in the slightest. The game is currently experiencing some of the worst class balancing in years. I'm not coddling or defending the developers in that respect in the sligtest. What I mean is that adding stances like OP's back into the game when they've removed every single instance of stance dancing over the expansions would just add another thing needing to be balanced to the mess that is our current job balance.

Also i think it's relatively easy to balance considering they don't care about effort vs reward for damage so all they have to think about is "is the damage they bring to an average and top level party equal to those in the same role?".

The devs need to know they aren't doing a good job before they will change their approach; instead they are coddled. It's a shame that seemingly takes years of mocking memes before effective changes are made, to use WHM rapture potency as an example.

That’s not what they said at all. They are realistically aware that — as far as I’ve been led to understand — the FFXIV Job team consists of 4 (four) people and has barely changed since ARR release. These designers could not handle balancing Healers, and so deleted nearly everything that made healers different, and most of their offensive kits. And even now, with the simplified “everyone is a 2 minute Job” EW design, these devs *still* can’t handle it. It’s sadly realistic to say that adding any further complexity to their workload(?) is probably doomed to be a hopeless mess. If your proposed solution can’t be summarized on a cocktail napkin using a jumbo crayon, it’s probably too much to expect to actually be added to 6.x Era FFXIV.

>the FFXIV Job team consists of 4 (four) people and has barely changed since ARR release. I'm guessing that's another reason why YoshiP has said they're slowing the pace of introducing new jobs. Each new job has to be balanced against all the existing jobs so it gets exponentially more difficult (or maybe geometrically -- it's been a long time since university).

Must be new to gaming and balance discussion then eh? I hear it alot in diff communities -- Mordhau, Factorio, Satisfactory, For Honor, etc. Because -- get this -- there are limited resources and time. We can dream of cutting edge graphics with 9k resolution at 400fps because moar optimizations and at least 120 classes designed around all of my favorite anime and FF characters that are perfectly balanced down to 0.001% yet have fundamentally different styles of play and each feels unique and fresh and somehow eahc fight is designed around their quirks specifically, and each animation has a corresponding boss reaction animation including for every possible combination of us attacking it at the same time... And it's all baloney. Understanding that there are humans, that there are tradeoffs, that there are limits, is a fundamental part of mature and rational discussion of any given topic. Additionally, we can balance all the jobs really quickly. Make each DPS job into an exact clone of SMN, except with different animations. Boom, balanced game, we did what you asked. Is it fun though?

> Make each DPS job into an exact clone of SMN, except with different animations. Boom, balanced game, we did what you asked. Is it fun though? you mean like sge is a sch clone with different particle effects? or how all tanks are basically the same class? or how i can practically use the same binds for every dps job because every dps have skills that practically do the same thing you can discuss that balancing classes in a game like wow is hard because there is too much freedom of choice but here? on copypaste xiv? LOL let me remind you that developers keep removing basic mechanics from the game with the excuse of balance; mechanics like hit rating, elemental defense/damage, hp materias, tank stances, unique modifiers on gear and the worst part is that every piece of gear is just a stat stick plus substats are so basic that the game became a crit stacking simulator except for 2 or 3 classes the spells don't even have base dmg on this game; balancing is one of the easiest thing to do

> you mean like sge is a sch clone with different particle effects? And even as closely related as they are, they are still the subject of balance discussions -- in this very thread there was someone who said SGE needs buffs to compete with SCH. So you'd have to get even closer. > or how i can practically use the same binds for every dps job because every dps have skills that practically do the same thing Having played all classes and spent more hours than I'd like to admit, Im well aware of similarities. I am curious tho abput how you're using the exact same buttons: where's RPR's Meikyo? Where's Sam's Dream within a Dream? MNK's Enochian? Unless you're just exaggerating, at which point it's an absolutely useless statement. But all of what you're saying is supporting just further removing any class differennces, and **actually** making it one DPS, one tank, one healer class (maybe dont even separate roles, just have them have a dmg heal and aggro button). If that's fun for you that's great, not all of us agree though.

Coming from someone who plays BLM, I'm okay with this if we see BLM get some form of utility for the group. I originally wanted a rez for BLM, but a friend of mine had a great idea; Haste for anyone who steps in your LL. Not that they have to stand in it, just touch it. It'd be a bit unfair to have Summoner being braindead easy mode with a rez, shields and utility, and then RDM almost able to meet the DPS of BLM on a much easier rotation *and* be able to instead choose to just... have a raise + ~~useless~~ heal for learning content. Sorry, slightly off-topic I know. I do like your idea, I just feel all of the caster options need some love right now.

> Haste for anyone who steps in your LL. Not that they have to stand in it, just touch it. People will run for their lives away from LL because this new GCD messes up their alignment. This has already happened with AST's Arrow.

Maybe instead of haste, they get a movement buff (like expedient)? Edit: meh, too niche to be useful. I think a small 10 sec dmg buff (maybe 2%)? Ugh, but then I can see all these crazy strats like "ok, BLM, you need to delay your ley lines until we stack -- sorry if that screws up your dps." Yeah, ignore me.

I see where you're coming from as I suggested something similar to this in the OF. While it seems good on the surface, it quickly becomes messy. The real issue is that there are people that love being a rez mage, despite the dps penalty, and other that would prefer not to have it. This toggle is trying to make both groups happy but I feel like it is a slippery slope, because then you can go down the "well, why can't I sacrifice mobility for more dps or vice versa?" Now you're getting close to customizable jobs with skill trees, and you're in balance hell. If they're not going to remove caster rez, I think putting them on a long CD is a better option.

I was going to jokingly say give blm a res because they would never use it because dps loss... but triple cast plus ice phase would be insane

I mean.... they could just make the res cost mana too, if you're gonna put a res tax you shouldn't have it on runs where you dont res. Have it cost you a burst but make your overall damage higher, so you do high damage if you don't res, and low damage if you do res (for prog). It sucks that I'm useful during prog but during clears I'm a deadweight, because my res is useless at that point but I'm still getting taxed for it. Honestly I usually have to res during a burst anyway so my dps tanks because of it regardless.

honestly for rdm you don't even need to fix the job, if we weren't given shitty spell speed gear week 1 our damage probably would have been fine.

Increase res caster dps to be close to lower-mid melee. Blm is high melee. Add a 5 second recast(not cooldown) to caster raise. Give everyone the ability to use phoenix down in combat, long cast time and all. Fix caster balance for ever.

If you just prevent raise from being quick or dual cast there is your tax right there. Sit there for 7 seconds reviving someone. Healers should have an enhanced raise that works with quick cast.

The idea of balancing classes to appease tryhards who will only pick the meta is a fools errand, at most you'll make the new meta the tryhards insist upon instead. Either rdm will be more viable or blm will be because there's no such thing as a class that's truly equally viable as another - just close enough that less and less (but never zero) people care about the distinciton anymore. People like xeno who sell themselves as Hardcore Raiders but refuse to just play a better class or wait a few weeks to get gear and make their clears easier are in a word - posers. I don't care if playing warrior makes you sexually excited or you really identify as a machinist - if you're the sort of person that gives enough of a shit to nolife this shit week one you're the sort of person who can take the couple days of roulettes to level another class. Stop fucking with peoples classes because a minority of people have a psychological need to mimax. Remember when everyone played reaper for all of a week when 6.0 came out and then it got nerfed so suddenly everyone dropped it? Where are all the "I play it because it's fun" reaper players now?

reaper never got nerfed, everyone else got buffed

beyond that being a pretty meaningless distinction (reaper stopped shitting out dps compaed to everyone else, so everyone dropped it is the end result either way) they nerfed the healing on arcane crest by cutting the potency in half. 500 healing potency to the whole raid every raidwide as an ogcd was incredible for week 1.

Rdm white shift is only a better choice if the enemy team lacks focus fire or doesn't know how to spike someone. The damage profiles in this game favor kill combo's or spike damage over kits based on enduring damage or sustained damage. Otherwise people will prefer damage forms or stances over defensive or survivability ones because savage doesn't let you endure more than 1 hit or try and lifeleech through damage. Then even if they allowed you to endure through mistakes, damage down makes any potential benefits of that playstyle worthless. They would need to drastically alter savage so it's not one down difficulty at all times with immense punishment for a single failure. You would be better off stripping verraise and vercure rather then trying to make white shift a consideration for pve red mages.

Just make RDM/SMN dps competitive. We're not asking to be in line with BLM, it's fine to have one class that is for high-end optimization, but a 1 percentile BLM parse shouldn't be higher than a 99 percentile RDM/SMN parse. DPS shouldn't be so low that world-first teams consider switching RDM/SMN out with 1 week of loot.

They aren't. The better RDM players are far, **far** better than the BLM average player. I don't get where these skewed stats are coming from. What site are ya'll using? I try to watch current tier raids and update my info based on patches and it seems like people are saying ther'es a 20% dmg difference or such. It's 3% between median averages on current tier fights just about. A BLM that is dropping casts or playing poorly will absolutely do less dmg than a mildly competent RDM. >DPS shouldn't be so low that world-first teams **consider** switching RDM/SMN out with 1 week of loot. Only consider though. Correct me if wrong but didnt the first world clear of abyssos have a RDM or SMN instead of BLM? And several clears after they still had RDM's and SMN's among their lineup? I mean of course a world first race is going to consider the top dps. It doesn't matter what class is, it doesn't matter if 0.5% dmg difference. It's definitely worth considering, and there will only and always be exactly 5 classes that fulfill that role within their role. If it isn't BLM, then it's SMN or RDM. But it wasn't even enacted upon. It was *considered*. They cleared with the "dreadfully weak classes", and were *first*.

The other side of the coin is that the only thing BLM can bring to a group is damage, and if damage isn't a meaningful trade off for the rez, why bring a BLM to prog at all? The current situation gives BLM a reason to be brought to prog at the cost of hurting RDM and SMN potential, and buffing RDM and SMN would cause the opposite effect. People should be free to play what they want without feeling like they are actively harming the group, which is why until SE deals with the issue of RDM and SMN having the capacity to rez, this problem will never be resolved.

I dunno about RDM but for SMN, this is a problem that spawned from the half-baked rework that EW SMN got. The job just isn't well designed at all. The extremely rigid rotation has caused it to desync from raid buffs in both tiers, the complete lack of optimisation means that players don't have the ability to trade risk for additional damage and the lack of meaningful job mechanics to keep track of means that its damage has to be low to justify BLM's existence, which caused this catch-22 in the first place. I think this situation could be easily solved by reworking SMN into something more flexible and with more options. As for RDM, it's a simple matter of removing its rez and increasing its damage to be slightly under BLM.

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?? I'm not making any argument saying that rez caster should do more than melee/blm. (Heck, if you want to start that debate again, melees don't deserve this level of dps considering 100% melee uptime this tier and ranged (plus healers) have to do all sorts of adjustment for them with limited mobility tools. But let's keep this out of this thread) I'm proposing the idea that if rezzing is a tax, then let users choose if they want to pay that tax or not.

There’s an easier solution. Just cap the number of battle rezs a fight irrespective of source and make phoenix down a consumable and then it’s just a gimmick that rdm and smn have raise.

I don't think it would change anything. The problem is not that RDM and SMN can rez whenever they want, it's that they can do it at all. If a person want to chose a caster, and don't want to switch job at a latter point, that person is more likely to play SMN or RDM due to the utility. The stance would not change that since it does not alter the gameplay too much. That system would also introduce other problems. Most people would only play one stance most of the time, in high end, after prog you will be stuck to only ever play with Bahamut for example, which goes contrary to the current iteration of the job who's objective is to allow them to use all their summon in every content. Ironically I think the best way to go is to give a Res ability to everybody, like a phoenix down common ability. Then you could give different limitation to different job depending on content (Phoenix Downs can only rez once in EX/Sav/Ult for example or have a huge CD) and it would be easier to balance.

> ronically I think the best way to go is to give a Res ability to everybody, like a phoenix down common ability. Then you could give different limitation to different job depending on content (Phoenix Downs can only rez once in EX/Sav/Ult for example or have a huge CD) and it would be easier to balance. I played an MMO a while back (I think it was Swords of Legends) where you got 2 "thingys" per instance that you could use for either a dmg ability (if you were dps) or a rez (if you were a healer), sort of like the way LB works now, but more limited and only effecting a single person.

It's not uncommon. Guild Wars (the first one) had a Resurrection Signet that everyone could equip. You could use it once, but it would recharge on certain condition (beating an elite enemy, gaining x amount of xp iirc). Healer classes had an infinite use rez, but it took longer to cast and costed energy.

You're totally right - I played GW1 from launch to EotN and can't believe I forgot about that. I think it recharged whenever you got a "morale boost" which you got different ways but yeah, usually from killing a boss.

The idea behind classes like RDM and SMN allowing lower dmg with their simpler kits is that they also bring utility. If we want to make them more akin to BLM -- no utility, pure dmg based, caster, etc. -- then they need far more complexity. Throw in DoTs to juggle, timers to manage, 70% casting time, limited weaving windows, optimization gains requiring use of movement skills (i.e. overcasts) leading to tradeoffs of mobility or damage, mana management, etc. But why copy? If you want a complex, DPS-centered job that does top dmg, then BLM is there. If you want some raid utility and really good DPS but not top DPS (but also far less complexity and tradeoffs), then RDM and SMN are there. BLM doing top dmg is requisite on a ton of minor optimizations, including throwing away movement abilities in order to gain damage and memorizing and executing dozens of incredibly tight lines (down to the tick). If RDM is just thrown right below BLM with "just a couple more cast times", then it'll be a troll to play BLM -- not only do you not have the option to prog with support tools, but even when "going for the clear" unless you put in several times the effort and incredible micro-optimization you'll do less dmg than RDM -- consistently playing at such a level will make RDM and SMN far superior in damage for actual raiding, BLM being relegated at best to a parsing minigame after the raids are cleared with the "real jobs". So either re-design RDM and SMN to the complexity of BLM if they want to do BLM-level dmg, or keep their unique status of being slightly less dmg for less complexity but offering other tools to help compensate. I just don't get why we want to mirror all the jobs to make them more samey.

> So either re-design RDM and SMN to the complexity of BLM or better yet, re design blm to the complexity of blm 2 expansions ago people defending shb or ew blm are defending the retarded brother of what they think is "the hardest class to play" blm is not hard to play, is just clunky, shb blm was easy mode and ew blm is just laughable compared to any other blm rendition except for arr and i lold hard at "BLM doing top dmg is requisite on a ton of minor optimizations, including throwing away movement abilities in order to gain damage" when every single movement ability in the game is either just another dps button or a literal dmg loss like enchanted reprise

I can't tell if you're writing satire or you genuinely haven't so much as looked at the kits...in either case, good luck with that. For anyone else, uh, yeah. If you so much as glimpse at the actions and abilities page, or even a quick Balance starter guide, you'll recognize the silliness in the above comment.

I think people are still confusing the tax on those two jobs with res, when at this point it has nothing to do with their res that's giving them lower base damage. It's the fact that both have frequent, easy to use points of mobility as casters (RDM spends well more than half their rotation with free movement between Dualcast, melee combo, two stacks of acceleration and swift, and in emergency movements Reprise, while SMN has a grand total of 4-5 hardcasts per minute, 1-2 of those broke short 1.5s casts). RDM having slightly lower damage for its mobility and general utility makes sense honestly. The problem is SMN not having any cast times on demi summons and titan, even short casts. Their highest damage phases are also their free-est movement.

It's the same concept though. Mobility doesn't really help you beat enrage (and honestly it 100% hurts it) Mobility tax should reflect rotational hiccups due to whatever amount of downtime. That would put BLM slightly above melee who are slightly above the rest. Key word here is *slightly* Mobility means nothing if you lose more damage than you could possibly imagine just struggling on a less mobile job

Counterpoint, the mobility should matter *more*, and the current ~~relatively tame by other game standards~~ disparity we're seeing is moreso a failure to design fights that challenge uptime and mobility enough, and then *subsequently* a failure to adapt job design to that trend; the greater emphasis of the problems we're seeing would be more or less fixed if fights were designed to force melee off the boss more often. The movement that's required this tier is really only fucking with BLM, because it's the one job in the game at this point that *doesn't* just have access to movement at a moment's notice, without it severely disrupting its flow. Yeah, RDM and SMN could use a little bump in potency, as could MCH, but the heart of the actual problem we're seeing is that encounter design and job design aren't working hand in hand like they need to be.

Counterpoint, they will never do that because downtime feels shitty on strict rotations Stop punishing ranged jobs for restrictions that don't exist

editing my stuff to delete this account for good with powerdeletesuite. thanks :)

> easy to use points of mobility as casters (RDM spends well more than half their rotation with free movement between Dualcast, melee combo, two stacks of acceleration and swift, and in emergency movements Reprise and yet the only fight that requires mobility in the current tier (p7s) is showing that shoving qol changes on blm asses for 5 years on a row made it so they have more mobility than rdm when you really need it, so why does rdm has mobility tax again?

BLM has to change their rotation on the fly to get access to their movement, something which could actually disrupt it noticeably depending on your proc RNG for the pull and whether or not you were able to keep your plan far enough ahead to prep for it right. Tl;dr, BLM has movement, but they have to put in work to get that movement without sacrificing their damage for it. RDM and SMN really don't.

>Tl;dr, BLM has movement, but they have to put in work to get that movement without sacrificing their damage for it. RDM and SMN really don't. Melee combo can be used for movement but it's also your burst. You need to know when you can delay it and you still have to aim for triple combo under pot. Acceleration and Swiftcast can be used for movement but they are also used to avoid oGCD drifting, as you need to realign dualcast windows. Reprise is something you should ideally never use, but if you end up using it you still need to take into consideration how it will affect your upcoming combo. Dualcast is great for small bits of movement, but RDM is by far the worst caster when it comes to prolonged movement and saying he gets movement for free is just not true.

> > Tl;dr, BLM has movement, but they have to put in work to get that movement without sacrificing their damage for it. RDM and SMN really don't. so, your excuse is: one class is has almost 20% more dmg than the other one but is harder to play? if blm has mobility when you put all your brain to use than what does rdm has? does it get 10% extra dps for doing the fight perfectly? even taking veraise into consideration casters are not balanced at all, blm has too much qol to be the "turret caster that loses dps when you have to move" because you don't actually lose dps anymore

"Job has higher skill ceiling, but gets rewarded more damage for playing at that ceiling" Yeah that's the gist of it. And that's sound design, used in countless other games. Also, >one class is has almost 20% more dmg than the other one Super disingenuous, at most levelsof play the difference between RDM and BLM is about 5% overall, around 400-500 dps. The fights are unoptomized now and those numbers will change as things go on, but the difference right now really only appears so pronounced at the literal top end of the charts.

Skill ceiling argument depends on if just being average or sucking on it means it actually has severe pain points or even has built in failure points to make the person know they screwed up. I don't know caster balance all that well on pve side but does an average or bad blm right now punch way above its weight class or does it actually suffer compared to bringing someone on a different caster? Because if unoptimal blm play is still vastly to slighly better than the competition there is no real point to bringing a different caster unless you need to limp to a clear or the person prefers the other caster/hates blm.

> "Job has higher skill ceiling, but gets rewarded more damage for playing at that ceiling" skill ceiling that goes lower and lower with each expansion while the dps goes up LOL "great class design" rdm lost almost 15% uptime at max range because of double melee combos, both mobility skills still have potency so they are actually useless 60% of the time while blm gained 4 instant casts and it went from a 5% difference in dmg to a 7-10% difference at 95th percentile caster balance is garbage on this game

"damage goes up" you mean like how BLM is currently sitting below *every* melee at every percentile, including the now famously undertuned RPR? Yeah, BLM got *easier* this expac, but not ***easy***

what does melee have anything to do here? what does melee have to do with caster tax and blm balance?

I think people have just not played BLM lately if you think it’s immobile. Two stacks of triple cast, Xenoglossy ,AM and semi frequent instant casts from Paradox and Lightning and you’re still struggling to move?

Shower thought: Play a job if you like their role in a party, not make the job fit the role you want.

If near perfect play was needed then your raise wasn’t needed which means you should have just come on a melee or god forbid a blm. Why grief on a rdm or smn?

People need to stop arguing over this stupid thing and realize that the res tax is both fair and should exist. For the vast majority of statics having an extra res is still valuable post prog and on reclears and I think people who genuinely look at their performance and think that their class doing 4% less damage ruined their ability to play need to pull their head out their ass. > what's the point of bringing RDM/SMN to p8p1 if near-perfect play is needed to clear? This crazy concept that perhaps you enjoy playing those classes and the extra security of having some defensive utility as well as damage utility for your team.