FFXIV’s Scuffed Job Drama Will Set A Dangerous Precedent

Btw, I actually parse blue, and in bad gear. Hopefully, this video sheds some light on how insanely complicated it actually is to solve this from the developer's end, but also reaffirms how important it is for these problems to actually be solved, because this game's been doing SO well for so long on balance.
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[@zaheela]

I feel the need to say that we should see if we could get a translator to submit Japanese captions so that we can have the dev see this rational conversation. It may not offer a solution to a single class but certainly offers a good middle ground view that they could use in their own discussions. Usually only the videos of someone growing red faced and yelling into a mic seems to climb to the top, so this video feels like a good counter to those

[@AoiKaze2000]

Absolutely it's necessary, and something that would help immensely with these conversations because while Yoshi-P and the studio heads understand English, I don't expect the average dev to, and being able to better communicate with them may help fix issues and pass on learnings from other MMOs (like WoW) so FFXIV doesn't repeat the fatal mistakes of the past.

[@brynphillips9957]

The community team very much is responsable for this. A big part of their job is to identify the key points in feedback and act as translators and filters for the dev team.

[@Auesis]

@@brynphillips9957 The devs literally ask English content creators to do this all the time. Nobody is making a team of translators just to watch some youtube videos.

[@24hr-Gaming]

@@AoiKaze2000 Bruh. This is so silly. If you've played literally any other MMORPG do you know how they handle issues like this? Have teams dedicated to collect feedback and then translate it to the devs. Asking every single player who wants to contribute meaningful feedback to have a translator is a wild af ask.

[@AoiKaze2000]

@@24hr-Gaming And the overwhelming majority of those MMOs are based in the west. You gotta take the Japanese culture into account here.

[@telenNG]

I think one of the best and most terrible ideas someone presented to me personally was to have machinist always crit on every single attack because they using a gun XD

[@zenixvampirchik652]

bruh, and then let gunbreakers to crit on every cartridge use... Cuz why not. But jokes aside some weird interaction/combo/resource managment that allows usage of some skill/buff that make next few attaks/skills of machinst a guranteed crit ,ight be an interesting idea, if enough thought put into it

[@Xbob42]

That would be an interesting and silly fun mechanic to be sure. I think they should just get killstreaks from Call of Duty. Instead of calling down the Queen mech, the Machinist operates a mounted minigun in an attack chopper circling the arena for 15 seconds!

[@Stinkdawg]

@@zenixvampirchik652 Machinist already has Reassemble, which makes the next weaponskill they use a critical, direct hit. It has two charges on a 55 second recast timer.

[@lethalramen]

Easy solution, crit every single attack but drop the base damage by half. EZPZ

[@Xbob42]

@@lethalramen That's good but then they'll complain that their DPS is too low, so I propose the concept of some sort of RNG damage bonus to get those numbers back up... We can call it a tirc!

[@Xbob42]

Make a class fun to play and give it a strong identity. Then try to help it keep up and be desirable in groups. The other way around just means you end up designing all classes to be one class.

[@JP11999]

Ah yes the "MCH is an RP job" drama lmao 🤣 Edit: best way you can describe MCH right now is... it's a selfish DPS that fights for a utility slot (because it's damage isn't enough to be a selfish dps) while also having 0 utility (you don't take MCH for tactician).

[@dolphinboi-playmonsterranc9668]

Imagine if SAM had no damage. Weebs would be malding.

[@Auesis]

@@dolphinboi-playmonsterranc9668 That's exactly what it was when it launched. They fixed it.

[@XieRH1988]

@@Auesis in general the devs are pretty good at fixing stuff when it comes to issues identified with certain content, for instance when players constantly didn't succeed in getting chosen for Duels in bozja, the devs introduced the notoriety system. And more recently with P7S arena waymark issues, they intend to tweak the arena as well because currently there's problem with not being able to place waymarks in certain intended spots. But job balance is an exception, the current ecosystem of so many jobs, each having 3 hotbars worth of skills, is a monster of a problem to be tackled and there's also a risk of messing with the meta if a fix goes too far and overtunes something by mistake. More often than not the 'fix' is just potency buff bandaid, or a 'future revamp' that may or may not even turn out well.

[@aSmolGoth]

The problem stems from OP's statement right here : "utility slot." It's a physical ranged slot that still brings mitigation and full range without losing uptime. MCH in particular offers consistent damage while DNC and BRD (especially BRD now) are more a testament to HUD watching and hitting the glowing button. Everyone's so busy focusing on min-maxing when they're unlikely to be good enough at the game to min-max to begin with.

[@JP11999]

@@aSmolGoth uptime is a joke. Melee can easily maintain uptime this expansion. SQEX has openly said ranged physical is the "support" role for dps jobs where they focus on helping the party while doing damage. Most of the playerbase acknowledges there is a problem with MCH (no utility and not enough damage. SQEX needs to pick one). Attacking me and others by saying "...they're unlikely to be good enough at the game..." despite having no proof to back up this blanket statement only shows your own insecurities. It's a game, people will vary in skill level. Striving and hoping to be better is a good mentality to have. If you genuinely think MCH is in a good state right now I think you need to look at things from a different angle and with a fresh set of eyes. That is all. Thanks for reading.

[@j_corb]

I think people assign this issue with MMO's, but it's actually an "issue" that permeates in Fighting games for as long as the FGC has existed. Unless you force all players to play the exact same character with the exact same moves, you're simply NEVER going to have a fight that is "PERFECTLY balanced". Objectively, one of those options will always TEHCNICALLY be better in some capacity, depending how you're comparing things. In PvE, if your main goal is damage, then people land on how much "Damage per Second" someone is "worth". It makes sense, but does throw out quite a lot of nuance. But what is often MOST impactful is simply player PERCEPTION. In Street Fighter II, Ryu and Sagat were generally considered "the best" characters. They were definitely extremely strong; Shoto's (read: characters like Ryu and Ken) are essentially your swiss-army knife, fairly easy to pick up and play. But perception fed into more players PICKING those characters, which perpetuated the idea of "look how overpowered they are? EVERYONE is playing them!", which the reality is... perhaps not "wrong", but far more nuanced than you might realize. It's certainly a massive issue with WoW. Hell, they're literally giving Warrior tanks Gorefiend's Grasp (the DK AoE "Death Grip"). The goal should always be to TRY to keep people balanced. But I think it's MORE important to have classes that FEEL unique. Because otherwise, we wind up with Street Fighter where Ryu is the only character.

[@wolfvermillion1729]

I'm not even a world first raider, I just love playing machinist. I've felt the comparative lack of damage to other jobs since 5.2, after feeling amazing to play in 5.0, and even in 6.1 and 6.0 savages and extremes have felt horrible to play with my favorite class because even if there are deaths, it feels like the cause of the wipe is...me playing something I enjoy rather than something I can provably get better numbers with but don't really enjoy the playstyle of: (MNK, BLM, DRG). I just want to play my favorite job and not feel like I'm holding back the people I play with.

[@wolfvermillion1729]

@@mista_louie When I run Extremes and above on MCH, play perfectly, but wipe to enrage with someone else dying 5+ times in a single run, and I run the exact same thing with the exact same people on DRG, a job I actually legitimately faceroll because I don't know how to play the job at a high level, or MNK which I know how to play moderately well, and clear with 5+ deaths in the raid without even seeing the enrage cast bar, MCH is an actual griefing job. Machinist I know how to play well and how to maximize burst windows, but all else being equal clears happen with a job I actually don't even play at a high level with an iLVL difference of 15+ on a job I actively hate? I genuinely can't justify playing the job I love.

[@Auesis]

@@wolfvermillion1729 Frankly that just cannot be correct. The disparity from the best to worst jobs in the entire game hovers around 10%. You as 1/8 changing job, and then playing it badly in your own words, would make a pathetically small difference to the clear time. People just played better in your faster clear.

[@wolfvermillion1729]

@@Auesis And yet we still made up for the 5% enrage that we'd been hitting for the previous two hours until I changed jobs. And yes, I don't play DRG great. I'm constantly overcapping at least three eyes a run because I don't have the timing down well enough and I forget to hit DFD because the jump reversion pushed it out of where I can actually watch the CDs, but the very run I changed to DRG, we cleared even with the same person dying constantly and spending the entire fight with BoD debuff. MCH is just too far behind to be able to clear anything without things being 100% perfect.

[@vanyel_etc8695]

@@wolfvermillion1729 what you're saying basically is that unlike rdm or smn for example, mch actually feels like it HAS to lean on its team comp to succeed. Blm, Sam, even reaper have enough dps to hold their own on a fight in any comp, but a mch in a suboptimal comp? It can't prog. No utility to help see new mechs, no damage to help break dps checks. There is no worse feeling than thinking you're just inting for playing what you love, and the very idea that the rest of your comp would have ti change to perfect jobs just so you guys could win is painful and you could play what you like is painful. As a havoc demon hunter on wow, I feel you bro.

[@ryudhal]

@@wolfvermillion1729 Might not be as terrible as your situation, but I'm playing RPR and my static has a PLD WAR (though they're way better off now) and we also have a NIN, and seeing my DPS slightly lower than the NIN with a purple parse and the NIN gets a damn blue, it just ain't right :( Atleast we're not world firsters, this issue is way worse for that crowd. Fights shouldn't ever be comp locked, that's the most unfun fucking thing possible.

[@arof7605]

Two things happened in EW that widened the gap between melee and the rest. The skill floor of melee was raised so high a below average melee parse (40-50) is a 90% on average from all the other jobs. This was a mix of original job changes (fewer positionals) and the fact that the melee designer continued to buff them to try to get them equal (and other than RPR, did a very good job, and even top melee to reaper is within 3%) while especially casters got absolutely nothing. 6.2 the caster dev was just...afk. But also, at a base level, melee combos got raised to a massive 30 seconds before they drop and they don't drop if melee have to ranged attack. These were described by a lot of people as a "qol" buff but it is a big part why melee have such consistently massive uptimes. Even a "bad" gcd is still some damage, even during movement. If a caster has to move during a cast, suddenly they're doing nothing and getting less prepared for the next burst window. The "melee tax" of downtime is nearly gone just from that before you even get into the whole hitbox problem. Ranged just get it worse in almost every way, at a system level. They're even so much squishier that undermitigated mechanics can just oneshot, especially if they're not fully topped off. Less base HP and lower gear defense especially vs physical mechanics, which is still a damage type on ranged, unavoidable mechanics.

[@PubstarHero]

Here's the thing - It feels like Dancer and Bard got a lot more to their toolkit than MCH did when leveling to 90. The gap has been growing, but P8S showed the cracks in the job. Back in Shadowbringers, I was able to pull off BRD and move to MCH and immediately gain ~3500 rDPS with my static. That was being 100% fresh at both jobs, and both hitting blue/purple range. While BRD gets a new raid buff, DNC gets a couple of new hard hits, all MCH gets is small damage gain on Queen and another 1 minute skill which is effectively just a second charge of Air Anchor. I also HIGHLY disagree with it needing a raid buff. The point of the job its that its greedy DPS (like SAM/BLM). What it needs is potency buffs.

[@kuronaialtani]

It's definitely the wrong way to go about it but I really really like PvP MCH with the charge cast attacks I'd love to see that kind of thing in PvE as well And yeah MCH is supposed to be the big damage no support of physical ranged and wow it somehow sucks at both right now

[@RaizerSkybreaker]

@@kuronaialtani a charge cast attack that lets you move sounds really fun if done correctly, which I too like in pvp!

[@aeravan]

TL/DR: potency buffs - sure. but how much and how to get the number? the problem is in how buff stacking works in FFXIV. (for those who do not know: four 5% dmg buffs do not total in 20% dmg increase, but a 21.5% (a 1.05^4=1.215... multiplier)) if you balance a "selfish" job to the highest possible potential of buff stacking, you end up with a job that outperforms in every situation. a group, that took only two buff stackers would actually be better with just one or none, because everyone can just smash buttons and not worry about aligning their buffs. buff stackers will always outperform selfish dps in party contribution, because the more you add the more you get out of it, so having 6 buffers (the maximum, as tanks have no party dmg ups as of now) rams up the efficiency of those buffs to insane levels. it must be, honestly, a nightmare for devs, as not only those buffs but also the increase in crit/dh stat value on armors pushes the gap even wider. (imagine you got extra 1.5% dmg up from buff stacking and now you direct crit: congrats, your 1000+ potency skill did 3%+ more dmg than it would/should) is the way to buff MCH every patch to compensate for that (ie. being strong on early prog but weaker as players get better gear and develop better strats for fights) or will they just homogenize the ranged and turn all of them into buff stacking slaves?

[@PubstarHero]

@@aeravan On the flip side, you balance a job that only gives buffs and the group is poor, you've created a massively under performing job. The idea though would be to just give it an optimal and sub optimal team comp, and balance somewhere in the middle. It also feels like you are ignoring two jobs here with that paragraph - BLM and SAM. Both perform extremely well, but are greedy as fuck. You're not going to run a 6 buff comp because you still need at least 1 heavy hitter to capitalize on the buffs. Thats down to 5. Now that also assumes you're running AST/SCH for the other 2 buff positions, which is not really a common comp I see right now (considering that AST has a 40% lower rate of parses coming in than the other healers for the past 2 weeks). So realistically you're going to have 4 in almost every comp. Thats a good spot to balance around. Besides, the most standard is going to be 2x Melee, 1x Caster, 1x Phys Ranged because running 2x Phys Ranged will always be a DPS handicap. Thats why the one vying for the 'support' slot that takes it and offers nothing besides tactician, it needs more damage. A lot more to make up for it.

[@aeravan]

@@PubstarHero I agree that MCH/SAM/BLM should be ballanced around 3-4 buffer party, so highly organized parties could get extra juice while average parties can clear no problem. but that would mean that a full buff meta will still be optimal. look at top speedkills. a lot of AST/SCH/SMN/DNC + melee buffer comps. and people would mimic that. and call for buffs to MCH/SAM/BLM. the problem is, that there are way too many variables. there are 12,960 possible standard one-per-job party compositions. one will always be at least 1dps better. there simply isn't enough high quality testers to test all of them. I feel sorry for devs. they face a hard nut to crack. there is no way to please everyone. IMHO, just stop making dps checks tight. all of this wasn't a problem untill they overtuned the HP of a boss. EDIT: by "not being a problem" I didn't mean MCH mains are unhappy and deserve a better treatment. I mean it was literally possible to clear any content, including DSR, with WAR/RPR/MCH/RDM + juicers, so, as you implied - the middle ground comp.

[@patrickoverstreet2372]

This is a problem that damn near destroyed the entire raiding scene in heavensward, there where at minimum 4-5 jobs that were unplayable on top of the first raid tier requiring perfect play to beat even with the highest performance jobs in the game. Then towards the end of the expansion brd and mch got an unacounted buff in the form of drg getting its piercing debuff increased so casters just didnt see play since drg, brd, mch was dealing exponentially more damage. FFXIV has had this problem in the past and it something that will always reappear whenever the dev team has any slip-up in job balance.

[@PubstarHero]

The meta comp was still a thing through Stormblood - PLD/WAR/AST/SCH/NIN/DRG/MCH/BRD. Losing the 1% job bonus from all roles was easily made up with the MASSIVE increase with job synergy.

[@patrickoverstreet2372]

@@PubstarHero True, but at least in Stormblood the balance was close enough that you didnt run into the issue of getting booted or excluded from content for playing a specific job like you did in Heavensward, or if it did still occur it was at a far smaller rate.

[@Hobojo153]

Didn't help that the PS3 couldn't handle the raids

[@DawnAfternoon]

@@PubstarHero In HW's offense, some jobs were just straight up broken and not usable in Savage at all. PLD in particular suffered horribly because it used to be that they can't block magic damage.

[@PubstarHero]

@@DawnAfternoon Really in HW though it was mostly just PLD. Then DRK got the dumpster in Stormblood because cover was too strong, Holmgang had an obscenely low CD (3 min was the old one), and PLD gained ranged attacks to keep up sustained damage on fights with jumping bosses. That being said, DRK was never not an option like how PLD was never really viable in HW - I had to run DRK to clear O12S for Dark Mind and just how good TBN was in that fight. Also there were plenty more problems with PLD in HW. Mostly the massive TP deficit they ran compared to the other tanks.

[@kaivenst]

100% agree with this take - my biggest complaint about the gradual job changes over the years is not the balancing (and I like playing MCH), its that the jobs are getting less fun to play than they used to be. This trend continues every update, and its way more concerning than tier - to - tier balancing which changes literally every major patch. Jobs being fun is more important than high-end raid balancing in a game where you can play any job and its really easy to level them all.

[@rei0]

As someone who has mainly been playing brd/mch for the past year, I have a lot of thoughts on this subject. Ignoring the rest of the issues mch has, and the issues I think phys rng in general has, I think it got hit too hard during the stat squish.

[@Boethion]

This 100%. Its big attacks Drill and Air Anchor (and by extension Chainsaw) lost ~150 potency from the stat squish alone and while they did slightly buff them back up again together with the basic combo its still nowhere near enough. Its also not like Machinist was too good in Shadowbringers, so "nerfing" them this hard was clearly unnecessary.

[@JohnPaul-nb5iu]

@@Boethion if you read the patch more closely. You'd know the state squish didn't actually nerf anything. Only the numbers went down not the damage ratios.

[@chrisbaldwin8570]

I like how in Heavensward the idea was all the ranged would be stationary or have a decent part of their dps be cast times and the player base hated it even as range dps was rocking the meters.

[@starstreamheartlocke652]

To be fair, people who wanted to play that style were probably already playing casters. Different audiences.

[@Riku2005]

bow mage and gun mage were the shit man. They had some of the most fun rotations/optimization.

[@Xbob42]

I hate the idea of immobile casters in general. It's a playstyle that, to me, is designed around just... not doing anything. Hit the button, stand still. Sure you have to "strategize" about where you want to be, but FFXIV is already heavily movement based so everyone is already constantly doing that. I want more magical DPS that can cast on the move! Maybe a cast bar that goes fast if you're stationary, but slows down if you're moving instead of ending.

[@Theheadless1858]

Shush your mouth. Never again! Rainbow mage must not return!

[@Riku2005]

@@Xbob42 oh i love it man. being able to dodge and do mechs at the last second of a cast and saving resources for movement is such a fun loop for me.

[@Cassapphic]

Most of xiv’s design flaws either fall into two groups, good on paper ideas with unforeseen issues coming up much later (gigantic hitboxes making melees basically phys ranged, every job being a 2 minute fiesta making poorly timed deaths run ruining and making it harder to balance) and a weird obsession with removing unique mechanics, (dancer’s more tight proc management that is now just “push the glowy button” and the removal of kaiten so every job gague is now just for a single target skill, an aoe akill and maybe for a couple jobs a long cooldown like bunshin or simulacrum) [EDIT: Something I forgot to mention is 2 minute fiesta makes crit rng a bigger factor, in the oldd esign crit variance over the length of a whole fight would usually average itself out, as although their were buff windows, they were more spread out so crits would kinda solve themselves, when most of your damage comes in specific windows that are 1/6th of the fight, if you're not critting THERE specifically, its a much more notable loss, when theres less chances to get lucky, the luck doesnt average itself out.]

[@TehTacoNinja]

The 2 minute meta is completely intentional and they know what they want out of it. I don’t like this notion that the devs just “don’t know better” they’ve been balancing this game for almost a decade, they know exactly what they’re wanting out of something and that makes it more important for players to speak out when issues do happen because said devs will be convinced it’s fine otherwise given their near-perfect track record.

[@kadian299]

You forgot (purposefully or not, I cannot tell)giant hit boxes that make melee have to run the entire length of the arena or miss positionals to do mechanics.

[@24hr-Gaming]

@@TehTacoNinja The point of it was to help pf (most average raiders) align buff without needing to communicate and think about it too hard. Problem 1: Pf is affected more by drift issues that put buffs out of alignment. If the dps check is made with that alignment in mind the dps check is actually harder for pf, not easier. Problem 2: Nothing natively in the game teaches you jack shit about doing stuff like having job specific openers that will align your raid buff with everyone else along with your burst phase. That is something you have to get from *gasp* filthy loggers and tryhards. Problem 3: This meta creates hard on meta and off meta jobs by whether or not your class can capitalize on the 2 minute burst. Problem 4: This meta makes crit variance a way bigger problem because whether or not you crit in all your burst windows makes a huge difference in the damage you do. Problem 5: Fights are being designed to interrupt the 2 min burst with mechanics which has it's own set of problems like some classes are fully mobile during their burst and others are not or pf has to magically osmosis whether or not everyone holds burst or not. So if it doesn't fix the problem it's supposed to fix and introduces more problems then what are they trying to do?

[@geller1243]

@@TehTacoNinja The 2 minute meta causes far more problems then they realize. Im sure that they had their reasons but it single handedly killed any enjoyment for fight optimization for me. Its now a binary desision to use 2 mins on cd, or hold 30s for mechanics on each fight and thats about it. the different timers made for jobs having strengths during certain burst timers (MNK brotherhood, and DRK/WAR come to mind during SHB, or DRG and BRD's 3 min synergy with lit and b.voice). If all the jobs fill the same 2 min burst niche then it just comes down to whatever does the most aDPS at that point. super bland and boring. The games balance is fucked almost entirely because of this shift to this 2 min meta, and it really needs to stop. Even GNB cant have 90s bloodfest anymore because they HAVE to fit into every 2 min, instead of creating different 2 min windows for each one, dependant on the CD of bloodfest at the time. making them do the same exact burst every 2 mins, utterly destroying any fun i had on the job. The way raid buffs worked in Shadowbringers was absolutely fine. The change was completely unwarrented. And makes problems for new jobs they could add. Are we just going to have classes that only burst at 2 mins for the rest of time?

[@TehTacoNinja]

@@geller1243 I completely agree with all of this, and it’s that much more important we’re vocal as a community not just about the fucked balancing numbers but the actual mindset they have right now. It’s 100% tied to how they’ve been pushing for homogenization across the board and examples like you’ve given are when they’ve clearly gone too far.

[@ericmoll1530]

I think the problem is bigger than MCH, it's just the poster job for it. They have been very clear about things like applying a ranged tax to jobs with the understanding that these classes would have higher uptime compared to the melee jobs (and this applies to casters as well). But with the change to their philosophy with melee uptime where it's been easier and easier to keep full uptime and fewer and fewer positionals this whole philosophy on class balance is falling apart. Especially with the current raid tier it's not uncommon for the opposite to occur, where melee get better uptime than at least casters (SMN excepted) due to the sheer amount of movement, causing even more of a disparity. The entire concept of a "ranged tax" needs to be re-evaluated and they need to adjust jobs accordingly. Also you have to remember that you get a 1% stat bonus for having a tank/healer/phys ranged/melee/caster each in your group, so even if the ranged tax was removed you wouldn't see some degenerate quad-phys-ranged group unless they royally skewed it in the wrong direction enough to overpower a well set up 2 min buff window with a spread of classes that can contribute, plus the loss of 2% stats (Not a fan of the 2 min meta either but thats a rant for another time). LB issues aside as well, trying to run something like mch, mch, brd, dnc would never be able to match a proper group with a good 2 min buff windows. At worst you'd see a melee, caster and 2 phys ranged which is still absolutely not likely unless they get ENORMOUS buffs. I disagree that normal matters at all, because you can take absolutely anything into normal, die 20 times and you'll still kill eventually as long as your healers or abused RDM can continue to drag people off the floor. If there's no time limit damage is irrelevant. We had WARs soloing p1n last tier. tl;dr the ranged tax is pointless these days, it makes no sense, ranged as a whole needs a rebalance if they're going to continue making melee uptime a non-issue.

[@arof7605]

Yeah, when a 90% parse on all the non melee or blm (on average) is around a 40-50% parse on the average melee, the gap has become so big that a player worse at melee can swap to it in similar or even lower ilvl and do notably more damage. It's insanely demotiviating if you play ranged, especially when casters especially have to deal with being notably more squishy. Saw a healer in P5S who didn't have crafted, but did have good old gear and food on just get oneshot by an undermitigated mechanic. It's so bad even some melee getting funneled in statics ask "can we give our caster and healers a few items for vitality?" Ever since an unavoidable mechanic in Ruby Weapon hit me as a min-ilvl RDM for 95% hp, the gap in job survivability just feels stupid. It's over 3x more ehp on a tank than a caster before you factor in block/parry or a single defensive CD.

[@xAciasx]

Melee is too easy right this moment, the fights are made around 100% uptime for melees, of course MCH sucks in that and BRD/DNC profit from increased rDPS due their raidbuffs. Also tanks are very strong right now even further increasing raidbuff contribution. Make positionals matter again. You can probably parse higher than a MCH if you completely ignore positionals.

[@chasey1978]

Summoner has a 2 second cast time on two of ifrit abilities and one for garuda that we can cheese by wasting one swift cast on so no summonor doesn’t always have it easy and we actually do need to think when the right time is to use those abilities.

[@ennovasnap7497]

With how much movement there is in these fights (savage) vs how big the hit boxes are, RDM is probably one of the hardest jobs to keep uptime with... yet its DPS is the lowest because uh rez bot.... the tax is just too damn high

[@JohnPaul-nb5iu]

Red mage is extremely mobile....

[@cgperschon]

@@JohnPaul-nb5iu name one job (besides blm) that is less mobile and how so?

[@Keira_Blackstone]

Whilst I don't really think the balance issue is even something worth worrying about, my personal proposed MCH fix is this- make it so your entire group contributes to the power of Wildfire. makes them more utility with minimal changes and without sacrificing any of the flavor of the job.

[@ViviCaligo]

I would like to point out another annoyance of the huge hitbox, team mits and shields are becoming a pain in the arse to hit everyone with. I think it's just instinct that people will stand on the edge of a hitbox meanwhile I drop sacred soil and it's the exact size of said hitbox. Guess how many people in normal roulette ignore that thinking they need to be outside the hitbox to hit positionals? Spoiler it's a lot... As an add on I now realise why i love playing dancer, because the chance to proc abilities keeps away some of the monotony of the rigid 2 minute rotation.

[@toodleselnoodos6738]

I really can’t stand the melee dps that somehow think positionals only exist outside the circle. Even something like Azeyma. They could dodge some side cleaves if they just go by cardinal positions. Also, why the fuck do so many travel ALONGSIDE the outside of the circle instead of walking straight through it?!?

[@seltheus9447]

It comes down to sth fairly simple. Create and balance a job around its identity and utility and THEN adjust potencies to balance it around group performance. Selfish dps NEED to be the top performing jobs of their role, otherwise their selfishness serves absolutely no purpose. If they wanna keep MCH selfish then that needs to happen. The other work around would be to add a utility to MCH, which would be an easy fix imo. The job fantasy would easily allow for a debuff that increases raid dmg. Something "Uncover Weakness", or "Weakpoint Extortion". A debuff that lets everyone deal 5% more dmg or sth. It's part of the job fantasy in the game already with Mustadio.

[@MrSporitus]

I was hoping you would also discuss how homogenization interacts with the button ceiling related to both we cannot place too much a necessity of mouse/keyboards that can deal with immense hotbars, but also controller and/or console players. They want to add new abilities but they are up against the limit and have to adjust previous ones when they do.

[@torashiki5646]

I dont think its a massive issue because even for keyboard the jobs they are reworking for that are becoming a bit bloated.

[@DawnAfternoon]

While I'm against homogenization I do feel button bloat is a valid issue that should be addressed. Heavensward did this to an extreme and some jobs you just almost can't play because you can't find enough rooms for your keybind.

[@nitrocide1746]

The greatest irony of this take is that Machinist went through a rework back in ShB and they took everything that was wrong with it: High APM class that struggles with latency with a bunch of features that worked against each other. Hard to control burst windows. But they completely gutted the class and everything that made it unique for the rework. We all saw potential in the class and were hopeful... But they just haven't done anything with it. Playing the job feels like you're revving an engine to no real payoff because of how their burst windows work. And now people are seeing that the same problems it had, it still has... It's still a high APM class that needs things to line up, but the 2min buff windows mean that MCH's burst windows don't line up as well with raid buffs. And I'm personally scared for reworks because of how they reworked SMN...

[@louisrharmony]

The team making the PLD rework is stuck between a rock and a hard place rn. The rock being the 2min meta/design philosophy and the hard place being upsetting everyone who likes how the job plays. I love the feel of PLD. It’s super satisfying to pull of the rotation in full uptime, and moving parts of ur rotation and spreadsheeting to optimize downtime is super fun and makes it unique among tanks and even most melees. The problem is that this means that it is really the only job in the game that doesn’t burst and buffing and reworking it likely means it loses it’s signature feel and identity. Since the team is unlikely to backtrack on the 2min design mid expansion, it seems like the only option is reworking PLD and likely upsetting a good chunk of it’s playerbase.

[@gackybass]

I would rather play WoW than a homogenised PLD. I don't see this going well at all after how they brutally murdered SAM.

[@25xxfrostxx]

Paladin is one of my least favorite tanks. I was talking about them with a friend that loves them and the way I feel when playing them was described as like when you come home late at night and you're carrying a bunch of bags and stuff in both hands. You try to manage all of it, shifting items between hands to fish your house key out of your pocket. Oh crap, you forgot to turn the porch light on. There you stand with a ton of stuff in your hands and in the darkness as you try to locate the house key on a full key ring in the dark by touch alone. That's what a paladin feels like to me. I think a good general place to start on a rework would be to change the resource generation. It's the only tank that relies on auto attack to use defensives. It needs to function like kenki. Then if I had my way, it wouldn't have the absolutely boring rotation that involves pressing the same button 3 to 4 times over and over. It feels bad. It also doesn't need a ranged damage rotation on a tank.

[@gackybass]

@@25xxfrostxx You don't like Paladin - Well there are those of us that do. Play another job.

[@25xxfrostxx]

@@gackybass Enjoy the rework?

[@gackybass]

@@25xxfrostxx nah i'll just fucking quit. greedy shits like you wont stop til every job is the same so you can "play it comfortably" but of course blm has dev immunity. Sooner or later people get sick of this. Parsebrained parasites will fuck off and find another game to kill. FFXIV wasn't the first and won't be the last. Goes to show banning add-ons won't do shit.

[@xKaisora]

I'm in the boat that you can beat any encounter with any job and meta does not matter unless you are speedrunning for week 1 clears HOWEVER..... MCH is one of the jobs I do think SE has seriously has not given enough attention to. They have been near the bottom of dps charts since Stormblood and I've only seen them make it to the mid-high dps range once or twice in certain patches. Which is concerning since their design was intended to be a semi-pure dps with minimal utility like MNK. I know the community can be a bit dramatic with shifting their attention from one job to another demanding buffs but I do think the outcry this time is warranted especially since MCHs have been waiting for the duration of multiple expansions for some positive changes.

[@chasey1978]

Sounds nice unless you are running a full dps group of the lowest jobs. This was an issue last tier too but nobody really talked about it because I guess p4s wasn’t overpowered. Test it out in pf and create a group with the lowest parsing jobs for p7s and see how it goes.

[@xKaisora]

@@chasey1978 Was this regarding my first sentence in my comment? (sorry was a little confused since my comment was about being in favor of MCH buffs) If so, I do agree if we're talking about current week but given enough time, gear, and practice I do feel that you can definitely beat the tier even with the most unorthodox team comp. I've definitely ran with extremely bad team comps before and cleared several of the previous raids (one of the worst comps I had we ran 3 NINs and a BRD and we cleared final tier of that patch)

[@minway3829]

It's a whole bunch of nonsense drummed up by people who can't statistics. I'm not argueing that MCH isn't the lowest dps, but to claim that they are a liability towards clearing is a huge overstatement. The difference between MCH and DNC dps is miniscule. It's 300 median. To put it in perspective, Median Melee dps dropped by 600 for every melee dps class between week 1 and week 2, even with an extra week of savage gear drops and tomes. The dps check for the last fight pre-nerf is 61.5k, which is doable by the cursed comp of all the worst dps of each job type performing at median. The 1% hp nerf is a 750 dps nerf 2.5x the "liability" you would have had for taking a mch, (it's 750 not 600 b/c the boss buffs the group for roughly 15k dps). Not to mention that crit rng on a melee dps is pretty much 600 dps between a good run and a bad run. The difference between some of these classes is so small that sampling variation has a much higher influence on your chance to clear than class choice. It's like saying if you're rolling 20 d6's and need to roll a total of 70, then changing one to a cheaty die where a 1 is replaced by a 2 will make you succeed. This is why Yoshi-P doesn't want us to use logs and never plans to implement it. It doesn't matter how balanced things are, as long as there is any possible difference then people will make a fuss and bring a lot of drama, toxicity, and negative energy over a statistical mirage. If you're going to complain about 300 dps in a job choice, then how do you think that makes the others in your party feel if they aren't as confident in their performance? Raid systems are designed to challenge people looking for a challenge, but still allow them to clear, not to gatekeep for an elitist community. We have crit because it allows for a slightly worse player to get lucky and clear with perseverance. We have tome gear and rng gear drops to allow for worse players to have a chance too. We have echo and unsyncing as a final measure. Sometimes, job balance is so bad that it's a problem, but it isn't so in this case. Fact of the matter is, if you're going into the final fight as a mch, you shouldn't feel any different from a person who didn't get lucky on loot rolls, or a person who doesn't want to buy a vpn, or a person who doesn't want to install a 3rd party tool or a person who didn't premap all their inputs by watching POV videos. It's not going to make a huge difference, and anyone who acts like it does is being a jerk and violating probably violating tos.

[@RothenX]

As a MCH main it's not a good feeling to be the undesirable member in the party, i hope the job return to his Shb glory.

[@lathamtk]

Dream bigger my friend, dream of the MCH from Heavensward days. Damage was absolutely busted :^)

[@EhhmmmNo]

I am casually clearing P7S and moving into P8S in party finder without bad looks playing MCH, I feel like this is conjured up drama for anyone but the 1000 week1 clearers.

[@KamiSlayer86]

same. "MCH blocked now go play a class we want. dnc or brd." sadge

[@margarinesnatcher]

Mate, MCH was only glorious in ShB because BRD was a joke, it already had all those problems back then.

[@MortalWombatI]

I wonder if it would be worth it to give MCH a single new utility ability similar to Ninja’s Mug. If there were now TWO Vuln up jobs instead of one it might be enough to make MCH worth taking in high end content, but I’m not sure if that would be worth the shakeup.

[@Keldiur]

It might be interesting. Bring it up to close of Ninny's DPS. Same APM kinda requirement but you would have to take the ranged tax into consideration (making sure Mch still does a bit less dps than Ninny.

[@meaninglez100]

MCH is my favorite job to play. But I also pretty much exclusively play with my friends, who don't really care about endgame balance. I can't help but wonder if adding a little more base damage would really throw everything off

[@DreadnaughtZero]

My brother is our team's MCH. But he's so good at his job that he can outright eclipse the rest of the dps sans our BLM who he competes with. This only really affects the cutting edge players at the end of the day.

[@XieRH1988]

​@@DreadnaughtZero it's the midcore players who suffer, and are even confronted with the irony of being able to deal more damage on a different job even if they play less optimally on that job, compared to trying their best for something like MCH and finding that it's still not enough. During week 1 of P8S there were so many memes of WAR/PLD swapping out to GNB/DRK when they reached P8S and the meme basically goes like this: in P5S to P7S on their usual WAR/PLD they clear with a high percentile on FFlogs, but on P8S they swap to GNB/DRK and clear even though they are clearly underperforming (as evident by their lousier percentile rating on those jobs).

[@DreadnaughtZero]

@@XieRH1988 That's primarily because people are idiot sheep. The dps check was too tight and the people clearing were primarily in 610 crafted gear. The job balance is less of an issue with gameplay after the cutting edge clears and more of player perception of job power, but if they are in savage and are unwilling to even bring in a mch or rdm and gauge their dps, that says more about how confident they are in their own skills than anything.

[@Darc1972]

I have been out of the loop, is this only applying to raid related content or is it overall gameplay, just wondering from a Machinist/Reaper Main

[@Zerromi]

Machinist needs the following fixes just from a "job functions outside of Japan" perspective: - Hypercharge lasts 30 seconds, and grants 5 stacks of Heated Up, which allows the execution of Heat Blast and Auto-Crossbow - Wildfire lasts 30 seconds, and detonates after six weaponskill hits. Obviously this doesn't fix any of the potency issues that Machinist has, but this at least allows higher-ping Machinist to play the job in a comfortable way.

[@HyouVizer]

THIS and also Wildfire always crit direct hit. When it goes off, barely feels impact, just needs some omph seeing its damage trigger

[@asdsad17]

you still need to weave in the 1.5s or gauss and ricochet will overcap. even if you overcame the cap you still need to weave because wildfire is in buff window.

[@XChronicHash]

Ping is not the fucking issue. A 99th percentile MCH does as much as a grey parsing MNK

[@everyonethinksyoureadeathm5773]

@@asdsad17 true but making wildfire detonate on weapon skills only, yet any damage you do as MCH including abilities will count towards wildfire. This means you can add all gauss and ricochet into it as well airanchor, Chainsaw and drill. It would change the rotation slightly, either doing a gauss round first into wildfire, then reassemble air anchor, barrel stabilizer, Chainsaw, reassemble drill into hypercharge and fill out the rest...it'd be a right 30 seconds but you would get maximum potency out of wildfire.

[@Nirual86]

yeah I'm still surprised that they declogged every other class that had those tight burst windows yet Machinist still has to weave with a 1.5s weaponskill that also quickly recharges TWO oGCDs. Even just making them share charges but buffing their damage would help a ton.

[@hundset]

Thank you for making this video, I have been very anxious from all of this, having come from WoW myself back in Legion and hating the changes to the specs from the very onset... I find myself wondering why the balance worked so much better in Shadowbringers, I find it difficult to believe that it could only be the 2 minute buff windows, but it does seem like a huge contributign factor... I also simply don't think It feels good. It was meant to make harder difficulty content more accessible, but as some numpty who actually used to enjoy optimizing my rotation even in casual content, or at least just pressing my buttons; the new buff windows don't feel good to me... Things feel too samey and rigid and on a schedule... I think doing some kind of a reversion to how buffs worked in ShB would do *something* to address the problem, and I'm happy to see at least see some big names in the community lean towards that in particular. By the same token I think that prior buff alignments punished jobs like PLD, RDM and MCH less than now.

[@thebigbrzezinski3201]

Back in FF11, we used to say class balance was not a feature of the game.

[@Mr_Catastr0phe]

So, I think the tanks getting buffs was absolutely necessary. But MCH needed a buff on the level of the tanks. To be frank, as someone who has raided savage in the past with Paladin as my main, seeing PLD and WAR get actively excluded from the tier prior to the patch, it KILLED my motivation to even log in on a daily basis. I feel for MCH players super hard, cause feeling like you can't play what you want to is absolutely shit.

[@Cassandra_Solidor]

While I do enjoy DRK, I wasn't overly thrilled about being forced to switch to it from WAR during week 1 prog simply because I couldn't justify being on a job where I could hit 90+ yet still barely top a grey parse on DRK. The buffs still aren't enough but they're at least serviceable.

[@ZeProblematicz]

I agree with the homogenization of jobs being a danger. Sadly, FFXIV has already done that greatly from where it used to be with class changes. Classes used to feel a lot more unique. Now for the last few expansions at least it's been getting more and more boring.

[@Derekloffin]

Sounds a bit like the approach should be to look at exactly what is the performance difference in normal vs savage down to. What mechanically are the savage MCH's doing better at optimizing that the normals are not, and then buffing that with perhaps a minor nerf to the stuff normals are doing good at to slightly off set it so they don't get OP in normal. Leveling this job at the moment, I can see why that dps window is both a pain, but also kind of the identity of MCH. It's not for me, but I must admit, every time I get that dps window opens up it is a bit of a rush, and ping problems aside, losing it would be quite the identity loss to the job, so I think they have to keep it, so not sure how they'd go about fixing it in regards to ping tolerance. Only thing that comes to mind is giving them a special ability queuing that is more flexible than most jobs, but that's probably quite the network overhaul.

[@espasmemuscular]

Such a good video, I hope everyone sees this. This applies to a lot more aspects of life than just videogames aswell btw. Good point!

[@brynphillips9957]

It will be interesting to hear if Yoshi P addresses the recent issues in the live letter. However over all, I am not too concerned either way. The FF14 team is usually pretty on point on their game design, more or less. However, for those who have been around since the start will know they have had some pretty major fails in the past. There have been some disaster jobs balancing in the past. There design and content balanace has sucked too. Diadem, their first open world zone added in patches (ie. Bojza and Eureka), was a complete fail. Worse, it came right after Gordias wing in Alexander which was also a complete disaster. A lot of people took time off FF14 till almost half way through the Heavensward patch cycle. For a while I was literally the only one in my FC still logging on regularly and that was only because I had set myself the goal of getting every ARR relic. Anyway, my point is that fails happen. As long as it doesn't become the norm, I am not too worried.

[@RealWildWitch]

Great video!

[@syrchalis]

Savage/Ultimate enjoyer here. I play almost all jobs and parse orange/pink on my main (AST) and around 95% on other jobs. I want to clarify some things: First of, coming from WoW the drama seems ridiculous to me and the devs response was correct. The boss being so tightly tuned made the tiny dps differences between jobs matter. Would perfect job balance be better? Yes, but it's also harder to achieve and unreasonable, given the meta problems. On a side note, I felt like the "flex" part of yoshi P's response was a meme ONLY. It just was repeated so much that people started believing it? MCH The thing with MCH is that it tries to be a selfish dps (high personal dps with lower utility) inside a role that 1. gets taxed on dps and 2. is up against jobs with very high utility. It doesn't work by design, because the more utility your counterparts have the bigger your damage lead has to be to be considered. DNC/BRD cannot be made to deal super low damage otherwise no phys range will be brought at all. MCH can't be made to deal BLM levels of damage because it's orders of magnitude easier. Is there a middle ground? Yes but it's very slim so MCH ends up either UP or OP very easily. MCH skill High amount of button presses does not equal difficulty. 1. MCH skill floor is medium low, but their skill ceiling is also there. It has almost no optimisation. Jobs aren't balanced around their skill floor. 2. NIN has a lot of button presses in a tight window where errors are extremely punishing (rabbit'ing hyosho = -1300pot) and 3. it is a wide range of buttons you need to press (>15 keybinds). MCH just spams A-B-A-C-A-B-A-C during their heat phase. Thats fast but it's also easy. The DPS it does is absolutely justified for how easy it is. That doesn't mean it's in a good spot or it's beneficial to the health of the game. MCH should deal more damage than it does right now. There is only really two ways for them to go about it. Scrap the idea of a selfish phys ranged and give it utility OR keep the unique role and give it more damage - they could justify a damage buff by making it play like in PvP (cast times + able to move at reduced speed).

[@RayDark33]

I kinda agree with everything you said but the MCH skill. I do think MCH isn't that easy and that his DPS doesn't show how hard it can be. In a casual play MCH is pretty dumb, on paper MCH is pretty easy to understand. On optimisation plays and perfect try it's show an absurd execution level sometimes, mistakes cost way less than certains jobs but the MCH ask for constant care, focus and intense gameplay, it's actually a job that nearly never breath. If you still want to compare with Ninjas, Ninjas only play with extreme precision every 2m for 20s, and have an easier burst every odd minute. The downtime on Ninja is extremely dumb and basic compared to other jobs. MCH in the opposite, have a constant need to keep an eye on heat and his 3 bigs CD, making sure you do not lose heat, uptime and do not overheat when one of your CD is going back in 5s. Downtime in MCH is a constant plays which make him pretty busy and unique. And a real MCH burst for the 120s is a nightmare to pull off, using your 3 big CD + 2 heatburst windows + queen without losing any uptime on any of your CD and GCD. So from afar it does seem quite easy, but it's not as easy has people say it is, far from it. It's just hard to see the top of the skill ceilling on MCH since the ris and reward is too low, mistakes does not hit hard on MCH And well, difficulty can change from a player to an other anyway so hard to tell Anyway I would love to see a DPS buff on MCH, or give him an new utility compared to BRD/DNC. Make the MCH a job who can mitigate more damages than the others, where BRD help with healing tanks and DNS got his small group heal/shield to help on easier prog if you're reactive

[@Scerttle]

I 100% clip even single weaving during hyper charge. That in conjunction with being weak even when played optimally, I gave up on ever considering using MCH in EX or savage content even though it's a very cool and fun job to play. We'll see how the potency changes today adjust things.

[@tatatorterra]

I only play casually in FFXIV but I raided old HC and mythic on WoW for 6 years (stopped playing at BfA prepatch), and before EW I played a lot as MCH to a point that I farmed it's relic at Bozja together with DRG. I also play with high ms (180-200), and while I would never play the job as intended even during ShB, I managed to pull decent numbers and have a lot of fun playing it. I noticed things were wrong with MCH soon I picked up the job to lv up from 80 to 90. Hypercharge window felt a little more tight than usual, but the most noticeable was that every new trait and skill, the job felt weaker and wonkier instead of more complete as usual, to a point that soon I got into lv90 I never touched the job in PvE scenarios again. I know things got better compared to it's release due the several buffs it received since but IMHO the issue is the current design. Even if they buff their skills again, I think that without addressing the ping issues + why the new stuff isn't working with the rest of the kit, it will be only be a temporary fix and soon a new content and gear sets get released it'll fall off to the last place again. A rework would be the best option, but with MCH being treated as selfish DPS as it should be.

[@miqotesoulia8620]

saw someone say it in comments, will echo it. As Arthars once said about this, "If you're not clearing in week 1 you don't need to give a shit."

[@bergeron-dubegabriel3023]

Maybe adding a melee rotation to the job, like land mine or C4 mechanic to the job getting close in for burst or something. Range dps seem to go down has more dps support job, giving dmg buff to machinist without some sort of conter balancing would make all range dps go mch

[@GIEarl]

Obivously I'm exaggerating when I go the exact opposite way of what usually happens and say: two classes can be compared? Then they aren't different enough. But in the basis that's the problem. The solution shouldn't be homogenizing, but going the other way and differentiate more.

[@horrighon4301]

The main issue with Machinist is that it has been underperforming for a long time now. The buffs they've been giving to the job have been very, very tiny and lackluster. They'll do a patch and give 20 extra potency to the 3 big attacks, but that's only 110 extra potency a minute when the job is very far behind everyone, then turn around and give a 500 potency a minute buff to a tank. I've been saying this for a long time now, but the easiest fix for Machinist to start with would be to make Flamethrower relevant. Just turning it into a flamethrower turret you place down as an oGCD would be enough. As it stands, even though it is an ability locked behind the level 70 job quest, it remains completely unused because using it is a DPS loss. Heck, after level 82, it even becomes a DPS loss during big pulls, where it should be strongest. It's completely useless. Buffing Heat Blast's potency is also an easy way to help the job, considering how often the skill is used, but then Flamethrower remains unfixed. Instead, however, they did pointless changes to the Automaton Queen's toolkit, that ended up resulting in absolutely no change in DPS. One of the reasons given by Yoshi-P was that harder jobs should be more rewarding. Machinist is, honestly speaking, probably the easiest job overall. Other than its dependancy on ping and high APM, the job itself is extremely simple to play. It's also usually reflected in the lower rankings as "average" parsing Machinists tend to be quite a bit closer to high parsing ones compared to most if not all other jobs. However, it is no excuse to leave it in the dirt. The job does not offer actual team utility the way Bards and Dancers do, so I think it's fine if, overall, Machinist is a bit weaker in terms of raid damage compared to them, but high enough in terms of personal damage to almost make up the difference. I do believe Dancer and Bard being more optimal is okay, but Machinist should be strong enough to compete. If that makes them appear strong at lower levels of play, that's okay too, because people don't mind as much how strong or weak a job appears to be when you're playing more casually. If they're so worried about that being an issue, then it's on them to find ways to give the job buffs that could mainly be felt when playing the game more optimally. As for the Ranged tax, I do think having it is fine. However, one of the recurring themes in FF14's more difficult fights is that DPS will often have the more difficult mechanics to deal with, and quite a bit of those are also affected by range. Ranged DPS often end up having to do the mechanics that involve the most movement, which is a wonderful way to make use of their freedom. It also adds to how rewarding playing the role feels at high levels. Keeping that in mind, I think it's acceptable if the Ranged tax is diminished slightly, but its existence is overall perfectly okay. As for my personal thoughts on the job itself; other than balance, I think it's mostly fine. The job is simple, but fun. Back when it was first introduced, during Heavensward, Machinist was... extremely similar to Bard, without the good parts. Sure, there were a few differences, but they had almost the exact same raid buffs done slightly differently, and both had an ability that turned them into a caster-type. Except for 10s Wildfire windows every 90s, Machinist was just a bad Bard. In my own opinion, Machinist started coming into its own in Stormblood, and reached maturity once Shadowbringers dropped. The way the pace changes at times is a fun twist that keeps me coming back to it, and most of the kit is based on using a bunch of different flashy gadgets, so it does have this engineer vibe nailed down. On the other hand, I feel like they've leaned far too much into the Automaton Queen. As cool as it sounds to have your own mech, the execution is actually kinda lame. At the end of the day, it's just another button you press then forget about. You can detonate it early, but it's hardly ever practical, and now the Queen has to do 2 attacks back to back when you detonate, which means that timing it perfectly so it does it before downtime is actually just annoying. It's a glorified DoT, but you don't have to care about upkeep. Scrapping or reworking the idea of the Queen, to me, feels like the best way to go about it, but the rest of the job has a nice and strong identity to it. It'd be a waste to completely redo it from the ground up just to make it more like the others.

[@ExiledDiclonius]

Flametrower changes nothing. Noone cares about balance in dungeons or in open world, but in savage raiding. And trust me you dont need aoe skills in these.

[@horrighon4301]

@@ExiledDiclonius My point is that it'd at least be a start for the ability to be of any use at all. Even if it's an AoE ability, as long as it's a useable oGCD, you can at least add it to your kit whether it's against one or multiple enemies.There are many jobs that use abilities during savage that just so happen to also be AoE. Not to mention it would somehow still be a stronger single target buff than anything Machinist got since Endwalker came out. I agree that dungeon and open world balance doesn't really matter, but I am not one of the game's developers and am in no position to say whether *they* care about it or not. I simply pointed out that if they do care, then it is up to them to instead find ways to significantly increase the job's output at the very least at the higher levels of play.

[@thefbat5847]

Ranged tax is worthless because not is it not difficult at all to get close to full uptime as melee, SMN is just as easy as MCH and does way more damage lol. And I disagree with Yoshi P on this, damage should not correlate with difficulty because you should pick a Job based of if you find its play style fun not because it's doing more damage or not.

[@ExiledDiclonius]

@@thefbat5847 if dmg would be based on difficulty then samurai and reaper should be at bottom of list :3

[@Bruno-rm4zq]

YOU ARE THE GUY, MATT!

[@atheistium]

I raided as MCH and BRD in Heavensward during the Caster-Ranged timeline. I actually loved being a caster bard as it was super fun and, for MCH, the original Gauss Barrel is where I think the MCH needs to go back to alleviate the free-movement tax. Gauss Barrell making your skills casting (like a kind of mounted machine gun/sniper) could work and could make it way more flashy, it would justify the tax-removal and honestly fix majority of issues making MCH more interesting.

[@Nirual86]

yeah I witnessed that era myself too. And I liked being a support class besides so I miss it in some ways. It just didn't work out for either approach but I can respect them for trying. And at least bard still has some party support utility with their songs, something they initially cut out entirely for ShB (besides of having to have a song active to use Battle Voice).

[@Tsuk323]

So one of the biggest issue balancing mch also is the fact that dnc and brd are huge rdps jobs meaning if you go into a a casual group where most ppl are green/grey, mch can easily out perform the other two on top of the job difficulty being lower (than brd). Say if they simply increase adps of mch, it can easily invalidate brd. I think where mch should land is in between brd and dnc. Also, the whole range tax thing I think is more true on caster than phy range. After playing caster on alt this tier… let me tell you… I’d trade that to a phy range any day.

[@windygraves]

I've been playing WoW again for the past few months again since I didn't have anything else to do in FFXIV. Tomorrow I'm downloading/resubbing to get into 6.2 content. Looking at just the differences in balance between WoW and FFXIV is insane - though understandable. WoW has talents to look into and tons more customization options; FFXIV is a much slower paced combat experience with each player on one job having all the same actions. It's kind of crazy to me seeing longer FFXIV players wanting some utility buffs changed by a percent or so (as an example) while WoW does something like "Reduced Paladin's Judgement damage by 30%". The changes in WoW are so much more drastic and the forums of both games are so different, too. Players on both games say "play what is fun to you" but I feel only in FFXIV are all jobs actually viable in their intended purpose.

[@sayt4n]

10:58 Edging me with that Doom guitar intro.

[@Merrylennium]

Machinist is the summoner of ranged dps, it even has a pet aka the avatar. The similarities are so obvious I set up my hotbars like summoner.

[@TheBenolan]

This is not the first time job balance has been off. The community is just super mad until it's fixed, then once it is they suddenly forget it ever happened.

[@jolt187]

Nah, they start talking about another job. We need a pinata at all times. The game could be balanced with a disparity of .01% between a monk and a dragoon, favoring monk, and people will call DRG trash and start making up stories about how they couldn't clear EX5 because they played perfectly 100% of the time but were on dragoon.

[@Eelanos]

Is no one going to talk about how we are in this mess *because* of player feedback? Are we just going to ignore that people kept saying that the game didn't teach you how to play because devs didn't plan some of the most backward openers in videogame history and therefore party buffs got mismatched if people didn't follow these "optimized openers"? Are we going to ignore the massive amount of people that complained that their buffs had awkward cooldowns and that it "felt bad" that sometimes they had to sit on buff cooldowns to match them to the rest of the party's? Why do you think they're designing stuff around two minute burst windows? Did people already forget about the weird "looping" rotation of SAM or the RIDICULOUS opener of RDM that made you a melee caster? Now people are reaping what they sow and they don't like it. Plus, "Machinist is an old job and you can tell"? Machinist has been a new job each expansion. This is the only one where it didn't get a rework because they felt it now felt more like other jobs. Why did they make the job more homogeneous? Because people were memeing "If you're scared of raiding, go MCH. You may not know what you're doing, but neither will your team mates LOL". They had to change MCH because it was one of the most unique and least straight forward jobs in the game. It wasn't following a rotation as much as it was "do what it feels right for the moment", and people hated it for it. If they decide to remove crits, do you think that'll be because they wanted to? No. It'll be because people are saying that crits make the fights imbalanced. Because "The difference between a clear and a wipe can be one crit". Why do you think they want to introduce crit buffs increasing crit power on top of crit chance? Because people are freaking out that forced crits "Is one less instance in which my buff can proc a crit" and therefore it's less efficent to have a player with forced crit on your team. Players are the worst to ask when it comes to game balance. They never see the big picture, they're only concerned on whatever last fight they're fighting. Just look at the mess we're at right now, it's literally *one* job struggling in *one* imbalanced fight that the devs already apologized for. They're taking this chance to mix up and muddy game balance and player satisfaction conversations as if they were one and the same, which they are not.

[@ProvostZarakov]

That's good insight

[@Malacite]

Let me put on some armor before I hop on the o'l soap box *prepares for incoming firestorm of angry 14 nerds* - This is yet another example of why I prefer horizontal progression and despite being old AF at this point, 11 has way better job design and combat balance and I will continue to fight Yoshida on the changes from 1.21 to 2.0, like scrapping elemental weaknesses, having unique affixes on gear and just about everything else that was good about 11 that had been carried over. They totally threw the baby out with the bathwater. Since you showed Strummer a few times in the opening clips I just wanna say I agree with him completely, that the shift to 1 and 2 minute windows has completely scuffed everything and some jobs (Paladin chief among them) just do not mesh well with this new paradigm. It's just more fuel on the very pretty fire that is 14. I say that because I do personally like and enjoy the game, but it's been increasingly feeling like a house of cards to me and I fear it might very well topple in the near future if they don't adjust. The vertical progression is never going away, I've kinda made my peace with that but they gotta do something about the job homegenization and the crazy obsession with balancing everything around recasts.

[@TheOneGreat]

Oh, I agree with you. As someone who played XI for almost a decade XIV's job design bores me to tears and with each expansion where we cut away yet another unique aspect for the sake of balance for the ever screaming meta slaves. :c

[@Malacite]

@@TheOneGreat yay a fellow vet who gets it. Yeah likewise I subbed for 10 years straight, left around 95 cap and come back now and then for the free logins (LOVED Rhapsodies) The key distinction is 11 designed its jobs with identity in mind first, balance second and yes that did lead to problems at various points but was the right call in the long run IMO. It wasn't that bad at first in 14 but ever since Stormblood it's gotten so much worse

[@SagelStrider]

10:14 "Yoshi-President, why are we paying this tax?" Amazing edit

[@Khastrx]

You could give MCH utility, (it used to have it back in pre-ShB with the turret) but even then it would still struggle to compete with current BRD and DNC who have more consistent party-wide buffs. Then we have Assemble which is nice I guess, but it's still lacklustre. Essentially MCH needs to be the BLM of ranged, all selfish DPS without utility and only buffs for itself, though the job needs a rework for that to happen.. As for other DPS, any jobs with party utility should not be as high in parsing as they are, NIN and DRG should not be outperforming SAM or BLM for less effort.

[@princessrayneshia1293]

funny thing is this is the reworked MCH it was a completely different class back in SB which was based around having the most explosive burst window in the game if played properly but because of how it was designed the gap between an average player and a MCH main was massive. so it got reworked in ShB and while the most decidecated MCH mains were upset cause their class got gutted in its playstyle it made the class playable for most players. MCH was a fine pick for all of ShB if you didn't have a SAM or a BLM in your party it was a fine pick for your selfish dps slot, than the 2 minute change happened in EW and screwed the class so hard. its only of the only jobs in the game without a 2 minute raid buff so in optimized play the other ranged physicals fly past it due to being able to take advantage of the 2 minute buff window to boost everyone else's damage where MCH can't do that while paying a massive range tax. it just doesn't fit in the current game, they could take some notes from FFXI and give ranged a critical distance where so long as you are the correct distance from the boss you do increased damage. but MCH isn't the first problem child class its just the first time a problem class is so badly tuned that people are very vocal about it, the SCH play base has been trying to get square to fix out class for years now because of how janky a lot of our skills are but SCH has always been overtuned so the general player base never gets upset about the jank, hopefully we see fixes for the problem jobs in the coming patches but I'm not holding my breath at this point

[@davidcai7063]

Imo the way you fix MCH is the same way you fix PLD and RDM, there needs a be a dps-support divide within the roles themselves. They wanted the individual roles eg. melee caster tank etc. to perform about the same but the reality is that within each role there will always be one job that does the most damage and one that does the least. Instead of trying to keep them close, they should lean into the gap, imagine for example having a GNB means you're losing the HoL raid utility but say getting +500ish dps for it, and picking a PLD means extra and better raid utilities with a -500ish dps loss attached. You would create a situation where you can design a fight where a certain amount of support utilities are expected, this would allow the MCH to become that powerhouse selfish dps and a raid team can make up the loss of raid utility by bringing supports from another role.

[@KatotsuSama]

See week 1 of current tier, where PLD and WAR had way more survivability but slightly lower dps, and they were getting excluded. I agree with your thought, but that solution has already been rejected.

[@Savashri]

That would require there to be a use for actual utility, and a complete 180° on the direction they've been going in for years. But having the goal of being able to clear with any comp means that you can't have jobs possessing unique utility that is meaningful to a fight, or else said jobs will be required, which is antithetical to current philosophy. Just look at what happened to NIN over the years. Having real utility that isn't related to damage isn't really a thing anymore because they've streamlined the necessity out of existence.

[@dahZeee]

Small correction, MCH current iteration is a shadowbringers job. They completely deconstructed the job and rebuilt it after stormblood, so saying it's hard to balance because it's an old job is like saying current summoner is hard to balance because it's an old job. Also i see a lot of people using the outliers and gold parses to compare MCH's damage to the rest of the ranged. In reality, where we don't gold parse all day, MCH raid damage is actually close enough to the rest that it is still perfectly viable. Perhaps if you're building a raid team comp of all the lower damage roles, you'll have a much tighter DPS check on week 1, but looking at the logs, it really is such a miniscule amount of damage we're talking about. Of course the class should get some buffs, but people saying "bringing MCH is trolling" or that the class is "unviable" is complete BS. A lot more whining that necessary for something that just needs some minor potency adjustments.

[@bounceycake1]

Okay, so first ff14 video that is kind of negative, but not in a bad way, just to address a problem, I'm okay with this, this is healthy for the game and will make the game better overall

[@Xbob42]

As a fan of classic arena shooters where the only thing to differentiate players was their skill and their cosmetic skin choice, I don't find it boring at all! Of course... that relies on there being basically limitless skill depth, which sadly is not something viable or even desirable for a tab-target MMO.

[@skwjisin]

I got lvl 90 machinist, and it is sooooo bad and weak, I started to play black mage main now

[@Yigrish]

i dont get this complaint im not a week one clearer but i have a static with a MCH in it and she is always top dps we got p5s down and she was still top dps so i think its more the small minority of first week clearers that complain now if u cant clear on warr first weak clear on GNB and give the gear to warr so u can go on it next week the racing bit u know u have to look at numbers not at what u want ,go for a chill clear week 2 or 3 and u can do whatever u want so is it a problem minor one maybe for first week clearers ye after that it kinda drops off,we only dont take random MCH since we already have one.

[@NotTheWheel]

It really doesn't matter you can clear the game with anything - there are threads out their that ask for the out right removal of healers because there's not enough out going damage. It literally makes no difference to anyone who aren't the top of the top. MCH might be the smallest number but it is from what I've been told by mains a very fun job. So if its fun to play and there's not that big a difference between you and a million other people who cares? All this over teteriary shit is stuff like in WoW that I don't give a fuck about. If you really care about high parses and speed kill you know what jobs to play. it's not about bringing MCH to their level because then it'll just be the next person who is on the bottom, over and over again through perpetuity.

[@Auesis]

As Arthars once said about this, "If you're not clearing in week 1 you don't need to give a shit." All the encounter number problems vanished in week 2 the moment anyone got more gear. Hell, there was a week 1 clear with 2 phys ranged, MCH being one of them. The disparity absolutely needs fixing, but this is exactly the kind of drama that a loud minority are capable of controlling. By the large community voices telling the average joe that MCH is unplayable trash and holding your raid back (when your raid only understands P8S' mechanics 4 weeks in when everyone has full tome gear), rather than just a couple of percent behind, Party Finder latches on to the hate and amplifies it to absurdly hyperbolic heights when their runs aren't even a cause for concern. I want to make clear that yes, this IS a major problem that needs to be addressed. There is no question about it. I am just sick of how profoundly disproportionate the discussion around it has become.

[@dacienvegas2712]

This 100%.

[@Cellybeans]

Amen

[@Mystra]

Thank you so much, needed to be said. But you lost me at saying it's a major problem, no it isn't.

[@kadian299]

I think this is a good perspective.

[@nahuel3433]

@vandarocks It passed the "loudly" threshold more than a week ago. Now its just annoying drama for its own sake. Not to mention that if you do it on their forums and maybe by some content creators then that's the places that actually matters. But random ass FF video comment sections which I've seen a lot of complaining of won't do shit.

[@GrandMagusDK]

The easy fix is just buffing the sustained dmg. Add some potency to 123 and HyperCharge. Maybe also Drill, Air Anchor and Chainsaw.

[@ExiledDiclonius]

you just named 90% of mch skills XD

[@solvirtusinvicta]

I witnessed the scalpel taken to the jobs that peaked during Shadowbringers and have wholeheartedly agreed with this sentiment that the homogenization of the jobs in the game is nearing and must be course corrected.

[@apharys8921]

Imo: 1. Balance jobs around the ~65th percentile - not so low that there's a huge variance at the top, not so high that worse players are overly punished. Give selfish dps a higher ceiling / more variance (ideally with a lower skill floor) with higher rewards for not making mistakes (landing positionals, using cds on time, not wasting resources or personal buffs, etc). Buff jobs have inherent variance in the people they're buffing so keep them more consistent with a lower ceiling. More difficult jobs will naturally move to the top in higher percentiles. 2. Have fewer but more powerful raid buffs with longer cds (5-6 min), give them to the most inflexible jobs like SMN. De-homogenize the jobs and unshackle them from the 2 min timer, allow them to be flexible enough to burst at different times without losing too much. Other buffs (group, individual, or personal) can be more varied with reduced potency and increased job flexibility.

[@Keldiur]

It would be neat if they brought back Caster Mch to fix some of the issues. Ideally it would have more movement options, but tis big hitters were cast timers. They could be faster than a Caster, but hit more often. You would create a Greed floor and celling for the class, allowing its damage to be higher than some of the jobs, especially the other raid buff utility who can stay as mobile as ever. You can not just simply buff Mch up to Sam or BLM for being a selfish DPS as he would instantly replace those two since there is no risk running around. The only risk Mch has with his DPS skill wise is hitting a wrong button while weaving his mind out.

[@thomas00129]

hmmm i see a problem already people are looking at data instead of playing the game if they stop doing that then there wont be too much of a problem

[@user-uv4wn2xx7o]

How to help the dps situation. Add job/class limit breaks. Your specific job will have its own form of limit break(s). Not just a “team limit break”.

[@devxved]

In my opinion, as someone who dropped bard to play machinist and practically mained it till shadowbringers where I went dancer, then back to machinist for endwalker. I can safely say I just don't like level 90 machinist, the fact its burst window works so differently to other classes for less damage is absurd. And I just don't enjoy it at 90 compared to other jobs. The fact it's below in terms of self damage and isn't as busy as I'd want it to be just makes me not play it anymore. Stormblood machinist was king.

[@konekokrysta]

I know everyone loves to ask the devs "what new jobs are we getting!!" but honestly I hope they just stop to add in *shiny new things!* for a while and focus on cleaning what we already have. And honestly? If someone can't find a job they enjoy playing out of 10+ already available.... yea just maybe this ain't the game for you lol Housing is in shambles. Lottery was just icing on an already mile high shit cake. Job balance is a mess. Character creator is in the dark ages. Just a few among other things I'd like to see them address first.

[@qamarqammar7629]

Thank you for mentioning that MCH has problems beyond the numbers. For those who play with ping you can just feel that and it feels bad, and just giving more damage won't change that part of it. But I wouldn't want to take away such a fun rotation for those who can execute it properly or are willing to use the addon.

[@Lorkynn]

Ironically, you don't need to go far a bad example of over-tweaking. Guild Wars 2 was having a hard time getting people to play engineer, so with their newest spec--ironically named Mechanist--they made it do so much damage that all you have to do is press 1 & 2 do 36k DPS. In doing this all you ever see in Party Finder is MCH Engies. Granted they have other issues behind the scenes, but it's still a good comparison, and a great example. As someone who plays MCH when they aren't maining DRK, I'd really like to see MCH get some kind of potency boast, where they are right not doesn't make any sense, and a simple 5~10 potency boast would go a long way to bring them up to everything else.

[@Auesis]

They have been over-tweaking Elementalist for a decade (or under-tweaking, I suppose). Everyone I knew that mained it quit the game because of how they dismantled all of its damage options for "reasons" and then pushed it in to melee while still underperforming. Last I checked, representation for that class is barely 3% now.

[@Lorkynn]

@@Auesis Yeah their balance team has been terrible for a long while. Doesn't help that it was one person that loved to play favorites for the longest time.

[@Nirual86]

actually on the subject of MCH in raids vs other ranged, rather than backtracking and giving them raid buffs, what if they got something like RPRs Plentiful Harvest, an attack that effectively gets stronger the bigger your party is. Maybe an upgraded Wildfire that counts attacks made by other party members at maybe a third of the normal potency. Just because they are the designated selfish DPS of their role doesn't mean they can't have interesting interactions with the party outside of benefiting from raid buffs.

[@NeocrimsonX]

I actually happen to enjoy current mch my first job in this game was bard I didn't like it but when I got my hands on mch I loved it.

[@Abundanceplayer]

What can reworking MCH even accomplish that can still make it unique and bring something to the table that can be beneficial. MCH needing a rework? it had one in SB. AST getting ANOTHER rework for the 5th time for 7.0 or DRG getting a rework? having to rework these jobs constantly after already getting updated shows me they just need to rework the combat system. they are updating the graphics and are reworking the base game so why not? I think its deeper than job reworks, they cant just band aid patch jobs. it worked well for MNK and NIN cuz of the game at the time but with the route the game is going even reworks on jobs are just band aids if the whole game design is shifting. This might involve a whole overhaul to the combat but i think they need to add at least one basic 1-2-3 combo to all melee jobs. That way when jobs have to peel off of bosses they can at least continue doing dmg and keep their parses up ( most mechs that force melee to peel off are usually a few GCDs anyways). So now they can buff all the ranged characters and do what they used to do when balancing jobs back in ARR/HW and just base it off on how much party utility they have and let ppl choose jobs off of playstyle. That in mind they need to now use their noggins and think of how to actually make the jobs feel unique.

[@benoitrousseau4137]

I think they're hitting the endgame of the massive job and system simplification that has been ongoing since Heavensward. They have effectively turned every job's worth into a function of how much DPS they can bring to a savage raid because of how little nuance there is, and now they have to homogenize their jobs so they all fit that rigid mold. As terrible as WoW's class balance may be (and to be fair to them they have 38 specs to balance) I think they do a much better job of adding nuance to how desirable a class is: some classes bring battle rez, some classes brings unique buffs, some classes have pets that can hold aggro, some classes have dispels, some classes bring Heroism/Time Warp, some classes have invulns or very strong defensives and can solo soak things, death knights have a ranged grab, shamen can reincarnate, warlocks and mages have cookies, heck priests have Reraise/Auto-Life/Life3 from almost every Final Fantasy except XIV (why doesn't whm have this super classic white magic spell...?) WoW's class dynamic is so much more interesting than FFXIV: both are about how much damage the raid can do but there are a lot more variables to the equation in WoW. Now to be fair WoW has a different problem with "required" spots, because some classes have perks that are too good to pass up, and this would be terrifying in XIV since there are more jobs than there are raid spots. White mages had a taste of this in P3S when astrologers could completely skip a hard heal check. But I think XIV went way too far in the other direction.

[@Swordhunter0817]

Predicting 2m req and adding fight or flight buff to confetior combo.

[@Joneymil]

I think one of the things that needs to be taken note of is the very nature of the phys ranged role being mandatory for 5% buffs in party comps and how they have to be the lowest rDPS category in the group. MCH will never be on the level of BLM simply for that fact alone or it would completely outshine every other phys ranged on top of being arguably the simplest phys ranged to min max on. A rank 1 MCH with its current design should never beat a rank 1 DNC/BRD in rDPS which requires 7 other players to be playing at the 99th percentile due to their extreme number of raid buffs or literally no one would ever pick DNC or BRD over MCH. On top of that, Resource building jobs in general can be screwed over by fight design if they don't have enough resources to do a full reopener/2min at the right burst window, causing them to under perform compared to other jobs which would be ok if they either had tools to help alleviate that like a way to build resource during downtime or fight design allowing for more uptime at a risk. this hits the other "under performing" jobs as well, RDM and RPR. personally i think if they really want to stick to the selfish dps job idea for machinist, the job needs to become infinitely harder to play, almost on the level of BLM to raise the skill ceiling high enough to justify it dealing that amount of damage.

[@saintjayme]

Thank you! Well said. I am tired of the loud 1% being overly rude and overly disrespectful. The garbage the devs and other players get needs to stop. All I see is them whining and crying about job balance and they are the ones gate keeping. Just like skip soar or disband. Where the week one raiders who have 99% of top DPS skipped a mech and that set the standard of the raid. Instead of learning the mech everyone had to do it the "META" way and thus no one learned the damn mech. And the top cried the fight was too easy and the rest crying the fight was too hard and both side didn't even play the fight the way it was intended. All because of META. We let the 1% dictate how the rest of us play and that needs to stop! I see world first raiders call other peoples static garbage because they use a different strat.

[@ExiledDiclonius]

There will always be people whining. Problem is when devs listen to top players. Devs complaining that dps meters are bad, cuz they dont want to make encounters focused around dps, then they do exact fucking thing because some no life nerds living in their mother basement with no job spending 20 hours a day in FF tell em its 2 easy. And no one will tell me otherwise when they make encounters with such small dps/enrage. They went so far that they even made a fucking sephiroth so tight on dps check that 90% of groups cant finish it.

[@saintjayme]

@@ExiledDiclonius I just thought about it, and all this anger on job balance is over 1 fight that is optional and fixed. They want a whole job over haul for 1 fight. All the jobs work for 99% of content but that 1% it does not work as well as it should they lose their minds. They think they are the only one's playing the game so only they should be listened to. They are okay messing up the 99% of content because they don't do it. They are spoiled brats.

[@lyconxero457]

It's funny seeing all of these newer players thinking that this current "drama" is some big thing in FFXIV. Firstly, FFXIV has ALWAYS had balancing issues all the way up until Shadowbringers and we lived inside of Shadowbringers for so long and grew by so much that many people either forgot or never experienced balancing in ARR/Heavensward/Stormblood. But here's the thing: SE has always tried to work towards addressing the balance which is why we vocalize our thoughts and concerns. Even among the big raiding content creators, you see them calmly discuss the issues of balancing and only get rowdy for entertainment purposes which is mostly on their personal streams. You can look back through the history of the game and see that this is true and nothing new. I personally LOVE playing Machinist and have used it as my main secondary job since it was reworked in Shadowbringers so I was very unhappy when my job was excluded from PF parties and I instead had to jump on Bard or Dancer. Of course, this is nothing new as back in Stormblood it was Samurai that was excluded from parties because it didn't do enough damage to justify its place and before that was Black Mage in the same expansion and before that was poor Paladin back during Heavensward. But in all of those situations the issues were discussed among the community and feedback was given to the devs via various channels be it videos or forum posts or even on social media and they worked to make changes. However, unlike in the OLD old days, SE has now shown that they are able to balance things more quickly than before as it used to take them entire whole patches to change jobs which they improved upon in Stormblood and then did so even more in Shadowbringers. Point being that it is our duty as players who love this game to voice our concerns over things we notice in the game that are becoming pain points in the hopes that the devs will work to improve them; a practice that they have been shown perfectly willing to do.

[@chasey1978]

The nice thing but bad thing about jobs sharing gear is that gear sets can’t be modified to also make up for weaknesses in one class. Wow for example can just change stats or abilities on class gear sets to give a class more power. I play summoner and think that if our gear had more crit we would perform so much better just due to that.

[@WhiteZombie7689]

Back in MY day, we built heat guage 'cuz we WANTED to use flamethrower, and we were grateful for the cleave!

[@thrashinuva]

Not a raider here, but even from my perspective I see 2 obvious problems that can be easily fixed for Machinist. 1. Wildfire should just be on stacks, and not on a timer. We've done this for so much else, and it might be scary to homogenize it, but it's become that way for a reason. 10s gives you room for 4 GCD's. It's just that simple. Just give the player 4 GCD's worth of stacks. 2. Flamethrower is not suitable as a single target skill, and yet every other cooldown ability in the game is. It's a DPS loss on single target. Give it a trait at Lv 90 so that it does around twice the potency that it does now, even if only on single target, for 120-160 potency. This would make it marginally higher DPS than the regular 123 combo. Machinist has space within its rotation to fit Flamethrower in empty space, making it a bit harder if you try, but won't conflict with anything if you time it properly. Making it a level 90 trait just makes it simple enough that it won't make it accidentally overpowered for any earlier content.

[@CWFDSmokeEater]

Melee downtime doesn't exist in this raid tier, it's like they wanted the game to be not about optimizing anything just hitting buttons. It's super lame.

[@OriginalGames2]

Something that might help is if they separated ranged categories to damage and support instead of magic and physical. Red Mage brings more utility than Machinist. If you balance Red Mage, Dancer and Bard as support classes, and Machinist, Black Mage and Summoner as damage, then you don't have to worry about trying to keep a non support in line with supports. Obviously there are abilities that would have to change, like interrupt, addle, tactician and whatnot. Summoner already has so few cast abilities it isn't that far off from Machinist in terms of mobility.

[@cablefeed3738]

Summoner has way more utility than machinist And this way easier than redmage it should never do more damage than redmage.

[@Ariancia.Thystarian]

@@cablefeed3738 If they part them like this they clearly need to make summoner harder. We summoners have been asking for that anyway. It's to easy now.

[@Arrek8585]

@@cablefeed3738 It absolutely should be doing more damage than RDM if you consider utility. RDM has a Raid Defense Buff, a Raid DPS buff, Faster Rezzes, a Heal that actually scales worth a damn, Decent Mobility, a Gap Closer and Jump back on demend. SMN on the other hand has only a raid wide DPS buff (Weakest one at that), a once a rotation Gap Closer that more often endangers you for DPS reasons rather than save you, and a Rez that doesn't really benefit from Swiftcast as that gets used in the normal rotation for Slipstream or Ifirit. Rotation wise they are both easy.

[@cablefeed3738]

@@Arrek8585 While redmage isn't hard it is definitely about as hard as Bard While summoner is about as hard as dancer. Summoner on the other hand has the most mobility of any caster basically to the point of having ranges role mobility, dancers simplicity without proc reliance, and having a rez raid buff as well as personal damage mitigation. It should definitely do less than redmage.

[@Arrek8585]

@@cablefeed3738 You'll need to explain what you mean by rez raid buff, because if it's just having a rez for the raid RDM still has it better. Personal Mit is nice but the Dual cast Vercure is far more versatile and useful. The Personal mit for SMN is basically use on raid wides or when you're going to get clipped, otherwise it's just waste (And getting clipped in Savages is usually a death or wipe). I would also point out that the complexity argument is skewed, RDM/SMN have openers that are effectively just their rotations and not anything wild. Neither has to worry about Dot/Song Uptime or tick rates so comparing to BRD is false. The only thing making RDM more complex is all the extra utility, which is the direct balancing point for why it has less damage. Asking for more DMG on RDM is like DNC asking for more, just why??? MCH has a true reason to be asking for more damage.

[@OzixiThrill]

Personally, I think finding some way to allow Machinist to double down on being the selfish class would be a smarter way to go about it. Say, a trait that makes buffs substantially more effective on them. Making it enough to offset their lack of raid-wide buffs in a raid environment, while also making the changes far less relevant in less high-skill environments. I don't know the numbers exactly, but that would be an angle that avoids homogenization while also solving the problem in a way that would result in the dev team only needing to tweak a single trait to keep Machinist relevant while not making it the only viable class. Or just throw DPS checks out the closest window or wall and make fights hard on needing to do mechanics extremely well, with a soft DPS check being the group's ability to concentrate on each mechanic long enough if they are struggling to batter the boss down. Though I guess that that might be a bit too large a leap for the team to take with their design philosophy.

[@ZenBearV13]

Developers can’t see the trees for the forest. Players can’t see the forest for the trees.

[@Sililos]

God I'm so sick of hearing the "I want the content so hard only i can clear it" crowd, They are always loud, annoying and when listened too, ruin games for EVERYONE! WoW listened to them because ma e-sports! for a long time and look what happened there? I keep seeing it come up in FFXIV lately like it did in WoW, i REALLY hope SE don't make the mistake of listening to them. Same note, nobody wants thing's too easy, but its the people who want things always harder and less accessible to anybody but them and those like them that are loud, obnoxious and seemingly everywhere due too their loudness. For me? I dont find ANY of the jobs fun because the loud people like their buttons and the constant having to keep an eye on 1000 things at once is incredibly taxing, especially when you are at the bottom of the world in New Zealand dealing with the Latency that brings in a game thats never taken Late into account with its design. Personally i think the fights could stand to be toned down about a % or two, especially normal content fights, they are quickly becoming too complicated for content everyone needs to be able to do, Savage/EX's? felt about right, but class design across the board needs working on, namely reduce the horrible button bloat, take Dancer, in EW they gained 3 new skills, all of which do the same damn thing! (Hit all enemies in front of you in a cone/line for ok damage and do 50% less per enemy hit after the first, triggered off using a previous skill. Did we really need 3 new buttons on the bar for that? Where was the interesting and fun design? Its just bloat, these skills don't even page off the skills that trigger them, they are their own, separate buttons.). The big issue is that this game needs the button count drastically shaved down, im not talking to WoW Legion levels, But enough to be accessible to even players at the low end of the scale, but of course without homogenizing.

[@bekomon]

I tried to explain this to a friend but you are so much more articulate. It's a bit silly, but this whole balance drama reminds me of the story of the game actually. Class Identity and fun (Hydaelyn) VS Balance (Zodiark) being demanded (Summoned) by the Playerbase (Ascians), as Homogenization (The final days) gets more prominent. Now who will be our warrior of Light?

[@Cassandra_Solidor]

Except this implies there is nothing wrong with job balance and people are overreacting. We have objective proof the job balance is crap right now. It's not so bad as for any job to be unplayable nor is MCH the only culprit. In fact, RPR and the Caster role as a whole are in a much worse place. The reason MCH has gotten so much attention is due to it being ignored for three years now. All these issues existed in ShB but the devs refused to listen.

[@herebejamz]

Simple logic should've fixed machinist a long time ago. Zero utility, zero buffs, lowest DPS makes zero sense. Either they should've redesigned the job a while ago or just upped the numbers. I still think they should just be phys BLM with light cast times, but that's mostly because their cast animations are cool as heck.

[@PubstarHero]

Thing is it was fine in most of Shadowbringers, especially if you weren't playing with perfect groups. I was able to hit higher rDPS numbers on MCH than BRD regularly. The issue was the level 90 job changes that gave BRD and DNC more, while giving MCH very little, combined with the untested rework to the battery gauge going into this raid tier.

[@herebejamz]

@@PubstarHero I somewhat agree, but the numbers don't lie and it's clear that while it still participated, it just seems weird to have a selfish DPS that does less than ones with buffs by default. Also, homogeneous gameplay will be the long death of this game, and I must admit I've fallen in love with replacing auto attacks with walkable channels what they did in PVP, it would be pretty cool to have a more caster like ranged physical. I'm really just hard advocating my own fantasy land, so maybe I'm biased.

[@PubstarHero]

@@herebejamz They already had caster like physical ranged. Everyone hated it. And I was never saying MCH was in a good spot now, I was just saying why it got kinda dumpstered compared to the others in Endwalker. It needs potency buffs. Bad.

[@HyouVizer]

@@PubstarHero comparing MCH to BLM as being a selfish dps but with big damage, not cast times like 3.0 MCH

[@herebejamz]

@@HyouVizer I just think maybe an occasional cast time for burst windows would be neat. Like samurai Iaijutsu, but ranged. I dunno, something other than spam button for mid damage.

[@Karn0010]

The 2 minute raid buff window have caused most of these issues to be honest. Jobs like MCH, PLD, WAR, ect, benefited from the multiple level of buff windows. I noticed this really early in EW as a tank player, GNB and DRK didn't suffer from the 2 min change, with all the oGCDs they have there are multiple points of power through the rotation. Jobs like WAR and PLD that either sustain (PLD) or burst (WAR) don't gain the benefit from the 2 minute windows alone. Ultimately the best solution is reverting that change going into 7.0 imo. I think the reason there is an uproar this time is two fold. First people want the team to know that stuff is going amiss right now. Since in the past the team has been willing to change things after looking into it. Second where some of this uproar is coming from is people who went through HW. I remember PLD and WHM just being near non entities in higher end content. As great as HW's story was, the expansion was a mess outside of that. I'm confident the team will adjust stuff for the next tier, it will mostly be stop gap measures the be addressed for 7.0 though. Which is fine, I'd rather wait for that, than a rushed fix that breaks more.

[@tonyx6380]

machinist got a rework at the begining of shadowbringers, and the strongest it ever was in a meta was during heavensward when they were not a selfish DPS but known for bringing bloodlust

[@merc7105]

Matt on the couch. Nice. GG.

[@Slade951]

Isn't MCH lore supposed to be new support unit for Ishgard knights. Not saying straight up healers but giving them some kind of buff wouldn't feel out of place. But then people will misunderstanding range physical as buff jobs. Maybe they want to keep it as selfish dps.

[@Dekaar]

Fixing MCH is basically an easy task currently: 1. REWORK it to be a egoistic solo DPS like BLM or SAM and deduct a bit of dmg so that people don't cry about movement tax (not that that is an issue currently as they already indirectly said, that due to current and coming bosses hitboxes the actual ranged dps and casters are in a disadvantage) OR 2. REWORK it to be a support job like DNC and BRD with a full utility-set so that people can bring it instead of a BRD/DNC to a fight without sacrificing both a support and DPS slot for the group

[@AoiKaze2000]

Machinist needs a huge potency buff AND NO RAID BUFFS.

[@Qorani_VT]

Another point of contention alongside the Machinist drama is the current state of casters. Given the devs' trend of making hitboxes absolutely massive for extended melee uptime during mechanics lately, the idea that casters, who 2/3 need to stand still for extended periods of time for their dps to be good, are either on par with or lagging behind ranged phys who have the benefit of distance and entirely free movement in terms of damage is a bit disheartening. Why be in the top percentile of your role and have to work the hardest in the game for dps when an average melee with crafted gear and a plucky attitude can do the same or significantly more damage than a caster at the absolute top of their role in the best gear possible? Also like how another commenter said, this is entirely a concern for those who do Savage+ raiding. It's a quote by Arthars and it's entirely correct. Savage is the baseline for challenging dps checks and it's really only there that job balance starts to matter. For everything below it you can be blissfully unaware of dps or balance and clear content very reliably.

[@keagian8115]

Honestly, I'd rather they remove all the damage raid buffs. Everyone has to line up their rotation for damage raid buffs that if they don't line it up, their damage just drops off. Damage raid buffs are fun to use, but it also makes everyone's playstyle at the high end revolve mostly around it with little room for error. It also homogenizes job rotations too much because everyone is playing around the two minute cooldown so most jobs devolved into 30sec 60sec 180sec buff jobs that only shine at those buff times when their rotation should feel good throughout.

[@24hr-Gaming]

Actually I kind of agree with this. I have seen games that try to balance around pure dps and "utility" and it never works out. If you want players to play a utility class that will do lower damage you need to provide some incentive. Otherwise you get the current state where phys range is rare af in pf. I've been in parties that wait almost an hour if not more to get a phys range player. And why? Because if you have to spend the same time and effort for gearing unless you are a diehard class loyalist, 99% of people will go for stronger classes. Self buffs are fine. Utility in terms of damage buffs needs to be thought of very carefully because it does create a strict on meta/off meta balancing situation.