Balance at the start of a new expansion is always really hard. It’s not impossible, but the Final Fantasy XIV team has an uphill climb when the devs have to account for the effect of new levels plus two new jobs, and no matter how much testing you do before players get their hands on this content, you know that you are going to have a certain degree of accounting for how things work live. That’s the reality.
I say all of this not to say that we should cut the team slack for any and all balance issues – not by a long shot – but rather to explain why when the expansion first launches, I make a point of not really talking about the state of balance in the game. It’s just not indicative or even particularly fair, and as you probably know if you’ve read this column for a while, I would rather get some time and observation out of the way first. But now that time is out of the way. What’s the state of balance in the game right now? How’s it doing?
Well… it’s all right. But it has some issues.
Before I go any further, I want to make something completely clear. For those of you who are big into DPS logging, I am mostly looking at the aDPS rankings for jobs, but I am also considering the rDPS when there’s a significant gap. Sometimes that is a big difference, sometimes it really isn’t, but the main reason is that aDPS is usually the “accepted” measurement but it also relies to a certain degree on raid composition. In dungeons, it’s not what people are usually going to see as much just because of the inherent difference of three other players rather than seven.
As far as tanks go, there’s not much to say; they’re all in competitive striking distance with one another. Warrior is lagging at the lowest of the pack but it also has so many survival tools that it almost makes more sense that way, and Gunbreaker and Dark Knight lead the group. Similarly, healers are in a reasonably good place. Sage and White Mage look worst by aDPS but best by rDPS, which fits more or less exactly what you would expect to see. No surprises, and while some dials could stand to be moved, it’s not enough to get really worked up about too much.
But then we get into DPS, and there are… some issues.
Let’s start on the low end. Ranged DPS in particular is still… well, messy. Machinist is definitely lapping both Bard and Dancer in aDPS, but it’s at the absolute bottom of rDPS, and Bard is outperforming Dancer on both levels, which really doesn’t seem fair, since “support DPS” is very much Dancer’s whole thing. Dancer really has not gotten a lot of help this expansion on a whole; it has some new very conditional tools, but the rotation has remained largely the same for two expansions now, and while it’s always messy to muck about with the very support-oriented job, there does need to be some balance. Machinist still seems like a problem that the developers don’t know quite how to balance, and that’s not great either.
But things get way worse elsewhere. Especially if you like playing Black Mage or Samurai.
Now, as is to be somewhat expected, the “selfish” DPS always looks better on aDPS than rDPS. But the problem here is that Viper looks fine in either context. Viper is doing great. Samurai, obviously, suffered a little bit when it needed some balance re-adjustments pretty fast after launch, but Black Mage in particular is lagging way behind because it is a selfish DPS, but it is also getting somewhat lapped by Pictomancer.
The thing about Pictomancer is that far from being too weak, the job is honestly a bit too strong. No, it’s not topping charts with its actual DPS (though it does for raid-wide damage and contribution), but it has insane burst right out of the gate and it severely laps both Summoner and Red Mage in every way, shape, and form. This seems a bit backwards, especially when neither Summoner nor Red Mage have a correspondingly huge contribution to the group.
Sure, Red Mage being able to hit Verraise is very useful on new fights. But the more gear and experience people get, the less useful Verraise is. In other words, Red Mage’s utility very pointedly goes down over time, whereas Pictomancer’s utility is evergreen. A well-placed damage up puddle is going to be useful forever, group-wide barriers (rather than damage mitigation which won’t always stack) are always helpful, and that hard burst is great.
The other flip side to Pictomancer’s hard burst is that the job is, in part, based around the idea that the burst is less important as the fight goes on. But again, better gear means shorter fights, and Pictomancer’s ability to charge back up for its big hits is specifically contrary to how Black Mage works. When the boss is not available to hit, Black Mage loses damage. Pictomancer actually benefits from having downtime to refresh motifs.
A couple important caveats here. Pictomancer is probably the closest we have to an “unbalanced” job and even then it’s only just (most of the bosses at this point do not have lengthy untargetable downtime, which I imagine is deliberate). I think Samurai is also stuck a little bit because the changes to its mechanics have made skill speed Samurai a whole thing, and since skill speed is a more fiddly stat and also not the “default” way to gear and meld, people have had less practice with it.
I also think it’s important to note that a lot of melee jobs have received some pretty solid balancing; Ninja has pushed a fair bit higher, for example, but considering the complexity inherent in the job, I think that seems fair (and its flat damage buff has never really made up for that complexity). I don’t think that job balance is in any kind of terrible state. Indeed, the biggest issues are just that casters are a bit wonky across the board, Samurai might need more data or just more tuning, and ranged DPS has a bit of a Machinist problem.
Still, with the first Ultimate on the way and a definite intent to include not just more group content but also some noteworthy challenge content this expansion, I think all of these things are definitely worth paying attention to. It’s still remarkable how well the game is balanced on a whole, but that makes the places where the balance just isn’t quite working stand out all the more.
Feedback, as always, is welcome in the comments down below or via mail to eliot@massivelyop.com. (I encourage people to guess at the jobs I actually play in the comments if they want to, but I would caution you against guessing it based on where I think the balance is working or where it isn’t.) Next week, let’s talk about the dark side of role quests and what they have meant for new jobs, both for good and ill.
The Nymian civilization hosted an immense amount of knowledge and learning, but so much of it has been lost to the people of Eorzea. That doesn’t stop Eliot Lefebvre from scrutinizing Final Fantasy XIV each week in Wisdom of Nym, hosting guides, discussion, and opinions without so much as a trace of rancor.
