FFXIV’s Scuffed Job Drama Will Set A Dangerous Precedent 

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

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

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.]

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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...

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.

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.

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

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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!

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."

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

10:58 Edging me with that Doom guitar intro.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE HIRE A JAPANESE CAPTIONS WRITER. Talking about this won't solve anything until the devs actually see this. They've admitted to watching these videos before. But they *NEED* Japanese Captions.

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

YOU ARE THE GUY, MATT!

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

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.

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.

I think they should commit to the "selfish, raid buff mule, and inbetween" like we have with machinist/dancer/bard and samurai/dragoon/reaper, and they should keep the "harder jobs do more damage at skill cap". Dancer SHOULD be the best phys ranged when playing in a party of 99s on selfish jobs. Machinist should be the best phys ranged when in a party of less synergistic jobs, and bard should be the 'safe' pick. And all three should do enough damage, that bringing a second caster shouldn't be the better choice.

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.

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.

You are right in that this goes far back frustration wise and this tier being just the straw that broke the camels back, but it goes even deeper then that. Machinist mains hear that "You're job is easier" "You don't bring raid buffs because you are a selfish job", but those who have mained it since Heavensward literally will immediately flip their desks, because they NEVER asked for their jobs to be like that. Original MCH from HW was the most popular iteration of the job. It had a complex rotation, it had casts times that were built into the initial job concept (not shoe-horned in like HW Bard which turned it awful), it had actual utility in the form of a powerful raid buff, tp and mp regen and a powerful defensive cooldown. Giving Machinist back these things doesn't homogenize the job, it gives the job back the identity that players used to love it for. Other jobs suffer from similar issues. Summoner players didn't want their job to be turned into the easiest DPS rotation when it used to be the most complex. Red Mage players have been asking for years to either remove the dual rez or give it to Black Mage so that they stop getting destroyed balance wise. Bards fall under the same issue as Summoner in that they never wanted their rotation to become so much easier compared to it's stormblood iteration. Melee players themselves are stating how the new boss hit boxes and lack of positionals has stripped so much complexity from their jobs and made it very unfair for ranged to be taxed so heavily, but this isn't just a new thing with this tier, this started as far back as the end of stormblood raids through the job reworks of shadowbringers and endwalker, as thats when bosses hitboxes started getting bigger and positional requirements started getting nerfed. I do agree with you in that many of these things are players chasing 'perfection' over 'fun', but it is very important to note that this issue goes even deeper in that many of these problems players point too are self inflicted ones that have been present for years and have only truly started to show up now.

Great video!

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?

Can we PLEASE stop misinterpreting Yoshida? He didn't say 'We're too good', simply they had extra time which let them perform better than usual.

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.

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.

It's actually very interesting and you did partially touch up on it. the thing a lot of people do not know about is that theyre looking at the wrong type of DPS, depending on their class as well. there are 2 ways to look at DPS (rDPS and aDPS) kinda introduced in ShB cuz DNC's raidbuff back then made parsing hard. i still think raidbuffs make parsing wonky For Jobs that have any aoe raidbuff they look at rDPS, which is the metric that REMOVES the damage that aoe buffs that other people give you BUT INCLUDES the amount of damage your raidbuff gave to the team. So if a SAM puts their Midare Setsugekka at the NIN's trick attack window. that NIN will get a better parse. while in rDPS it doesnt matter to the SAM, they have no raidbuff and it's removed anyway. The DPS metric for SAM (and tanks and other "selfish" Jobs with no aoe raidbuff) is aDPS which includes all the aoe buffs available. So to properly parse for SAM is to see how well that SAM can put their big dick damage into raidbuffs. Cuz thats the measure of a good SAM player, being able to put EVERYTHING in that 2 min burst as much as possible. cuz thats overall the best DPS. If you actually flip the switch and look at aDPS MCH is clearly doing well vs BRD and DNC.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

That's good insight

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

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.

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.

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

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.

Machinist needs a huge potency buff AND NO RAID BUFFS.

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

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.

I come to the point in my life I don't give a shit about stuff like this, I used to loose my shit on WoW and I'm currently at the door boss 8 in savage this tier playing paladin and doing it slowly but I'm enjoying it myself. Unless it becomes a completely useless pos job I'll still play it and if it's shit I'll just play something else or move to another game taking a break. Life is too short to care about this especially when folks cry about week 1 stuff that only sweaty players do.

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”.

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.

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.

Last Raidtier in shb had full uptime, both raidtiers in EW have full uptime. Tf has ranged tax to do in the game anymore? There is no need for that. Rotations aren't compareable and they are also highly subjective. In a static no one will complain over their "hard" rotation, apm on the other hand is a objective way to categorize what each job has to do. And if MCH has the second highest apm, getting ranged tax and is the worst (ranged) dps in the game there is something wrong. Especially since SE will remove positionals sooner or later

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.

Just a thing to consider.... unlike most traditional MMORPGs, going ALL the way back to text MUDs in the early 90's, FFXIV lets you level and play every single job on one character. I point this out because if some top tier content is designed with super-strict tolerances, of course you'd LOVE to finish that content on your favorite job! However, it's not a deal breaker if you MUST switch to another job to do it. You can. NOTHING stops you from doing so. Some jobs even share gear, so you might not even need to go re-optimize your kit. You just have to be willing to try it from another perspective, another job. Back in the days of text MUDs, you picked a class to level and that was it. Content was designed around groups, not individuals, so there were things you just could not solo on YOUR character. A mage would not be able to play through a magic-dead area. A fighter would die quickly trying to enter an area full of casters and archers. We all knew this, and that's why we had to form groups. But here in FFXIV, you have the luxury of being able to be every job on one character, of NOT needing to run a dozen alts through the MSQ and other gating systems again. So, while it's annoying, I fail to see where the outrage comes from. The devs here are not stupid or blind. If they see certain jobs not being used, they'll adjust them when they have the chance to do so. Nobody at Creative Business Unit 3 creates a job to punish players or be unpopular. They want every job to be useful for the role it was intended to fill. They do NOT want to end up like World of Warcraft, having constant job balancing nerfs every other patch to try and make every single number perfect. I doubt most players really want that either.

A big problem is that he's the selfish DPS of the ranged slot. With BLM and SAM existing and being justifiably better (which I've no problem with), you're not gonna get the single target buffs to make you push that selfish DPS. It feels to me like MCH needs to work somewhat like reverse of DNC, and instead pick someone to buff him somehow. Maybe linking with a character would buff him depending on their uptime, or the buffs their receive get forwarded to him at a smaller portion, though that would increase everyone else's rDPS and sounds like more nightmares to balance. I loved it when MCH had access to Pallisade, when it regened resources, when it caused invulnerability, but think they should stick to their Selfish DPS guns (huehue). The other two have been reworked for support utility nicely enough that he doesn't need to be a middling not-good-enough-at-any kind of position.

15:43 Wait, I though only Monks in FFXIV have Perfect Ballance ^^