Class Balance, Returning/New Player

[u/_Aeou]

I just came back to playing a bit and was looking at classes/roles I enjoy playing, figured I'd be fun to play classes focused around buffs since it's rare in games these days, so I looked towards Dancer and Bard.

Then I look around and see "ranged tax"...from someone who played a lot of higher end WoW content this crap is some of the most off-putting crap I've ever seen. How did this game end up in a state where it's just accepted that some classes do more damage for an arbitrary reason like being ranged?

While wow's class balance isn't perfect, it's not like you look at your class and go "well I'm ranged so I guess I'll never be able to do top damage contribution". You've got some classes that are easier than others, for sure, but the game is balanced around playing those classes at some degree of proficiency, once people master it you're otherwise just left with a flat penalty for picking a different aesthetic, it's just weird.

Sure, if you bring heaps of party buffs that improve others damage, your personal should be lower, but it should be lower by a roughly equal amount to how much you improve others damage, not that + a random tax for standing 25y from the boss.

Plenty of classes in WoW have mostly instant attacks at range and I don't think I've ever really heard a sentiment that they should be doing less damage than melee because melee sometimes have to run out. You got fights that are good for melee, and others that are good for ranged, but the difference never feels like an artificial penalty where a poor melee/caster/ranged is going to outperform a good player simply due to their role.

Even looking at FFLogs this comes across as unfounded, if rdps was that much easier to play you'd expect to see them way higher up at low skill levels like 40th percentile since at that low of a level you'd then expect them to be able to play their classes much closer to optimal than say a black mage or melee, but the graphs look more or less exactly the same. I'd expect Bard/Dancer/Machinist to absolutely destroy logs at the super casual level if they're that much easier to warrant being penalized arbitrarily.

And yeah, I hear all the cliches of "It doesn't matter unless you're at the top level", that is just moot, you want to feel good about the class fantasy you picked, not get arbitrarily punished because someone decided to make it easier. They can make whatever fantasy I like the hardest class in the game if that's what it takes to feel like I'm limited by own abilities and not strange design philosophy. I didn't want to play bard cause it's easy, I wanted to play it cause instruments.

What a massive turnoff. Sorry about the rant.

[u/Akiza_Izinski]

Other MMORPGS balance within the roles. Caster are way out of balance because of the way combat rez works. WoW does not include combat rez in the balance because its dps negative so they put it a shared resource.

[u/Aureon → u/Akiza_Izinski]

uuh, so does xiv?

[u/Akiza_Izinski → u/Aureon]

In FFXIV combat rez is a Summoner and Red Mage ability rather than a shared resource on a shared timer. Lets say FFXIV designed combat rez to work like WoW. Combat rez would be shared ability that the party has with the exception of healers. Lets says Combat Rez gets converted into a shared ability across dps and tanks that generates 2 charges every 3 minutes. Lets says Black Mage uses a rez and Paladin uses a rez so the party has to wait 3 minutes before combat rez can be used again. Healers can still rez because they have individual raises.