If every DPS class does the same amount of damage on a stationary target, the theorycrafters and raiders will find the one that is easiest to do the most damage with, and then they will demand that class and that class only. Normalizing raw DPS across all damage dealers will always result in class stacking. The devs are not perfect and nobody has ever designed a fight that is completely fair in how much pressure it places on every possible raid composition.
Class stacking happens. It happened in FFXI, it happened in XIV 1.0, it happened in WoW constantly. It's what created the whole idea of a "Flavor of the Month" class. Hell, it happened in 2.0, when everyone would stack bards and one Dragoon for Disembowel. It happens now, in 2.1; Garuda EX favors ranged stacking while Titan EX favors melee stacking.
There are ways to prevent this, some of which work better than others. The limit break nerf was a pretty heavy-handed way to punish class stacking, but not as heavy handed as Blizzard's constant "balancing" which just forced FotM rerolling. Making sure that certain classes synergize well with each other is a much better way to do that, which is something Squee did do and I'm glad for it.
What I'm trying to say is that if you design your damage dealers to do the same amount of damage, your players will poke and prod and pore over thousands of parser logs until they figure out which one does the most with the least amount of risk and the least amount of player skill, and then they'll only want that one. The stereotypical raider always takes the path of least resistance. The only way to stop this is to make the riskier classes worth more than the less risky ones.
If you don't, you have the FFXI situation where every damage dealer is a SAM.
Class stacking happens. It happened in FFXI, it happened in XIV 1.0, it happened in WoW constantly. It's what created the whole idea of a "Flavor of the Month" class. Hell, it happened in 2.0, when everyone would stack bards and one Dragoon for Disembowel. It happens now, in 2.1; Garuda EX favors ranged stacking while Titan EX favors melee stacking.
There are ways to prevent this, some of which work better than others. The limit break nerf was a pretty heavy-handed way to punish class stacking, but not as heavy handed as Blizzard's constant "balancing" which just forced FotM rerolling. Making sure that certain classes synergize well with each other is a much better way to do that, which is something Squee did do and I'm glad for it.
What I'm trying to say is that if you design your damage dealers to do the same amount of damage, your players will poke and prod and pore over thousands of parser logs until they figure out which one does the most with the least amount of risk and the least amount of player skill, and then they'll only want that one. The stereotypical raider always takes the path of least resistance. The only way to stop this is to make the riskier classes worth more than the less risky ones.
If you don't, you have the FFXI situation where every damage dealer is a SAM.
attractive enmity device
