Why does SE hate rng?

[Urmom]

So if people remember several months ago SE adjusted pdif caps to greatly increase the melee dmg for basically everything but bst pets which were already that high. Was a great equalizer in damage potential between bst pets and other sources of melee and probably what should've been done instead of the distance nerf but that's a discussion for another day.

Overall was great but some people quickly noticed that ranged was kind of forgotten and some people complained that it made the sharpshot automatom frame kind of useless compared to the melee ones. So that got a quick patch which straight up increased max ranged dmg for it by 60%.

But player ranged was still barely touched. All other physical dmg that uses pdif has been vastly increased to become more on par with bst pets except specifically ranged for players.

Surely this must be a bug/oversight right? Surely it wasn't intentional to raise the physical dmg of just about every job except one of the least played. Surely the slowest form of attacking shouldn't also have lower damage caps right? So to the bug reports... which promptly got sent to "working as intended" with no explanation.

So how is making ranged damage (but just for players pets ranged is just fine) have the lowest damage caps "working as intended"? Is the intent for people to stop playing ranger or just to do weird stuff like melee and spam magical ws and stop using any ranged physical attacks? Because that's what's it's going to cause

[Fae]

So this is just my take on it, but other jobs don't get trueshot like ranger and corsair, and if you factor in trueshot to the ratio, then ranger can with enough gear actually have the highest multiplier. Typically though a ranger is only used to be safe from aoe and stand at the edge of 20 yalms for that reason so... I still agree with a lot of your points but wanted to make sure that is factored in. SE wants ranger to be a DD that has some risk involved to optimize it's damage but still let the players use it as a safe DD if needed. Unfortunately even if you do stand trueshot range and do good damage, you tend to pull enmity and if that happens then you lose trueshot bonus >.> Soo, optimizing ranger damage is tricky at best and in some situations actually impossible, but if you do use all your tools like Decoy Shot, enmity reduction gear etc, you can pull off doing trueshot range damage quite often against non dangerous targets. Also as you said, magical WS can be an answer if you can't stand trueshot range.

Also there is zero reason for Ranger to melee for tp gain these days. Even with low delay weapons you can with good gear and samurai roll obtain 3 hit builds. With double shot up you can actually be doing WS -> Double Shot -> WS and without it WS -> Shoot -> Shoot -> WS. With overkill up the entire duration will be WS -> Double or Triple Shot -> WS. Sometimes you can get tp faster than melee now and ranger white damage can also be significant so there's really no reason to be in melee range on ranger unless you just really hate hitting the shoot button all the time, which I could understand. SE really does need to make ranger have some sort of automatic ranged attack and just have it stop at 1000 TP or something, since they said the reason they didn't do it is it would prevent you from WSing due to how the ranged attack system works. Or, let you alternate the toggle on and off. It'd also be cool if Ranger always kept their bow out unless in melee range, just like Semih Lafina trust does.

I don't think SE hates ranger but I do think it has been a problem for them in the past from a design perspective and it makes it hard to get right. If content is extremely dangerous and requires a ton of accuracy, then rangers have many times in the past been the very popular answer and dominated the scene, like in Delve. And before that, arrow burn parties were very popular of experience gain and had to be nerfed. And for high end content, ranger was preferred because the calculations on high level targets favored them, which was also to some degree nerfed. Trueshot is a tool SE introduced to try to control ranger balance, but I can understand if you didn't include it in your calculations. I think SE just didn't want ranger to always be the answer to hard stuff like it was in the past, while in return giving RNG options to do more damage and compete with melee zerg clear times. That's my take on it anyhow.

[Urmom]

I thought about true shot but seemed not really good idea to deal with special traits/abilities cause then you might want to factor in other jobs. Plus was really more talking about how much was gained not absolute though even with TS archery still lower. Magical isn't really a solution so much as it never gets accounted for either way and doesn't care about pdif to begin with so in comparison it gets better.

Perhaps not hate but don't care about. I mean purposefully greatly increasing every other physical source of dmg but jugs except ranged is pretty suspicious at a time when rng hasn't been popular in a good couple of years. And even then it's been a very long time since it's been popular because of dps and more just something safeish until people get used to new content. It wasn't really the optimal choice was just a tool until you learned how to melee it effectively. True shot idea is interesting... though to be effective role should have increased that then with pdif update as right now it's effect is kind of small comparatively