Quote:
2. The ease of play advantage ranged dps have vs. other melee and even casters. I'm sorry, but being able to attack from almost any distance while being optimal in output is going to cost you ceiling dps.
Having a small cost for mobility seems fine, in my opinion. I won’t speak for anyone else. However, I don’t think the cost should be 1,000~1,500 in term of damage—for some jobs, it’s even more than that! This tax is too high, and it’s heavily skewed when you consider the “Big Jobs” (BLM, MNK, DRG, SAM, and now possibly NIN) versus the physical ranged. Even in the caster role, there is a heavy skew towards BLM compared to SMN and RDM. The differences between the jobs are not small.
Quote:
Maybe stop playing with people who would rather kick you off their teams than have a 1% less higher damage ceiling (if all things go well with extra melees or whatever).
Honestly, I don't think that's normal behavior and is more telling of who certain people hang around. I personally have 0 qualms with a player of any class if they are really good at playing that class while knowing all the mechanics very well in a fight. I think if the game was balanced around such limited focuses, the majority of the playerbase would end up less satisfied with the game, and sorry, just because you feel that you are a more hardcore player doesn't entitle your preferences to a a greater degree of consideration than even the most casual of pleebs you'd likely hate to even be associated with. Square is making some adjustments to some classes, and I think that's good, but I think it's clear they do not want to only balance classes around the desires of 1337 hardcore gamers™ either... Which is probably also good.
You’re ignoring the trickle down effect that metas have on the more midcore and softcore raiders. It’s not uncommon for players to hear that certain jobs are underperforming and begin to lock them out of parties due to hearsay, whether its true or not. I’ve already seen some instances of DNCs being excluded from Savage PFs on Aether—and while this may not affect me since I have a static, not every DNC is in a static setting. There’s also a lot of criticism against the job itself for having such low personal damage, and raid buffs that don’t quite compensate for how low said personal damage is. There were similar complaints surrounding NIN—and look at what is being done for it: potency buffs this patch, plus plans for job reworks in Patch 5.1.