Let's talk about physical range jobs

Actually there are a lot of ideas to give us back an identity but they rather ignore us.
They are going to be like "Potency for Empyreal Arrow has been increased to 5"

Yesterday on Party Finder on high peak hours we were looking for a range for like 45 mins.
Why they dont get it?

If Party Finder groups are struggling to find Physical Ranged players, it's mostly because the role is only there for the 1% buff. Instead of addressing valid concerns over the role, the dev team doubled down on previous mistakes by buffing most melees recently. They've also been increasing the ranged tax with the release of every expansion, and somehow that aligns with MCH's weakest patches.

Players have been trying to highlight the issues for (at least) 3 expansions, but there's no indication of changes in the near future, especially after the recent melee buffs.

Should this trend continue in 8.0, we'll have a decade of stagnation on the matter, and I don't see how the game's subscribers will still have the energy to point out the same issues. This applies to other areas of the game as well, and maybe that's why the sub count has been dropping substantially.

The devs consider those jobs as "baby's first raid job" on training wheels and have stated that arbitrary difficulty ratings should inform their damage output and effectiveness. That's why there is nary a line on rphys jobs at every balance patch. They're too busy making tanks overpowered and their healer counterparts irrelevant the same way they're obsessed with competitive dps jobs like melees over the total neglect that rphys jobs have become (and SMN/RDM are soon becoming too).

As long as they'll stick to their guns with this, there is no hope for any change at all.

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Originally Posted by Valence

The devs consider those jobs as "baby's first raid job" on training wheels and have stated that arbitrary difficulty ratings should inform their damage output and effectiveness. That's why there is nary a line on rphys jobs at every balance patch. They're too busy making tanks overpowered and their healer counterparts irrelevant the same way they're obsessed with competitive dps jobs like melees over the total neglect that rphys jobs have become (and SMN/RDM are soon becoming too).

As long as they'll stick to their guns with this, there is no hope for any change at all.

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Honestly maybe I’m just missing something but their whole ‘strength = difficulty’ seems like a massive joke (or maybe a massive middle finger lol) to the entire community, because there’s no goddamn way anyone can say that Summoner is objectively harder than Dancer or Machinist. Like tf? What game are you playing Yoshi?!

But yeah, it feels definitely like part of why they treat phys ranged like absolute trash is because they randomly decided it’s the ‘baby job’. Yet Summoner is like, so complex somehow lol; that complexity is not in the room with us Yoshi

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Originally Posted by Connor

Honestly maybe I’m just missing something but their whole ‘strength = difficulty’ seems like a massive joke (or maybe a massive middle finger lol) to the entire community, because there’s no goddamn way anyone can say that Summoner is objectively harder than Dancer or Machinist. Like tf? What game are you playing Yoshi?!

But yeah, it feels definitely like part of why they treat phys ranged like absolute trash is because they randomly decided it’s the ‘baby job’. Yet Summoner is like, so complex somehow lol; that complexity is not in the room with us Yoshi

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To be honest SMN is kind of trash dmg wise right now too. The real joke is they consider most melees harder than something like BRD

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Originally Posted by Shyxx

To be honest SMN is kind of trash dmg wise right now too. The real joke is they consider most melees harder than something like BRD

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True, but it’s still got higher output than all three phys ranged I think? Which, by dev’s logic, means it harder than Bard, Machinist and Dancer lol. And while I don’t play melee so can’t really compare, I would imagine they surely can’t be any more ‘complex’ than a Dancer or Machinist. I mean disengaging is rarely even a thing for melee anymore right? It’s not even like they can use the ‘oh but melee sometimes have to move away from the boss for 1.5s so obviously they’re the Gigachad big brain role’ anymore lol.

Bard I’m biased towards since it’s the dps I’m most familiar with lol. Honestly I’d put Bard down as the easiest job in the game by far (literally just hit the glowing buttons and press Iron Jaws every song reapplication), but something like Machinist just scrambles my brain. Like, you want me to press these combo buttons? in sequence?! . How dare you Yoshi!

Which really brings me to the extremely obvious (at least to 99% of players) fact that difficulty is subjective (not you Summoner). Like, you’d think such an obvious thing would move them away from ranking jobs on an arbitrary scale of ‘difficulty’, but instead they decide to double down on it? Like…what the hell? I can’t help but feel like they’re literally just making stupid decisions not; it’s not even misinformed or misguided. It’s just plain stupidity at this point. I really can’t think of any other reason they’d double down on such a design other than a blatant lack of intelligence or forethought lol. Maybe I’m being too harsh but it really does beggar belief. I mean if jobs actually had a literal difficulty scaling I could maybe understand (but I’d still hate it). But they very obviously don’t.

Ended up ranting but like Jesus Christ are these people developing their first ever game or what? It’s so frustrating

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Originally Posted by Shyxx

To be honest SMN is kind of trash dmg wise right now too. The real joke is they consider most melees harder than something like BRD

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Originally Posted by Connor

True, but it’s still got higher output than all three phys ranged I think?

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If we look at the likes of, say, 95th percentile Dancing Green Savage... Bard is neck-and-neck with BLM and VPR, and well above RDM > DNC > SMN >> MCH.

And, yeah, I would definitely say Bard feels easier to play than most melee, that it offers freer positioning for the raid than do melee, and has less competition for its primary stat buff than does each melee, so... yeah, I'd be fine with a gap like that between BRD and your average melee.

The problem is that BRD only does that well in that fight. And that so many other non-melee/BLM/PCT jobs have an even wider gap even there. There's not much sense to having BLM, PCT, NIN, SAM, MNK, DRG, RPR, VPR all making a near-sheer cliff of values only to then see such a curve beneath of "everyone else".

Bard does my head in, but it's actually pretty simple and yeah, it just feels weird because it feels a tad more how MMO jobs should, in a game that usually staunchly refuses to do any actual class design. (meaning its procs + general flow make things not cleanly align into a static rotation that does not need you as the player, autohotkey could do it for you)

I think machinist's job fantasy kind of feels confused. Like in heavensward it started off primarily as a gunslinger with some gadgeteering with gauss rifle, gauss round, two turrets, and a grenade. But now it kind of feels like an engineer that larps as a gunslinger. As when you get the job to max level, its gunslinging is reduced to: heated split shot (basic combo 1), heated slug shot (basic combo 2), heated clean shot (basic combo 3), blazing shot, scattergun (basic aoe), and reassemble.

I get the reason why, as it leans more towards Edgar Roni Figaro or Mustadio who are more like the gunslinging engineer archetype. But with how different dawntrail's machinist is compared to heavensward, it kind of feels like they accidentally or purposefully left out the job fantasy of a proper gunslinger. Which is where the desire to have a job that is either a dual-wielding pistolero or a cutlass+flintlock corsair has gained traction in terms of what people want from an aiming job.

And this only gets reinforced in Shaaloani where the people there don't even bother with aetherotransformer meant for Machinist and just utilize only the gun and some normal bullets.

I personally think its not going to be feasible to rework machinist into more of a gunslinger with equal parts gadgeteering and instead would rather have a new aiming job that is about being a proper gunslinger from shaaloani.

Having 'noob trap' roles/classes like phys ranged is such an obsolete design philosophy.