Why are Melee and ranged DPS roles mostly support and not focused on damage?

Why does it seem like melee and ranged magic DPS roles are lacking?

Tank role abilities decrease damage, increase healing, manage aggro etc.

Heal role abilities increase healing, allow for swift cast, sure they have some terrible abilities in Break and Cleric Stance only being 5%.

Bards and Machinist roles make sense. They've always been support and the roles reflect that accordingly.

However Ranged Magic has absolutely nothing that increases their damage, and neither do melee dps. These "Role Abilities" don't fit their role at all.

Crutch and Arms length are probably barely ever used. Feint's CD is way too much for a 10s ability.

Break is useless for ranged, as is Drain (it doesn't heal enough). Erase doesn't work on enfeebles, just dots. Addle is as bad as Feint for the same reasons. Apocatastasis is tough to time, because you never really know what attacks are physical or magic even if something looks like and appears to be magic.

A basic aoe move would help for melee dps when you're synced down and don't have any aoe at all (DRG don't get their spammable until level 40 and ninja don't until 42)

Idk about you but I rather like Feint, Addle, Apocatastasis and Erase in general; just need their CD to be slightly shorter is all.

Break, Drain, Arm length, and Clutch though are really, REALLY bad and need to be replaced entirely. Replace drain with a Second Wind effect for casters. Break can just be flat out removed for a spammmable AoE like Blizzard 2 was, with an equivalent skill for Melee as well to replace either Arm or Clutch and those 2 should just be condensed into a single skill.

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Originally Posted by Silver-Strider

Replace drain with a Second Wind effect for casters.

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I really like Drain as RDM. Dual Casting Drain before Veracure is nice and i use it frequently for the Yokai Event but i see it going by the wayside once I am done farming medals.

I don\\'t play melee so I can\\'t comment on them.

However, I feel like for casters this issue arises from the fact that the role skill abilities they have don\\'t often fit with the job.
For example, Apocatastasis and Addle don\\'t feel out of place at all as a Summoner or Red Mage. But on a Black Mage, not so much. The same goes for Drain.
For a Red Mage who has Vercure, or a Summoner who has a tank pet and Physick, it feels very out-of-place.
As a Black Mage with no other means of recovering your own HP, though, it may feel indispensable in solo content (despite healing too little to be worthwhile).


And of course, as with all role skill pools, there are some abilities that are functionally useless, for casters Break is the biggest offender, as is Drain due to the low potency and healing it offers (for comparison, a Summoner\\'s Ruin spell is 80 potency, whilst Drain is 50 potency I think)

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Originally Posted by Deceptus

Why does it seem like melee and ranged magic DPS roles are lacking?

Tank role abilities decrease damage, increase healing, manage aggro etc.

Heal role abilities increase healing, allow for swift cast, sure they have some terrible abilities in Break and Cleric Stance only being 5%.

Bards and Machinist roles make sense. They've always been support and the roles reflect that accordingly.

However Ranged Magic has absolutely nothing that increases their damage, and neither do melee dps. These "Role Abilities" don't fit their role at all.

Crutch and Arms length are probably barely ever used. Feint's CD is way too much for a 10s ability.

Break is useless for ranged, as is Drain (it doesn't heal enough). Erase doesn't work on enfeebles, just dots. Addle is as bad as Feint for the same reasons. Apocatastasis is tough to time, because you never really know what attacks are physical or magic even if something looks like and appears to be magic.

A basic aoe move would help for melee dps when you're synced down and don't have any aoe at all (DRG don't get their spammable until level 40 and ninja don't until 42)

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The moment DPS classes get role abilities that increase damage, those abilities become necesarry over even the best support skills. Could you imagine someone not bringing IR, b4b or raging with crss classes? Thy would be bad.

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Originally Posted by Connor

And of course, as with all role skill pools, there are some abilities that are functionally useless, for casters Break is the biggest offender, as is Drain due to the low potency and healing it offers (for comparison, a Summoner\\'s Ruin spell is 80 potency, whilst Drain is 50 potency I think)

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Drain is 80. Ruin is 100 with a proc attached.

Because anything that increases damage would be straight up mandatory.

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Originally Posted by Rawrz

Drain is 80. Ruin is 100 with a proc attached.

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I see, not sure where I got the potencies I stated from then. I'd like to think my point about Drain still stands; there isn't much use for an 80 potency heal when you can use Ruin III (or IV with procs) and just end the encounter.

I agree that adding damage buffs to role skills would result in them being considered mandatory, which would just limit the amount of support abilities you could take. I think a better way to solve the OP's issue would be to make each ability available through role skills equally viable (or at least close) in party content.

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Originally Posted by Kabooa

Because anything that increases damage would be straight up mandatory.

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Provoke and Swiftcast are considered mandatory on tanks and healers. Generally Rampart and Largesse are as well.

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Originally Posted by Deceptus

Provoke and Swiftcast are considered mandatory on tanks and healers. Generally Rampart and Largesse are as well.

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Imagine how quickly that dynamic shifts if you move Internal Release, Blood for Blood, Raging Strikes, and Leylines into the Role Menu, any role menu (Tank, melee, ranged, caster, or healer)

Would you argue any of those would be considered 'optional'?

Every dps classes have skills and rotation to increase their damages.
They don't need to it on the role action system.

But they all increase their damages in different ways.
That's why there not a unique skill in that system.

There's nothing else to understand, here's the answer to your question.

Well for me as summoner.

Swiftcast = more mobility = boost dps
lucid dreaming = more mana = more ruin 3 casts over ruin 1 = more dps
addle = more wyrmwave triggers = more dps
surecast = very situational but very good in fights like exdeath = less running (knockback immunity) = more cast time = more dps
mana shift = during foe use it on bard so foe last longer and more group dps.

Atleast for me role skills boost my dps.

Drain is really good for solo content I soloed titan extreme thanks for that skill, break is only heavy we have so it is probably needed for some mechanics in future. For healers if you need stall mana somehow you can use break because of zero mana cost. I have seen some jp healers use that while solo healing o4s. It is better cast something than afk while mana is recovering.

Arms length is amazing for keeping uptime, feint is to be used with physical tank busters. the skills are fine and have their uses depending on the fight change them around as needed very few of the abilities aren't meant to be used in every single fight that's kind of the point.

i think mandatory wouldn't be an issue I mean the only mando role ability on my DRG I see is arms length for V4s and true north for those times the boss is just facing the party which both are situational lol

Only ones I use on SAM regularly is invigorate and diversion...

Mana Shift is pretty amazing if you're a Black Mage or a SMN (and otherwise swimming in MP) because you can save your healer from mana dehydration.

Though, it is sad that there's no straight up damage buffs for the DPS classes.

True north for melee is kind of a damage buff because you can do your best potencies from anywhere you like, getting debuffs/buffs from anywhere you like, if a mechanic demands to be in front of the boss for example. It's situational but I use it in every fight I think, just need a bit of timing/knowledge about the fight.

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Originally Posted by Sunako

addle = more wyrmwave triggers = more dps

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I would imagine this is going to be fixed sooner than later, it can't be intended.

As others have said, the moment you place damage buffs in the role action slots, they become mandatory. Currently, I take...

Diversion
True North
Invigorate
Second Wind/Bloodbath/Goad/Feint
Arm's Length (only for Exdeath)

If you added Blood for Blood and Internal Release, I'll never remove them from Samurai.

Break has a niche use for cases where healing takes out all of your mana, as it has no MP cost. The O4S solo healer run used Break for damage. Aside from that it is usually useless.
Drain is actually useless.
Arm's Length is virtually compulsory for O4S to negate Vacuum Wave. Depending on boss placement not bringing it varies from reducing DPS by quite a bit to instant death. It's also used in Demon Wall and Demon Book for melee uptime.
Crutch is virtually useless.

Damage-boosting abilities have largely been removed from the list as they used to be mandatory in the previous cross class system, which defeated the purpose of giving a choice when there's only one acceptable set of choices. The only remaining direct booster is Cleric Stance, and even that is only useful if Largesse is taken first as the GCD conversion of a heal to a damage spell weighs exponentially higher in DPS than 5% more on already-low potency attacks.

There are a couple of strange role skills like Drain, Crutch and Protect that should either never be used, or should be converted into always-on passives rather than taken as permanent choices, but for the most part the system is functional, and rewards swapping between skills to fit the encounter.

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Originally Posted by Bourne_Endeavor

As others have said, the moment you place damage buffs in the role action slots, they become mandatory. Currently, I take...

Diversion
True North
Invigorate
Second Wind/Bloodbath/Goad/Feint
Arm's Length (only for Exdeath)

If you added Blood for Blood and Internal Release, I'll never remove them from Samurai.

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Do you ever remove Diversion, True North or Invigorate? At that point, aren't they mandatory?

'Role Skill' doesn't mean they should simply increase your primary function (Heal, DPS, Support, Tank). It's just a simple term to group together jobs. As a ranged DPS: I envy melee/magic role skills. Our skills are boring. We get Pali and Refresh. Maybe Tact. if someone screws up or Silence on 03S if they deny us our divine right to focus on padding.

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Originally Posted by Deceptus

Do you ever remove Diversion, True North or Invigorate? At that point, aren't they mandatory?

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Sort of. Granted, those three are usually slotted because what else am I going to take? Adding damage buffs only renders the fourth and fifth slots locked to those new abilities. At best, I'd swap out Invigorate or True North. The point is once you add raw damage abilities to the cross role system, no DPS will pass on them, which defeats the entire reason for the system to exist.

Removing pure damage boosts from role actions make jobs to be easier to balance individually since you don't have to deal with damage skills that are shared across them. Meanwhile removing defensive abilities from healers (Addle, Feint, Reprisal) and placing them on other roles make healers easier to balance. In this game everyone has many responsabilities besides doing their primary objective of their roles, this was always a thing. They just pushed the concept foward in a way to make the balancement better across all jobs and roles.

If you don't believe me just see how strong and boken BRD and MCH's unique defensive skills can be. Or how the fact any party before Stormblood pretty much needed a Int down debuff on the bosses to function. Which was a debuff a tank and a "non support" DPS could bring.

Everyone's already said why damage up on role skills can be pretty tricky. However, I do agree that some skills are kinda useless like Crutch on melees. But, there's really not much else to bring so I'd rather take that one damage up role skill that becomes mandatory over just randomly slotting Bloodbath or Arms Length even when I don't need it outside of just one fight like o4s.

SE wanted to give DPS more things to do during combat, give them something to help the group, this is why casters/ranged/melee have buffs and debuffs. Casters was left out from the OP, but casters have debuffs and buffs aswell. Aside from the job skills, all casters have the option to take these skills with them:

- Addle: Lower target’s intelligence and mind by 15%
- Manashift: Transfers 20% of own MP to target party member.
- Apocatastasis: Reduces magic damage taken by party member by 20%.
- Erase: Removes a single DoT from target party member other than self.

As for why we have support skills and not offensive buffs to our own damage, SE removed most, because players did not use them enough. This was one of the changes that they added to close the gap between the casuals and hardcore dps players.

I am leveling my DPS classes right now and the differences between HW and SB is alot, I do more stuff and I like it. Giving DPS players only the job the deal damage, would be the same as making tanks only keep agro and healers only heal and ress players. We all know how people feel about healers not dealing any damage, I reckon its time DPS as a role steps up and gets more responsibility in the group.