Melee is easier than it's ever been. Can we stop babying the role?

This role gets insane damage for free, gets utility like crest of borrowed time and mantra, have ranged nukes that do a better job at clearing content to make phys ranged shine (viper in m6s) and for some reason melee players cry if a ranged dps like pictomancer dares encroach on their damage territory.

But my uptime wah! Stfu the only melee with no spammable ranged gcd is monk and tp is gone and these attacks no longer break combo.

Even red mage got its melee uptime made easier which is ridiculous and subverts class fantasy.

It's time all selfish and hard jobs dealt comparable damage and melee isn't taking the 4th slot 99% of the time .

It's a problem in fight design.

In ages past (on a gaming scale I mean), the deal was this:

• Melee DPS deal high damage, and have superior defenses for being a damage dealer. This was because not only can they not always attack (say ranged enemies that run away), but they also are exposed to a barrage of 360° cleaves and such, all untelegraphed. They needed to survive this damage. Their output was also partially balanced by their higher burden on healers having to re-heal that melee-range damage.
• Caster DPS dealt high damage but usually less than melee, on account of having to lose casts and abort whatever they were doing when they had to move. Potentially letting DoTs fall off, buffs drop, etc. To make up for this, their damage when they could actually stand still and cast in peace was superior.
• Some ranged DPS like rangers or archers dealt the lowest damage, but in return for usually having full mobility while dealing damage. This was not universal, something they suffered from having to be in melee reach, but that just meant they were bad at solo-play in older games (and back then nobody except classes specifically meant for that could solo well in the first place).

I'm all for melee dealing tons of damage despite their nowadays near-inexistent restrictions and lack of even positionals (with low-CD 2-charge True North it's a joke anyways). But it needs to have actualy consequences to be in melee reach of a boss, tbh. Something you don't want to be doing unless well, that's what you do, but you need to sometimes just sit outside and chuck lances for example.

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Originally Posted by Carighan

It's a problem in fight design.

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It is not. Shifting the problem toward fight design is basically arguing for maintaining status quo.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Carighan

In ages past (on a gaming scale I mean), the deal was this:

• Melee DPS deal high damage, and have superior defenses for being a damage dealer. This was because not only can they not always attack (say ranged enemies that run away), but they also are exposed to a barrage of 360° cleaves and such, all untelegraphed. They needed to survive this damage. Their output was also partially balanced by their higher burden on healers having to re-heal that melee-range damage.
• Caster DPS dealt high damage but usually less than melee, on account of having to lose casts and abort whatever they were doing when they had to move. Potentially letting DoTs fall off, buffs drop, etc. To make up for this, their damage when they could actually stand still and cast in peace was superior.
• Some ranged DPS like rangers or archers dealt the lowest damage, but in return for usually having full mobility while dealing damage. This was not universal, something they suffered from having to be in melee reach, but that just meant they were bad at solo-play in older games (and back then nobody except classes specifically meant for that could solo well in the first place).

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Looking back to 3.x as an excuse for class balance in 7.x, is nonsense. History isn't the reason for current balance. The current developers are.

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Originally Posted by Carighan

I'm all for melee dealing tons of damage despite their nowadays near-inexistent restrictions and lack of even positionals (with low-CD 2-charge True North it's a joke anyways). But it needs to have actualy consequences to be in melee reach of a boss, tbh. Something you don't want to be doing unless well, that's what you do, but you need to sometimes just sit outside and chuck lances for example.

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The choice is to either change some potency values, or completely redesign every bossfight in the game. Melee would need extremely excessive downtime for VPR to approach the rDPS contribution of a BRD. No melee player would enjoy that much downtime. And melee jobs would need a big rework to balance our their ranged dps, VPR has far better ranged options than MNK. And SE is not going to rework all bossfights.

And even if they managed to change content so that melee has far more downtime, that would end up with BLM contributing far more than any melee. So then all bossfihgts need top account for that too. And I have no idea what would work. BLM is very mobile these days, so adding more forced movement is not going work.

The only realistic way forward, is to make the optimal rDPS contribution for any dps job far more equal.

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Originally Posted by aiqa

Looking back to 3.x as an excuse for class balance in 7.x, is nonsense. History isn't the reason for current balance. The current developers are.

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Well yes. The players asked for tons of homogenization, and the devs listened. Also, I think you misunderstood me. But I sometimes forget I'm a bit older than most gamers. >.>

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Originally Posted by aiqa

The only realistic way forward, is to make the optimal rDPS contribution for any dps job far more equal.

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So basically yes, players want more homogenization and less identity. You are even doing it right there.

But I mean, there'd be plenty space to do role or even class identity while keeping overall rDPS nearly identical. Virtually all possible setups of class and fight design have been explored in some *RPG. We had everything from the designated best-at designs per role from late-TBC era WoW, we had learn-skills-to-advance with limited hotbar slots so you can't use all your abilities in GW2, we had all-telegraphed-AoEs action combat in Wildstar, we even had an MMO that sadly never made it out of alpha where you earned XP by roleplaying and GMs followed you around to play into it and judge your roleplay. On top of MMOs we had so many RPGs in general that virtually and class setup, unique gimmick or combat mechanism has been done, and we can see what worked and didn't work.

We also can see how elastic playerbases in general are to certain degrees of numerical balance vs class uniqueness vs fight designs.

One important thing however is to accept that by and large, homogenized output is inherently incompatible with class or even role identity. Do it long enough and you will erase what it even means to be "melee" or "a caster". The logical consequence btw would be a near-GW2-like design where even tanks and healers no longer exist, rather everybody can do anything, and you just select different loadouts to put onto your hotbar depending on what is expected of you. It's in a lot of ways the more "honest" version of the design paradigm we already see nowadays.

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Originally Posted by Carighan

Well yes. The players asked for tons of homogenization, and the devs listened. Also, I think you misunderstood me. But I sometimes forget I'm a bit older than most gamers. >.>



So basically yes, players want more homogenization and less identity. You are even doing it right there.

May I ask, have you played a lot of other MMORPGs, or RPGs in general? Most of this design space has been explored, to any end imaginable. We know how different designs look, and how they work or don't work. Somebody has long done it. We've had everything from what I said above in early WoW or early~mid DAoC, we had designs based on learning skills and freeform class construction with just a handful of hotbar spots in Guild Wars 1, we had all-telegraphed-AoEs-no-exceptions in Wildstar, I mean we even had albeit only as an alpha an MMORPG where you earned XP for roleplaying (and GMs followed you around to play into it and judge your RPing).

We can just see how changes would look. Like, you seem to be a bit confused how BLM would work if a system were to differentiate melee by downtime and damage-intake more, and well, I even mention that just in the second bullet point: Casters miss spellcasts. Due to not being able to stand still. So we're looking at very very slow but very very strong damage output, coupled with few if any movement tools and ability to cast on the move. Casters excel when a fight doesn't force them to move repeatedly. And they falter when it does. That used to be the design paradigm. Not in 3.0 or some other modern game (by comparison). In older MMORPGs!

Would that be viable from a modern perspective? Of course not. But it'd be possible to take some minor notes from it to promote some role identity but only if fight design is adapted to work with that.

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I reject the idea that similar rDPS across dps jobs has to mean homogenization. The uniqueness of a job isn't "best rDPS". And I never argued for removing variance between different fights. The reason why things are all the same, is because players couldn't accept a job being better in content A, and worse in content B. And players demanding strict dps checks, without excluding any job

But this thread isn't about that, it's about job ABCD having far higher rDPS than EFGH. And they have been for years, multiple expansion, through multiple reworks, consistently in any relevant content. So the point is, the FF devs seem to have some idea about why melee "should" contribute more than ranged jobs. And why that idea is inherently flawed. Just tweaking some potency numbers can completely fix the wide rDPS spread across dps jobs. No more homogenization needed.

Yeah but my solutions is to make melee difficult to play. Their rDPS would be balanced, because they say have 20% higher DPS, but can only contribute it 83% of the time.

Unpopular maybe? Maybe. But it's not like ranged DPS cannot take the melee spots (so only one is required for the buff), and devs could also stop spamming more and more melee jobs into the design every second expansion if the role becomes less popular. (I'm not a melee DPS fan conceptually, yes)

But fair enough, just reducing melee DPS across the board while upping caster+ranged slightly would work in making all roles functionally equal, which yes they mostly are (which isn't a good thing, and this'd make it worse, but it is a tiny numbers change of course).

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Originally Posted by Carighan

Well yes. The players asked for tons of homogenization, and the devs listened. Also, I think you misunderstood me. But I sometimes forget I'm a bit older than most gamers. >.>.

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I don't always agree with you but you have fun ideas half the time.
Don't see yourself as an unc but an OG
https://i.makeagif.com/media/8-28-2021/E6t_QB.gif

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Originally Posted by Carighan

Well yes. The players asked for tons of homogenization, and the devs listened. Also, I think you misunderstood me. But I sometimes forget I'm a bit older than most gamers. >.>

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I've been playing since Heavensward and I'd argue that the players didn't ask for homogenization, we just asked for better balance because the balance in Heavensward was terrible. Some of fixing that balance did require homogenization, but that was stuff like making it so Paladin just being worse at mitigating any fight where the outgoing damage was magical instead of physical which just made playing that job miserable rather than actually have anything to do with playstyle or job feel. Changes like making every raidwide DPS buff on a 120 second cooldown, every healer having their offensive kit reduced to a 30 second dot and a single spammable spell, or making every tank's burst window some flavor of Fell Cleave spam was never something people asked for, it was something the devs did on their own presumably because every job existing on the same or similar timelines makes determining how much damage a job will contribute over that timeline much easier.

Now that said there probably should have been more pushback in Shadowbringers/Endwalker when those changes were made, but hindsight is 20/20 and unfortunately everyone just saw those changes as buffs because of the multiplicative nature of partywide buffs aligning at the time.

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Originally Posted by SpeckledBurd

I've been playing since Heavensward and I'd argue that the players didn't ask for homogenization, we just asked for better balance because the balance in Heavensward was terrible.

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Goomba fallacy nonwithstanding, asks for more homogenization are constant, even nowadays when we're already so over-homogenized. Look at DRKs every so often flaring up that it's soooo unfair that their Living Dead might not trigger but they didn't die either way (and conveniently forget that getting this homogenization would cost them their extra 1s-10s invuln duration). Look at the discussion around caster DPS in particular Picto.

The problem is as always this: You can improve balance but at some point, which depends a lot on your combat system and enemy design, be it 3% rDPS difference, 5%, 10%, you cannot further improve balance without removing most unique aspects as these naturally make a class better or worse at a specific mechanic and as your game ages you'll naturally have more and more fights where that mechanic is either overrepresented or underrepresented.

And yes, like you say though I'd go a step back further. Though Stormblood was highly unique on many jobs, it ended up laying the groundwork for the massive homogenization effort that was Shadowbringers (amazing as that expansion was, overall). Its fight-design was never re-implemented mid-expansion, and it was understandably quite beloved. So wanting to expand on that naturally required tighter balance and removal of per-class hindrances to fight design. Which in turn necessitated sweeping reforms to class design. Stormblood was also a particular high point of players asking for strong tight balance efforts, which again naturally require the removal of per-class hindrances to rDPS balance.

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Originally Posted by SpeckledBurd

I've been playing since Heavensward and I'd argue that the players didn't ask for homogenization, we just asked for better balance because the balance in Heavensward was terrible. Some of fixing that balance did require homogenization, but that was stuff like making it so Paladin just being worse at mitigating any fight where the outgoing damage was magical instead of physical which just made playing that job miserable rather than actually have anything to do with playstyle or job feel. Changes like making every raidwide DPS buff on a 120 second cooldown, every healer having their offensive kit reduced to a 30 second dot and a single spammable spell, or making every tank's burst window some flavor of Fell Cleave spam was never something people asked for, it was something the devs did on their own presumably because every job existing on the same or similar timelines makes determining how much damage a job will contribute over that timeline much easier.

Now that said there probably should have been more pushback in Shadowbringers/Endwalker when those changes were made, but hindsight is 20/20 and unfortunately everyone just saw those changes as buffs because of the multiplicative nature of partywide buffs aligning at the time.

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The party buffs themselves are a big problem with homogenization, and are all at 120 CD for balance reasons that only exist because they do. Back in ARR, there was only BRD and NIN with a damage buff that affected the party. That left jobs able to have different paths to damage, you had jobs with heavy burst like DRG with it's multiple damage buffs and spineshatter dive and dragonfire dive lining up with blood for blood, a huge damage buff at the time and WAR, saving for inner beast with berserk on CD, then you had jobs like MNK that has almost no burst at all and the parse looked more flat, with small bumps when the smaller damage buffs applies such as cross class blood for blood. Since then most dps jobs added have some kind of party buff, and DRG and MNK and SMN had them added as time went on.

With so many party-wide buffs in the game, consistent damage across the entire fight became less valuable than what you could squeeze into the burst so a job that did the same overall as a burst job while being a consistent job would still perform poorer when you took stacking buffs into account. So, SE has now made all the jobs into burst jobs, and all the buffs on the same timer, that way it is easier for them to balance.

I think it would be interesting to remove all the damage buffs, and let some jobs be burst and others be consistent damage and see what happens, but that's almost certainly not gonna happen because I can't see SE re-working every DPS job, and 2 healers, to make that happen.

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Originally Posted by SpeckledBurd

I've been playing since Heavensward and I'd argue that the players didn't ask for homogenization, we just asked for better balance because the balance in Heavensward was terrible.

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Players absolutely asked for homogenization and continue to do so to this day. There are threads on this forum right now complaining that DRK is the worst tank because it's not exactly like all the other tanks, praising GNB after it got lobotomized into another WAR clone, praising BLM after its timers were removed and cast times reduced, complaining about DRG being "too busy" which led to it getting gutted in DT, the list goes on.

Every time a job gets dumbed down and homogenized you see people absolutely loving it across social media. What percentage of the community those people represent is debatable, but to pretend they don't exist at all is nonsense.

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Originally Posted by SpeckledBurd

Changes like making every raidwide DPS buff on a 120 second cooldown, every healer having their offensive kit reduced to a 30 second dot and a single spammable spell, or making every tank's burst window some flavor of Fell Cleave spam was never something people asked for

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Players quite literally asked for all of those things. They complained their buffs didn't line up so the devs made them line up. They complained healers were too hard with more complex DPS options so the devs reduced them to what they are now. And as I pointed out above, patch 7.4 turned GNB into fell cleave spam and this community was partying in the streets over how awesome they think it is.

At the end of the day the jobs are simple and homogenized because the community taken as a whole asked for them to be simple and homogenized. You can blame the devs for listening to bad feedback but you can't pretend that feedback didn't exist because it absolutely did and still does.

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Originally Posted by CidHeiral

Players quite literally asked for all of those things. They complained their buffs didn't line up so the devs made them line up. They complained healers were too hard with more complex DPS options so the devs reduced them to what they are now. And as I pointed out above, patch 7.4 turned GNB into fell cleave spam and this community was partying in the streets over how awesome they think it is.

At the end of the day the jobs are simple and homogenized because the community taken as a whole asked for them to be simple and homogenized. You can blame the devs for listening to bad feedback but you can't pretend that feedback didn't exist because it absolutely did and still does.

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The blame lies ultimately with the devs though.
It doesn't matter if one comment on the forum asked for BLM changes or if a Xenos asked for tanks to become WAR 2.0.
The devs should know and accept that there are enough people who genuinely enjoy how those jobs played beforehand.

Regarding the BLM changes they also more or less said themselves that they were done because of the fights from now on so no, those weren't to feedback.

Yes, there have been raiders asking for buff alignment being more in line and yes there have been people asking for healers becoming easier and easier but more often than not those same wishes were and still are met with heavy resistance in comments everywhere with VPR having been one of the beste examples of one person asking for it and all others being against it.
BLM changes were borderline universally hated by older BLM mains and were even on the JPN forum disliked.

I really don't agree that we blame the community for the most part and let the devs go free of responsibility.
Those are the ones who have the last say in the end and they have shown that they can and will outright refuse to change things.

Jobs have been changed first and foremost for two reasons:
To better fit fight design and like that make the development of those easier for the devs.
To get more people to play certain jobs by making them more approachable.
It's all to fit into Yoshidas view of how the game should be, namely fight design first and everything else second while bending around it, nothing more and nothing less.

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Originally Posted by Voidmage

The blame lies ultimately with the devs though.

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For listening to their players?

That can often be sensible. I remember a long long time ago in WoW (think early Cataclysm) where the devs did a change that factually made balance worse. The point was that players kept asking for a change because supposedly something was unbalanced, and the devs could not figure out why, their stats proved that no, things were balanced. They did the change, it made balance worse and they could track that. But the playerbase commented that now it was finally balanced and "felt better".

Point is, balance might be something that can be measured, but player feel is important, maybe more important than actual balance (which is why I strongly prefer interesting gameplay design over numerical balance and having both very quickly becomes impossible beyond a certain point of balance which we long crossed with our sub-6%-deviations). The devs listening to players to do more homogenization is sad, of course. And I can blame them for doing that, I'm with you there, even if you are probably correct in that many changes were maybe originally spurred by the community or that gave the push, but originated from elsewhere in their specifics.

OTOH listening to Xenos is something nobody should ever do. Seriously. Unless you need something like a bad-takes-8ball, but I suspect LLMs do that better in modern times.

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Originally Posted by Carighan

For listening to their players?

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Yes, that is kinda what I meant in a way.
The devs have the responsibility to look and decide what is healthy for a game and what not, even if some (note the some) players want, otherwise we would have only CT as a raid for example.

There are always two sides to it all.
Refusing so long to unlock glamour just because the producer didn't want to was a bad decision by the devs and where listening to players would have been better (though it was a decision i at least could partly understand in the past), while delaying Savage for one week was something they correctly listened to feedback.
I don't expect for the devs to always make the correct decision, mistakes are fine and some things are absolutely hard to decide but the job changes (like the BLM ones for example) for a long time now go so extremely against what it's target players wanted that it's flabbergasting.
What I find the worst though, is that those job changes only really matter and are to a large part done for Savage while everyone has to live with them.

And that's basically my standpoint on it. Ultimately the devs have to take responsibility, be it listening or not listening because it's ultimately them who do that and who should know what the consequences are.
I personally see the often brought "the players asked for it" as a very cheap shifting of the blame because I and others did not ask for it. At most I give the playerbase part of the blame but no one held a gun to the devs head regarding these changes.

But anyway, it's off topic, just wanted to throw that in.

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Originally Posted by CidHeiral

Players absolutely asked for homogenization and continue to do so to this day. There are threads on this forum right now complaining that DRK is the worst tank because it's not exactly like all the other tanks, praising GNB after it got lobotomized into another WAR clone, praising BLM after its timers were removed and cast times reduced, complaining about DRG being "too busy" which led to it getting gutted in DT, the list goes on.

Every time a job gets dumbed down and homogenized you see people absolutely loving it across social media. What percentage of the community those people represent is debatable, but to pretend they don't exist at all is nonsense.




Players quite literally asked for all of those things. They complained their buffs didn't line up so the devs made them line up. They complained healers were too hard with more complex DPS options so the devs reduced them to what they are now. And as I pointed out above, patch 7.4 turned GNB into fell cleave spam and this community was partying in the streets over how awesome they think it is.

At the end of the day the jobs are simple and homogenized because the community taken as a whole asked for them to be simple and homogenized. You can blame the devs for listening to bad feedback but you can't pretend that feedback didn't exist because it absolutely did and still does.

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The loss of spine shatter dive and my 3 nastronds will never stop hurting. I also miss the dragon tether. It would have been nice if they reworked it to work like dance partner but eye partner.

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Originally Posted by Voidmage

I really don't agree that we blame the community for the most part and let the devs go free of responsibility.

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That's not what I said at all. The person I was replying to said the community didn't ask for any of these changes, which is demonstrably false. I agree that ultimately the buck stops with the devs since they should have the wisdom to not listen to bad feedback.

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Originally Posted by Reginald_Cain

I also miss the dragon tether. It would have been nice if they reworked it to work like dance partner but eye partner.

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Damn that was the first thing i said after they got rid of it. We already did kind of use it like a dance partner before via macros. Pretty surely everyone had multiple dragon tether macros. Just get rid of the distance penalty thingy it had and make it so we pick an "eye partner" at the start of the fight. I'd be all for this.

Yeah the eye tether being gone is sad. It was also (IIRC?) one of the last few mechanics that had a range restriction which is interesting as far as where in a fight you can fit it. Nowadays it's only Cover that still has that.

ontop of them making viper go from fun to play to mch in melee range early expansion by removing dot management almost every other boss has an omni hitbox making positionals pointless, the only melee job that doesnt bore me to death thankfully is samurai which is funnily enough more of a caster than summoner

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Originally Posted by Deejudanne

ontop of them making viper go from fun to play to mch in melee range early expansion by removing dot management ..r

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Just to point out, Viper never had a DoT, the debuff was a damage increase like Reaper's Death's Design.

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Originally Posted by Carstien

The party buffs themselves are a big problem with homogenization, and are all at 120 CD for balance reasons that only exist because they do. Back in ARR, there was only BRD and NIN with a damage buff that affected the party. That left jobs able to have different paths to damage, you had jobs with heavy burst like DRG with it's multiple damage buffs and spineshatter dive and dragonfire dive lining up with blood for blood, a huge damage buff at the time and WAR, saving for inner beast with berserk on CD, then you had jobs like MNK that has almost no burst at all and the parse looked more flat, with small bumps when the smaller damage buffs applies such as cross class blood for blood. Since then most dps jobs added have some kind of party buff, and DRG and MNK and SMN had them added as time went on.

With so many party-wide buffs in the game, consistent damage across the entire fight became less valuable than what you could squeeze into the burst so a job that did the same overall as a burst job while being a consistent job would still perform poorer when you took stacking buffs into account. So, SE has now made all the jobs into burst jobs, and all the buffs on the same timer, that way it is easier for them to balance.

I think it would be interesting to remove all the damage buffs, and let some jobs be burst and others be consistent damage and see what happens, but that's almost certainly not gonna happen because I can't see SE re-working every DPS job, and 2 healers, to make that happen.

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Reapers are kinda that right now with consistent damage but even then we reapers in the community are demanding a full rework or fix our resource management.. At that point coming back now I rolled back to my old main with Monk.. I like being a evil reaper cat and even a DRK but I gotta face reality and know people have and are going to ruin those jobs. They've even ruined Monk to some fantasy extent but it still at least feels like a Monk.

I use to be a tank only main in Stormblood, that got ruined. Tried all the healers out and clearly they have something against every healer except AST.. Physical DPS, just no... Magic DPS is "ok" with BLM being the main dealer people want alongside pictos. For melee its just Monk, NIN and SAM then throw Reaper in for the party buff and fill with support to further buff the rest..

I feel like FF14 is going the direction with burst only in content like WoW did with making every class/spec good at AOE dps because of mythic + content dominating player numbers and class metrics.. Also making every single class/spec able to do every piece of utility for stuns and sustain alongside party buffs.

Hope 8.0 isnt coming for a long while longer because they need to rethink some things before ARR 2.0 and beastmaster alongside the 5 reworks being talked about.

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Originally Posted by Carighan

Well yes. The players asked for tons of homogenization, and the devs listened.

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I keep seeing this claim and I have never once seen proof of it being true. If anything, it seems they are homogenizing jobs because that makes their jobs easier when it comes to balancing and "new" abilities.

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Originally Posted by PercibelTheren

I keep seeing this claim and I have never once seen proof of it being true. If anything, it seems they are homogenizing jobs because that makes their jobs easier when it comes to balancing and "new" abilities.

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Okay fair enough, of course correlation does not beget causation.

I should word it as two separate things:

* Players constantly ask for more homogenization out of wanting "their job" to have no downside at activity X compared to some other job Y.
* Developers constantly homogenize more and more.

You are correct, it might be for entirely unrelated reasons. Or it might be that they take it as an aside "Oh we do a lot of homogenization for fight design but is fine, players want more of it anyways so we don't have to worry", or it might be driven by player feedback. But we don't know either way.

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Originally Posted by PercibelTheren

I keep seeing this claim and I have never once seen proof of it being true.

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Browse the forum you're on right now and you can find a mountain of it, which is to say nothing of all the other places people discuss the game. I once saw someone on the FFXIV sub comment that every job should be completely mindless so everyone can play whatever job fantasy they want without having to think about playing correctly at all. It is delusional to pretend these people don't exist.

It's always bewildering that people like you say seek to "mindlessly play whatever job fantasy they want", yet part of that very search is removing the fantasy that each job entails.

After all, a job can't give meaning to playing it if all meaningful elements have first been removed. And despite so many past MMOs clearly showing this, too many FFXIV players are unwilling to accept that meaningful job distinction requires actually balance-affecting upsides and downsides.

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Originally Posted by Carighan

It's always bewildering that people like you say seek to "mindlessly play whatever job fantasy they want", yet part of that very search is removing the fantasy that each job entails.

After all, a job can't give meaning to playing it if all meaningful elements have first been removed. And despite so many past MMOs clearly showing this, too many FFXIV players are unwilling to accept that meaningful job distinction requires actually balance-affecting upsides and downsides.

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No idea why you keep droning on about this point. It's not relevant to the subject of this thread. This thread is about melee contributing more than ranged. Even if playing melee was significantly more difficult than ranged, the contribution should even out at some player skill (a bit like BLM at some points in the past). But it doesn't, and hasn't for a long time, if ever. And the downtime required to make a VPR contribute similar to a BRD, is obscene. That is a typical "you think you want it, but you don't", even if there was a realistic path towards that.

Trying to make issue X a discussion about issue Y, isn't helping with anything. At just adds confusion, and distractions. Melee outperforming ranged contribution, in almost all content, isn't about unique gameplay for jobs. It's about balancing the potency values of attacks.

Quite the opposite, the point would be that there should never be a need to even compare damage between melee and ranged as they ought to function so different that in no fight should the comparison be sensible.

Like I said before, melees in older MMOs used to have a host of very strong upsides, on account of essentially standing "in the damage" like they were tanks of sorts. And not being tanks, all the mortality that comes with, quite often.

If we think about it that way, the melee-pandering problem in modern MMOs is even more basic: We rarely compare tanks to healers directly, or say healers to melee DPS. Yet somehow we've all accepted that "DPS" is this one big sea of classes, not different roles that ought to be just as different and incomparable. And hence their gameplay should not be homogenized (like it is right now) which even enables the toddler-treatment melee DPS and to a lesser degree other DPS currently enjoy, but be so wildly different that at no point in a fight is "am I being outdamage by that Black Mage over there or not?" even on the agenda of problems crossing your mind as a player. Yes you both produce damage, but in so wildly different ways and for so wildly different types of damage-requirements, some stuff is just incomparable.

I'm sorry if that sounded too much like going off-topic. I very much agree on a basic level, even though I'd not contain it to melee in particular. But I also agree for melee DPS in particular as a result of that: The role is too simplified now, despite having so very many buttons, because it no longer has anything it butts up against.

tbf there is a relatively recent thread on JP asking for fights to not force downtime on melees/tanks or give them methods to deal with it, OP specifically mentioning a role action that increases their range as an example

DT's been trying to force close ranged to disengage way more than EW and has had them whining about it early as 7.0 with light-heavyweight or even some dungeons. A few jobs have some good tools for it (VPR/PLD/NIN/SAM, MNK to a slightly lesser degree) and so there's been requests for the remaining jobs to get something as well, which is more homogenization. There's always been folks who argue jobs within each role shouldn't have much disparity but that's also why we've ended up with 5 classes in several flavors rather than 21 unique jobs.

And of course the moment you do have Viper-levels of dealing with it, it also becomes a non-issue to be forced out of melee again so there's no point ever forcing it in the first place.

As OP decries: Class has no reason to have a damage advantage any more.

And don't get me wrong, a single melee class having tools that make short bursts of lack of melee uptime optimal in fact would be great design, assuming melee loss-of-uptime was a serious thing and that class's identity were built around this. Well, there's the total lack of any design or identity on Viper that'd still overshadow it but that's a different thread altogether.

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Originally Posted by Carighan

And of course the moment you do have Viper-levels of dealing with it, it also becomes a non-issue to be forced out of melee again so there's no point ever forcing it in the first place.

As OP decries: Class has no reason to have a damage advantage any more.

And don't get me wrong, a single melee class having tools that make short bursts of lack of melee uptime optimal in fact would be great design, assuming melee loss-of-uptime was a serious thing and that class's identity were built around this. Well, there's the total lack of any design or identity on Viper that'd still overshadow it but that's a different thread altogether.

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The thing it does is add a layer of effort for managing your free range resources like casters do with instant casts. There is more skill expression in that, but that also makes phys ranged the "easy" role that doesn't deserve to be good.

And that's been bringing in requests to add cast times or range restrictions to phys ranged to add effort, but why even have the phys ranged role at that point?

People asking for downtime tools like viper or pld have has been there pretty much since day 1 when this savage tier got released. The thought process was to just go pld or viper and you dont have to bother with fighting for your uptime. But since people are attached to their favorite jobs they want those ranged tools on them as well. If all melee jobs get a ranged resource to manage then that could add a little bit more depth at least i guess.

Melee being "hard" is a joke this isnt WoW or anything where you have to react to not being able to be in range to do damage this is full on scripted fights where every strategy guarantees 100% uptime for melee and melee do more damage just for existing. No other MMO has it and it should change there is no reason why im going in a expert roulette and see ranged dds and think this will take longer than it should because ranged dds dont do damage in this game

It's fine to work a little for uptime, I think some people may have been spoiled by the previous tiers where the most common design for bosses was to make the hitbox so hilariously large it was virtually impossible to lose any uptime, and still reap the benefits of doing a ton of damage anyway.

I don't want more ranged attacks if I'm a melee DPS I think thinks like Six Sided Star are a good way to deal with forced disengages for example. I will be disappointed if I see 8.0 Monk get "new skills" and it's just yet another cheeky ranged follow-up attacks thrown onto the end of our 120/60/90s buffs. Please no more additional ranged nonsense thrown into melee jobs, If I wanted to constantly be attacking from a distance I would just play a RANGED DPS instead. I don't know about the other melee since I don't play them, I suppose a dragoon and stuff can throw a spear but I personally am not expecting in 8.0 to suddenly become Mr. Fantastic and stretching my arms 25+ Yalms to punch someone.

I know it's not really discussing damage and the very questionable balancing between ranged vs melee, but I just wanted to get those thoughts out there.

Wouldn’t giving everyone the ranged tools of viper and paladin be moving towards the homogenization people consistently complain about on these forums?

At this point, if your job doesn’t have it and you want it then play the job that has it.

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Originally Posted by Leonus

Wouldn’t giving everyone the ranged tools of viper and paladin be moving towards the homogenization people consistently complain about on these forums?

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Yeah plus - as is right now but via encounter design - if your uptime can never be an issue for you, either because like Viper you could not be underdesigned as a class any less or because like in Endwalker the bosses all have hitboxes from Thavnair to the Gold Saucer or because like in Dawntrail all downtime is designed to be sub-1-GCD then there's no reason to ever have it in the first place. That is, you might as well just get 25y range on your attacks. Factually that's already how not-restricted you are gameplay wise.

Melee DPS only feels melee by actually being unable to attack or having to use a filler that actually costs you sensible amounts of damage. That's how that works. If you can keep going, there's no point being melee in the first place. Viper might as well just be psychokinetically hovering two swords from a distance making them fly at enemies.

... and come to think of it that'd be a whole lot cooler as a class design idea than the dude-with-swords nonsense they made out of it, too!

Reaper is fun, don't touch my Reaper.