Can we talk about how mnk, drg, and blm are blatantly overpowered right now?

[wereotter]

The issue with this is they don't even out. Current fights are so easy, and melees and casters have so many contingency tools, that all fights are practically 100% uptime endeavours for good players. And of course, you balance the game around good players. I don't think ranged would be happy to know they're being taxed because there are mediocre melees and casters out there only getting 50% uptime.

Melees and casters should frankly stop hiding behind their uptime as an excuse for their tuning. BLM is right now the most mobile of all caster jobs, and the only one that can handle movement phases of arbitrary length on demand without losing any dps at all. True north now has 2 charges, MNK in particular has had a lot of its positional work trivialized - the one other thing melees like to point to as a source of 'difficulty'.

It's worth asking why the ranged tax is so large, or why it even exists, if the current fights are not designed to validate its existence at all. Tell me, where is the fight that requires so much movement that ranged are top dps for once? It does not exist, so either the tax is too big, melees and blm are overtuned, or fights are too easy.

Tell me.... what resource do I have as a monk to do damage when I can't be on the boss? You seem to be confusing True North with being out of attack range. I can maintain Greased Lightning, but I have zero ranged skills, and other melee jobs have very weak melee attacks that you use because they're better than doing nothing at all (unless they would break your combo, then you literally do no attacks because the penalty for breaking combo is bigger than the DPS you gain from tossing a dagger)

True North isn't there to trivialize positionals, but it's there explicitly for times when hitting positionals is impossible. For example, you have to stack in front of Titan in E4 for his massive landslide attack, so you use True North so you aren't punished for doing a mechanic. You don't just pop it because "meh I don't wanna do my job right now" True North doesn't let me hit Voidwalker when the bleed pools aren't in melee range, while casters and ranged physical jobs can still attack, melee jobs can not.

Basically I can say after leveling up Dancer and now working on Machinist, ranged physical jobs are simply easier to do mechanics, preposition for them, and keep up time than both casting jobs and melee jobs. You're getting taxed because the job is flat out easier to play, and play effectively. We already know that ease of play is something that the devs of the game want to reward. Highly complex jobs have a high DPS ceiling, simple jobs have a lower ceiling. This in addition to the amount of party utility jobs have, which historically ranged physical jobs had much more of this than casting and melee jobs.

[Myon88]

Your first mistake was leaving the boss in the first place as a monk.

[wereotter]

Your first mistake was leaving the boss in the first place as a monk.

Because standing in the point blank AOE is always the right move or dropping your gravity puddle in E1s on the boss too.... you forget that these are things that exist? There are mechanics that require melee to disengage from the boss, this can't be avoided for melee players, and when you disengage, you're not doing damage if you're a melee job. If you're a ranged job, though... hey look at that, you're still doing damage!

[Myon88]

You can aggressively tackle mechanics like that with judicious use of your max melee range. Even good timing will suffice in a pinch, you can execute a gcd, move out of range for the briefest moment as the mechanic resolves, and return to the boss before your next gcd rolls around. The game is not balanced around imperfect or conservative play on your part, nor mediocre tanks pulling the boss away from you and things like that. Ranged players would be sorry to hear their tax is being pegged against such subpar standards of play.

Also I hope you're not implying mnk or blm are difficult and complex jobs, truly the hubris of melees knows no bounds. You know, I could see myself being all for balancing around 'difficulty' and skill ceilings, I would nothing but stand to gain in that kind of framework. But I only wanna hear that from the poor ninjas or summoners or machinists, in terms of skewed effort to reward ratios, they have by far the most claim to that gripe.

[Powercow]

Because standing in the point blank AOE is always the right move or dropping your gravity puddle in E1s on the boss too.... you forget that these are things that exist? There are mechanics that require melee to disengage from the boss, this can't be avoided for melee players, and when you disengage, you're not doing damage if you're a melee job. If you're a ranged job, though... hey look at that, you're still doing damage!

Unless you have 3 melee DPS, you can drop a puddle on each side of the boss in E1S and lose no uptime. Both tanks stack in front, everyone else stack behind (ranged drop their puddles farther away), puddles drop, MT slides near one of the puddles so the melee can still do positionals, easy. Everyone's in range for Flare and no melee ever gets off the boss. There's even a kind of goofy strat for the laser orbs that means no melee uptime lost. Even without that strat you lose half a GCD -- one GCD *max* -- or so running out and back in. Even for Deltas the ranged/healers should be going out further than melee, so that's a half-GCD each. So in total... what, 2 lost GCDs throughout the fight? It's really not as bad as it seems.

True North isn't there to trivialize positionals, but it's there explicitly for times when hitting positionals is impossible. For example, you have to stack in front of Titan in E4 for his massive landslide attack, so you use True North so you aren't punished for doing a mechanic. You don't just pop it because "meh I don't wanna do my job right now" True North doesn't let me hit Voidwalker when the bleed pools aren't in melee range, while casters and ranged physical jobs can still attack, melee jobs can not.

I haven't done Titan Savage yet, so I can't talk to that but... you do know you can be on the sides/behind titan for Massive Landslide right? You just need to be in the square, so you have to stand inside his hitbox. As for Voidwalker normal, yeah the puddles can be inconvenient -- you know what, let the ranged/healers/OT get the faraway puddles. If roulette decided to give you 3 or 4 melee, well that sucks, you got bad luck and didn't get a normal comp.

[wereotter]

You can aggressively tackle mechanics like that with judicious use of your max melee range. Even good timing will suffice in a pinch, you can execute a gcd, move out of range for the briefest moment as the mechanic resolves, and return to the boss before your next gcd rolls around. The game is not balanced around imperfect or conservative play on your part, nor mediocre tanks pulling the boss away from you and things like that. Ranged players would be sorry to hear their tax is being pegged against such subpar standards of play.

Also I hope you're not implying mnk or blm are difficult and complex jobs, truly the hubris of melees knows no bounds. You know, I could see myself being all for balancing around 'difficulty' and skill ceilings, I would nothing but stand to gain in that kind of framework. But I only wanna hear that from the poor ninjas or summoners or machinists, in terms of skewed effort to reward ratios, they have by far the most claim to that gripe.

I can only speak to the jobs I've leveled... but it's not only complexity of job play (as I've stated before) that determines damage output potential. Party utility is also a MAJOR determining factor in how much damage a job can do as well as the ease of which a job can execute raid mechanics. That said, having leveled up all the melee jobs except for dragoon at this point, and having leveled every casting DPS, having leveled Dancer and in the process of leveling machinist, I will say that melee jobs are more involved to play and play well than ranged physical jobs.

There are indeed varying levels of complexity within each job, and the damage definitely doesn't match up between complexity and damage potential, I have never denied this, and I've also fully admitted that certain jobs are absolutely over turned. Monk should not be doing more damage than samurai, and dragoon is doing WAY too much damage, especially compared to how much utility it has in comparison to ninja.

But I also will say that in general, melee jobs should be doing more damage, when personal plus raid DPS damage is considered, than ranged physical jobs.

[Eliadil]

You can aggressively tackle mechanics like that with judicious use of your max melee range. Even good timing will suffice in a pinch, you can execute a gcd, move out of range for the briefest moment as the mechanic resolves, and return to the boss before your next gcd rolls around. The game is not balanced around imperfect or conservative play on your part, nor mediocre tanks pulling the boss away from you and things like that. Ranged players would be sorry to hear their tax is being pegged against such subpar standards of play.

I would be really curious to see you play a melee dps on high level content tbh, you make it sound really easy. I do understand that SMN is one of the most difficult job to play atm, but you seem really certain that the others class are that much easier.

"Execute a GCD, move away while the boss finish casting, get back under the boss to hit the next GCD just in time".

Having to maintain positionals, wasting ressources on a gap closer, jobs with high SkS, high ping, having to use an oGCD or even having to cast a Iaijutsu right now just to not delay your rotation (and fall out of raid buff window)...

But sure, all of this is easy. We all know that when a monk or a dragoon dies on a mechanic it's just because he wanted to, or was playing with one hand. Not because he had to keep uptime, or he tried to do like you said, moving out at the last second and failed because his GCD was off-synched with the boss cast or simply he didn't had sprint off cooldown.

Doing mechanics and avoiding AoE is "easy" too when you're just looking at it from far away, but still peoples keep making mistakes on those. Maybe this game's playerbase is just dumb after all, you're right.

More seriously, every job has its fair share of difficulty, be it in terms of fight knowledge or simply mastering the class. However, saying that doing mechanics as a monk is exactly the same as doing those on a Dancer or MCH while being as easy isn't really... Close to reality, I would say.

But maybe you could then explain why playing a Bard is no different in fight as playing a SAM ? And how you would have no difficulty at all by playing a RedMage or a MCH strictly at melee range, because it is no different after all ? ^^

[Myon88]

Well, you're more than welcome to look up this character if you think I'm all talk, I'll be happy to do the same for you. What you think is an improbable feat is simply the expected baseline for a certain level of performance.

This is precisely why the game should be balanced around informed players. Not that I think you need to be some endgame raider type to hold a valid opinion, but your engagement with the game inevitably informs your perspective, and there are many blind spots in the general playerbase as a result. For instance, people tend to overrate the difficulty of keeping uptime, because it's easy for anyone to notice when you're failing at that, it's intuitive and everyone can relate to it. On the other hand, when a demonstration of skill relates to things like precise gcd optimizations or alignments, that tends to be invisible to people because they don't even know those things exist.

If you think playing a job like bard or machinist is a free pass to hang out far away and not be bothered by mechanics, you're terribly mistaken. In the first place, most mechanics are in fact easier to resolve when closer to the boss. Any radial type attack demonstrates this clearly, the cleaver in e2s being the one most people will have seen. If you need to hand off a prey marker in e1s, you need to be near the boss. In e3s, you being ranged actually saddles you with more responsibility, like doing the tether while melees are pampered as much as possible to ensure they hardly need to move. And even if you could ignore mechanics by standing far out, you wouldn't want to anyway due to limitations on aoe heal ranges, you'd either find yourself dead or with a very upset healer.

[Wayfinder3]

All in getting from this is that there are layers to how jobs interact with mechanics. I’ll be honest though, melee uptime is a lot more forgiving this tier as there aren’t many forced off the boss mechanics and a lot of Titan and all of Leviathan has no positional. Casters have it rough in Titan phase 1 but that’s likely true of melee and it’s smoothing sailing in most other areas. Ranged don’t really have much issues inherently so while melee and caster aren’t struggling as much to do damage, Ranged never really have to struggle and can literally hit from anywhere. There does need to be a dps tax in place but I’d be lying if I could give you a solid number

[Cetonis]

Pulled an arbitrary good Dragoon log from E2 Savage. Pull lasted 476 seconds, and he was auto-attacking for 470 seconds out of that. That's not even something controllable like making sure you handle your dodging between GCDs. That's just being in melee range when a timer you have no control over strikes 2.8.

So he was able to simply sit in melee range for all but 6 seconds of a fight, and not just any fight but one that is notorious for hellish dodging mechanics, considered a big PF trap because lesser players get hit by stuff left and right.

"Melees are constantly losing uptime to mechanics" is in fact a fallacy. If you're good, you lose very little, if any at all. And even if it were true, that'd be borne out in the fight statistics anyway - nobody is looking at dummy parses, they're looking at real fight data that's going to have all of these "but mobility" benefits baked in.

The ranged tax uses the same logic of the raise/non-offensive utility tax, if everyone does the same damage but someone is better at doing something else (in physical ranged case doing mechanics) why not take the "better" class? If ranged jobs had like Classic WoW Hunter's dead zone (the class couldn't use ranged skills in melee range) it would be one thing, but right now being ranged is by default better if not for the damage difference.

However while SE has the right idea the numbers are just way off, phys ranged is doing too little comparably (I could understand if MCH was like 300 dps below BLM/SAM, but now it's like over 1k below BLM and SAM is going to be buffed to this level), casters with raise are being way overcharged by this ability and in general utility is being overtaxed (in SB at this time it was exactly the opposite tho, selfish jobs were barely above jobs with utility and thus were a joke among the raiding community).

This is the right take. You do want to apply some penalties to factors such as mobility and defensive utilities that would "break the tie" if the most important factor (rDPS) were fully equal. But it needn't be a penalty of 10% or more, that's excessive beyond any conceivable purpose.

Gaps of just 2-4% would be plenty enough to serve the intended purpose, without going so far as to make players feel pressured to play jobs or roles they don't want to for the sake of not dragging their party down. Even if as always every job can clear, now more than at any point since 2.x there's a lot of feelsbad to playing over half the dps jobs, knowing how far they are behind the top dogs.