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.

Quote Originally Posted by Lina_Slayer View Post
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.