Is Blm gonna be the only accepted range option now? :(

[Akiudo]

First and foremost, Machinist can never rival Black Mage and Samurai in damage due to their free mobility. While the "tax" shouldn't be anywhere near as high as it is currently, there still needs to be one otherwise it and the Range as a whole have a distinct advantage over Melee.

not trying to start an argument or saying i disagree, i do somewhat, but i will clarify that after my question, but what do people, be it you or anyone else that wants to chime in feel would be a fair tax ? preferably in current raidtier numbers, thats less abstract.

Reason why i ask is specifically the last part of you i quoted, "otherwise range as a whole have a distinc advantage over melee", because that gets mentioned often, but what is that advantage ? i mean obviously it is "can still deal full damage while running in circles" i get that, but i mean is this : as you yourself said the current tier it wouldn't be that bad, but generally speaking if samurai and mch both simply hit the boss like a training dummy and they are equal than the moment this isn't the case anymore mch (or "the ranged) will allways be better than the melee, that much is true and i will never deny that.

However, lets flip this around, if a semi competent melee can do a fight only losing 200 dps do to movement, and the ranged is 200 dps on a dummy fight below the melee, wouldn't that just reverse the situation that people call "ranged advantage" ? wouldn't their need to be a break even point where in fact the ranged does have the advantage ? Not talking about 99% here because at this point you will basically get the one try where the melee simply didn't have to move even though the mechanic generally exists, or the whole group catered the dealings of mechanics to a single person, but at the 90-95 range, so realistically the top. and yes, you could argue "staying in range" takes skill not expected from a ranged, but at the same time you could argue "doing your rotation perfectly while dealing with a mechanic so all melees can stay still and explicitly not deal with it" takes skill not expected from a melee

[Kitfox]

not trying to start an argument or saying i disagree, i do somewhat, but i will clarify that after my question, but what do people, be it you or anyone else that wants to chime in feel would be a fair tax ? preferably in current raidtier numbers, thats less abstract.

I think anything below 5% would be fair. At 90k raid dps that's about 800 dps. That's about the maximum the role bonus can cover: tax greater than that makes triple melee and double black mage more competitive than bringing ranged. I wrote about this in my thread about ranged tax so I'll leave the quote here.

In case someone was as curious as I was to how the role bonus interacts with job strength, I made this little calculator that uses simplified dps distributions and custom inputs to play around with different weights for acceptable tax. It's easy to give a ballpark number of how much the role bonus contributes to raid dps but a bit harder to say much that is in percentage of rdps of a single player.

Role tax calculator

With role bonus set to 1% (or maybe a little higher to account for buff multiplication effects) and taxation set to ~90% of role bonus amount results in roughly 5-6% acceptable dps loss to stay within striking distance of the top dps jobs. So if a BLM is doing 100% dps then a ranged should do around 94-95% of that amount. Anything beyond 7-8% loss puts ranged at the risk of being totally replaced. Currently with ranged jobs being ~10% behind the high hitters means that ranged tax is closer to 150-170% of the role bonus amount.

There's an argument that can be made for 100% tax based on the fact that role bonus also gives bonus VIT and therefore HP, so breaking even would still grant an advantage. The tax could also be increased a little bit to account for rdps losses other classes would suffer when doing mechanics more suitable for ranged players, but mechanics like these are very few and far between and honestly quite negligible if it only costs a couple of gcds for the player. Not to mention if those losses can be turned into tank or healer uptime losses they become a lot milder than losses dps roles would suffer. I don't think a tax higher than 105% of role bonus can be justified because we're simply not pressured enough with ranged mobility mechanics.

Over 10% rdps loss for simply being a mobile class is not justifiable. Ranged classes pretty much need a flat 5% buff across the board.