Ranged DPS role is about to be excluded from all content

[ForteNightshade]

But I don't know why I bother with any of it. You're right you are the most important group and the rest of us better just fall in line and abide by whatever Savage raiders want. The next expac should just be a vendor for gear and savage raids, don't even bother with the rest of the content. Could even cap your level when you log in for it.

Nice strawman.

Care to explain why job balance should focus on low end content where only a fraction of the jobs overall potential will be tested? The reason people, even non-raiders, cite Savage and Ultimate as what should be the benchmark is due to that level of content pushing each job to display their capabilities. Incidentally, balance adjustments in this category also benefit players who don't raid whereas the same is not necessarily true, or may even prove detrimental. For example, Dancer is incredibly powerful in dungeons provided you pull large. Why? It has very high potency AoEs with minimal drop off penalties. Conversely, it's the weakest job in single target encounters by no small margin. Factoring dungeons into the equation could easily give you the wrong impression that Dancer isn't actually in need of some serious potency buffs.

That all being said, if raiders had any say on balance or skill adjustments. A lot of jobs would become more complex not less. In fact, just to grab some examples off the top of my head. Dragoon was changed from its Heavensward iteration purely to accommodate people who couldn't maintain BotD properly; Inner Release became the Fell Cleave meme because people whined it was too difficult when it used to simply cut your gauge cost in half. Neither of these changes came with raiders in mind.