Ranged DPS role is about to be excluded from all content

[Katie_Kitty]

I would say this savage is the only thing that matters mentality is why the levelling experience turns off new players and is so abysmal right now. No one wants to even consider how these jobs play before you get to savage or in any other content.

I have everything at level 70 or higher (except the two new jobs that start at 60) so this is literally irrelevant to me right now. Savage actually matters to me so yeah that's what I care about. Although, what I will say is that the leveling experience would be a heck of a lot better if you could level a DPS without waiting 20-30 minutes in queue for every dungeon run.

[CKNovel]

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.

We didn't said "Make the gamer harder for new players".
We asked for "Raise the skill ceiling"

There is a huge difference in skill floor and skill ceiling.
Skill floor si the minimum required, in other words how a really bad Black Mage/Monk/Dragoon can pull 12k rDPS.
Skill ceiling is the maximum you can do, when there is no more or very few to learn, for example a ranged pulling 13.3k rDPS.

The gap between a good and a bad player is about 2 to 3k, about 15% to 20%. All we want is to increase that gap, increase the skill ceiling.
We don't want to touch the skill floor.

[Maero]

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.

You are very much missing the points..
Jobs should not be balanced or data obtained to do so from players that simply run normal dungeons.
If you do not see doing adjustments based off feedback from players that run Savage is more beneficial well idk what to say

[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.

[HyoMinPark]

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.

I think your anti-raider bias is showing.

[Rika007]

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.

For real, one has to only just look at Bard compared from 4.0 to now to see that the devs are definitely not balancing or designing around raid players opinions.

[Valence]

Other than being in total agreement with the OP, I want to point a couple of things about DPS taxes (mainly, mobility and raise):

- OP explained perfectly why those advantages for ranged physical (raise support and/or mobility advantage) are already included in the rDPS charts.

- Live letter 36 (or 37 was it?), SE specifically answered to a Q&A that they stopped balancing job damage around their (very subjective) "difficulty". This was for the launch of Stormblood. Whether you agree or not with this, I do personally agree and for one main reason: difficulty is subjective and I don't see the problem with some jobs being easy of access while some others require more complexity to play. Everyone can find the thing they like the most in terms of accessibility, while still remaining competitive in rDPS.

- Job balance doesn't matter at low level or casual level. There is no DPS checks to meet, there is no hard requirements that makes being competitive an edge for your team.

- For the raise tax (SMN and especially RDM), you get a "raise tax" on your total DPS. I really find this silly and this for two reasons. First, raising with any of those jobs means wasting GCDs to raise people. This means a drop in damage already. And second, you can argue that having a job able to rez and save the day and allow the party to push on to completion nevertheless can be a thing, true, but in most progression based content the true penalty is when people die, period, and you can't meet the DPS checks anymore ANYWAY. Raising as a party utility is mostly, and has always been mostly universally seen as a progression tool, not a raid DPS clear too.

- For mobility tax, I guess since now we have party boni tied to every role, if we get ranged physical buffed enough, it could survive pretty well and stay in the course as long as its party bonus doesn't get offset hard. As OP said, it would require a significant buff though, not slight increases as promised in the live letter. Ranged physical would probably live decently even with a slight mobility tax penalty just due to the safety of that party bonus margin (which also buffs every personal parse of your party members, so people will want that). We'll still have a problem seeing parties with 2 ranged physical being rather suboptimal though. I would rather see SE give ranged physical actual hurdles of its own that aren't based on cast times / mobility or melee uptime. Just as a reminder, physical ranged damage has always been total garbo and it's nothing new, it was already the case in HW and SB, and the only way to offset it and make it actually either competitive or outright broken in the meta was that damn piercing debuff (10% then 5% !!), that got fortunately nuked out of the sky. Now it's gone, well, people can finally truly admire the true state of ranged physical DPS. And it's not pretty to look at

- Our role abilities and support as ranged physical is just not competitive anymore.

[Myon88]

Well, those of you who watched the live letter today will have seen that they explicitly singled out ranged as a role to receive potency buffs, as well as mentioned melee might be a bit too strong. (No word about BLM though, perhaps we're getting away scot free)

Whatever the case, this should put to rest the debate over whether they deserve buffs or not, the only question is whether it will be enough or not.

[CKNovel]

Whatever the case, this should put to rest the debate over whether they deserve buffs or not, the only question is whether it will be enough or not.

A 5% buff overrall would settle the case.
We can always dream for that 500 dps difference (It's what you loose if you purposely misses all positionnals).
But if, let's say, melee overrall see their rDPS drops by 400-500, MNK with a bigger nerf and the ranged with a 200-300 DPS buff, we would be much closer.

They talked about balance overrall so we'll have to wait for it. In any case, the gap will be reduced from both ends and that's progress.

[Kitfox]

I do hope the rebalancing of jobs somehow touches BLM as well because it's not only the melee that we're competing with. Even though we need 5%, SE nerfing melee at the same time makes me think they're not going to brave enough to give a buff that large, which would still make BLM a problem.