Ranged DPS role is about to be excluded from all content

[Vendalwind]

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Your comment did make me consider a certain aspect of ranged difficult i hadn't given much credit to. And a funky but off kilter idea.
Effectively mechanics end up as the fight specific adaptations ranged have to make. Melee and casters probably optimize this way just as often. but for less mechanically complex events (such as head avoidance in E2)

Ranged don't make melee jobs easier. They suffer the least drawbacks, however, from movement based mechanics, and thus are given that responsibility. Unfortunately that responsibility tacks on some fight specific difficulty, and that's where ranged have to adapt for fight specifics.

As far as those mechanics go tho: Ranged don't somehow magically make melee easier, or caster easier by doing the mechanic. They(melee/caster) could do the mechanic they'd just lose more. You aren't EVER making a melee's job easier, you are just minimizing the loss that comes from mechanics because as a ranged you have a skill ceiling that enables you to perform at 100% uptime during those mechanics., and if you are good, that minimization reduces the impact of a mechanic to effectively zero.

As consequence tho Ranged do get saddled with extra difficulty from raid mechanics being assigned to them in bulk.. Perhaps in some way they should be rewarded for that? but the question is how, and is the ability to keep the rotation going during them the reward? From this arguable standpoint you could definitely make a case for ranged needing to be able to perform just as high (dps) as any other class. It seems a really weird idea, but if mechanics offered a reward system if a ranged performed them that could actually be kinda cool.

Que weird idea alluded to above. What if ranged had a passive, called counter strike or something, that functioned to give them a damage boost while they were the target of certain mechanics: baited meteors in E1, Black Smokers, tethers, etc.?

And even Tsunami debuffs, and similar mechanics, could trigger this effect for them. It would be interesting because ranged would shine and maybe even out dps melee/caster in mechanic heavy fights if they baited as much as possible. It would very much be a fight specific system tho, and would demand further skill on the devs side for raid design. But i personally would love this. Ranged could sit like 150 dps below the lowest melee normally, and then on raid heavy fights the buff could be enough to push them up significantly into melee and caster output.. this might be a terrible idea, but hey its a random fun insomniac thought i had.

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So much everything you just said. both for caster and melee having to respond to mechanics can mean a lot of foresight and planning. It is gross oversimplification to say melee think "I need to move first then I can DPS when I'm at range/stationnary" because thats definately not how it works. A more correct statement, is at least 10 seconds before a mechanic goes off, a melee or caster thinks, "what can i do to mitigate this loss and and/or still do some damage from ranged or during my movement without F---ing up the other things i have going on?"

all classes can suffer cascading negative effects from a rotational screw up, but ranged is the only class that technically shouldn't ever have to outside of downtime moments in fights. melee and casters have to accept that some loss is innevitable and figure out how to minimize that lost by planning ahead.