Patch 5.10 Current state of physical range jobs' balance is unfair.

[Myon88]

Something to remember is that in TEA, the situations where you have 2-target scenarios all occur very early in the easy parts of the fight. This is different from ucob where the sole multitarget scenario (adds) occurs late in the fight in a situation with higher stakes.

Jobs like smn/brd being strong in p1 and p2 of TEA isn't a huge deal because those are easy phases that most groups are gonna prog past quickly (and their dps checks aren't even that high anyway). Wiping in ucob adds because your group had mch + rdm instead of brd + smn was a super feelsbad situation, wiping for the same reason in the brute justice/cruise chaser phase is more like "Eh, we'll be farming this phase in a couple of days anyway".

And also, when you get to perfect alex, the only phase in TEA where there is a somewhat serious dps check, machinist suddenly gains an advantage because unlike bard, its job design allows it to hoard resources and enter the phase with full heat and battery. If you look up peoples' performances in TEA and select only the end portion of the graph that covers the perfect alex phase, I think you'll find that mch still has an rdps advantage over the other ranged for this reason.

Jobs with the ability to 'flex' and disjoint their resources like this have advantages that jobs with more straightforward rotations don't have, and this is one of them. I agree the ranged role as a whole needs a lot of help, but I wouldn't be so quick to count machinist out of the running in TEA compared to the other ranged.

It's why I'm not too worried about summoner being 'broken' in TEA too, because it's not. Jobs like bard or summoner may look higher overall, but only because a lot of that damage is literally padding on irrelevant phases. Now that I've cleared the fight myself, I can confidently say good black mages have nothing to fear from summoners. Compared to past ultimates (especially ucob), they have never designed a fight as raise-unfriendly as this one. If they want to marginalize raise, clearly they can do it if they want to. The vast majority of the time if someone dies it's a wipe whether you have a raise or not, which just leaves dps where blm is still #1.