Marksman jobs and keyboard faceroll playstyle

[Connor]

I mean, literally the only thing Machinist has going for it is that it’s DPS is a bit higher than other ranged jobs, at the cost of any kind of support outside of role skills / Tactician (basically a role skill). Seems a little unfair to advocate taking that away from them lol. And I definitely wouldn’t say Machinist is the kind of job where you can put out large amounts of DPS with little effort; if anything my impressions were that it’s the exact opposite lol

Bard and Dancer have their own problems too. I’d give you it if the issue was that Bard is easily the most braindead of all DPS jobs, since it’s mostly hitting the same button (Burst Shot) until a proc appears then repeating. The simplicity was mitigated by the added responsibility of supporting the party, but apparently that’s not the ranged DPS job anymore (or anyone’s). I mean you essentially only have 3 GCDs weaponskills with Burst Shot, Iron Jaws and Refulgent Arrow. Everything else is on some sort of cooldown. But then Bard is the very bottom of the DPS barrel, maybe even below Dancer, so it’s not like either of them are doing incredible damage with little effort.

[CKNovel]

So here's multiple facts:

-Melee could not do any of their positionnal, they'd do more damage than ranged jobs. Positionnals are around 500 dps.
-Without the buffs in 5.1, ranged damages would be so ridiculously low, that the 1% bonus in all stat for the whole party the ranged spot bring (supposed to be necessary) wouldn't be enough to make it better than a SMN/BLM/SAM/MNK comp. AKA if the whole party would loose 1% in all stat just to bring a Summoner instead of a BRD/MCH/DNC, it would be better DPS wise (Not better mechanically wise).
-"Mobility" means more responsibility. Since the ranged is the most mobile, it should be always the player handling the most mechanics when possible.
-A very good ranged will have an active time between 94.5% and 95.5%. A very good melee will have an active time between 94.5% and 95.5%. Maybe more, it depends on the fight length, but basically means that you're loosing less than 50 rDPS due to the "mobility".
-A SAM/MNK/BLM/SMN at a 50th percentile (Meaning they're really really average and don't master their jobs at all), would do more rDPS than a 95th percentile DNC/BRD (95th is basically where the player make less than 5 mistakes in their rotation).


If as a Melee, at lv80 and with a similar ilvl to the ranged, you deal less damage than a ranged, the problem is you and you alone.
It's claimed everywhere on this forum that ranged damages are too low, you have to ask yourself "What if I'm wrong and there is room for improvement in my way to play?". There's countless guides and data to help you there.

It's litterally a "Git gud" situation.
I'm far from being a MCH model, but when I reached a 95th percentile, I never managed to deal more rDPS than a Melee/Caster than isn't a RDM or died during the fight.

Damage and all is good but remind yourself that respecting mechanics and surviving is far more important, rDPS is but a single step towards being a good player. Plus, making it a priority will never put you behind a ranged unless that player is extremely good and you are doing below average.

[Shurrikhan]

With great capability comes great responsibility, i.e. if you have unlimited mobility as a ranged, you can safely assume you're responsible for moving the BLM via its Aetherial Manipulation and the first to deal with any mechanic requiring movement outside of melee range. Mobility, meet taxi duty.

[ReiMakoto]

Here's an image from the website that must not be named showing how each of the jobs perform at the high end, you'll notice ranged are at the bottom

[Myon88]

Hol' up that can't be right, everyone says stuff like,

Thats why melee jobs are slightly higher in performance to make up for the difference in gameplay, its all balanced.

but that image shows ranged still at the bottom. You'd think that like, if a ranged can do 1000 dps, and a melee loses 200 dps from moving around, they'd be tuned to do 1200 dps so that 1200 - 200 = 1000 dps. That's the idea right? So what gives?

Ok enough sarcasm. Well think about it, everyone says melees and casters need to be a little overtuned to compensate for movement, but the reality at high level play is that good players of these jobs can turn most fights into 100% uptime fights anyway. So there's a disconnect here, which essentially means that,

• Melees and casters are the only jobs with a high skill ceiling that rewards good play. If you're good enough to manage your own uptime, you're rewarded with overpowered damage because you've basically dodged your own 'movement tax'.

• Conversely, ranged jobs have an artificially low ceiling, and it's only balanced like that because of mediocre players. That 40th percentile monk or black mage that keeps complaining about being outdpsed by ranged jobs? They're the reason your job is limited, even though you've never met them in your life. Unlike the melees and casters, as a ranged there's no way you can just 'play better' and recover the dps that was taxed from you.

It's kind of like melees and casters are balanced on the assumption you will only reach ~80% of the job's potential, and of course good players will reach 100%. With ranged on the other hand, they assume you're always at 100% of the job's potential - consequently, the job has a low potential (lol). So you see it's actually kind of the opposite of what the OP thinks - it's way worse. Far from being overpowered, ranged are actually underpowered, not just in terms of absolute numbers but in the kind of philosophy of how they approach the tuning of the ranged jobs.

I don't know about you but I'd feel pretty bad about playing ranged jobs knowing this. The way they are now it's like they're basically telling you they're meant to be the easy mode jobs or something. Got a friend new to mmos? Recommend a ranged job to them. Making a progression team and have one person that isn't very consistent with mechanics or good at dps? Stick them on bard to minimize the damage they can do (in more ways than one heh). Ranged are a far cry from the high skill ceiling support monsters they were in Heavensward.

[ReiMakoto]

Hol' up that can't be right, everyone says stuff like,

but that image shows ranged still at the bottom. You'd think that like, if a ranged can do 1000 dps, and a melee loses 200 dps from moving around, they'd be tuned to do 1200 dps so that 1200 - 200 = 1000 dps. That's the idea right? So what gives?

Ok enough sarcasm. Well think about it, everyone says melees and casters need to be a little overtuned to compensate for movement, but the reality at high level play is that good players of these jobs can turn most fights into 100% uptime fights anyway. So there's a disconnect here, which essentially means that,

• Melees and casters are the only jobs with a high skill ceiling that rewards good play. If you're good enough to manage your own uptime, you're rewarded with overpowered damage because you've basically dodged your own 'movement tax'.

• Conversely, ranged jobs have an artificially low ceiling, and it's only balanced like that because of mediocre players. That 40th percentile monk or black mage that keeps complaining about being outdpsed by ranged jobs? They're the reason your job is limited, even though you've never met them in your life. Unlike the melees and casters, there's no way you can just 'play better' and recover the dps that was taxed from you.

So you see it's actually kind of the opposite of what the OP thinks - it's way worse. Far from being overpowered, ranged are actually underpowered, not just in terms of absolute numbers but in the kind of philosophy of how they approach the tuning of the ranged jobs.

I don't know about you but I'd feel pretty bad about playing ranged jobs knowing this. The way they are now it's like they're basically telling you they're meant to be the easy mode jobs or something. Got a friend new to mmos? Recommend a ranged job to them. Making a progression team and have one person that isn't very consistent with mechanics or good at dps? Stick them on bard to minimize the damage they can do (in more ways than one heh). Ranged are a far cry from the high skill ceiling support monsters they were in Heavensward.

Thing is, the only time that ranged had a relatively high skill ceiling which allowed better play to show, people complained that they had short cast times, that mch was too complicated and double ranged meta became king (don't know why thats necessarily a bad thing though)

[Neela]

yeah i see, only one sided answers, so you guys looks satisfied

The range mains arent satisfied tho - they need a slight dmg or utility buff. But thats what is is. U can’t deny hard fact data so all u can do is wait for adjustments.

[SpeckledBurd]

Thing is, the only time that ranged had a relatively high skill ceiling which allowed better play to show, people complained that they had short cast times, that mch was too complicated and double ranged meta became king (don't know why thats necessarily a bad thing though)

Because it was the culmination of a series of extremely questionable Job design decisions that had plagued Heavensward for the entire expansion.

On its own the ranged jobs steadily creeped upwards in power from 3.0 until the end. At the start of the Heavensward Machinist was extremely weak so Bard was the only option, then they overbuffed Machinist to the point where Bard was falling behind to compensate... so then they overbuffed bard. The result? Bard and Machinist were both doing higher personal damage than every other job at around 80th percentile performance and above (With Summoner occasionally shining due to being the undisputed AOE master at the time) while providing powerful party buffs, resource regeneration, and still pretty decent mobility. At which point the the reasonable assumption of Personal Damage vs Party buffing, where if a job has strong party buffs, it's personal damage will be low to compensate completely collapsed. At that point the devs practically just gave up and said to wait on them to fix things in Stormblood.

However a buff arms race wasn't the only reason they were so strong, because double ranged also was a result of the rest of the DPS balancing being worse than them

Melee balance being busted was probably the biggest contributor to double ranged, with Dragoon and Ninja being too strong and offering personal damage comparable too Monk (Monk was ahead of them by like 70-100 DPS total) but with much stronger buffs than they offer now. Monk at the time had pretty much nothing except downsides with it offering no party damage buffs, no useful defensive buffs (Dragon Kick had an Int Down that was better offered by Dark Knight, and Mantra was basically worthless), its damage was middling (despite ostensibly being the Samurai of the game before Samurai took that niche), it's TP exhausted faster than any other job, and it had extreme aggro creep because it didn't have Quelling Strikes (Diversion) or an Aggro cut. At the time it was basically considered a net negative raid damage for your party because it would force Tanks to adopt tank stance and was the weakest DPS (and possibly job) in the game by a huge margin. Also note that everything I just said are the final numbers after multiple rounds of Monk getting buffed, on launch it actually did less personal damage than Dragoon. Meanwhile Dragoon and Ninja were basically at their strongest in the games history. Dragoon offered 10% Piercing damage down which more than pushed its raid DPS past Monk's personal damage if there was a single Ranged Physical Job and with the pre-nerf Battle Litany it was basically the strongest job in the game. Ninja had pre-Nerf Trick Attack which needs no explanation, but it also had exclusive access to enmity control to help keep Tank's out of tank stance because Diversion/Shirk weren't things yet. The casters were good to begin with but fell behind after a long buff arms race between Bard and Machinist put the ranged to the top, and they never received any compensatory buffs to keep them in good standing.

Also note that Tanks weren't too great either. Warrior had exclusive access to what could be a 100% uptime 10% debuff on all outgoing damage and the best CD suite for taking busters so it was always a lock, and Dark Knight had higher damage than Paladin and a strong CD kit for the fights because it was geared towards Magical Damage. Meanwhile Paladin had the same problems as Monk did, doing less damage than DRK/WAR, offering worse party support, and having bad TP burn on top of having a kit focused on Physical damage when almost every tank buster was Magical. Healers fell apart towards the end as well, Astro started way too weak so it was successively buffed in such a way that Diurnal Sect mostly benefited, while White Mage didn't get touched. As a result at the end Astro made it better at being a White Mage than it while also offering 20% Damage boost Balance and other cards, whereas Scholar's shields were never threatened.

People have some rose tinted glasses for the design of Heavensward jobs and I can relate on some level, but the balance at the time is the worst its ever been in this game.

[Mordraug]

I play BRD and SAM.

BRD is the lowest DPS and while it's relatively more comfortable gameplay, even with all the dodging mechanics and chasing the boss when the tank has to move, BRD will never come close to SAM's damage. If anything, ranged physical DPS needs a buff.

Melee DPS's positionals aren't as hard as they sound.
If you know your rotation on melee, damage is really consistent.
If you know the mechanics, you can adjust your rotation to minimize downtime's effect's without too much mental effort.

BRD can dodge mechanics while attacking, yes, but has to be relying on procs to get the bursts out (as opposed to making them happen with a proper rotation), and even those bursts are on par with SAM/DRG/MNK standard attacks.

[SaitoHikari]

Thing is, the only time that ranged had a relatively high skill ceiling which allowed better play to show, people complained that they had short cast times, that mch was too complicated and double ranged meta became king (don't know why thats necessarily a bad thing though)

And not just that, double ranged meta only became a thing because of piercing debuff from Dragoon, not because of anything the ranged actually did. You can’t blame the Bards for wanting a free damage buff along with a crit chance skill, but the way the devs treat Bard now, you’d think they blamed us for how the meta turned out in SB, when we just merely benefited the most from everyone else’s buffs.

Bard also did have a very high skill ceiling in Stormblood, based around manipulating your proc rates around party buffs. They took that away from us in ShB with the across the board utility nerfs to every class at once, along with splitting our procs away from crit chance. The more I play current Bard, the more I become convinced that the current 40% repertoire proc is nowhere near enough to recapture the pace that SB Bard had in a raid setting. In the devs justification for making our class less reliant on RNG and thus more easily accessible, they gave us a proc rate low enough that we’re actually even MORE at the mercy of it due to the inability to manipulate our chances higher, especially in a single target setting.

Do you know how it feels to get only one fully powered Pitch Perfect in your 20 second raging strikes window? Not only does it mean you missed out on additional uses of one of your core burst skills, it also means the charge up time for Apex Arrow got pushed further into the fight. The RNG likely won’t make it up for you later. It’s absurdly inconsistent as is, one opener I get procs like crazy and leaving Minuet with 23k+ rdps, the next opener I’m barely doing more than the tanks.

Granted, I was the person that made the pre-expansion thread telling fellow Bards to calm down and that things weren’t going to be as bad as they seemed, that we still had plenty of advantages. I completely regret ever making that thread now.

These days I’m leveling Ninja since I’m interested in how it plays. Enough to consider taking it into raids, when I exclusively played Bard in a raid setting for the past three years and achieved 97+ percentile across the board for the current raid tier and UwU pre-expansion. If my first week performance as a new Ninja somehow ends up contributing more rDPS than literally one of the top ~150 Bard performers in the world... That’s going to be a really bad feeling.