So...is the Ranged Role gone? Are we in a Reverse HW?

[Aiscence]

How does Machinist depend more on raid buffs than Black Mage and Samurai? All three are selfish jobs. If anything, the latter two benefit more because of their higher output.

Because of how his burst works, you try to align turrets and WF to align on raid buffs, with awkward gauge management on top of your two "strong" gcds, but with every drift you lose quite a big part of damage because you are not aligned anymore without hope of getting back into it. SAM and BLM are doing good damage on their own, buffs are giving them "more", but arent doubling their dps (compared to the average they have, outside of them) for the duration of their burst, which lead to them being a huge component of mch's dps, even though less than in SB. just compare a death of all 3, BLM can just get back into their rotation, sam the same, but MCH's dps will just plummit hard because of that (on top of being ultra punitive because of the loss of ressources, like smn).

Alphascape and every single Ultimate fight would like a word with you about that. Go ask Paladin and Dark Knights how much they liked doing Panto2.

Because in the fights mentioned above, melee will suffer far worse than the range do now. Non-uptime Hello, World is bad enough for melee you wouldn't bring any of them. The 1% simply wouldn't make up for the sheer loss they suffer having to disengage so much. This is also why your analogy doesn't work. There is nothing melee can do to compensate for fights that force them away from the boss except hope people are willing to accommodate them. Higher end statics will, but the average won't. This makes them increasingly less desired. In essence, they get put into the Range role now but with even worse utility.

Stormblood was another thing, job had different tools, some had less mobility, brd was clearly too strong (which i will come back to it later), etc. O12s FO was badly designed too, but you seem to forget how, during 4.4, mch was so bad some were apologizing and thanking their group for letting them do the prog as one, a sam actually bringing more in a meta comp than them. And during SB, there were double range, triple melees, etc used to speedrun. About panto, that strat was actually a -cheese- strat, the ranged or caster were supposed to do it. And speaking of ultimate, I cleared all three of them: Ucob liquid fire bait could be done by a healer or a caster, they were the one taking the range spot if they had to do the neurolink anyway, melee had to leave the melee too for those anyway. UwU eruptions were anyway done with ranged + caster or healers. TEA had literally nothing to bait outside of a tornado and one super jump which basically bring the boss to you, so even a melee could technically do it and only barely lose 2 GCDs at max.