Physical range dps damage?

[Vaer]

I mean, I guess ranged could remain as the ‘easy mode mechanics’ job, but then as others have said I have to wonder how much of an advantage ranged mobility actually affords, since it’s not like casters can’t bypass movement requirements with instant casts, or melee have absolutely no ranged attacks or gap-closers to mitigate disengagement downtime. Not that I’m saying they don’t need to consider cast times / downtime because of these abilities, just that they aren’t exactly rooted to the spot for whole fights at a time

Personally I think passive mobility and high uptime is a significant advantage when the game revolves on keeping the GCD going and the amount of positioning mechanics the game throws at you. Mechanic design varies and sometimes it punishes casters more than melee and vice versa, but ranged don't have to worry about that most of the time. Ranged can even stand in for melee positioning spots with minimal damage loss.

Disengaging on melee and cast interruptions on caster are decent potency drops. Dropping a cast at the wrong time on BLM is painful.

In a perfect world, all dps subtypes are using their support skills though. Addle, Feint, Second Wind, Bloodbath, Tactician line, Mantra/Minne/Waltz all support the healers.

It seems like they usually balance the subroles against each other first (the dev's version of the ideal dps comp is 1 melee, 1 ranged, 1 caster - enforced by the party stat bonus in an 8 person party). This is why RDM was buffed, it was seriously lagging behind BLM and SMN.

They then balance them all to make them all viable for the floater 4th spot. This spot has usually gone to melee recently but this tier there are a lot more 2 caster comps primarily due to SMN and the RDM buffs.

I think at most the utility penalty should be around 4-6% from the top depending on the type of utility, so ranged could probably use a slight buff.

Mostly I think they're probably a bit more conservative for the ranged subrole in general because it went through a bunch of expansions where stacking ranged was common due to the synergy with Dragoon and casters were the first to be replaced in those situations leaving the party comp as 2 melee and 2 ranged.

[dinnertime]

Why does ranged have to be the worst dps with the worst utility, when Summoners to have it all and more.

Idk I don’t get why Summoner is allowed to be what’s essentially a support job, except with great dps and high utility, but then the actual role that’s supposed to be ‘support’ can’t have any of those things?

I’m not saying Summoner should be nerfed or anything because that wouldn’t be fair on them, but why can’t ranged have equivalent levels of utility? Would Bard really become a very top dps of them all if it had a regen? If Dancers had raise? Machinists using debuffs?

Idk I guess what I’m saying is, why are these things ‘super-OP’ on ranged, but they’re totally fine when they’re on a caster?

You have to realize that:

SMN's raidwide buff Devotion has the longest cooldown out of all the buffs in the game.
The SMN regen, Everlasting Flight, is not something we could use whenever we want it to. It's tied to Demi-Phoenix and it's never timed for moments where people need healing.
The debuff, Addle, is essentially the same as Troubadour, Tactician and Shield Samba.

Resurrection is probably the most notable support utility SMN has that has made countless debates, but it's still a niche, barely utilized ability. Also Titan-Egi's shield is useful and all but most of the time you'd rather use the other two Egi.

Its support utilities cannot really be compared to most of the physical ranged, because physical ranged does it better and do it more constantly. Still, I agree that physical range definitely needs a lift.

[TheMightyMollusk]

Resurrection is probably the most notable support utility SMN has that has made countless debates, but it's still a niche, barely utilized ability.

And yet whenever someone talks about buffing Red Mage, they get Verraise thrown in their face.....

[dinnertime]

And yet whenever someone talks about buffing Red Mage, they get Verraise thrown in their face.....

Doesn't surprise me. A lot of people just don't know what they're talking about, to put it nicely. Red Mage's support abilities like Verraise and Vercure were only useful in progression so it's also barely utilized everywhere else, and it's detrimental to their DPS since it's a GCD and not an oGCD/passive support ability.

Red Mage is in a better spot now, but whenever I saw those arguments, it never held any weight.

[Cithaerias_pyropina]

Mobility is the king of everything in any game ever to exist in the history of gaming. Nothing is more valuable than getting somewhere quicker or moving away from an impending attack quicker.

The moment Bard, MCH or DNC are buffed to do damage > any job that has cast times, or is melee, is the moment all those other jobs may as well not exist. Why take a Dragoon, Ninja or Monk if a Bard can do as much damage as they can without ever having the fear of downtime, being stuck in an animation (jumps/assassinate/Tin Chi Jen) or needing to worry about Greased Lightning stacks . Why take a Summoner or RDM if a MCH can do as much damage as they can without ever having to deal with cast times or a melee combo. (And don't bring up "but raid progression" that only last a week if not a few days. And it requires someone's death for resurrection spells to ever be useful, not much of a utility if its requirements are failure. They're dead weight spells/"utility" if no one dies)

The only way you ranged DPS players can feasibly attain higher DPS is having 3.0's cast times back, and you wouldn't want that now would you?

Side note: Since people like to attack Summoner for some reason, it's nowhere near as mobile as the ranged DPS, which can move freely with no penalty toward their DPS. "Oh but Ruin 2! Dreadwyrm/Firebird Trance!" you might say. Ruin 2 is 40 potency lower than Ruin 3, that's actually pretty enormous believe it or not. They have to sacrifice potency for mobility, who'd have thought? And the trances are on a 55s cooldown with a 15s and 20s duration, hardly free or infinite mobility unlike ranged DPS. And as someone earlier had said, it's hard to play so it's allowed to do high DPS unlike something like RDM (which is roll your face across the keyboard easy but, still has cast times and a, must be in melee range, melee combo)

[Connor]

It’s definitely true that Summoner utility is way more limited use than anything ranged have, so it’s a fair point that the two aren’t really comparable. Especially with how Everlasting Flight works (why exactly did Summoner need a random passive regen anyway lol)

I’m definitely not suggesting that ranged should have damage comparable to Summoner, since that would just make things even more unbalanced.

I do still think it’d be nice to see more ‘support-y’ things on ranged, especially ones that require some kind of planning like Requiem on Bard or Machinist’s debuffs. And naturally, I’d be happy if ranged dps was lower/equal to what it is now to compensate for having utility. And I hate to sound like a ‘oh but I’m not like the girls’ contrarian, but I actually really enjoyed Bard in 3.0 (not that I didn’t think it was clunky as hell and needed some real fine tuning lol)

Or maybe a better way to put it would be that I’d like those abilities to be more involved with the job, especially for Bard. Dancer already has a really good foundation as a ‘support class’ and it feels rewarding to use Steps since you’re actively doing things to support the party (as opposed to just spamming an oGCD every 30 seconds).

Then again, when Bard/Machinist actually were support-oriented, they were guaranteed takes to any raid content and essentially became kings of the meta. So I do get why ranged aren’t really allowed to have support either, especially not something involving. Because naturally the more involving it is, the stronger it has to be (otherwise it’s like, ‘why am I doing all this effort to give the party 1% damage buff lol), and ranged can’t have strong support abilities.

So I do get why ranged has to have the limited-use / cooldown-only support rather than stuff like the old gcd songs. They’re impossible to balance and just make it so ranged are guaranteed raid spots, which isn’t very fair on other dps.

I guess logically, the only thing they really can do then is to raise ranged dps, but only by like a tiny amount so it doesn’t overtake casters? And just keep everything else the exact same

[dinnertime]

Side note: Since people like to attack Summoner for some reason, it's nowhere near as mobile as the ranged DPS, which can move freely with no penalty toward their DPS. "Oh but Ruin 2! Dreadwyrm/Firebird Trance!" you might say. Ruin 2 is 40 potency lower than Ruin 3, that's actually pretty enormous believe it or not. They have to sacrifice potency for mobility, who'd have thought? And the trances are on a 55s cooldown with a 15s and 20s duration, hardly free or infinite mobility unlike ranged DPS. And as someone earlier had said, it's hard to play so it's allowed to do high DPS unlike something like RDM (which is roll your face across the keyboard easy but, still has cast times and a, must be in melee range, melee combo)

You're forgetting Egi Assault, which gives Summoner a tremendous amount of mobility, not to mention that it gives you Ruin IV, granted it should be saved for Demi-Bahamut, but for phases outside of that, it's free for you to use if you need to move around. Demi summons *can* be used for mobility but it's not recommended.

Also the dev team does not factor difficulty in performing the job to how much damage it makes, otherwise we'd see an entirely different list of who's on top and who's at last.

[Dfess]

I do still think it’d be nice to see more ‘support-y’ things on ranged, especially ones that require some kind of planning like Requiem on Bard or Machinist’s debuffs.

The problem is Bards don't have Requiem anymore.

[Connor]

The problem is Bards don't have Requiem anymore.

Yeah, I think it’d be cool if it returned is what I mean

Was the removal of Requiem even warranted in the first place? I know it’s strong but surely it doesn’t add enough dps to change Bard’s ‘rDPS’ ranking significantly?
Like it’s not gonna shoot up to the level of Melee / BLM just from that one skill surely?

[Dfess]

Yeah, I think it’d be cool if it returned is what I mean

Was the removal of Requiem even warranted in the first place? I know it’s strong but surely it doesn’t add enough dps to change Bard’s ‘rDPS’ ranking significantly?
Like it’s not gonna shoot up to the level of Melee / BLM just from that one skill surely?

It made the enemies take 3% more damage. So it was applied for every source of damage the enemy took. It was good but, I don't think it was so overpowered to warrant a removal of it. I think the issue was you had that mp regen at the time to. You would pop Foe and mana regen and it would last a bit longer than it would normally. I think removing the mana regen was more than enough honestly. Removing Foe wasn't really warranted. If we would have kept Foe and lost mana regen we could have had another use for Ewer from AST. That way you could regen mana slowy during a fight instead of like 10% instantly every second. That's just my opinion though.