Quote Originally Posted by Claire_Pendragon View Post
Magical Melee: 0
The problem is that there are some combinations that just seriously do make more sense, such as casters (in the sense of having actual casts) not having to restart their casts if their target moves out of melee range, or have more reason to function more differently as a role, i.e. differently enough to warrant the label.

Ranged and Melee are a sufficient distinction because of how raid mechanics interact. The rest, though?

But now, imagine a Magical Melee. Given what is necessary to function as a Melee, how diverse can that Magical Melee be? How does it keep from just being a NIN (already arguably a hybrid in terms of damage types and casting), a SAM (already a hybrid in terms of casting), a Monk (already has nominally 'elemental' stances), or DRG (which had outright magic damage in HW Geirskogul and has it still in DFD), "but with more of its damage being magic"?

Are mere aesthetics sufficient? And even if so, is it worth forcing all to be predominantly physical or magical? What happens to the jobs that step too much on the toes of "Magical Melee"? Do we remove TCJ from Ninja because it's too "caster-like"? Do we remove Iajutsu from SAM?

Let's consider the historical context as well:
  • Lancer/Dragoon's unique armor class fit squarely between standard and tank-level passive mitigation, with none of this Tank Mastery nonsense to make it worth basically nothing. Heck, Lancer was originally Gridania's answer to needing a tank.
  • The difference between Bard and BLM/SMN was arguably less about its mobility than the raid sustain it brought.
  • Scouting differed from Striking in that, again, it brought unique utility -- recovery (single-target TP regeneration) and capitalization (Trick Attacks), and later enmity control (Shadewalker, Smokescreen).
Now, would the themes in each of those cases have been worth pursuing further?
  • Can we even make use of a half-tank armor class, for instance? Raid design and enmity control thus far would indicate otherwise, but it's probably possible with less bloated tank passive mitigation and more defensive tools being allowed to DPS (in particular, Maiming users).
  • Ranged's prior distinctions are completely gone, apart from "even more mobility (than is ever needed)".
  • Scouting has lost all but one of its unique tools, which has itself been badly watered down.
(All this then leaves the question, if the distinct melee armor classes are vestigial, should we remedy the lack of identity across each armor class or just consolidate the armor classes...?)

Functionally, we have classes with varying degrees of functional reach and mobility, which ultimately amount to just one stat: uptime (including uptime provided for others through positional swaps you enable). (Nominal factors won't do here; one either has enough GCDs of Ranged spam on PLD to allow a melee to continue attacking while you sit where one would otherwise be out of range, or you have some percentage of that downtime filled, to proportionately lesser functional reach.)

That's not going away, but it's quickly becoming a smaller and smaller concern. (Even were it not, you'd see the difference only in progression vs. farming, with the jobs with easiest uptime maximization run earlier and hardest run later, especially where two distinct choices lie in the same armor class.) That leaves only convention, which amounts mostly just to assigning people places to stand on a clockwheel or inside/outside mechanic.

I'm not exactly sure what to do about all that, and while I might seem consigned to everything being blurred together, I'd still have rather Maiming had gone for that half-tank angle and saw another job added to it, Dancer had been added to Scouting (fitting its former half point-support, half raid-support niche, ideally with a bit more melee interaction such as via its Dash), and the numbers eventually evened out across those armor classes such that Ranged and Melee would each get ~2.5 armor classes, but it's all pretty up in the air for me. I just hate this pretending that Ranged is so much more inherently unique across its roster that it should have two guaranteed slots while it'd be a travesty if melee were to do the same, all while Melee is so much less gearing-friendly if playing more than 1-2 jobs among the roster.