The unrewarding state of physical ranged

[Grimoire-M]

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99th percentile is unrealistic in terms of comparison. 75th is a bit more honest if you're worried about tuning at the top end, and while it generally it holds true to what you've noted there is some amount of shifting. Notably by the time you go down to 30th SMN, SAM, and NIN are the clear winners, and that covers most Savage clears period. I think that's more important to take note of. Those three have clear cut burst windows and excellent mobility options in their respective roles as well as minimal friction (less positional requirements and clear-cut disengage tools for NIN/SAM, flexible instant-casts and a lot of free damage compared to other classes for SMN) that make them easier to execute in most situations, and that's in spite of being considered 'execution heavy' by most players, they're still more accessible by the numbers. The important thing to note though is this doesn't change the overall position of Ranged DPS at all, in fact when you start comparing the overall statistics you see that these three and any of the top five DPS can be about a quartile behind on the ranged DPS and still be ahead overall. SMN in particular has the highest minimum damage output at the low range on most fights.

I think that's the real problem I have with the ranged tax. At that low end the stat bonus is barely breaking even, and we have to take into consideration that these logs already filter out non-clears, while Savage itself filters out players who don't know the basics of their job or aren't up to the challenge in general, which ups the competency curve a fair bit. There's a reasonable argument to be made that if you suck at ranged you're better off swapping to a caster DPS instead, Which isn't something that should be possible given how it could affect pugs.

[Myon88]

99th percentile is unrealistic in terms of comparison. 75th is a bit more honest if you're worried about tuning at the top end

SMN in particular has the highest minimum damage output at the low range on most fights.

You should only be looking at 99th percentile metrics for comparison because that shows you how each job performs at their intended ceiling. 75th is not 'top end', and if you are falling there you are making frequent errors. The people performing even lower than that are barely playing the same game at all.

I don't really like the idea of balancing jobs based on how they perform at the lower end too. You're basically asking SMN/SAM/NIN players to pay an 'idiot tax' because of low performing players benefiting from their high performance floor. Conversely, jobs like BLM get a difficulty rebate - their job has to be overtuned because the people bad at black mage are really bad at black mage. That's not a very satisfying way to balance the jobs to me, it's basically a caste system with jobs split into 'expert' and 'beginner' jobs. I'd know which one I'd want to play in that case.

It's also important to note that how jobs perform when piloted poorly is not the only factor behind inter-job metrics at low percentiles. The worse the clears you look at, the more you find things like red mages getting embolden-shafted by having extra casters in their party, poor usage of uptime strats that hurts melees and black mages, poor coordination of burst damage that punishes bards and dancers. I'd be careful about drawing conclusions from that data in a vacuum.

Besides, if you rag on summoner you can't really justify any numerical buffs to the physical ranged at all. Unfun gameplay is one thing, but raw numbers are another, and between their mobility and general 'ease of use', they are everything people love to hate about summoner turned up to 11.