There's a huge Physical range shortage in PF and Statics

[Connor]

I think it is possible to balance both Bard and Dancer as ‘party buffers’. Extremely difficult, but possible. Probably.

Basically as long as what they do is ‘the same but different’ it can still work I think. Like if Dancer had stronger buffs for single target but Bards were all aoe and weaker to compensate.

Or they could go the way of having different limitations on the support (I.e Bards have to stop spamming Jump to sing again, Dancers have to do the dance input part which is essentially a cast time you can move with). Or making it tied to different job gauges / resources or whatever to ‘bottleneck’ them in different ways for balancing.

I want to say there’s a case for making one more defensive/utility buff oriented and one more offensive/damage buff oriented. But then that doesn’t really work because unless the ‘utility oriented’ one is literally game-breaking it would always be inferior to the ‘damage’ one. Even if it had Raise and a heal gcd it’d still be considered massively inferior to the ‘damage’ one, even assuming exactly the same personal dps (because of rDPS). For them to make a situation where a ‘utility’ and ‘dps’ buffer are both valuable they’d have to both provide roughly similar rDPS (with dps one edging out of course) which is nigh-impossible. If not just because defensive utility like healing and raising can’t be quantified in rDPS because the value is technically both 0 and infinite depending on whether you have to actually use it lol (it can single-handedly save a wiping party as you resurrect more dead bodies than Jesus Christ, or it can offer absolutely nothing the whole fight except a dps tax and a wasted ability slot because nobody died lol)

I think balancing Bard and Dancer around having ‘the same but different’ buffs is really the best way for them to get balance between them. And of course following from that they should be around the same dps as a Dancer, with rDPS being what determines who’s higher so there’s an actual reward for using support abilities. I kinda wish they’d say ‘screw’ it and take ranged dps back to how they were in Heavensward or Stormblood. Obviously that won’t happen though because they were so disgustingly OP it broke the game lol.

Although, I find it hilarious that SE justified deleting all the ranged role support because ‘we don’t want to force players to take a ranged dps’…

then they add a system that specifically forces players to take ranged dps (role bonus)…