Why are Ranged DPS so unfun to play?

[Payotz]

Refresh, the point at which it became a free use-on-CD ability, was never fun. It just held a large portion of your party's agency/"fun" hostage.

It has niche use in recovery, the same as raises on a SMN and RDM, as it'll fill up a recently raised healer
It'll also have a niche use in prog in general because healing won't be optimized as much, especially with changes like Thin Air for Whm.

It's on a 5s CD as is, and lasts 30. Is this supposed to be "a shorter cooldown relative to SCH's Expedience"?

Yeah relative to SCH's expedience. It won't have a damage mitigation attached to it, so it's more akin to extra movement for executing mechanics.

Why bring back further ST external physical mitigation in a context in which tanks take so little damage already (given that their own and healers' additions to their mitigation profiles have increased their durability considerably more than boss damage has increased)? Moreover, the majority of modern tankbusters are magic damage.

Which they can just tune the fights for. DSR P6 massively destroys tanks, so clearly they're capable of increasing damage on tanks rather than the whole party.
The physical only aspect can be switched to take both physical and magical or if you want, we can also have another button for a magical Palisade separate from physical palisade.

This one, though, sounds fitting and fun! I see no reason to homogenize it by making it a Role Skill, however.

This is more of a compromise due to how SE likes to make sure that jobs have baseline abilities. I see this as a baseline ability due to how powerful it actually is.
I think having role skills be improved/changed depending on what job you are is a decent compromise to both keep the job's flavor, and making sure that the job differences aren't as massive.

This way of designing jobs around encounter types is not a good idea, unless you want to be obliged to swap Physical Ranged jobs on a per-fight basis (and for the "good for one target only" option to be preferable in the vast majority of cases).

It's not anything rough because I see this similarly as the differences between Battle Litany and Arcane Circle, or PLD mitigation vs DRK mitigation. It's job flavor without sabotaging a job's ability to clear content.

And honestly, SE should lean more into incentives to swap job within the role. Phys Ranged is less punished when switching between jobs because the melds are so similar to each other compared to let's say.. BLM and RDM. We can all play every job with one character, so it's about time if SE actually adds incentives to do that within a role but not require it.

And besides, there will always be a meta class, a meta playstyle and a meta comp even if there's only minute differences between every single job within a role, so really, leaning into the job fantasy without making it so that some jobs can't clear content won't hurt. With this, people can literally just play whatever they want BUT they're incentivized and rewarded to be an omni role. It's just less homogenization without hurting anything.

Like I still played MCH in TEA even when BRD was obviously the better ranged in that fight because I just liked MCH better and I'm a lot more comfortable in that job.

And to reiterate:

Sure this probably needs more tuning and all that to be viable, but literally THIS IS BETTER than the state of the role right now.

These are just napkin ideas that I've been thinking of when thinking up of how Phys Ranged can actually be improved. I don't claim it's the answer but it's a step in the right direction.
Feel free to discuss it and add your ideas though! I'd love to refine my ideas and learn of new ones.