Why are Ranged DPS so unfun to play?

[Payotz]

You can't simultaneously argue "the tax is excessive/bullshit" and "it'd be fine to be more taxed".

My argument is that if there is more tax to be put on the role as a result of added utility, it's just gonna be based on the fight design adding more responsibility to the role, which is what we want anyway.
The kit isn't going to be taxed. Damage isn't going to go down. It's literally going to be an expanded kit and damage output (even a little bit more because of addition of vuln ups into the jobs again) without any additional tax on the kit
The fact that you have fight mechanics designed around physical ranged using their brand new utility Is the "tax", which technically isn't even a tax, it's just more added responsibility for the role.

The role is already taxed on the fact that they have "utility" (that they don't even have). If they need to tax it more, it's not gonna be on the damage output or kit, it's gonna be on the fight design.

Then where does that lead us?
Raging Strikes? Damage Cooldown. Must be utility.
Gauss Barrel? Damage. On a cooldown. Must be utility.

Does Raging Strikes affect the party and add more damage for 15 seconds to the party? If yes, it's utiltiy. If no, it's a personal cooldown.
Is Gauss Barrel being put on give the party a damage buff? If yes, it's utility. If no, it's a personal cooldown.

Utility is literally anything that buffs the party. It's something you give to the party to either boost their movement speed, attack speed, mana regen, max hp, damage mitigation and yes, even damage. It's things that will help the party rather than only help yourself.

Except, you do not have to hold Refresh for a raid jump any more than Lucid Dreaming, because Refresh's value has nothing to do with upcoming duration/uptime. You need only not use it when healer MP is absolutely topped off.

No you hold it for heavy heal checks that the new fights will have since the devs will be able to have the freedom to force the healers to go OOM, OR you hold it for when the healers die during prog.
You don't hold it for jumps, because that's not the situation you need to hold it for. You hold it for other scenarios, like heavy heal checks that need more heavy mana GCD healing, or when the healers die to get their mana back up.

Unlike the likes of Intervention or raid buffs, the timing after the very first use literally does not matter, in which case your only optimal choice is to use it on CD, maximizing bonus MP ticks over time, because, unless your healers are MP-capped, there is no difference between MP ticks over time and effective MP ticks over time.

It will matter if there's phases in the fight that is designed for it.
It will also matter for niche scenarios like the healers dying, but they need to gcd heal hardcore in the next 15 seconds, and their lucid is on cooldown.

If there's no tankbusters in raid, then you're gonna go ahead and press intervention on cooldown to mitigate auto attacks, and you'll be saying the same thing for Intervention as you are saying right now with Refresh.
Having Refresh available will make it so that the devs can add more mechanics that involve Refresh, just like how tank cooldowns are essentially made for tankbusters

[Shurrikhan]

Utility is literally anything that buffs the party. [/B]

Personal mobility tools? No utility to be had, despite situationally varied rDPS value, because it doesn't affect allies.
Having higher burst than any other job, thus better capitalizing on externally granted damage buffs? Not utility, because it doesn't target or spread to allies.

Let's say Adloquiem gains an effect that stores 50% of HP healed as damage to be dealt upon the allies' next attack. Because it's raw value, not potency, it doesn't scale with the recipient's gear or traits instead of yours. Because the value is snapshotted immediately, it cannot scale with the opponent's buffs instead of yours.

It would literally just be an additional half a Broil in damage, wasted if the fight ends before the target's next attack. Yet, by your reckoning, that would still be utility, because it's an effect that occurs through the ally, even if at virtually no dependence on or variance because of that ally, rather than SCH's utility there being that their nuke GCD heal refunds 150 potency (roughly half a filler GCD). (Hell, technically, Adloquiem itself would be utility already, as it generates a buff on the target.)

________________

At this point we're arguing semantics, but to my mind, if the "utility" does nothing that simply adding filler potency would do to identical effect across a majority of situations, it's not utility. To utility, it must have something to how it works, relative to more normal ways of granting equivalent rDPS, that causes its value to vary in different situations beyond merely teammate (in)competence (since any personal effect was already 100% dependent on competence -- your own).

Otherwise, it's just damage. Given ilvl equal to party average, having Battle Voice, for instance, behaves almost identically to additional Burst Shot potency. Both have their benefits potentially delayed by lengthy incoming downtime (Burst Shot's buff being wasted as you refresh DoTs instead, if necessary). Both are just as dependent on alignment and player competency. That doesn't mean I'd prefer for Battle Voice to be gone, but its effect is solely to...

• move raw damage from your kit to that of others, only to be moved right back again on FFLogs,
• move that portion of damage from depending on your gear and competency to that of your 3-7 party members,
• reduce Bard's relative power in parties of fewer than 7 players, and
• faintly increase party punishment for any deaths, especially yours.

It offers no affordances, no advantages over a simple buff to filler potency. Unless things go poorly, at which point it comparatively underperforms, it scales no differently than added filler potency. It grants no further use, nor way to be used.
At that point, is that "utility," or simply a constraint?

Having Refresh available will make it so that the devs can add more mechanics that involve Refresh, just like how tank cooldowns are essentially made for tankbusters

Like what, though?

So, you've got your shiny CD here by which to counter mechanic X.

It also happens to have an effect identical to Lucid Dreaming, except halved over time (split two-ways / at half the frequency), such that for it to have any impact outside of the very worst of situations, Lucid Dreaming must now be insufficient, and the healer's ability to use AoEs/Rez/GCDs --i.e., to use their full kit-- purposely made dependent on having one or more Physical Ranged.

This, in turn, would turn SpS from being a BiS stat up to a certain GCD threshold and Piety a waste stat in general to now either that... or the exact opposite... turning all healer optimization on its head the moment one speedruns or goes without a Physical Ranged to again having one.

And what does that mechanic look like? Just saps partywide MP? Introduces healing checks well beyond the level of DSR (which can nonetheless be solo-healed with a majority of casts being spent on Malefic), in hopes of draining healer MP throug AoE spam, despite the devs repeated insistence that they will not be increasing relative healing requirements?

No you hold it for heavy heal checks that the new fights

But, again, like what?

You can solo-heal every fight in this game even without Refresh / bonus MP.

the devs will be able to have the freedom to force the healers to go OOM

But the low modern healing requirements aren't simply a result of healers not having access to Refresh. It was a purposeful design decision, for better or (imo) worse, to make healing 'more accessible'. You will no more be able to try to force healers to go oom without a Bard under your suggested change than to force them to very low MP in a typical fight right now.

Like, just do anything to change up that effect as not to be flat total MP restoration, over time, on CD and you'd be more nearly able to do what you want, but the Stormblood design for MP restoration --free and therefore largely impotent and inflexible-- is not it.

But even then, you have to deal with the fact that you cannot use Refresh to uniquely counter anything, and having it actually be important means holding hostage healers' ability to even use their kit (that is, beyond rez, which other jobs would be able to cover better than your MP bonuses ever could). That's not going to work out well in a design paradigm specifically looking to minimize healing requirements and the tax of DPS-Rezzes is flat and therefore kept miniscule. You'd probably have to readjust how MP itself works for this to work out. You cannot simply draw from a very differently designed era and attempt to plunk its value into modern XIV. (Not that Refresh would actually offer any gameplay to Physical Ranged jobs even then, only hold Healers' hostage in certain cases.)

If there's no tankbusters in raid, then you're gonna go ahead and press intervention on cooldown to mitigate auto attacks, and you'll be saying the same thing for Intervention as you are saying right now with Refresh.

P.S. Intervention has an opportunity cost, just as Physical Ranged jobs' previous ways of granting MP did. Unless incoming damage would be more than 30% auto-crits, you'd be better off Provoking and using Shelltron. It is an otherwise less efficient option used when it has the most reason to be used (as per ARR/HW Ballad/Promotion), rather than a flat value over time (as per Stormblood Refresh).

[Payotz]

Personal mobility tools? No utility to be had, despite situationally varied rDPS value, because it doesn't affect allies.
Having higher burst than any other job, thus better capitalizing on externally granted damage buffs? Not utility, because it doesn't target or spread to allies.

That's right. Yeah.
A job can be brought for high personal dps with 0 utility (SAM/BLM), low dps overall, but very high utility (PLD), lower dps but for very specific utility (RDM/SMN/SCH/SGE), or for high burst, and high utility without having great sustained damage (NIN). A job can literally be just brought because you're comfortable with it really. It doesn't change the fact that Mug/Battle Litany/Expedient/Divine Benison/Passage of Arms are all utility.

Let's say Adloquiem gains an effect that stores 50% of HP healed as damage to be dealt upon the allies' next attack. Because it's raw value, not potency, it doesn't scale with the recipient's gear or traits instead of yours. Because the value is snapshotted immediately, it cannot scale with the opponent's buffs instead of yours.
It would literally just be an additional half a Broil in damage, wasted if the fight ends before the target's next attack. Yet, by your reckoning, that would still be utility, because it's an effect that occurs through the ally, even if at virtually no dependence on or variance because of that ally, rather than SCH's utility there being that their nuke GCD heal refunds 150 potency (roughly half a filler GCD). (Hell, technically, Adloquiem itself would be utility already, as it generates a buff on the target.)

Yeah that would be utility as well. That's correct. It's going to be as unweildly as your En Avant suggestion, and nobody would actually use it as seriously as other options, but yes that would also be utility. You're right. Utility is utility, even if it is bad utility, good utility or even unsusable utility (like Arm Graze and Head Graze).

I don't know why we're arguing semantics when it turns out that you do understand what I'm getting at. Utility is utility. It's stuff that makes the party burst more during their burst phases or during tight dps checks where you have to dump 3mil damage in total in under 60 seconds, it's mitigation where it stops you from being insta killed from full hp by an 80k raidwide, and it's movement speed buffs wherein it makes it easier to do a mechanic or position for a mechanic.

Whether or not it's bad utility, it's good utility, it's boring utility, it's engaging utility doesn't change the fact that it's all utility.

having Battle Voice, for instance, behaves almost identically to additional Burst Shot potency. Both have their benefits potentially delayed by lengthy incoming downtime (Burst Shot's buff being wasted as you refresh DoTs instead, if necessary)

It allows you to pump out as much damage as you can during intermissions where you have limited uptime (like all Thordin Phase in DSR). Yes that's utility.
It allows you to complete a tight dps check that you need in phases, like DSR Rewind, yes that's utility.
It allows you to have a higher chance of Direct Hitting in the 30 seconds window of you having higher main stat because of pots, yes that's utility.

It helps the party, that's why it's utility.

Like what, though?

Mechanics like BJ enrage, E12s enrage, E11's bleed after a raid wide, Nisi, a more damaging Mortal Vow, and literally Tumults back in E4S (our healers went OOM during prog for this one, so this is a really good one.)
A mechanic that applies more dot damage every raid wide, forcing the healers to gcd heal more than usual.
More outgoing raidwide damage that goes out constantly rather than every 30 seconds.

Hell, WoW's bursting affix in M+. Anduin's healer bubble check in Sepulcher. Even Grievous as an affix.

There's a lot of mechanics that's already there in FF14 that just needs to be either tuned higher or come out faster one after the other, and there are mechanics from their competitors that I believe is more than possible in FF14's fight design. More inconsistent damage coming out that doesn't give a fuck about your OGCD cooldowns would force healers to GCD more, because they simply have no more OGCDs left to spend after a while.

And even then, with only few more tune ups to the current fight design, Refresh still has a place as a recovery tool.
Rezzing as an RDM is not free mana, nor does mana actually come back when healers die.

Lucid Dreaming doesn't have a short cooldown, so in niche situations where they have no lucid dreaming AND the healers needs mana to GCD heal, Refresh has a place.
Hell, even if Lucid Dreaming is off cooldown and they used it, SE can make it so that Refresh stacks with Lucid Dreaming to have more mana available faster.

There's a lot of situations I can think of that Refresh is useful, but it just seems like you're hell bent into denying all of my situations as being feasible.

the healer's ability to use AoEs/Rez/GCDs --i.e., to use their full kit-- purposely made dependent on having one or more Physical Ranged.

Yes because the fight design is tuned with the existence of Ranged Physicals in mind. Ranged Physicals are already obligatory in content now anyway, might as well have their reason being there not just be the 1%, but also the utility they give. Refresh is a part of that utility yes.

This, in turn, would turn SpS from being a BiS stat up to a certain GCD threshold and Piety a waste stat in general to now either that... or the exact opposite...

No, because the only reason why SpS isn't maxed out is because faster GCDs will mean that your natural mp regen and lucid dreaming can't actually keep up with the amount of Glares you're going to do.
So really, Refresh will just make it so that higher SpS will actually be viable, with extra Piety staying the same "prog stat" as always.
You've always run minimum Piety as a healer when you're not progging anyway, so yes Piety, in an optimized run, is a wasted stat, even today.

turning all healer optimization on its head the moment one speedruns or goes without a Physical Ranged to again having one.

All speedrun groups already need a Physical Ranged because of that 1% party dps buff.
This won't change. Hell, you're already obligated to run a Physical Ranged, it's just the main reason why you wanna run one is because you give more dps to the party by merely existing. No raid buffs, no buttons to press, you don't even need to be alive to actually give the 1% buff.

You're already obligated to bring a Physical Ranged, might as well be obligated to get a Physical Ranged because of that AND its utility, re-establishing the Physical Ranged role as the utility dps.

I feel like we're running around in circles at this point.

And what does that mechanic look like? Just saps partywide MP? Introduces healing checks well beyond the level of DSR (which can nonetheless be solo-healed with a majority of casts being spent on Malefic), in hopes of draining healer MP throug AoE spam, despite the devs repeated insistence that they will not be increasing relative healing requirements?

There's a big misconception in the community that big party busters are actually heal checks. They're not. They're really just mitigation checks.
There's really very few heal checks in this game that actually makes the healers heal.

Akh Morn in P7, E12S enrage, and E4S Tumults come to mind as the only actual true heal checks in this game.
Most "heal checks" in this game are literally just "oh did you mitigate this? Oh no? Then you die."

The problem with the implementation of true heal checks in this game is that it's literally lined up with your cooldowns going off cooldown.
They're spaced perfectly apart from one another that you already have full mana, full OGCDs and cooldowns, and ready for the next true heal check.

You want more healing in this game? Bring those moments of heal checks closer. That's it.

If you Akh morn one after the other, then eventually you'll have even your AST go OOM, necessiating a Refresh.

But even then, you have to deal with the fact that you cannot use Refresh to uniquely counter anything, and having it actually be important means holding hostage healers' ability to even use their kit (that is, beyond rez, which other jobs would be able to cover better than your MP bonuses ever could). That's not going to work out well in a design paradigm specifically looking to minimize healing requirements and the tax of DPS-Rezzes is flat and therefore kept miniscule.

In a world where healers are demanding more healing, that's all going to change. You already have a guaranteed Refresh cause you'll have a Ranged Physical in every party.
Just like how tanks need extra cooldowns to stay alive for tankbusters, just like how the party needs shields from a shield healer to survive a party buster, just like how the party needs a Melee to Melee LB3 the boss for maximum damage.
You're already obligated to take a Ranged Physical because of an uncontrollabe 1% buff, just like you're obligated to get one melee, one caster, one healer and one tank because they all give a 1% dps buff. The only difference with Ranged Physicals is that Healers, Tanks, Melee and Casters bring more to the table, and Ranged Physicals don't.

Utility like Refresh, will be that extra something that Ranged Physicals can bring to the table, cementing their identity as Utility DPS.

You'd probably have to readjust how MP itself works for this to work out. You cannot simply draw from a very differently designed era and attempt to plunk its value into modern XIV. (Not that Refresh would actually offer any gameplay to Physical Ranged jobs even then, only hold Healers' hostage in certain cases.)

If you're talking about something like Heavensward Cleric Stance, Accuracy and even Positionals not giving buffs if not followed, I would agree, but we're talking about Refresh, which is the same as a Combat Peloton, Palisade, Divine Benison, Shake it Off and current Tactician. I can definitely see Refresh fitting in with little to no resistance and needing only a few adjustments in fight design. Hell, kiting adds and CCing them is from ARR, literally all the way back to the first version of the game, and it can stil fit in the game now with some adjustments. That's just not a valid excuse to not reimplement Refresh in modern FFXIV.

[Shurrikhan]

we're talking about Refresh, which is the same as a Combat Peloton, Palisade, Divine Benison, Shake it Off and current Tactician.

It's literally not, though. Benefits to mobility, benefits to mitigation, and benefits to MP are all going to handle differently based on how much need there is for their given benefit. You may as well say that Benediction works just like Edge of Shadow; they are each differently constrained by situation. The problem is that any situation that causes bonus MP to be useful in modern XIV is going to be far more constrained than benefits to mobility or, especially, mitigation.

Mitigation needs only save even a single heal, or prevent a single death, to have value. Mobility needs only do the same or grant further uptime. MP, on the other hand, requires that at least one MP user would otherwise have been locked out of a portion of their kit.

In the cases it matters, that's more akin to the fight silencing and pacifying all but a single sub-role, and that sub-role being uniquely able to cleanse the silence/pacify.

To bring fights to the point that, as you put it, "healers are forced to go OOM" if not for Refresh... is to bring baseline gameplay way down just so you can give it back via a Physical Ranged. That is holding gameplay hostage with no actual net benefit. At best, gameplay is returned to the new dependents, back to, at most, exactly what they had before. That is not good design.

Adjust how MP works, so it's not merely a bimodal between whether one is or is not, in effect, silenced and pacified, and then it can actually be decent.

Give the MP granting ability more nuance than just being "hit on CD" and at least Physical Ranged would be getting something out of the deal beyond feeding some sort of "Ahh, yes, their ability to perform basic functions comes at my pleasure," but that is not Refresh. Refresh was literally Lucid Dreaming, but at twice the CD and affecting all (effectively two) allies. (Holy Shock is a dps loss outside of its fixed Req, DRKs would instantly be made immune to MP restoration again, BLMs are already and always have been immune to it in Astral Fire, you're not going to time it to a single rare Umbral speed-transition tick, SMNs no longer care about MP beyond their rez meter, same as RDMs.)

I don't know why we're arguing semantics when it turns out that you do understand what I'm getting at.

Because I very much hoped your definition wasn't as uselessly conflatious as that.

There's a big misconception in the community that big party busters are actually heal checks. They're not. They're really just mitigation checks.
There's really very few heal checks in this game that actually makes the healers heal.

Yes, which has nothing to do with there being Refresh or a lack thereof.

Devs: "Fights shouldn't be won or lost over healers healing enough. They shouldn't need to use oGCDs atop GCDs outside of very rare scenarios. Yes, this may mean that MP goes largely untouched and that there's far less downtime, so to compensate we'll be further reducing the penalty of taking rez-capable DPS and nerfing maximum healer DPS."

RefreshBackPlease: "But, what if I gave healers more MP?"

...MP was never the bottleneck. It was made finnicky, unpolished, and largely irrelevant as a side-effect of other changes in design philosophy (i.e., to significantly reduce relative healing requirements and instead nerf healer dps into a balance around ~100% offensive uptime).

You already have a guaranteed Refresh cause you'll have a Ranged Physical in every party.

Then it's effectively passive and would exist only to worsen healer play in the offchance you want to play with 7 friends, none of whom want to play Physical Ranged.

The success of such utility is that "healers are still allowed to cast spells." If you force it to be necessary, it shouldn't be hard to imagine the impact that has on Ranger-less parties (or, alternatively, queue times, now that you've made them into a forced role of their own).

If you Akh morn one after the other, then eventually you'll have even your AST go OOM, necessiating a Refresh.

1. That there's little to no GCD healing required is not an oversight; it is by design. Fights were changed to match that design, with E12S and certain parts of DSR being considered the oversights in how much healing they still required.
   
   
2. And if you did somehow necessitate Refresh, you've effectively only gone to "Take me or wipe automatically due to your healers being, effectively, silenced." Again, I must ask, how is that good design?

Hell, kiting adds and CCing them is from ARR, literally all the way back to the first version of the game, and it can stil fit in the game now with some adjustments.

...I'm not arguing against Physical Ranged utility here.

I've argued literally only against giving them raidwide Lucid Dreaming, as per Refresh. I'd likewise argue against giving them raidwide Invigorate and forcing everyone back onto TP if that were likewise done for the express purpose of making teams more dependent on Physical Ranged.

Or, at the very least, if you're going to have Physical Ranged give basic resource generation and force others into dependency on it, make it more interesting than Lucid Dreaming.

_________________

Let me put it more simply:

To argue that parties should be forced to take Physical Ranged by virtue of Refresh being made necessary requires that there is greater total enjoyment to be had from both...

• there being a necessity for healers to cast MP-expensive spells and
• healers being to be unable to cast spells (not even abilities, though -- specifically spells) at all, past a point, that is then undone by Physical Ranged giving them it back to them via a Lucid Dreaming.

Why would that be fun overall?

Back when TP was a thing, it forced far greater constraints than any other sub-role, leading us down the path of Physical Ranged 'not needing to be fun, because, like healers, they're obligatory anyways' while simultaneously crippling melee if matchmaking screwed them over.

Why should healers now have access to their spells likewise purposely made finite, let alone in a way that'd cause explicitly them to be eventually unable to make heal checks (such as to fail certain fights on the mere basis of composition)?

__________

Imagine it for any other bimodal (can cast or can't cast) capacity the excess of which cannot be converted into rDPS. Wait, there isn't one.

Okay, well, let's take another instance of "Bring a Physical Ranged to be able to use your base function":

"You have X amount of movement you can do over a fight. Bring a Physical Ranged to extend it, hoping that they'll use their relevant skill on cooldown so you have the greatest amount of Movement Points over the course of the fight. No, it cannot increase your maximum movement speed, nor does it have any effect on movement abilities. It merely means that, once you run out, you will not be able to move until it has sufficiently regenerated."

And that's the problem with attaching that to MP without first adjusting how MP itself works (e.g., to be used by abilities and to a more granular impact, rather than just whether one can or cannot use a spell that has no real competition anyways for its given purpose). All you've done is tied an additional fetter to healers, just to give you something to do by taking it back off.

At that point, you'd not be adding Physical Ranged utility so much as simply worsening the base state, making it hostage.