Let's redefine "damage taxes"

[Aurora428]

Well yeah of course they can just make everyone's damage the same and call it "balanced" but I personally like the idea of jobs that do more damage than others but at the cost of utility.
The paradoxical thing about my idea is that through those limitations you've mentioned we would actually see more party variety than we do now. All we have now is 2 melee, mrange, and prange for basically every party. With my idea each role could have choices in what kind of dps you'd want to play in each role. There could be parties of 3 pranged and 1 mranged and still get the party buff because those classes are from different roles.

This wouldn't work without designing encounters for triple melee, which would entirely shift the paradigm for raid design.

A ranged can pretend to be a melee, but a melee can't pretend to be a ranged.

[Nutshell]

This wouldn't work without designing encounters for triple melee, which would entirely shift the paradigm for raid design.

A ranged can pretend to be a melee, but a melee can't pretend to be a ranged.

I made this suggestion on the premise that they will continue designing fights like they have for EW. Hitboxes so massive melee has the same uptime as ranged.
You are right tho for older content. Wouldn't be very fun to run old content synced with three melee dps.

I still think my original idea of removing MCH, SAM, and BLM and putting them into a fourth dps role is still a decent alternative to just making everything basically do the same damage and it wouldn't run into the 3 melee issue you bring up.

[Aikaal]

This wouldn't work without designing encounters for triple melee, which would entirely shift the paradigm for raid design.

A ranged can pretend to be a melee, but a melee can't pretend to be a ranged.

You are right but here's the issue with that statement.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L9_t7md58v0

I look at this week 1 Ninja clear and I really can't tell if he's a melee of ranged physical. He moves so much and has 75% of the arena to smack the boss. On this fight, you can at 100% have quad melee and keep full uptime for all of them.

Also, I do want to mention that Smummoner have a melee combo and Red Mage also have a 1 to 3 melee combo. (They are casters) It feels extremely biased that the dev team heavily favors melee playstyle.

[Dyvid]

You are right but here's the issue with that statement.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L9_t7md58v0

I look at this week 1 Ninja clear and I really can't tell if he's a melee of ranged physical. He moves so much and has 75% of the arena to smack the boss. On this fight, you can at 100% have quad melee and keep full uptime for all of them.

Also, I do want to mention that Smummoner have a melee combo and Red Mage also have a 1 to 3 melee combo. (They are casters) It feels extremely biased that the dev team heavily favors melee playstyle.

This is one of the huge problems with the battle design that Endwalker added, Huge Bosses who's hit box is half the arena. The only way for "range tax" to works is if melee have to move out of the hit pocket.

[CKNovel]

This wouldn't work without designing encounters for triple melee, which would entirely shift the paradigm for raid design.

A ranged can pretend to be a melee, but a melee can't pretend to be a ranged.

Due to current design, you could bring 4 melees, 2 of them would have to adapt for the very few ranged mechanics such as P5S puddles or the quite rare spread here and there.
In content like P7S you would barely see any thing change, melee uptime is given.

On the contrary even, in P7S and P8SP2 it's impossible for a range to pretend to be a ranged.
Due to healing, mitigation and raidbuff, it is forced to play like a melee in all mechanics except one or two.