Quote Originally Posted by Eraden View Post
My apologies if this is a silly question, but are these so-called ranged taxes really a thing? I've come late to this party and am somewhat lacking in much of a understanding of the game mechanics with respect to job balance. If these ranged taxes are indeed a thing, it doesn't really seem to make much sense when looking at fight mechanics. I play mostly as BLM and to be honest, more often than not it's safer to be almost hugging the bosses than it is standing back, as the AoEs they sling seem to cover the whole darned combat area. It's actually easier in a lot of cases (cone-based attacks for example) to avoid hits by being up close and personal.
Older fights used to push melee out of melee range quite frequently thus melee tended to always have higher dps to make up for the loss of uptime while physical ranged could potentially do all mechanics while having 100% uptime. The ranged tax never applied to magical ranged dps. Yoshi-P basically acknowledged this the other day in the recent live letter with the changes to the boss hitboxes which has lead to melee essentially having 100% uptime leading to the bigger gap between melee and physical ranged and all ranged are apparently getting potency buffs in 6.28.