What even is the purpose of all those non melee/blm jobs?

[Azuri]

Unreal content is almost two years old by now, and keeps coming. And those old trials are still fun. Hell, synced Coils are still fun.
Stop avoiding my original question about how inventing new methods of downtime is bad somehow.

Dog 2 could have been uptime. It isn't because it would be melee downtime.
Natural Alignment could have used full arena instead of only two rows. It doesn't because it would be melee downtime.
Limitless Desolation could have spawned towers in the last row too. It doesn't because it would be melee downtime.
Dominion towers could have spawned in the whole arena and not just the front half. They don't because it would be melee downtime.

You see where this is going, right?

[Ayche]

sorry, but it seems to me that in an interview it is said that the balancing is done on the new content and not on the old one. (also because they would go crazy in balancing classes even on old content) The new content does not justify such a high rpds delta between ranged and melee, also by the fact that melee do not have downtime and infinite positional as in previous content.

Dog 2 could have been uptime. It isn't because it would be melee downtime.
Natural Alignment could have used full arena instead of only two rows. It doesn't because it would be melee downtime.
Limitless Desolation could have spawned towers in the last row too. It doesn't because it would be melee downtime.
Dominion towers could have spawned in the whole arena and not just the front half. They don't because it would be melee downtime.

You see where this is going, right?

Ok, so what if 6.2 and maybe even 6.1 were overcorrections.
What if 6.3 will have an extreme trial that makes melee DPS's life hell?
Or maybe it will take until 6.4?
We know the dev team is very slow when it comes to these course corrections, Endwalker is response to Shadowbringers is response to Stormblood is response to Heavensward.
But at the core, before this tangent, what even was the ALTERNATIVE?
Because past all the doomerism, I have yet to see a person who actually WANTS what they doom for.

[Kabooa]

Ok, so what if 6.2 and maybe even 6.1 were overcorrections.
What if 6.3 will have an extreme trial that makes melee DPS's life hell?
Or maybe it will take until 6.4?
We know the dev team is very slow when it comes to these course corrections, Endwalker is response to Shadowbringers is response to Stormblood is response to Heavensward.
But at the core, before this tangent, what even was the ALTERNATIVE?
Because past all the doomerism, I have yet to see a person who actually WANTS what they doom for.

Unlikely, to be honest.

It is most likely to see this trend continue into 7.X, where by then there'll be significant enough data to them to see if this is actively hurting the game or just making a small amount of people mad.

[Ggwppino]

Ok, so what if 6.2 and maybe even 6.1 were overcorrections.
What if 6.3 will have an extreme trial that makes melee DPS's life hell?
Or maybe it will take until 6.4?
We know the dev team is very slow when it comes to these course corrections, Endwalker is response to Shadowbringers is response to Stormblood is response to Heavensward.
But at the core, before this tangent, what even was the ALTERNATIVE?
Because past all the doomerism, I have yet to see a person who actually WANTS what they doom for.

let's take the case that they do, when testing new content, they will realize that melee will need more damage to make up for the likely downtime and will behave accordingly. With each new content there are also class balance patches. I don't find any problems there. But currently, melee are rewarded for something non-existent.

[Lyth]

You don't have to rebalance for every individual fight that gets released. That's just a crutch for inadequate fight design. Put all DPS jobs/subroles on a completely equal playing field as far as rdps is concerned. Design fights that challenge you to dance with death to maintain melee uptime while also having movement mechanics that make you think tactically as a caster rather than turreting up. Being challenged by the fight design shouldn't be an excuse for sympathy buffs, it's something that should be embraced as skill expression. May the best player bring the best performance.

[Valence]

Alright, you got all of those posts out of your chest.
It is really basic. If a Monk, a Red Mage and a Dancer all did their rotations to a target dummy for 10 minutes, you would have a good grasp of their uninterrupted damage output.
But the game is not about spanking target dummies. Sephirot does his Pillars mechanic, you get yeeted around the map, what does the output look like disrupted?
Dancer is least disrupted aka most consistent, melee/casters are less so. Sure, the nuance comes in how much individual players are able to minimize that downtime, but that is good! Having nuance in your gameplay is good! But it is also good to have straightforward, consistent jobs for people who like that too! There is such thing as a "healthy amount of imbalance".
This is how you are supposed to look at it, not how "difficult" things are.
And I am not naive, I know people want to frame it in meritocratic light with "winners and losers", but god that is so cynical, PF can be so cynical. It is not enough to play a job for the sake of mastery, that must come with some inherent prestige and status.

The game has been an uptime dummy fight in savage for several expacs already. At least since Omega. The only thing we still have left in terms of disconnects is boss invulns or untargetability (is that even a word?), which doesn't discriminate jobs a lot except on their personal rotational adjustability. Bigger hitboxes is just smoke and mirrors, but I'm glad they made them because it actually makes people talk about it.

You're mentioning extreme fights. I would need to do some more research on those to say. I've always found them more challenging personally on mobility and disconnections (vs their easier mechanics). Anybody else has that feeling?

Like i'm ready to acknowledge that some fight are true disconnection nightmares on melees, like Red Girl. But not in savage/ultimate, or extremely rarely.

Anyway, the real basic fact is the results we're getting on savage charts, which aren't that far from dummy charts (but dummy charts are screwed by essence because raid buffs don't get any value there). Would have to look into extreme ones too, I can't talk about those.

EDIT: actually you know which melees still have regularly to deal with melee uptime those days, until it gets lessened (whenever it's possible)? Tanks. One such famous example was E4S phase 2 but i'm sure you can find a lot more of those. Tanks are the actual winners of the hitbox expansion in EW.

[Ayche]

You don't have to rebalance for every individual fight that gets released. That's just a crutch for inadequate fight design. Put all DPS jobs/subroles on a completely equal playing field as far as rdps is concerned. Design fights that challenge you to dance with death to maintain melee uptime while also having movement mechanics that make you think tactically as a caster rather than turreting up. Being challenged by the fight design shouldn't be an excuse for sympathy buffs, it's something that should be embraced as skill expression. May the best player bring the best performance.

I wanna run a line of thought on this, I wanna get practical so we move out of the ideological.
Skill expression exists inside job design (do your rotation correctly) and outside in fight design (adapt to the fight mechanics properly). As a simplification, all job designs can be mastered so they ought to be ignored here.
As long as melee dps and casters can flex their skill by increasing their uptime in fights, prange will stay behind. You can either remove all the melee and caster nuances and flatten the damage differences. This would be obviously bad because it would make the game more boring.
So you would have to invent new skill expression for a subrole. Gunmage/Bowmage was one attempt, it was bad (You just become a pseudo-caster). Bonus damage at max range is also brought up a lot, it is also bad (either too easy to fulfill because boss is always far away or impossible with a huge boss in the middle of the arena).
I mean, the game is just kinda ... basic. In Monster Hunter pierce ammo is interesting because you always have to think about the dimensions of the monster since that ammo is at its strongest when you hit the monster at the point where it is longest, allowing for most hits along a line. Not possible here.
Lot of action games involve actual aiming, not possible here.
Random weakspots that spawn on the targeting circle on the boss, so you have to move around the arena to hit them. Would conflict with how the raid mechanics work with the game, and easier done in melee anyway...

I mean I kinda fear that if people take a hardline stance with the "melee dps bias", they will go with that boring option.

[Aurora428]

Just because a job doesn't have a certain uptime challenge shouldn't mean it should be doing exactly the same damage as a melee who failed every instance of that job mechanic.

I don't think anyone cares if melee and caster have higher damage caps, but a prange should be doing more damage than a melee who is consistently failing most positionals and refusing to make any uptime optimizations. That is the point of making range and no-castbars an advantage of the job and a reasonable trade-off.

Ranged don't need castbars or positionals(?) to justify more damage than they currently are. If they wanna add more challenges to uptime for those jobs, sure, but I doubt those will be healthy changes unless they admit that fact.

[Valence]

One of the main issues with that balancing act usually is the clear opposition between different types of content. If you want to take into account casual content (including extremes but those sit awkwardly in between I guess), then yes, obviously, if your ranged jobs pull out the same damage output you'll see melees and casters struggle in... casual content. On the other hand, those restraints that melees have to deal with in challenging content have been a non issue for ages, for all the reasons already mentioned all across this thread: boss mechanics designed around melee uptime, melees having enough disconnection tools to deal with the few remaining gaps, etc. Even at lower "percentiles" melees are still ahead in raiding content, which is pretty telling, and I don't remember that the gap lessens a lot as well, because guess what, even ranged players at lower skill levels also drop in efficiency.

Now then the obvious answer has always been, give something else to rPhys to chew on. You removed all of their identity (manasong, raid mitigation) but the heavy raid buffs (except on mch because who cares about mch those days anyway amaright?), then give them something back that is mandatory to take into parties (like old manasong) where it will not be really mandatory at casual level but then the damage gap will do the balancing job there, OR give them more challenging gameplay, whether it's rotational complexity (while staying intuitive, but hard to maximize) or stuff like old cast times I guess (me no likey, that would just turn them into casters). If those solutions are out of the order, then I'm sorry but I'd rather have a balanced endgame savaged experience than a storymode/casual one, where this will get drowned wildly into non existing raid checks, differing gear levels and player skills anyway.

[ForteNightshade]

It should be noted you can miss every single positional on Dragoon, which has the most at three, and still completely stomp every single Prange, Red Mage and Summoner. Melee can literally ignore their only real "gimmick" and still perform better. Kind of goes to show you just how ridiculous things have become.

Perhaps an unpopular take, but I'm largely indifferent to the hitbox range and Melee having near constant uptime. The rotations have become so rigid any sort of long forced downtime will just make them full apart. Dragoon was downright awful to play in E8S for that reason. Especially once you factor in PF strats not necessarily favoring uptime. My preference is they add more nuance back to the jobs themselves instead of dumbing down the rotations to the extent they have. Stormblood is arguably the most health the game has been in terms of job design. The irony is that's when Bard was king. Except it had almost nothing to do with it having free mobility but rather its insane power creep which itself caused because the dev team never considered balancing around piercing.

Letting the Prange be close to the Melee in DPS won't suddenly make Ninja mains play Bard. It'll just make Bards not feel like the kid brother Mommy SE forced their older sibling to bring with them to the movies.