Please decorrelate party support from party damage

[Taranok]

There's also some bizarre messaging going on from Square. I keep hearing on the forums that Square "doesn't balance jobs based on difficulty", when Yoshi-P has stated outright that they do. I think the reason the fora believe this is that Square's balancing decisions look barely related to job difficulty, even taking subjectivity into account.

• RDM and SMN are a prime example. RDM is clearly more difficult to optimize than SMN, but their balance doesn't reflect this
• The gigantic advantage melee have. The relative difficulty between roles is arguable, but you can't deny that Square has been trimming positionals, adding True North effects, blowing up hitboxes, adding melee safe spots for mechanics, and making bosses untargetable during forced disengagement. Square has been taking steps to make melee easier to play, but hasn't made intra-role changes to their relative damage with respect to those steps.

I could probably think of more. The community have been guessing that utility and damage are the key factor here (and honestly probably play a role), but I think we're also just spitballing. Square's been making damage balancing tweaks based on party finder popularity just as much as they've made them based on utility. Hell, Monk has some great utility for a melee and yet is allowed to do quite a lot of personal damage.

I'm fine with RDM and SMN more or less being around each other. That in-and-of itself is good design and balance, and I don't want people to feel like they need to suffer to play optimally. But that's neither here nor there. The problem is, melee no longer deserves to do more damage than anything else. The devs aren't forcing melee downtime, so they don't deserve bonus damage. Hell, the fight design is so bad in endwalker that even being the top DPS outright, BLM is still just not worth playing. These are all problems.

Ranged phys is supposed to be balanced around having permanent uptime. How are they supposed to gain any damage back against mDPS if they're never forced out, or cDPS if they're being turned into rphys in everything except name alone?

I really wish fight design would be more reflective of neo exdeath. The boss forces melee downtime by forcing melee out, jumping from one side of the arena to the other, and through other such mechanics. All while forcing casters to move, but not too much, and forcing rphys to have good damage by just never skipping a beat, despite still being squarely middle of the pack.

[Valence]

I'm fine with RDM and SMN more or less being around each other. That in-and-of itself is good design and balance, and I don't want people to feel like they need to suffer to play optimally. But that's neither here nor there. The problem is, melee no longer deserves to do more damage than anything else. The devs aren't forcing melee downtime, so they don't deserve bonus damage. Hell, the fight design is so bad in endwalker that even being the top DPS outright, BLM is still just not worth playing. These are all problems.

Ranged phys is supposed to be balanced around having permanent uptime. How are they supposed to gain any damage back against mDPS if they're never forced out, or cDPS if they're being turned into rphys in everything except name alone?

I really wish fight design would be more reflective of neo exdeath. The boss forces melee downtime by forcing melee out, jumping from one side of the arena to the other, and through other such mechanics. All while forcing casters to move, but not too much, and forcing rphys to have good damage by just never skipping a beat, despite still being squarely middle of the pack.

It's always been like this. EW possibly magnifies this with outrageously big hitboxes and specific designs, but way before EW melees and casters always had the upper hand on charts. People always found ways to optimize and made most of those uptime concerns irrelevant, either because designs back then asked casters to move less, or because melees could already play around their own downtime anyway.