Anyone else think caster has suffered this expansion? (hopes for the future)

[Lyth]

We can absolutely make that comparison. As you said though, it's not exactly challenging work at baseline, and movement around casting only matters if you're playing a job that actually requires you to do it. Though if you want what little bit of skill expression that is still present in your role to remain, there's no point in complaining about its 'difficulty'. Perhaps that's just a difference in role mindset though, and maybe the caster playerbase is just looking for something more laid back. Maybe everything on BLM will be instant cast next expansion.

[Urielparadox]

the fact the our low physical defense is racking up the damage we take from bleeds, having healers openly saying they don't want rdm in their party since they have no self mit at all. We have to get extra mit from healers or literaly fall over with the best food and gear in P10S the second fight thats ilvl requirement says that shouldn't happen. the fact that rdms do horrible damage when playing at the highest lvl mean while absolutely trash samurias who don't hit positional and overcap gauges can do more damage. rdm has been in awful spot since the second tier, being locked out of almost as many parties as mch was. they "buffed" us strangely which saw very minimal almost nonexistant buffs(you can actually see in FFlogs how little rdm and smn gain compared to other jobs. saw we still did crap for damage and said RANGE TAX, on a job who has to cast and constantly gets in fights over needing to do melee combo, with a backflip and gap closer that only have about a 6% usability rate(gap closer take more time in animation lock than running because of boss hit bocks, inability to properly control back flip because of boss hit box/wall boss).

[Ggwppino]

snip

Well, its clear. My speech is only to clarify that caster and phis ranged are not the same. I want clarify that this: "they can safely eliminate the artificial divide between 'physical ranged' and 'magical ranged', and put to rest this ongoing myth that occasionally stopping to 'cast' is difficult (this isn't even specific to Casters)." Is deeply wrong conception because the caster uptime Is not absolutely a picnic in the park.


also, personally, I'm not complaining about the "difficulty" of the blm or rdm.
1) because gameplay is fine like this. There are more individual problems which, however, have nothing to do with the gameplay but more on both defensive and offensive mathematics
2)the smn, unfortunately, teaches

[Urielparadox]

but the "fight against the class" is the gameplay of the caster. If the caster doesn't have to move and think because the boss is a dummy, it would just be keystroke spam, it wouldn't be fun.
On the smn I totally agree, I challenge you to find a main smn of the older expansions that is completely happy and satisfied with this iteration, they stole a decent job and replaced it with a physical ranged with no resources to manage, no gameplay that would feature, with no leveling progress but a single caster combo. It clearly shouldn't be in the role of caster, but it clearly shouldn't exist at all (it would be rather unfair even for a phys ranged)




indeed, strats are for melees, not casters. But this is due to the simple fact that melees have an exclusively spatial uptime problem, since they are melee, and not temporal, therefore easily solvable with strats and therefore guarantee that the melee follows its rotation constantly. The caster on the other hand can deeply vary his rotation according to the timer and can position himself in the best possible way to be able to reduce or cancel the downtime and this is the fun of the caster: not having the rotation deeply static and therefore adapting it to the fight , giving great satisfaction when you feel you have found the best solution.
Furthermore, the caster must also think about where to position himself and to pre-position himself because the movement between one cast and another is limited, if you preposition yourself in one point, maybe you don't lose seconds, positioning yourself in one point instead of another maybe allows you to earn a triplecast and "earning" one/two gcd because you have to move less.

This can not be done in party finder unless your party is used to working with casters because more often than not tanks and dps will stand right on top of u and claim you are in their spot, in fact for casting uptime it is more beneficial for a blm to be the melee spot in many fights(which leads to rdms and blm often fighting in older fights because rdm 2min often came up during forced spread positions. The tanks also have to make sure to not kill the caster, and the party has to be ready for the tank to be in the not normal spot. It is not easy for a caster to adept around a party, it is easy for a party to adept to a caster, but 90% of the time they will refuse to.

[Ggwppino]

I agree. In pf you will almost never have a degree of uptime optimization that you have with a static one, you will not reach the absolute optimable, but the relative one will. however the caster is led to position himself and vary the rotation according to the boss's timer. He can get the most out of what surrounds him for example he can't use the mainfold blm uptime strat in p8s P1, but already positioning himself between tank and melee instead of running to the corner was a nice saving of movement.
my intervention always referred to the fact that the casters, to keep as much uptime as possible, must think and strategically make plans both for rotation variation and for positioning. and therefore it is not "*put to rest this ongoing myth that occasionally stopping to 'cast' is difficult (this isn't even specific to Casters)."

[Semirhage]

It's not even "boohoo having to move to cast is so hard". It's a confluence of several things.

• Endwalker fights have been designed with long periods of downtime, followed by bursts of rapid, constant movement (Voidcast East, and then West, and then North, and then South, and then behind, and then in front), which is a pain in the butt for caster gameplay
• They keep adding instant casts to casters to make them less caster-like to make them viable for the rapid movement-happy fight design, instead of letting casters be casters
• They keep adding things that make melee's "difficulty" easier
• They state outright that they balance based on "difficulty", and then boost the crap out of melee while doing things to make their lives easier, and take a dump all over RDM and SMN's damage because "buh buh Raise utility", while also designing fights that devalue that utility

It's self-contradictory. It's hypocritical. And in a game where damage is overwhelmingly the thing that matters in encounters, playing these weird semantic games to justify lower damage output while hypocritically ignoring it when it comes to melee DPS is a source of frustration.

[SilversLyu]

It is Meleewalker for a reason. Is there a reason why the devs are catering to melee so much? Are those the mains of the balance team? Is the role that more popular than others, I guess but...
Maybe cuz it is the easiest to "balance" around, My bet is they "rework" all roles eventually. Next expansion perhaps caster, at the same time we are long overdue for a new caster job.

[Lyth]

It's not even "boohoo having to move to cast is so hard".

That nicely sums up the arguments in here in a nutshell, though.

I don't think that jobs should be balanced based off of 'difficulty'. In fact, I've been arguing in favor of rDPS parity across all DPS subroles for some time now. But I'm also not naïve enough to think that the average player here wants a level playing field and a good competition. No, the collective response is going to be to argue in favor of doing the highest damage for the least effort. People come here looking for handouts for their preferred jobs.

I don't think that melee is balanced the way it is because of 'difficulty', either. They design fight mechanics around four players in melee range, four at a distance. Four supports, four DPS. Spread, stack, protean, partners. Everyone knows the formula. There are two reserved ranged slots by subrole. The dps balancing just reserves the M2 spot. And it's not a simple issue of going the tank/healer route and simply reserving those spots. Physical and magical ranged were historically subdivided in a system where BRD types were there to help with resource management as a sort of 'support DPS'. So now they're forced to work around the legacy of that decision well after it is no longer relevant.

Casters are in a bit of an unusual situation in which they simultaneously attempt the argument that 'it's only fair' that physical ranged do less dps than them on the basis of difficulty, while simultaneously complaining about the 'ranged tax' separating them from melee. Abyssos' underwhelming fight design and exaggerated hitbox size allowed casters an avenue of attack to try to apply the 'difficulty' argument more universally, but Anabaseios snuffed that out quite readily, as you've likely seen yourself in P11S/P12SP1. And our community's attitude to this is entirely different than yours. We love being able to demonstrate skill. Even in the recent melee positionals discussion, all the loudest complaints came from caster mains, hilariously enough. It's a privilege to have fights and mechanics that have a skill differential on them. Competitive people love this. Why would you beg for handouts if you take pride in your ability to compete?

I think what really needs to be discussed is how to give each role its opportunity to demonstrate skill at higher levels, and to have fights that reward this. Part of this should be around breaking down this arbitrary separation between physical and magical ranged DPS. If the occasional cast is the main determinant of 'job difficulty' when playing at range, then perhaps physical ranged jobs need action mechanics in which they need to stop and 'cast'. You also need more fight-specific mechanics that deliberately force movement, similar to those targeted AoEs that follow marked players around an arena. The current system is deeply unsatisfying for physical ranged, because you're in a position where you do less damage than 'casters' because they can claim that you're playing the 'easy' job. You're undervalued and disadvantaged in the same moment. And then you get brought along just for a raid buff. I can see why a lot of players don't want to be stuck with that design direction for the long term. I think if you put all jobs on a level rDPS playing field across melee/physical ranged/magical ranged, merged down physical and magical ranged into a single role group, and just enforced a 2/2/2/2 comp across the board, you'd have a lot more satisfaction across the playerbase.

I will say this. Complaining about the things that makes your job interesting as a means of bartering for more dps is always a bad idea. Because the response has invariably been to simplify down any complaints around player difficulty. If you don't want to see further erosion of our gameplay, reinforce the fact that you enjoy being challenged by the game developers. You really don't need a gold star for fulfilling your job description, the challenge is the reward. What do you call yourselves when everything invariably then becomes instant cast? Not casters.

[Ggwppino]

It is Meleewalker for a reason. Is there a reason why the devs are catering to melee so much? Are those the mains of the balance team? Is the role that more popular than others, I guess but...
Maybe cuz it is the easiest to "balance" around, My bet is they "rework" all roles eventually. Next expansion perhaps caster, at the same time we are long overdue for a new caster job.

there was Shadowbringer who had undisputed best rdps the blm and smn (while the rdm was close to the dps of the physical ranged, probably due to the high mobility and much less complex rotation). With this expansion they wanted, from what it seems to me, to put a stop to this thing. Not that melee did less damage but had less uptime and more positional to deal with, while blm and smn, with good planning, didn't have major problems. They wanted to cut this story short because they basically want there to be 2 melee, 1 caster, and 1 phys ranged (they design fights with this Comp). The way to do this was either by creating mechanics that predicted a clear need for this comp (see Omega) or by encouraging the use of melee by making life less tortuous or by increasing caster downtime or by playing on bonus party percentages by incentivising the use of 2 melee (a decision that would have been momentous, but maybe the best solution).

[Lucan_Astral]

Yes yes! please rework SMN again.

The new summons are amazingly cool, who doesn't love summoning a giant bahamut or phoenix to annihilate your foes? but my god it's so excruciatingly boring, it's insane it even made it past testing. I checked the SMN guide on The Balance discord and it has a single paragraph on the rotation which basically just gives you a flow chart:

Use Searing Light in alignment with party raid buffs
Summon Bahamut and use all abilities to refresh your primal gems
Go through three primal phases
Summon Phoenix and use all abilities to refresh your primal gems
Go through three primal phases
Repeat

In comparison, the NIN guide on The Balance has like 4-5 pages on the basic rotation, then an extra page on advanced optimization for the rotation.

The other caster jobs suffer from this issue of being so mind numbingly easy that they're boring, but I think SMN suffers far greater from this. Unfortunately for SE, their SMN rework has failed and needs to be looked at again (though I doubt they will).

Also you know SE loves melee more since in EVERY single expansion the MC uses melee jobs, even in the Shadowbringers trailer when the MC is rapidly switching between jobs, the MC never once switched to a caster job.