Giant boss hitboxes and constant mid teleports make melee less fun.

[ZiraZ]

Funny how you didn't catch the sarcasm where I said following the flawed logic of making boss hitboxes massive. But.. have it your way. If you think it's punishment, then there's no point arguing with you. Melee jealous of ranged planting themselves and still wanting the high dps.

Well I guess you were never merely pretending, you just are

[Mecia]

Coupled with loss of positionals its made melee easier and less interesting.

[rawker]

Well I guess you were never merely pretending, you just are

if you say so.

[Lyth]

...

Some points are in order, since I've seen your points about Physical Ranged before and tend to agree with them.

As you may recall, I've fairly consistently argued in favor for dps parity across all DPS jobs. There is two reasons why I can do this. First, we have nothing to prove; everyone knows that melee has a high skill cap, and that's specifically what attracts competitively-minded people to the role. Second, we're not in competition with you. We're in competition with other melee. If the fight design for the past few expansions hasn't made it abundantly clear that the intended design is 2/2/2/2, then surely the addition of a second melee job in two expansions should have tipped you off. Melee job counts are balanced to have roughly equal numbers to Ranged as a whole, without regard to the subclass split.

What that means to you is that your real competition as a Physical Ranged DPS is and always will be Magical Ranged DPS. Even if the developers were to 'nerf melee to the ground' so to speak, you would gain nothing from that exchange, because you have been always treated as the weaker, more 'support-orientated' counterpart to Caster DPS (even though they offer far more utility with Raise). It's a historical throwback that goes back to ARR, but persists in the developers' minds despite no longer being relevant.

Physical Ranged DPS contributions have always been treated on this subforum as less valuable, simply because Magical Ranged have 'casts' and you do not. You could be double weaving constantly through your opener and maintaining 45-50 APM throughout the fight, and the community still sees that as less skillful than a BLM playing the turn-based version of this game while slamming their forehead on the F4 button at half your APM. Because they have 'casts' and you do not. (Also because BLM is the chosen job of the director and producer, but you can't help that.)

And with the addition of a fourth caster, who do you think that second ranged slot is going to go to if the developers decide to open up two slots to any Ranged in the coming expansion, regardless of subtype? I would expect it, to prevent a bottleneck from forming. If so, it's going to be BLM/PCT + SMN/RDM. We already see a split forming between 'support casters' and 'damage casters'. And the icing on that cake - the casters generally have better movement tools than you do, for all the complaints about 'cast-related immobility'.

This isn't your battle. If I were you, I would be up in arms, but not in here. Good luck, I'll be rooting for you.

[Aco505]

Small hitboxes are more fun and wall bosses are boring.
But you need to buff melee even more than they already are to compensate, look at the latest crit dungeon to see how even a little downtime kills the huge melee number advantage that exists in savage raids, but I don't know if the devs are even competent anymore to adjust for things like this without hurting other raid modes.

Yeah, the main issue with melee downtime is that there's little to no options at range. For instance, spamming Piercing Talon for big DPS losses simply feels bad because it's not engaging.

Casters and healers* have plenty of tools to deal with their main problem, movement, and so can keep their rotation going whereas most melee simply can't. Only NIN and to a lesser extent RPR have some limited tools to deal with it.

*Not all healers are equal. SGE is clearly above when it comes to movement tools compared to the others and especially AST, who is quite immobile outside of 2-min buffs.

The problem is as fights get more complicated you also get mechanics that would be absolutely impossible to ever get uptime if the boss was not a giant hitbox that covers the entire room, Aloalo is full of this and it shows how modern complex mechanics would be a snoozefest in 8 man content for most melee.

I have been doing Aloalo savage and optimizing my uptime and positionals. There's RNG involved but you can greatly reduce the amount of Piercing Talons (can do the first boss with as little as 0-1) with proper strategies and even then my SMN will always be quite close to me in DPS as evidenced by the aggro list. While not a perfect metric by any means, it is an indication that working so hard towards my uptime barely puts me above or close.

It's also partially an issue of DRG being a buff job that performs better in 8-people content but still. When you factor downtime, the differences between melee and ranged jobs become less pronounced. The "best" jobs for Criterion are the more "selfish" jobs, to no one's surprise.

[Valence]

Buff jobs aren't supposed to perform less well in criterion light parties for the reason that the potency of their performance is multiplied by some hidden number behind. I don't know ultimately how it compares and holds, but it's what the devs stated, and it seems to be a true and real thing as well.

[ZiraZ]

Buff jobs aren't supposed to perform less well in criterion light parties for the reason that the potency of their performance is multiplied by some hidden number behind. I don't know ultimately how it compares and holds, but it's what the devs stated, and it seems to be a true and real thing as well.

Even with the hidden buff it's a crap-shoot
Some jobs like BLM and MCH are head and shoulders above everyone else, specially for BLM since crit is heaven for them practically designed around triple cast, while things like Bard even when accounting for the biggest hidden buff I mean look at that sheet lmao, they are still a huge joke.
Either way all I was trying to say is the devs better be careful with over-correcting. Melee doing more base damage than range and casters makes sense in a world with downtime (like alalo crit), but not in the current savage tier.

[ThorneDynasty]

You guys would be surprised how many people who play a melee job and keep running away from bosses every time they get the smalleest aoe circle under them instead of staying in range and keep attacking.
I see it all the time, it is frustrating to watch.

Well it is nice to pass the low minimum bar of managing melee uptime, rather than being handed even the barest for free with no skill check so whatsoever. I mean that's the fun of melee for me, figuring out the timings and exact spots to stand in to keep my maximal uptime even while the floor is littered orange.

I don't want to fight a training dummy.

[ThorneDynasty]

Those arguments constantly trying to justify the damage superiority of melees are so tiresome.

Having a theoretical superior damage is fine if it's reflected by the gaussian spread of skill level. Ranged should provide a tighter reliable spread while an excellent melee player should be able really push their uptime to the upper quartiles past simple reliability. I don't know if that's at all reflected by fflogs data currently. I doubt it.

[Aco505]

Even with the hidden buff it's a crap-shoot
Some jobs like BLM and MCH are head and shoulders above everyone else, specially for BLM since crit is heaven for them practically designed around triple cast, while things like Bard even when accounting for the biggest hidden buff I mean look at that sheet lmao, they are still a huge joke.
Either way all I was trying to say is the devs better be careful with over-correcting. Melee doing more base damage than range and casters makes sense in a world with downtime (like alalo crit), but not in the current savage tier.

Something curious is how AST provides less damage to the party through this hidden buff than SCH. Plus this damage doesn't go to the buff jobs themselves but the entire party, thus making the "selfish" jobs present even stronger.