Physical Ranged (Also SMN) "Freedom of Movement" Tax

[Galvuu]

Having this discussion before Savage is somewhat pointless because, presumably, they're attempting to reintroduce melee uptime concerns (smaller boss hitboxes, actually working for the few positionals left, etc).
I agree that, in EW, melee were basically physical ranged because of the bloated boss hitboxes, but that has more to do with the poor encounter design than the jobs themselves.
You also absolutely cannot run double caster without losing damage. Double caster is awful, because any of the non-Pictomancer casters are substantially weaker than melees.
Like, I agree that MCH needs a decent bump in damage, but I disagree with the general premise that free perfect uptime shouldn't be taxed. There are fights where you will struggle to maintain uptime in some jobs, and doing so usually incurs a substantial penalty to your burst (TOP p6). This is even true with the current extremes for some jobs.
And I also generally think that if you need to work 5x as hard to get perfect uptime (usually as a team), that should have some non-insubstantial reward. I remember the voodoo I did in Shiva (E8S) for perfect melee uptime, we ended up adopting a much riskier, harder to execute strat. In a universe where BRD and MCH are comparable to NIN and SAM, we simply would never run those two jobs.

We're hitting the point where even the comp buff is becoming irrelevant because other jobs can simply push their dps higher to compensate. Phys ranged design is using ARR logic in Dawntrail class design. That needs to change. It's not a case of they need to do more damage. Yes it would help, but more damage has to come at the cost of something. Thus the design of phys ranged as a role needs to change. Casters and melee aren't bound by the old class design anymore, so why should phys ranged be?

This comment is interesting because, imho, Picto and Viper are much closer to the "classic" design of their roles than the recent reworks/additions. Picto has a number of fairly long casts (although it has tools to help it deal with modern encounter design) and definitely feels like a caster (unlike the reworked SMN). Viper has a fast gcd and quite a few positionals, which is reminiscent of the older versions of MNK.
You can tell that the cast bars on Picto matter because it has a differential between the 25% and 50% percentiles, and a differential between the 50% and 75% percentiles similar to Black Mage's, which is usually the case for jobs whose damage is gated behind gcds.

There are certainly severe issues with the current balance that need addressing, but saying physical ranged don't have an advantage in keeping total uptime while handling mechanics is disingenuous. Are they overtaxed? Yea, I agree with this. But I'm not comfortable in saying that mobility should be free- you'll have a hard time convincing me current SMN should be within 1% of current BLM or PCT.

[RaZz0r]

I still think all DPS should be with in a 1-5% margin of error between each other class "difficulty" should not affect the amount of damage they do, it's bad job design.
Anyone should be able to pick up any job and do pretty decent at it, the main difficulty should come from the encounter design, not the job itself.
Jobs should not alienate people and feel like they can't even do basic game content with it.
Let's say you have a friend you absolutely love playing with, everything you do is just a blast, but the person playing is mediocre at best.
Why should that person be punished for just picking a job they liked the look of the most? And feel like they can't play the game anymore It's not right

[Valence]

Read someone recently saying that BLM was the easiest job to play for them. What do we do, we tax BLM then?

[Warlyx]

Having this discussion before Savage is somewhat pointless because, presumably, they're attempting to reintroduce melee uptime concerns (smaller boss hitboxes, actually working for the few positionals left, etc).

let me "doubt" about that , being viper the prime job of this expansion

and yep remove "Ranged tax" should have been removed long time ago

[CaedemSanguis]

well melee have to greed in ex1 and ex2, they also have positionals, while casters have casts, I dont thnk we should remove the freedom of movement tax, maybe reduce it a bit ?

[Supersnow845]

I still think all DPS should be with in a 1-5% margin of error between each other class "difficulty" should not affect the amount of damage they do, it's bad job design.
Anyone should be able to pick up any job and do pretty decent at it, the main difficulty should come from the encounter design, not the job itself.
Jobs should not alienate people and feel like they can't even do basic game content with it.
Let's say you have a friend you absolutely love playing with, everything you do is just a blast, but the person playing is mediocre at best.
Why should that person be punished for just picking a job they liked the look of the most? And feel like they can't play the game anymore It's not right

Because when you have all the difficulty in the encounter and jobs are beige nothing then you end up with only encounters that are actually hard being engaging, doing something like myths on the modern jobs is just boring because the jobs are designed to function in TOP

There should be ceilings on the jobs that are higher than the floors, the floor shouldn’t be “your job basically doesn’t work” like in HW, but actually getting more damage out of playing a job better is just as engaging as good counter design

[RaZz0r]

Because when you have all the difficulty in the encounter and jobs are beige nothing then you end up with only encounters that are actually hard being engaging, doing something like myths on the modern jobs is just boring because the jobs are designed to function in TOP

There should be ceilings on the jobs that are higher than the floors, the floor shouldn’t be “your job basically doesn’t work” like in HW, but actually getting more damage out of playing a job better is just as engaging as good counter design

Let me reword a bit to make things clearer when I say 1-5% difference is at the top level of play of all jobs, but anyone should be able to pick up and play any job to about 80-90% of their max damage the additional 10-20% should come from mechanical knowledge of when to use your CDs and potions as well as general boss knowledge, but the base jobs should be easy to pick up and play at a casual to midcore level and keep in mind I'm talking DPS.
I have no idea what healers do as I don't play the job's healing is boring to me in all games, it's not the kind of gameplay I enjoy.

You also need to be aware that ffxiv is the retirement home of MMO players, most are in their early 30s to mid 40s and older if I had to take I guess who moved away from high APM gameplay and changing away from that play style now would flat out kill the game.
They tried to be more WoW like back in the day, and it failed horribly and only a VAST minority of players bother with savage / ultimate, hell I know people who don't even do the normal raid in story mode due to performance anxiety already they are just barely able to do alliance raids.

It's just the type of game FFXIV is, so keep the job gameplay easy enough so anyone else can do it and keep the challenge on content people can seek out on their own time if they want to

[Ruminous]

This comment is interesting because, imho, Picto and Viper are much closer to the "classic" design of their roles than the recent reworks/additions. Picto has a number of fairly long casts (although it has tools to help it deal with modern encounter design) and definitely feels like a caster (unlike the reworked SMN). Viper has a fast gcd and quite a few positionals, which is reminiscent of the older versions of MNK.
You can tell that the cast bars on Picto matter because it has a differential between the 25% and 50% percentiles, and a differential between the 50% and 75% percentiles similar to Black Mage's, which is usually the case for jobs whose damage is gated behind gcds.

There are certainly severe issues with the current balance that need addressing, but saying physical ranged don't have an advantage in keeping total uptime while handling mechanics is disingenuous. Are they overtaxed? Yea, I agree with this. But I'm not comfortable in saying that mobility should be free- you'll have a hard time convincing me current SMN should be within 1% of current BLM or PCT.

While pictomancer has the 'classic' design of long casts, how much uptime does it lose? Yes viper has fast GCDs and positionals, but how often is it a problem to hit them? The answer is not very, pictomancer has a lot of instant cast abilities or short casts to avoid mechanics, viper has a ranged ability that they can bank charges of that hits for a fair bit. Black mages now have several instant casts, samurais got longer range on iaijutsus...Need I go on? If the argument between the lower and higher percentile is skill, then we're needlessly punishing an entire role because a couple jobs in another role have extremely low lows due to not knowing how to play theirs effectively. That's not great design.

It's not disingenuous to say phys ranged don't have an advantage on uptime now, because they don't. The fact that boss hitboxes got much wider, the prevalence of uptime strats...The only advantage phys ranged have is completely gone. Yet they still play with the ARR mentality of "should have highest uptime but lowest dps". On the note of summoner though, I don't think many disagree that the job is way too easy to pick up. The Endwalker rework did the job no favors, but to leave it where it is now relegates it to dumpster tier status.

[mallleable]

Really, and truly phys ranged balance can be 'fixed' by giving them walking casts. While they still afford movement, they're still casts so they will allow phys ranged dps to be brought more in line with magical ranged dps.

[Skellydawizard]

Really, and truly phys ranged balance can be 'fixed' by giving them walking casts. While they still afford movement, they're still casts so they will allow phys ranged dps to be brought more in line with magical ranged dps.

You mean like how they are in PvP?

BRD/MCH are surprisingly enjoyable with the walk casts. They still give you a niche over casters in that they aren't entirely locked down. It's a super small addition that raises the skill floor a bit, since your walking you can't panic dash out of mechanics while keeping uptime.

Honestly anything to end this ancient "Ranged Tax" curse that's honestly plagued Phys ranged for ages now..