Quote Originally Posted by Galvuu View Post
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.