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

[Ruminous]

Again, I keep reiterating this, I think this is the worst balanced .0 patch since HW (and including HW). If you said that you want to give a blanket buff of 5% overall damage to all non-PCT ranged jobs, I wouldn't argue against this in the slightest. I am simply commenting on the fact that I firmly believe that saying "ranged tax shouldn't exist" isn't accurate. And, if you want to talk about EW design with giant boss hitboxes and perfect melee uptime, then you can construe the same argument about a "melee tax".
If we get to the point where every job can get perfect uptime with minimal disruption of their burst windows and without some hyper-cursed, top 0.5% of the playerbase strats, then yes, I will share the sentiment that this "ranged tax" should be gone. But we're really not there yet, not for 2/3 jobs. And the preview we got from savage leads me to think that melee uptime might become challenging again. Ofc, maybe that was another classic SE bait and I'll end up saying the opposite of this once savage hits. It wouldn't surprise me in the slightest.

Thing is, ranged tax shouldn't exist. At all. It's old, it's antiquated, it's a product of the design of its time. That being said, ranged should have mechanics that promote proper positioning like black mages. Not gun/bow mage like in Heavensward, but something that rewards the ranged player for playing well. A blanket 5% buff isn't going to make phys ranged more desired, machinists and dancers will just suck 5% less and still not be worth bringing to parties. But until ranged tax finally gets removed, the role is going to be the token role for the 1% until the other jobs can make up for that 1% loss. We're already seeing that right now, and as gear becomes stronger, the differences will become more and more pronounced.

[Tunda]

range dps should have 10% more DPS + slow effect while attacking 50%

[Aurora428]

Thing is, ranged tax shouldn't exist. At all. It's old, it's antiquated, it's a product of the design of its time. That being said, ranged should have mechanics that promote proper positioning like black mages. Not gun/bow mage like in Heavensward, but something that rewards the ranged player for playing well. A blanket 5% buff isn't going to make phys ranged more desired, machinists and dancers will just suck 5% less and still not be worth bringing to parties. But until ranged tax finally gets removed, the role is going to be the token role for the 1% until the other jobs can make up for that 1% loss. We're already seeing that right now, and as gear becomes stronger, the differences will become more and more pronounced.

The ranged tax isn't "old and antiquated", it was terrible from its conception to today.

It never served a meaningful purpose. It never "leveled the playing field" for melees restriction of movement. It just made the role terrible for no reason.

SE forgets that double prange meta didn't exist in a vacuum, it existed in a time that DRG had pierce resist down and the raid buffs DRG/NIN offered synced up well with BRD/MCH.

What's funny is they reworked SMN to be basically a physical ranged and then actively chose to make it terrible. What exactly was going through their minds?

[CrystalAurora]

Again, it wouldn’t really matter to me if ranged physical did literally 0 dps as long as they could actually support the party (you know, the literal function of the job as stated by the official ffxiv job guide lol).

I mean nobody comes to ranged physical dps jobs because they want to be the big D dps at the very top of the dps rankings anyway lol (and if they did they’ve misunderstood the role completely).

Yet every expansion developers completely forget that the ‘low dps’ is supposed to be evened out by ‘party support’, give us some more damage skills, then wonder why everyone’s complaining about ranged physical dps output. Like, if you want us to accept the low dps at least give us something to use to our advantage lol

Addendum: to clarify, by ‘support’ I mean ways to actively support the party, not more mind-numbing 120s cooldown buffs

I don't think its worth taking their job descriptions or explanations on their page seriously to be honest.

The physical ranged one says that "They excel at inflicting sustained damage." And we all know that they lack any sort of sustained damage.

Caster description says "Movement is restricted by casting times" When we know that has not been an issue in recent expansions and SMN ignores this concept entirely.

What is even funnier is if you go back to patch 6.4 when they buffed BLM with the description being "The potencies of certain black mage actions were increased to keep in line with other magical ranged DPS jobs." When it was already head and shoulders above the other two casters.

And as you have of course stated you cannot force physical ranged to be so far towards the bottom if they have nothing else really going for them.

Take BRD for example with its unique support utility other than Troubadour which is physical DPS role wide just like Feint and Addle (Not saying its not clearly superior than these two) being only Nature's Minne... Well MNK has Mantra which is just about the exact same thing only being 5% worse with the same duration.

So what support does BRD really have that SCREAMS that its a 'Support DPS' just to follow up on your point.

[Ruminous]

The ranged tax isn't "old and antiquated", it was terrible from its conception to today.

It never served a meaningful purpose. It never "leveled the playing field" for melees restriction of movement. It just made the role terrible for no reason.

SE forgets that double prange meta didn't exist in a vacuum, it existed in a time that DRG had pierce resist down and the raid buffs DRG/NIN offered synced up well with BRD/MCH.

What's funny is they reworked SMN to be basically a physical ranged and then actively chose to make it terrible. What exactly was going through their minds?

True, but at this point, I don't care what it is. I'm just tired of being actively punished because I play the phys ranged role. The spread is just much, much worse now than it was.

[Galvuu]

True, but at this point, I don't care what it is. I'm just tired of being actively punished because I play the phys ranged role. The spread is just much, much worse now than it was.

This is almost reminiscent, to me, of some points raised in the healer strike thread.
FF XIV used to have some content catered to make use of the ranged mobility. A good examples is T7S, where a comp with two mobile dps is very useful to allow you to kite the Renauds without bleeding damage (or, god forbid, using a melee or healer for that if your team has some psychopath who's willing to do that on those roles). But then they realized you couldn't run any random comp, and stopped adding mechanics like that (A6S also had stuff you had to silence with a BRD or MCH). I'm not saying every fight needs to be that way, but one out of four wouldn't hurt.
Again, those mechanics, if added, wouldn't justify the current, awful balance. But I feel that signals encounter design problems too. Perhaps, implicitly, this is what you meant with ARR-design?

[Aurora428]

I think the sad thing is that the devs are aware of the issue, and are aware it is disliked. They even admitted back during the P8S drama that PLD was being range taxed for holy spirit (lol)

The issue has also been extensively discussed on JP forums as well.

The devs know, they just don't care and never intend to fix it. Shadowbringers came out in 2019, let's be real lol

[Rekujin]

I think it's really annoying that the only "Bow Archetype" is a 'support class' so not only do we get penalized for that, we also get the 'movement tax' which is just a joke, literally every boss that is relevant has a huge hitbox, melee have literally zero downtime these days, and what about casters like RDM and Picto who can keep dpsing while dodging stuff and have much higher potency than BRD/MCH?

Bard and MCH will never be "top 5 dps" and that's just disappointing. It doesn't feel nice when I'm executing my rotation flawlessly, and since both classes are high actions per minute I'm working extra hard, just to output less dps than someone who died twice.

Might be time to hang up the bow.

[NightHour]

Just looking for some actual reason as to why the development team is insistent on
physical ranged being the most underwhelming part of every party

Have extra movement has been a meme ever since the skill of the player base has increased along with bosses not having any sort of forced downtime at all unless you just aren't good at the game.

This will be the first expansion since Stormblood in which you can run not only Double Melee but Double Caster without losing damage. However if you try to run double physical ranged you are accepting the fact that your damage is going to be severely hindered. This only makes it harder for statics and party finders to form and there is no beneficial reasoning behind making physical ranged so weak in comparison.

The 1% party bonus is literally not implement to encourage party diversity... It actually discourages it since you don't have complete freedom over what DPS you want to play in a specific group.

1% Party bonus and ranged tax is a band-aid fix to a problem that has not actually existed for the last few of expansions.

DNC and BRD should receive significantly higher personal damage to bring them closer to the melee so that they can carry the load without relying so much on their team and then WHEN their raid buffs come into play they are within 1-1.5% of them at the very least.

MCH should be at bare minimum the 4th highest personal damage class behind SAM, BLM, and VPR and be within 1-1.5% of these jobs. MCH doing over 12% less than SAM in personal damage is ridiculous and has been since Shadowbringers.

Stop balancing the game around people having egos over the fact that their job is 'Harder' to them and let people play the job that they enjoy playing without feeling bad or lowering their clear chances just because the balance team decides that they should.

DPS jobs should not have more than a 2% difference between them if possible.

As a Dancer main myself, I don't think the job should be doing melee tier damage but it also shouldn't be over 20% behind in aDPS.


If we use EX1 as an example and 70th percentile as an example.

70th percentile is where I'd consider players to be decent at their jobs.


Dancer is doing about 15,489 DPS and most melee are sitting between 19.4 and 23k.




Dancer right now is



20.18% behind Dragoon which also brings a raid buff.

20.22% behind Monk which also brings a raid buff and a mini heal.

23.02% behind Reaper which also brings a raid buff and a raidwide regen.

24.95% behind Samurai.

26.24% behind Viper.


Yes, Raid buffs should mean you do less personal dps but not 20-26%.

10% yes, 20-26% is absurd.


Also we can't really use the "attack at range" argument anymore when 99% of mechanics resolve at max melee and don't force melee off the boss.




Red Mage arguably has as much or even more utility than Dancer and is doing ~12.62% more damage.

I think it's really annoying that the only "Bow Archetype" is a 'support class' so not only do we get penalized for that, we also get the 'movement tax' which is just a joke, literally every boss that is relevant has a huge hitbox, melee have literally zero downtime these days, and what about casters like RDM and Picto who can keep dpsing while dodging stuff and have much higher potency than BRD/MCH?

Bard and MCH will never be "top 5 dps" and that's just disappointing. It doesn't feel nice when I'm executing my rotation flawlessly, and since both classes are high actions per minute I'm working extra hard, just to output less dps than someone who died twice.

Might be time to hang up the bow.

A grey melee outperforms a Purple/Orange Physical ranged... it's cringe..

I can look at XIVAnalysis and see


99.9% gcd uptime, good cooldown usage, no weaving issues, good tech step windows from me.

Melee in the group dies, 70% uptime, weaves wrong, misses buttons in burst and still outperforms me.


I get punished for playing well yet a poorly played melee gets to outperform me because of a "silly tax" that is tuned way too high in modern FFXIV.



From a personal DPS point of view...


A 95 percentile Dancer (top 5% of all dancers btw) is the equivalent to a 25 percentile Dragoon.

So basically a Good Dancer is on par with a bad Dragoon.


Both of which are RDPS jobs.

And Dragoon runs away with it on rdps metrics.


On RDPS a 95 percentile Dancer is the equivalent of a 40 percentile Dragoon..




TLDR: I agree that Ranged should deal less damage due to possessing more utility but not 20%+ less damage.

5-10% yes, not 20%+



I don't see a point trying to optimize DNC or BRD when a melee who can barely do their combos correctly can outperform you while being a lower skill tier than yourself.

[Ruminous]

This is almost reminiscent, to me, of some points raised in the healer strike thread.
FF XIV used to have some content catered to make use of the ranged mobility. A good examples is T7S, where a comp with two mobile dps is very useful to allow you to kite the Renauds without bleeding damage (or, god forbid, using a melee or healer for that if your team has some psychopath who's willing to do that on those roles). But then they realized you couldn't run any random comp, and stopped adding mechanics like that (A6S also had stuff you had to silence with a BRD or MCH). I'm not saying every fight needs to be that way, but one out of four wouldn't hurt.
Again, those mechanics, if added, wouldn't justify the current, awful balance. But I feel that signals encounter design problems too. Perhaps, implicitly, this is what you meant with ARR-design?

This is what I mean, plus the tools given to players back in ARR. Stuff like tricast did not exist, all the instant casts, powerful ranged skills like uncoiled fury. Designing a fight that caters to phys ranged is fairly hard to do now with the tools available to us now. It's much simpler to upgrade phys ranged design to match the design now and actually make the jobs competitive and not active detriments to the party. Plus, if you have one or two fights that cater specifically to x role, then it makes the rest unfun to play and just gives the impression you're the token role. I don't want to be useful and live to suck in every other fight. I want to be useful and competitive in general. If I end up on top of the dps, I want it to be because I had a chance to be and played my best to get it. But right now you can work hard on mch, have a perfect rotation, and still be as useful as a pictomancer who died once or twice.