Quote Originally Posted by Lyth View Post
Fights are more interesting when they are designed with varying amounts of melee uptime, because managing the disconnect is a really simple way to differentiate between players. It just means that you tune ranged jobs to do slightly less damage under target dummy conditions. The same is true for downtime segments and burst-orientated jobs, where you tune burst-orientated jobs to do less damage under pure uptime conditions. This type of numerical balance is the easy part, and it's really just player and development team dogma that prevent it from occurring.

The hard part is determining what sorts of support functionality each job should have, such that it's viewed as fair. But you can't really trade-off support functionality and DPS, nor can you have large discrepancies in support functionality within the same category. I suspect that the long term options are either to remove Raise altogether, or to merge Ranged down into a single role category with two slots, each which brings Raise as a role action.
But where is the 'skill expression' for phys ranged players?

Let's imagine a mechanic that is tailor-made for the physical ranged experience. The boss drops an ice puddle at its feet that freezes anyone who touches it, the boss won't move out of it, and the edge of the puddle exceeds max melee range. Everyone then gets the 'keep moving or you freeze' debuff as well that lasts 35 seconds, and everyone has to dodge randomly baited AOEs with even some important far baits on top of it until the mechanic ends when the debuff wears off. It has what we want: challenging down time for melees, and casters to navigate, and the phys ranged player or two gets to have their moment, and run around far away from the boss, and press their buttons -- right? Right-?.. The physical ranged player didn't have to make any adjustments to their rotation in preparation for this mechanic. Everything just sorta happened around them, and then it was over. Maybe things got a little spooky with the randomness when being out at the edge of the arena for that important far bait, but things were just as spooky for everyone else. There were no job related challenges for the physical ranged player to overcome. They continue to just kind of exist. Where is the skill expression of not having to make any adjustments to how you play a physical ranged job while other jobs are forced into significantly more down time because fight design changed?

It's 8.4, and the player sentiment is still 'we just need more mechanics like Frozen Shithole for physical ranged to feel like they serve a purpose.'