Concerns Regarding DPS Balance: Physical Ranged, Red Mage, and Summoner

[mallleable]

The thing is it it has very little to do with movement penalty, and more to do with the cast time. The cast time is essentially a 'do nothing step' -- a delay from when you press the button, and it deals damage. A concept that shows up in many other kinds of games. You can have a turn based game where you can have an extremely powerful attack on your next turn in exchange for skipping your current turn. Or even a card game where you can have an extremely powerful card, but you have to skip a turn before you can play it. When you reload in an FPS, you are doing nothing in exchange for replenishing your damage resources. Even down to something like fire rate where each 'bullet' from a high fire rate, high ammo capacity SMG will deal less damage than say each bullet from revolver that has a lower rate of fire, and can only fire off 6 shots before reloading while we're still on FPS games. Oh no, there are downtime mechanics in my single player FPS game because everything is uptime DDR, it's busted.

Back to FFXIV, there is like a lot a lot of downtime in every fight where no one needs to be running round so the movement penalty from walking casts or any casts in general means very little. Job design, fight design, and yes player skill have improved to such a degree that movement penalties from casted actions is not a problem, like at all. And to such a degree that I don't think that current physical ranged design holds up anymore.