They forgot Ranged Physical is a role in the game

[Valence]

I consider those kinds of constraints actually good. Much like the limited range on healing before they demolished that too for 6.4 because yoshida forbids that people need to use their brains to position themselves properly and play around hurdles. If you remove stacking on Waltz, you essentially remove skill expression and any thought process behind using this skill optimally. Either way, all I'm saying is that mitigation on rphys is lost in a see of mitigation coming from everyone else, and healing is not required (even though Waltz is actually godly, just not needed). If healing was needed, even SMN could shine, even if not every 60s ever.

[Taranok]

I consider those kinds of constraints actually good. Much like the limited range on healing before they demolished that too for 6.4 because yoshida forbids that people need to use their brains to position themselves properly and play around hurdles. If you remove stacking on Waltz, you essentially remove skill expression and any thought process behind using this skill optimally. Either way, all I'm saying is that mitigation on rphys is lost in a see of mitigation coming from everyone else, and healing is not required (even though Waltz is actually godly, just not needed). If healing was needed, even SMN could shine, even if not every 60s ever.

Of all the forms of homogenization in the game, the mitigation homogenization is one of the weaker ones to bring up. But on the trash heap that is homogenization, it's truly icing. What I'd do to see Stormblood-era fight design to come back, and fight design like the more experimental Coils.

Hell, on the topic of the massive range increases on abilities, all the devs did was make the arenas massive and ruined caster gameplay by forcing nonstop jog-a-thons across gigantic maps in response to trying to destress healers by making it easier to heal with larger aoes. What was intended as QoL just accelerated homogenization in a different way. One of these days, the devs might realize they've painted themselves into an extremely tiny corner, and the solution is to dehomogenize fight mechanics design to make things that primarily target and challenge individual roles instead of all of them equally. It'd be nice to see rphys have mechanics like the original turn 7 cyclops again, only to then get a rest for an extended period of time while mechanics that specifically challenge other roles, like melee, happen. Only to cycle with things that are tough to solve for anyone with cast bars.

But, rphys get forgotten because the rphys tax is meaningless but still present, casters get turned into rphys, melee get coddled and do the most damage because every mechanic is designed to not be hard to them, and tanks all do the exact same tanking gameplay across all classes while healers all heal so functionally identically, they may as well be the same class for all practical purposes now.

Game truly is a mess.

[Lyth]

...

Stormblood fight design was the basis for what we have now, with choreographed dance sequences following fixed timestamps and self-positioning bosses. It's a byproduct of a game-breaking mob movement glitch that had a fair bit of attention in late Heavensward.

Renauds weren't actually a Physical Ranged mechanic, when playing optimally. A lot of groups were using a SCH bait by the time Savage Second Coil rolled out. It's the same idea as the Gobwalker in A2S. It's generally more efficient to offload responsibility to supports wherever possible.

The primary issue with Physical Ranged is that it has been classically framed as a 'support DPS role' in a game that doesn't value support gameplay. And in the process of standardizing everything, Casters offer greater support functionality and more DPS while playing at a lower APM. People have retroactively tried to justify caster superiority based off of 'job difficulty', but casts always come at the expense of APM and mechanical difficulty. And the end result of these complaints is that SE has taken it to further simplify that fake 'cast-induced difficulty'. The only reason that there's finally a conversation around this is because PCT just exposed these gross discrepancies for all to see.

The solution to making Physical Ranged valued is to stop treating the role as inferior to Damage Casters. All ranged jobs offer varying degrees of utility. They all should do competitive damage. Eliminate the 'damage tiers' within ranged jobs, and you will have resolved the issue.