They forgot Ranged Physical is a role in the game

[Valence]

BRD songs just need more flair and options during their filler. I also happen to like positive feedback loop rewards.

Under the condition of reworking the Soul Gauge so that it generates a lot more of it and Blast Arrow works differently, what if using Apex under Army grants the party X seconds of sprint tied to gauge spent? What if using Apex under under Minuet, adds X potency to each GCD for party members? What if under Mage it grants a budget bunshin to party's AoE attacks? What if Radiant Finale worked like old Foe's Requiem but also gave a steady regen to the LB gauge as well like Final Fantasia does? What if Battle Voice got back to what it used to do and doubled the power of any song being sung? What if Minne came with a Reflect attached to it as long as damage is suffered? What are they waiting for to give us pvp Warden's in pve? And that's just for raid buffs, which I find way more interesting than what BRD's currently does. Just replace the % boring passive increases with something like this that also requires active uptime with active Apex uses.

As for mechanical gameplay, what if only refulgent has a small cast? What if Refulgent actually generates gauge and repertoire moves like PP also give repertoire when used? What if Army's repertoire also increases Refulgent proc rate? What if Refulgent generates Harmonic stacks that allow a free cast of Harmonic past a certain amount? And I'm not even talking about bringing back the dots as a base for repertoire procs (it was so cool). Imagine all the new things to do during even the filler suddenly..

On DNC, well pvp happens to have that neat little thing called Dance of the Dawn. Perhaps this could proc from your partner actually doing good things and rewarding both of you. Perhaps Starfall should also grant sprint to both when used. Perhaps the partner damage bonus should be tied to Sabre Dance uses, just saying. Totally wilder but, imagine whenever you get a feather proc, the partner also gets one to spend with a lower random chance?

And frankly maybe you'd also bring a rphys because rphys jobs would have tools to generate LB faster. Or maybe LB would behave like in ultimates and not generate at all on its own but through the current actions that do, PLUS some new rphys abilities or mechanics. There is another thing rphys could bring, if they'd dare bring back damage types in an intelligent fashion, which would involve encounter design, where some mobs would have some resistances to specific damage types and rphys could manipulate this (probably comes with a lot of caveats due to duty finder, etc).

[mallleable]

It's funny, giving BRD, and MCH walking casts would make double 'caster' comps standard, and meta.

[SalamanderIX]

I think at this point it would be best they just removed Physical Ranged as a role.
Consolidate Phys Ranged Magic Ranged into one catagory "Ranged DPS" and Redistribute that 1% buff to +.25% for the 4 remaining roles.

Because then Square can see the real numbers of how many people actually want to play Bard, Machnist, or Dancer in groups. I'm going to guess 50% of the people in statics were made to play these jobs for that 1% bonus, not because they wanted to play one of these jobs. People in party Finder might had geared them because they'd get an easy spot.

Whereas, I think far more people would love to play one of the mages. The game opens up to what people want to play in the meantime while these jobs are forced into rebalance and remakes.

[Valence]

So once rphys is removed as a role and baked into Ranged in general, what then? We just buff them or do we leave them as they are?

[Carighan]

It's funny, giving BRD, and MCH walking casts would make double 'caster' comps standard, and meta.

And they'd be casting more than Summoner, Black Mage and possibly Pictomancer. :')

[Lyth]

So once rphys is removed as a role and baked into Ranged in general, what then? We just buff them or do we leave them as they are?

The dev team would be forced to give them role parity with Casters, and you'd take your pick of two best Ranged players on their jobs of choice. Which is what needs to happen.

[Supersnow845]

The dev team would be forced to give them role parity with Casters, and you'd take your pick of two best Ranged players on their jobs of choice. Which is what needs to happen.

I for one fully support buffing BRD to BLM levels. DNC can sit at RPR level or so and MCH can be fighting SAM for best selfish job in full uptime

[Lyth]

Sure thing. Don't forget to also raise up BLM, and bring PCT down to SMN's level where it belongs, and it'll just be peachy.

[Connor]

Wait I’m so confused. And that’s as somehow who would genuinely be happy if Bard became a caster role lol. My dream would be one step closer to reality.

But how would putting physical ranged into the caster sub role somehow cause the devs to start giving them caster level dps? They’d stay exactly where they are now because they have raid buffs/utility (not you MCH) and can jump while using weapon skills lol.

Like wouldn’t buffing Bard to Black Mage’s current dps levels be game breakingly overpowered? They’d have to delete every raid buff and probably the majority of phys ranged utility to balance them against ‘real casters’.
Except they’d also be competing with Raise casters over the obviously superior Pictomancer / Black Mage, and no amount of utility can trump combat Raise anyway so there’d be no competition there unless all phys ranged has hilariously busted personal dps outputs.

That’s not even considering Role Skills (which for some reason everyone pretends don’t exist). Yes I’m bringing then up again because I don’t see how that would work? The system currently makes absolutely no distinction between dps sub-roles within the same overall role. I.E maiming has the same role skills as striking. If they made phys ranged and caster the same category, either physical ranged get Swiftcast, Surecast and Lucid Dreaming, or casters can start spamming Peloton and silencing enemies with Head Graze. They’d have to develop 3 new spellcasting animations for each phys ranged role because Sleep exists lol. It would take way too much work for the developers who can barely manage 1 dungeon release every 6 months

If they were going to change the role system to somehow account for subroles within the same dps roll, that would be a ‘system change’ which is apparently super impossible under any circumstances.

[Valence]

The dev team would be forced to give them role parity with Casters, and you'd take your pick of two best Ranged players on their jobs of choice. Which is what needs to happen.

And here we come back full circle, do we give them cast times like casters or do we keep them kneecapped like SMN but without a raise? Or do we give them a raise so that there is more SMN options in the ranged role? And we make RDM mains cry more because they have to actually stand and cast and not SMN/BRD/MCH/DNC?