They forgot Ranged Physical is a role in the game

[Lyth]

...

This is job balance 101. Why would you ever play a melee job if attacking from afar was equally effective under target dummy conditions? The instant you had any amount of melee downtime on a fight a full ranged party would become a mandatory pick.

This is essentially the 'burst' vs. 'continuous' DPS argument all over again. Why would you play a continuous uptime DPS when you can dump all your damage on burst and go have a coffee for two minutes? If the two were equal under target dummy conditions, the instant you have anything that has downtime it benefits burst.

You essentially have two axes to think about. Jobs that have little burst and require continuous uptime should be tuned higher under target dummy conditions. Obligate melee range jobs should also be tuned higher under target dummy conditions. That way, when you design fights with a wide variety of uptime conditions, different jobs will pull ahead. Perhaps it will be MCH on one fight. Perhaps it will be NIN in another. Perhaps PCT pulls slightly ahead on the high downtime fight with alternating coffee breaks and burst. Perhaps BLM and VPR will be neck and neck on the charts on a high uptime fight where you have to squeeze out every last GCD. That's how you create balance without making all the jobs identical.

It's also worth noting that the 'competition' for slots has nothing to do with the allocation. As long as they continue to release more jobs with each expansion, you will have more and more jobs competing for the same number of slots, and melee isn't really in a different position being at 6 jobs. That's why having PCT be a mandatory lock into a ranged slot is a major problem. Because what do you think happens to the rest of the ranged jobs, then? They're either denied a slot or forced to fight for a smaller pool of available slots. But that's what happens when you create a higher and lower DPS tier in ranged jobs.

[Supersnow845]

Because (note as I said at the bottom I don’t disagree with your balance design on a vacuum, more just how the playerbase will inevitably respond to it)

1) this literally doesn’t remotely affect the proposal to fuse the change roles, your only argument on that front is PCT is overpowered forcing a slot lock but that honestly doesn’t affect the physical ranged as they current exist, nor does PCT existing in the way it currently does necessarily force permanent changes when the easier solution is to simply nerf PCT. There really isn’t currently any benefit to a formal fusion of the roles when the ShB design of 1/1/1/x works better than both the currently enforced 2/1/1 (sans PCT) or the proposed 2/2. As it stands right now a fusion of the roles either necessitates hard nerfing the damage casters or putting the physical ranged in a worse position without actually fixing their problems. Like the original intent of this post was exploring why physical ranged don’t bring anything unique to the table, nerfing PCT and BLM to open a 2/2 composition doesn’t fix the core of why the physical ranged are in a bad position. And the current favoured comp of RDM/PCT in FRU shows that lower damage but higher utility can be a versatilite and useful comp. If physical ranged actually bought anything useful to the table it would be worth running 2 of them and sacrificing the extra damage a melee/damage caster brings

2) your idea completely ignores the fact that people simply don’t like playing in the way your balance suggests. You say “oh fight conditions may favour BRD in this one fight”. You and I both know the uproar of the melee and damage caster mains if they either forced downtime on them or even fighting for uptime they still ended up disfavoured. You can see that right now where people point to M4 as an example of why melees should do more than PCT when the average melee downtime on M4 is EIGHT GCD’s and 4 of them are also non actionable for the caster. This sort of balance (while admirable and I don’t disagree with it on a vacuum just so we are clear), simply doesn’t gel with the playerbase for the same reason people think that phys ranged need an “extra consideration” to be worth doing caster/melee damage

[Valence]

You'd need to bring all ranged jobs on to the same DPS tier, and ideally standardize raise as a role action (i.e. Phoenix Down). Then you'd take any combination of two ranged jobs that you like. I don't personally care what Magical Ranged has to say on the issue, nor should you (unless you've already made a swap to PCT).

Melee have literally nothing to do with the matter, and you might as well be comparing yourselves to tanks. Melee uptime is a physical constraint, which is why it influences fight design and the 2/2/2/2 raid comp. (You'd also need to catch up to NIN first). I think close parity is reasonable where possible, but it's a natural limitation of game design (otherwise everyone would play ranged).

More homogenization and sandpaper.

No thank you.

[Valence]

They have their own issues with janky reaction times and clunky gameplay, but don’t things like HW Minuet or Gauss Barrel solve that? Then you have complete control over when you do/don’t cast. In theory anyway. I suppose that would make phys ranged kind-of have uptime considerations, so maybe it would convince the devs to make phys ranged super strong lol. As for Dancer, I’m not a Dancer main so I can’t answer that question for them. But honestly I wouldn’t care much if Dancer did have a cast on something as long as it actually added to the gameplay and did something interesting.

I am not especially opposed to stance dancing like it used to be in HW, but in HW the paradigm wasn't high octane DDR. And those cast times remain cast times on the filler, which is a big property of caster DPS jobs.

If I want to speak for myself a little here, I actually enjoyed playing casters back then even though they had extremely limited mobility options (HW BLM was essentially a low amount of sharpcast + swiftcast and that's it). I enjoyed it because the whole paradigm was not about us roleplaying frogs in a blender. Casting actually felt good, and the cast times were long as well. Tactically it was more about positioning than running all around while trying to minimize casts. As a result 1.5s fast casts on rphys was not much in comparison to what every caster (including healers) had to go through and had a lot of lenient margins within that old paradigm. Right now however, that kind of casts suddenly becomes much more prevalent because every caster is a lot lighter on cast times as a result of a meta shifting to full DDR all the time. This to me, makes casting highly irritating and not enjoyable in the slightest and that's why I don't play casters anymore, and even in casual content beyond leveling them (and SMN for different reasons, this job is just an insult to the player's intelligence with how low the ceiling is).

If we turn rphys into a constant act of turning on and off barrel to get stance dancing back and it's actually something you spend your time doing due to DDR, this is going to feel insanely cumbersome and annoying as far as I'm concerned, and it's really a problem of tactile feeling on top of it. I'd rather have ammo back, but even then, I'd still be turned into a caster within a paradigm that hates the whole concept of casting.

I mean, I’d say a lot of that is the result of ‘what phys ranged need to become balanced’ and ‘what phys ranged need/could have to be more fun/interesting’. Like, I think those are more suggestions for ‘flavour’ rather than ‘these are what will solve the balancing issues’. And I mean, it kinda sounds like it doesn’t matter what they do to phys ranged, either casters or melee will scream about it anyway lol.

Oh don't get me wrong, I would actually not mind some cast times on songs or MCH tools, or even on DNC's DoD, and if they could actually port pvp Honing and pvp En-Avant into pve I'd consider playing DNC a bit more perhaps. This is good tactile vibe, and good flavour enhancement. But this will not change balance in any way, and if we actually do get damage buffs bringing up to melee levels, then lol, I'll take it, because the current battle system doesn't work anyway.

Throwing out weaponskills combos mid-step are we? You know I didn’t mean ‘including using oGCDs that were made available later in the job’s development due to player feedback’. It’s a delay ‘between main actions’ (GCDs) not ‘literally any action whatsoever’. And it’s completely ignoring the mention of Improvisation which has those exact qualities that ‘define a cast’ you mention. You have to stand still, which is inherent to casts, isn’t it?

Ok, I misunderstood then. But Steps aren't exactly casts, they don't root you in place or make you heavy. They can even allow to use abilities. That there is a higher recast between the start of the move and the end than the standard GCD... I mean, what does it change? It's like Ninjutsu.

Improvisation is definitely a channeled cast yes (we need more channeled stuff tbh, like Honing), but in 95% of the cases you just weave it between normal GCDs just to get the regen effect on people. The times you actually cast it and channel it is during downtime...

1) Makes the assumption that phys ranged players would accept their jobs becoming ‘significantly’ more complex than they already are. Not to mention, how does one even measure ‘involved, intricate rotations’ relative to other jobs. More involved than Viper? Pictomancer? Where do we set the bar? And where even is the bar for every other job? I mean, there could theoretically be someone out there who thinks Summoner is more involved than Viper. They’d (probably) be objectively wrong, but I don’t think you can convince them of that lol.

They can work around keeping a skill floor decent, and bringing back a lot of depth that wouldn't affect casuals too much, ideally. The type of complexity I'm talking about is inherently based on RNG, procs, and decision on the fly with an engaging priority system, which I may remind everyone is that what rphys jobs were all about before ShB. MCH was probably the hardest dps job in HW, rotationally wise. Not because of APM, and perhaps a little because of finicky crap, but also because the toolkit was complex. Granted, it repelled a lot of casual players that considered that it was an engineering job. I'd like to aim for compromises between an accessible skill floor and a ceiling that truly defines skill expression, and not within the caster paradigm where it's all about planning fights on an excel sheet, but within the rphys paradigm where it's all about priorities, choices, reactivity, which is still at least a bit of a thing in BRD and DNC's bursts, even though SE does everything they can to truly suppress it for good. Bring back ammo, give us projectile types, I don't care, but give us things to play with that aren't melee toys or caster toys (and once more i'm not against sporadic casts like iajutsu on songs or tools or channeled abilities like Honing on DNC).

2) We kinda had this before and didn’t people just complain ‘if phys ranged dies nobody can do the thing!’? It wasn’t technically true, but they still said it lol. I mean, it’s kind of the same argument devs have used to justify spreading healing capabilities so widely across roles (‘if healer gets overwhelmed who will save the precious dps?!’ lol). The devs seems to be strongly against the idea of one ‘capability’ being the sole domain of a single role. Like being able to silence the enemy; it could be a responsibility unique to the ranged role, but ranks do it too. Devs would be like ‘we can’t make it so only ranged do it cuz what if they die forget etc’. Player tension and all that.
Then again, we already have the role bonus ‘enforcing’ (or trying lol) specific comps anyway, so it’s not like you could get into a situation where there’s no phys ranged. And it’s not like we have much pressure on the role anyway lol.
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To speak bluntly? I don't care what idiots thought or complained about. Not interested in that kind of whining. They also complain when they die because the healer didn't heal them and then we get the devs make tanks invincible and not require the healer anymore. Like someone said, "just fucking adjust and stop whining about your uptime". The fact that one can adjust and still complete the mission without the rphys is already a testimony that the solution isn't within the exclusive realm of rphys.

[NightHour]

It... is? /confused

It is not.

Not even close.

[Connor]

The year is 2025. The devs have still forgotten than physical ranged do, in fact, exist.

If it weren’t for the 1% bonus and job-stack LB penalty (both of which are losing their ability to actually act as penalties I think lol) the players would forget about them too.

Oh well, least we’ll get +10 potency to Empyreal Arrow in 7.2. Only 3 more months of basically trolling your party by using a phys ranged over literally any alternative!

[Carighan]

This is job balance 101. Why would you ever play a melee job if attacking from afar was equally effective under target dummy conditions? The instant you had any amount of melee downtime on a fight a full ranged party would become a mandatory pick.

Yeah of course.

Although older MMOs were smarter about this: In addition to having vastly superior DPS (often 50%-100% extra damage over ranged!) melee usually had some other extra benefit to offset their, and this is important, increased danger. Either they were actually quite durable (halfway between tanks and non-tanks for example) or they had special inter-class combo systems that required melees to be present to augment ranged DPS in the first place (Vanguard had a class that could apply all kinds of augmenting debuffs to a target so your ranged were kinda bad without them there).

But like I said there: Those games also threatened melee with more than just losing uptime. Specifically, instead of having a melee-range AoE you're supposed to run out of lest you die, you had ~constant small melee-range AoEs happenign (called 360° cleaves back then as they happened on every autoattack or had a high proc chance to happen at least) and hence the melee DPS also needed that increased defense. Ranged and healers would just die ASAP if caught in those.

[Valence]

Sometimes I wonder if they should go look the side of FF13 and the class distinction between Attacker(EN:Commando) and Blaster(EN:Ravager). Both had good DPS, the former focused on sustained smaller faster hits building stagger on targets, and the latter using big nukes and taking advantage of staggered targets. It's been a consistent system used in later FF games in one form or another, and many other action based jRPG as well so it's not like it's alien to the franchise. Within that example you could have roles or individual classes based on those paradigms idk.

[AmiableApkallu]

But like I said there: Those games also threatened melee with more than just losing uptime. Specifically, instead of having a melee-range AoE you're supposed to run out of lest you die, you had ~constant small melee-range AoEs happening

That's something I miss about earlier fights in this game (ARR, HW?).

And we could flip the question around: What's the point of playing a ranged job if you can safely stand next to the boss's rear end the whole time?

[mallleable]

I feel like they tried to do something in Chaotic with the Atmos adds, but they are best killed by any ranged damage. Once again it shows that simply being able to hit an enemy from afar is more important than being able to feely move around while doing so. A magical ranged DPS can kill them just as well -- if not better than a phys ranged.