A New Mechanic to Breathe Value Back into Ranged and Casters (and Mele)

[Gurgeh]

The Problem

It sucks to be any kind of ranged job, and it sucks range-squared to be a caster.
The moment the damage is boss centric, or the speed crosses a certain threshold for arena wide patterns, your job design has about as much use as a cooldown on a passive ability.
If the damage is boss centric the further away you are, the further you have to move, the harder it is to doge, and your weaker than mele to boot. Dash abilities don't cut it.

Since the game engine is so limited, as content gets harder, if its not boss centric damage, then its still arena wide damage with 'incredibly' tight solution times.

Now I accept that this latter option is never going away, and perhaps shouldn't but from ranged/casters perspective your ice cream now comes in only two flavours: plain, and vanilla.

If you want proof of this, just look at how alliance raids all turn into every job just standing around the bosses hit box together (among the experienced players). If the boss suddenly cleaves 180 or even 90, or spins, and your far off... your F'd! Give up immediately and remain where you are. Push that defensive, which in the most cases only mele have. >:-/


The Solution (at least something of one)

DAMAGE PROPORTIONAL TO DISTANCE FROM SOME POINT

(the game already has this I should add, but hardly ever uses them, one ability raid wide used twice in any fight for only one out of four instances)

Imagine, there is an attack type that:
- has a focal point of that attack.
- that focal point can be point, or it can be a point-circle/hoop/circumference.
- that focal point can be placed anywhere: at the bosses own feet for wedge/arc shaped cleave aoe attacks; on the bosses hit-box boundary to circle aoes, or even out in the area.
- where you are standing relative to that focal point, distance wise, proportionally affects how much damage you take.

What this means positives:
- If you now have a 'majority' of 'boss-centric' abilities that work like this:
-- Then there is once again an advantage to be ranged standing off in the distance. Yes its easier for them, but that's how they choose to play. On the counter side ranged/caster have lower hp. On the counter side caster (should) have far less mobility, so they will be taking some damage, rather than mele who can dodge completely.
-- you can vary the proportionality. So some boss abilities distance will save you, and its only mele who have to worry. Others, the drop off is less and ranged will have to book it out of there as well.
- It will add variety to the boss actions. Because some actions will be non-distance-proportional 'puddles', and look more like a cast, or a big hammer, or foot, or fist, or tentacle, or other appendage (have at it you degenerate modders), that smooshes you or doesn't.
- it will be variety for mele too. Because you can really make the risk they take to be closer, and the mobility they have to dodge thanks to being close to the bosses compas, really mean something.

The extended benefits: (if additional limited snapshotting can be engineered)
- now imagine giving this to 'just 1-2' player abilities for all jobs.
-- imagine mele have a point blank ability, that occasionally pulls them right in or a kick ability that pushes them a little out, to optimise damage. Instead or just the boring cardinals which disappeared because they were incompatible with DDR.
-- bard that has a fixed distance barrage ability to draw them a little in, or out from where ever.
-- Caster with a crescendo cast that acts the same.
-- RDM can have a fixed distance lunge, if they are too far, they hit less. Too close, and now they are in point blank mele proximity.

Who loses out?
- The people who love to spreadsheet entire fights, and allocate DPS, as the be-all and end-all solution. The margins in variability will make that 'less' standalone impactful.
- The members of the dev team who want to create difficulty by tuning fights to 'zero' margin for error, perfect play.

The arguably goods, the arguably bads
- DPS will variations will swing massively compared to now if you give distance proportional abilities to players
- to get enough skill levels through the fight, the parties who can 'ace' their distances will suddenly breeze DPS checks and enrages.
- Boss DPS will also swing massively. Again, you are going to need higher margins to get enough skill levels through the fight. Skilled players will suddenly breeze fights.
- This has another up side though... to make a tighter difficulty level... all you have to do is vary the 'rate' of those damage drop offs. Great for quantum.


The implementation

Now for the love of hydaeln... DO NOT START CALCULATING SQUARE ROOTS or even radii squares IN GAME!

Think:
- approximate linear vs min vs max distances, octagons.
- even Manhattan
- make sure your bound boxing for anything really, really, really targeting only DPS, or doughnut. (can be Manhattan)
- use lookup tables, pre-calculate and hardcode into the instance.
- you can use this to implement simplified exponential damage to distance proportionalities
- Think bit shifts, addition, multiplication
- Make sure your using Single Instruction Multiple Data (SSE/AVX). Don't transform one player, transform four. (It sounds like everything has been coded from assmbly so I hope thats already being done anyway)
- and if your bottle neck is memory, then the whole of the above is irrelevant and knock yourselves out with division, square roots, cmath, and cml.

Snapshotting player-boss position *for player attacks* also, that's the hardest problem. The game can barely keep up with boss attack snapshots already. But its the boss's attacks that are the main benefit here.

The octagon/Manhattan/approximations have an implication for presentation though. You can either present that a perfect octagon or grid/diamond projection of the approximation boundaries (not recommended) or you can pretend this is a fantasy game 'world' and just present it as a fuzzy circle, and a game that has margins and variability (like crit? anyone heard of that) and not a dry square dance laid out in a spreadsheet. (Again the modders will love turning that into a pixel perfect projection of where the approximation boundaries occur)

[Mercury_Grey]

so tl;dr youa re upset taht casters don't have more damage for range if i rea it right? you do realize in pvp BRD and DRG have bonus damage further away they are for certain attacks. If anything i seen some caster/range dps have easier time due to them not neeing to dance around the boss except for certain attacks

[GraceHorizon]

This sounds basically like the impact markers they’re already using. The most recent fights I’ve done with those are the corner proximity markers in the last phase of M11 Normal and the markers where the adds drop from the sky in Shinryu Normal. It’s also not too different from the triangular flare markers that get put on players (typically tanks) in some fights.

But more generally, ranged DPS sometimes have a tendency to wander off into the back of beyond. It sounds like the complaint of this thread is that if you’re far away from the boss and there’s a cone/wedge shaped AoE with its point at the boss, you might not be able to get out in time? As someone who plays healer a lot I’d like to point out another problem with being so far away: you might be out of range of your healer. When I’m healing I like to position myself near melee range to catch the whole party in my AoE heals. At lower levels I often find that in large arenas, some ranged DPS will have wandered too far away to get with those abilities, sometimes even too far away for single target heals. It’s less of a problem at high levels because people have usually learned to stay closer, but it still happens sometimes. My counterproposal is that these last few ranged DPS hanging out in the hinterlands ought to stick closer to the rest of the party. You don’t need to get into melee range, just get a bit closer and you’ll have a better time.

[PyurBlue]

Varying damage with range could be interesting, but ranged players already have all the tools they need to avoid damage. Phys ranged is fully mobile. Casters have movement abilities that make avoiding large AoE's fairly easy. Then there is rescue, so there are one or two safety nets in the form of healers.

If anything it sounds like the problem is assuming that having ranged attacks means a player needs to sit at range. You don't have to move out to an empty corner just because you can.

[Ultran]

In the old days we healers would have punched you for this idea. But as the aoe range of our heals is now gotten higher and higher, the main issue is gone.

[Moqi]

Frankly I'm not a fan. On one hand the fun of ranged DPS is freedom of movement and casters should (at least in theory) move as little as possible.

But there are certanly better ways to engage with ranged's movement than what we have now.

[Gurgeh]

Ehhh.. I'm no game theorist.
The idea might be useless. (Not impossible) But useless.

I still haven't heard any reason though, with the current game design, as to why ranged... should play at a ranged distance.
I do know that for that reason I personally find ranged incredibly futile and frustrating. What's the point. They are only disadvantaged at range. Just play at mele distance. (Mele down time is 100% irrelevant in all my content)
I like dancer though for when I want to just F about a bit and D about the arena.

Its not like it stands a fart in hurricanes chance of being implemented no matter how amazing an idea it is. It was just a thought exercise.
And it tells me that I'm on my own (pretty much) with finding ranged pointless. Which is interesting.
How how many people here though are judging them by how they work in high end content, which make at least some effort to contrive to spread players about and make melec down time mean something.

[mallleable]

They tried distance-based damage on BRD in the Endwalker PVP rework, but it was scrapped going into Dawntrail. Glad they kept walking casts though.

I think PVP DRG still has it on one of their skills.

[VeyaAkemi]

I still haven't heard any reason though, with the current game design, as to why ranged... should play at a ranged distance.

I think you are looking at it from the wrong angle, ranged isn't about being at range, it is about having the freedom to be at range, and unlike what you make it sound like, this freedom matters a lot and actually makes it much easier to position yourself relative to the boss, the safe spot is close to the boss? you can be there, the safe spot is across the arena from the boss? you can be there, meanwhile melee always needs to hope the safe spot is within a cast bar's range of the boss.

[Shurrikhan]

DAMAGE PROPORTIONAL TO DISTANCE FROM SOME POINT

This is effectively just a 'proximity AoE'. We've already seen them aplenty. And yes, they can at first make Ranged seem a bit more attractive, but if you make such AoEs survivable to melee then, well, ranged isn't going to be required just because you included something that kills everyone in melee range (because they can go out... and back after, often with half a GCD or less lost).

If anything, such mechanics just restrict where ranged can be since they lack the instant movement tools melee have by which to escape suddenly and therefore have to preposition for such things, further reducing their main advantage -- freedom of positioning, something that otherwise better allows them to take distant towers, contribute in stacks, bait stuff out, or whatever the heck else, all with less loss overall than melee for anything sustainedly out of range, and without crowding the melee during splits (whereas melee cannot go any further out of their way, in turn, for ranged).
__________________________

The more stuff you put outside of melee range frequently enough or long enough that melee can't losslessly participate = melee nerf = relative ranged buff. The more splits you have that would otherwise overcrowd triple-melee (5x if including tanks), the more secured having two ranged is. Etc., etc.

However, murdering all melee unless they pre-position at cost to uptime (the only way they wouldn't just be able to Elusivethunderkuchiwarp out and back) is not the way to do that, and short of that, boss-centered AoEs with falloff as to be survivable only well out of melee range would just be irrelevant as they'd just use their tools to undo the mechanic.