How about a non-support ranged dps?

[RiceisNice]

True. That's honestly what I thought they were going to do with MCH for awhile, until we got more information about how turrets were going to work. I thought they were going to be a full DPS for the caster slot (and even pondered if they might have been INT-based "engineers" instead of marksmen). But I'm a dork and like to ponder different wonky possibilities.

To be fair though, I think it's a better alternative to make them compete with BRD, because otherwise you're looking at 3 melee, 3 casters, 1 ranged competing for 2/1/1 slots respectively. Unless they homogenize BRD into a full dps without the regen, and do away with the ranged/caster role to consolidate it all into one "Ranged" dps role. If they go with the latter though, they'd need to bake in the missing regen into the healers and physical dps so that it's entirely on the burden on the individual players to manage their resources, or at least not make it a requirement for progression.

I mean taking an example, WoW healers aren't running out of mana because they don't have regen, it's because the fight is taking too long (on the DPS) and/or the tank is requiring too many heals (which can be partly be because they're not durable enough from a mitigation perspective, something that FFXIV doesn't make a point of with the vit/str setup)

[Alahra]

To be fair though, I think it's a better alternative to make them compete with BRD, because otherwise you're looking at 3 melee, 3 casters, 1 ranged competing for 2/1/1 slots respectively.

Sure, given the current class spread I'd agree that MCH is a better fit for BRD's current role. I think there is room in the future for a ranged DPS that's physical in the current caster slot, though.