Why are Melee and ranged DPS roles mostly support and not focused on damage?

[Pence]

'Role Skill' doesn't mean they should simply increase your primary function (Heal, DPS, Support, Tank). It's just a simple term to group together jobs. As a ranged DPS: I envy melee/magic role skills. Our skills are boring. We get Pali and Refresh. Maybe Tact. if someone screws up or Silence on 03S if they deny us our divine right to focus on padding.

[Bourne_Endeavor]

Do you ever remove Diversion, True North or Invigorate? At that point, aren't they mandatory?

Sort of. Granted, those three are usually slotted because what else am I going to take? Adding damage buffs only renders the fourth and fifth slots locked to those new abilities. At best, I'd swap out Invigorate or True North. The point is once you add raw damage abilities to the cross role system, no DPS will pass on them, which defeats the entire reason for the system to exist.

[zuzu-bq]

Removing pure damage boosts from role actions make jobs to be easier to balance individually since you don't have to deal with damage skills that are shared across them. Meanwhile removing defensive abilities from healers (Addle, Feint, Reprisal) and placing them on other roles make healers easier to balance. In this game everyone has many responsabilities besides doing their primary objective of their roles, this was always a thing. They just pushed the concept foward in a way to make the balancement better across all jobs and roles.

If you don't believe me just see how strong and boken BRD and MCH's unique defensive skills can be. Or how the fact any party before Stormblood pretty much needed a Int down debuff on the bosses to function. Which was a debuff a tank and a "non support" DPS could bring.

[Vshunyi]

Everyone's already said why damage up on role skills can be pretty tricky. However, I do agree that some skills are kinda useless like Crutch on melees. But, there's really not much else to bring so I'd rather take that one damage up role skill that becomes mandatory over just randomly slotting Bloodbath or Arms Length even when I don't need it outside of just one fight like o4s.

[Laerune]

SE wanted to give DPS more things to do during combat, give them something to help the group, this is why casters/ranged/melee have buffs and debuffs. Casters was left out from the OP, but casters have debuffs and buffs aswell. Aside from the job skills, all casters have the option to take these skills with them:

- Addle: Lower target’s intelligence and mind by 15%
- Manashift: Transfers 20% of own MP to target party member.
- Apocatastasis: Reduces magic damage taken by party member by 20%.
- Erase: Removes a single DoT from target party member other than self.

As for why we have support skills and not offensive buffs to our own damage, SE removed most, because players did not use them enough. This was one of the changes that they added to close the gap between the casuals and hardcore dps players.

I am leveling my DPS classes right now and the differences between HW and SB is alot, I do more stuff and I like it. Giving DPS players only the job the deal damage, would be the same as making tanks only keep agro and healers only heal and ress players. We all know how people feel about healers not dealing any damage, I reckon its time DPS as a role steps up and gets more responsibility in the group.