Ranged DPS role is about to be excluded from all content

[EpicOverlord85]

As noted above, Shadowbringer job balance has been a complete mess. Only the tanks were more or less solid upon release. It's been one panic buff or adjustment after another. There is really no excuse whatsoever for the Range, SMN and RDM to be this far below everyone else. A mobility or Raise tax is one thing, however that should result in 300-400 DPS at most, not over a 1,000. It's beyond ridiculous that an average Black Mage is still better than every other job not in the melee category.

The sad thing about the tanks is it’s not surprising that they’re better balanced, at least half of them play exactly the same.

[ForteNightshade]

As it is ranged dps will always do less damage since they don't suffer the same restrictions as other dps jobs.

Melee need to mind their position and can't afford to move as they want since they need to stick close to the target to keep their dps up.
Caster dps have casting time and have to be stationary when they don't have any instant cast to make a move so it's more planning or they lose dps.
Ranged dps can be wherever they want and be constantly on the move and not lose any dps at all. That mobility and convenience is what lower their dps.

If you're looking at a farm party where you know all the dps and caster dps will perform their job perfectly and knows the fight enough that you're sure there'll be no problem, sure having a ranged in a party will be a negligible dps loss. In other situation a ranged dps will always have an easier time pulling solid numbers, even if things go wrong or the party is still new to the fight. And that's because of the convenience of the job.

Now I'll agree that the argument had more weight when they could also replenish ressources such as mp and tp.
But if you want them to have a dps closer to what melees do, ranged will need a new trade-off to make up for it, which would be totally fine. Something like a perfect distance mechanic, where you've got to stay at a certain range of the monster to hit harder on all of your skills, something on your hud would tell you when you're at that range. And they could add a role skill that would be like true north and make it so you can bypass that for 10 seconds when you have to.

A 50% Black Mage is pulling better numbers than a 95% Bard, Machinist, Dancer, Red Mage and Summoner. This means a near perfect player in those respective jobs is still weaker (or on par) with an average Black Mage. At the 95 percentile, Black Mage has a staggering 1,500 rDPS lead against all five of the aforementioned jobs. What this means is by bringing one of the meta jobs, you can afford more mistakes whereas the non-meta jobs may lead to a wipe should players make the equivalent mistakes. Again, it's one thing to argue Range need a mobility tax. I agree with that. But it shouldn't be so lopsided it may actually be better to take three melee DPS even if it means one has to disengage for a couple GCDs.

[Sigiria]

A 50% Black Mage is pulling better numbers than a 95% Bard, Machinist, Dancer, Red Mage and Summoner. This means a near perfect player in those respective jobs is still weaker (or on par) with an average Black Mage. At the 95 percentile, Black Mage has a staggering 1,500 rDPS lead against all five of the aforementioned jobs. What this means is by bringing one of the meta jobs, you can afford more mistakes whereas the non-meta jobs may lead to a wipe should players make the equivalent mistakes. Again, it's one thing to argue Range need a mobility tax. I agree with that. But it shouldn't be so lopsided it may actually be better to take three melee DPS even if it means one has to disengage for a couple GCDs.

I don't disagree with that, I'm just trying to see it from a developper's persepective.
Most of the parses come from people that are clearing or trying to clear savages and extremes, which is why you won't see that huge of a difference between percentiles since a lot of the people there have at least some basic notions of how to play their job right (within that setting it's still a big difference though.)

But as they stated before, people playing through the savage and extreme are not the majority of the playerbase and the way they seem to balance stuff is on a larger scale than just the people that do this type content. For them a 1000 dps gape might not be such a difference if they think it won't prevent people to clear with a decent gear.

That's why I'd rather they shift the mobility/raise tax from the dps output to something else. Reward people for taking the extra steps required for their jobs, Monk and Black mage deserve their dps. Thing is, other jobs should also have mechanics that an average player can butcher and still have a correct dps in lower difficulty content. While players making the effort to deal with these mechanics perfectly should have a dps on par with the other top ones.

[ForteNightshade]

But as they stated before, people playing through the savage and extreme are not the majority of the playerbase and the way they seem to balance stuff is on a larger scale than just the people that do this type content. For them a 1000 dps gape might not be such a difference if they think it won't prevent people to clear with a decent gear.

You may be right in saying that is their approach. Unfortunately, it's an incredibly shortsighted and flawed approach. When it comes to job balance, the only content they should be focusing on is Savage and Ultimate. Why? Because only those pieces of content push the jobs to their capacity. Dungeons are a complete joke. Back in Stormblood, I ran 70 dungeons without a Healer. That's how piss easy they are. You don't balance around content that barely requires a pulse. This is the exact same problem they had with Piercing. Yoshida outright acknowledged they never considered Dragoon when balancing Bard which led to Bard utter dominance throughout all of Stormblood—to the point if you did like Machinist, you were going to struggle finding a group at the Savage level.

And therein lies the issue. We've already seen more and more people either refuse to recruit certain jobs or lock them out of PF. If you're a Red Mage main. You better be parsing at an orange level or you're going to struggle finding a group. Not to mention, it feels pretty bad knowing that if you, a physical range or non-Black Mage caster, played at other job. Your party would have much higher success on any Savage fight in the game.

[CKNovel]

Is there a need for this ranged tax? Yes, for sure else why anyone would play Melee jobs?
But is there any Melee loosing 1K to 1.5K DPS for dealing with mechanics? If yes I have very bad news for you...

That ranged tax was relevant in Stormblood as ranged had very usefull tools such as Refresh, Tactician, Requiem/Hypercharge, Dismantle... Rest in peace sweet prince.
I never played healer during raid but it basically allowed them to DPS without fearing for their MP. Indirectly, it was rDPS but I can't say how much. Back then, the DPS difference was about... 8, 9% between ranged and the top DPS? The idea is that it was not as much as today and that now we don't have that utility to support this low DPS.

ShB ranged DPS are taxed like if Refresh and Dismantle/Songs, Hypercharge/Requiem&Crit buff were still a thing.

The remaining arguments are the damage reduction buff (Tactician, Samba, Song) and the mobility. Honestly I don't see how 10% reduction every 180 seconds would cost more than Dismantle and it was 10% every 60 seconds. Ranged shouldn't reach BLM/MNK DPS for sure but a perfect ranged should not be rewarded with a 50th BLM/MNK DPS. The tax exist so casters and melees may exist.

But I don't see positionnals/casting/melee range being such a pain that it costs you 1k DPS. If that's the case, you may need to improve.

For 2 years MCH was unfun and unplayable.
Now the job is fixed with flashy animations but is shooting spaghettis.
Our comp is MNK/RDM/DNC/MCH, why do we need to push harder simply because we want to play the jobs we love? We intend to tackle Ultimate but how tight the DPS checks will be?

I just want to have fun and feel usefull to my team, SE. Complexify the rangeds rotation, bring back utility, just give us something so I don't feel like a weight! I don't play perfectly, but even if I was, I would perform better on a Black mage and it's extremely disheartening to see the ranged role in such a state.

[ForteNightshade]

How do triple melee work on E2S tower mechanics tho? Sure it is not a huge dps loss and tanks are doing less damage than SB so losing tank gcds is not a huge issue, but I can't see how you do that without at least some loss.

Admittedly, I forgot about towers. Still, you could have the tank lose a couple GCDs unless PLD has Holy Spirit ready there. As you said, tank DPS just isn't that high.

[kajv95]

I think the biggest joke I face this expansion is that I played BRD / RDM / AST. This whole thing is just painful to watch, how RDM didn't even get touched when SMN did and how we now have 4 very clear benchwarmers is pretty awful.

And as a BRD main, I can't even be bothered doing more savage raiding right now, I don't particularly enjoy thinking "I should probably just level a BLM instead" while I play. I haven't even been able to put myself through leveling RDM, because it just feels agonizingly slow knowing what I know.

[UnrealTai]

A 50% blm is doing that to ALL dps though.
Ive been running mch and no other roles out dps me except for blm, and its typically by alot. If im between 10-12k (im only 453) a blm is at 15k.
Ranged physical is fine imo.

Caster ranged other than blm? rdm/smn, ouch. Ya, those needs work

[HyoMinPark]

A 50% blm is doing that to ALL dps though.
Ive been running mch and no other roles out dps me except for blm, and its typically by alot. If im between 10-12k a blm is at 15k.
Ranged is fine imo.

I’m going to be frank: if you’re only getting outDPS’d by BLMs, any MNKs, DRGs, or SAMs you’re meeting are downright bad at their jobs. It’s easy to see from the percentile rankings that all three of those are performing higher compared to a MCH at the same percentile, and some at lower percentiles are straight-up outperforming the physical ranged at the higher percentiles.

The physical ranged are not fine. Not by any stretch.

I feel like you're disregarding that 1. Most players aren't hardcore players and the game won't survive off the small number of hardcore player subs alone thus Square must have balance feel appealing to casual players as well.

“Average” BLMs and “average” MNKs are doing better than the “hardcore” physical ranged. The discrepancy between some of the jobs is truly astounding when you consider the different percentiles and how “average-tier” for some jobs still beat high-tier physical ranged play. See ForteNightshade’s prior comments about 50th percentile BLMs doing more damage than any of the physical ranged at a 95th percentile level.

2. The ease of play advantage ranged dps have vs. other melee and even casters. I'm sorry, but being able to attack from almost any distance while being optimal in output is going to cost you ceiling dps.

Having a small cost for mobility seems fine, in my opinion. I won’t speak for anyone else. However, I don’t think the cost should be 1,000~1,500 in term of damage—for some jobs, it’s even more than that! This tax is too high, and it’s heavily skewed when you consider the “Big Jobs” (BLM, MNK, DRG, SAM, and now possibly NIN) versus the physical ranged. Even in the caster role, there is a heavy skew towards BLM compared to SMN and RDM. The differences between the jobs are not small.

Maybe stop playing with people who would rather kick you off their teams than have a 1% less higher damage ceiling (if all things go well with extra melees or whatever).

Honestly, I don't think that's normal behavior and is more telling of who certain people hang around. I personally have 0 qualms with a player of any class if they are really good at playing that class while knowing all the mechanics very well in a fight. I think if the game was balanced around such limited focuses, the majority of the playerbase would end up less satisfied with the game, and sorry, just because you feel that you are a more hardcore player doesn't entitle your preferences to a a greater degree of consideration than even the most casual of pleebs you'd likely hate to even be associated with. Square is making some adjustments to some classes, and I think that's good, but I think it's clear they do not want to only balance classes around the desires of 1337 hardcore gamers™ either... Which is probably also good.

You’re ignoring the trickle down effect that metas have on the more midcore and softcore raiders. It’s not uncommon for players to hear that certain jobs are underperforming and begin to lock them out of parties due to hearsay, whether its true or not. I’ve already seen some instances of DNCs being excluded from Savage PFs on Aether—and while this may not affect me since I have a static, not every DNC is in a static setting. There’s also a lot of criticism against the job itself for having such low personal damage, and raid buffs that don’t quite compensate for how low said personal damage is. There were similar complaints surrounding NIN—and look at what is being done for it: potency buffs this patch, plus plans for job reworks in Patch 5.1.

[ForteNightshade]

A 50% blm is doing that to ALL dps though.
Ive been running mch and no other roles out dps me except for blm, and its typically by alot. If im between 10-12k a blm is at 15k.
Ranged physical is fine imo.

Caster ranged other than blm? ouch. Ya, needs work

... have you seen Monk? At 50%, Black Mage is pulling an average of 13,063. Now lets look at Monk, Dragoon and Samurai at just 60%. This is all on E4S.

Dragoon: 13,237
Monk: 13,515
Samurai: 12,904

So the only one that doesn't completely slaughter Black Mage is Samurai... who just received a buff. Likewise, Ninja will be trailing just behind Dragoon now. So now, a 50% Black Mage isn't doing that to all DPS. Please actually look up these statistics if you're going to comment.