Ranged DPS role is about to be excluded from all content

[Akiudo]

I’m starting to get a little confused now.

If they buff ranged DPS, and it ended up at like 500 dps, then what’s the point of bringing a Summoner/Red Mage over them? Even Samurai and Dragoon could be in danger if the ranged DPS role gets too close. But then, if they get any less of a DPS increase, would it even move their position in the rankings?

ranged dps in the context talked about does indeed include Red Mage and Summoner, bard/mch/dancer in particular would be referred to as physical ranged in that case, sometimes that gets taken somewhat out of context because people act like being mobile should automatically cost you 1000 dps at the top end before anything else. also its not about moving the position in the ranking, it's about not having such an gigantic dps falloff after 5th place.

If we assume that an ideal ranking is something like: Black Mage, Samurai, Dragoon, Ninja, Summoner, Bard, Machinist, Red Mage and Dancer, then how would they buff the ranged DPS without them moving up from where they should be? If the ranged DPS are higher than any other job in a different role (e.g Red Mage), isn’t that a pretty big blow to said job?

why should we work under this assumption ? like i get what you mean, black mage only has personal dps, same with sam (mch is the same btw) but thats not what people complain about, FFLOGS since 4 weeks or so ago actually tracks your actual raid contribution, so not just your personal dps but how much dps you did-the dps you only did because others buffed you+the dps you buffed others for so theres no real reason why "pure dps" need to be at the very top off raid contribution. Before that it meant if a blackmage was 300 dps above a bard but the bard buffed the group for 600 dps the bard factually offered 300 dps more than the blackmage, when fflogs now says blackmage is x dps higher then y job such things are allready included.

It stands to reason that Summoner and Red Mage will also receive damage buffs, so the amount they’re contributing would go up at the same time as ranged DPS, meaning that while there wouldn’t be a chance of ranged overtaking they, we’d still be in the exact same position but with slightly higher DPS. Isn’t that a really roundabout way of nerfing Black Mage and Monk? I mean, if we really want things to be balanced without changing any aspects of the game itself, wouldn’t nerfing them (maybe Dragoon too?) mean balance is immediately restored without them having to lift a finger to adjust other classes?

it's not "maybe dragoon", even samurai outdps every ranged by a bigger margin than monks have on samurais and ninja are even above that. So its either nerf top 5 or bring bottom 5 up, and one of these would feel suckier and has a much higher chance of fucking statics over so theres that.

I imagine that if ranged just got a flat potency boost, it wouldn’t really mean anything because Summoner and Red Mage are getting them too. In 4.0 most raid groups would gladly push out a caster if they had to choose between that or a ranged for Refresh etc, which isn’t unacceptable. But now they’re competing purely on a personal DPS basis, which means that the only way they can be really balanced is by all having the exact same DPS. Even if say, Summoner was 200 DPS above every other job in the category, wouldn’t that technically make everything below it useful? I mean, when we talk about ‘dps’ we mean rDPS, and I can’t imagine Battle Voice gives more DPS than Devotion consider they have the same cooldown. Embolden I hear is really weak so that wouldn’t make Red Mage worth taking over Summoner. Machinist doesn’t have anything for rDPS, and Dancer must always be at the bottom of the DPS anyway because of its damage buffs.

the point is that the discreptancy has gotten so big at least some are considering things like double blm two melee, or tripple melee and use some cheese strats, like who cares if one melee loses 500 dps because of mechanics not designed for them if they start at 1500 above the ranged they replace. Also, and that cant be stressed enough, they are NOT competing on a personal dps basis, they are competing on a raid dps basis, you don't need to imagine how much better or worse battle voice is than devotion or whatever, FFLOGS flat out tells it to you

And I mean, my own wishes aside they couldn’t increase the utility for ranged DPS for the exact same reason (would create an imbalance). So it doesn’t sound like this works as a valid way to balance the role between others anymore. I know the whole post is just going to seen as my way and it makes to try and justify turning ranged into some abhorrent mutant support role, and it’s a fair assumption to make based on my post history I guess lol. But for once, I’m not trying to suggest that utility is ‘the’ way to adjust this, because realistically it’s the exact opposite way of adjusting the balance, at least from the majority of what I’ve seen

"utility" is a nice word, but encounter design pushes dps as king, but even so why do you think it would necessarely create an unbalance ? lets say smn does 400 dps more than (buffed) brd/mch/dnc/rdm and loses the rezz, redmage can rezz, bard can give mana again, mch gets 2 nice dmg reduce cooldowns, dnc whatever i'm out of ideas. this would be way harder to balance than simply damage (and actually be a lot more subjective) which is why i'm personally against it, but at least than there would be choices/tradeoffs. as it stands everyone basically has the same utility so of course at that point you can only balance with damage

If only a small gap exists between these jobs, then there is a balance there, but then we still have the ‘ultimate’ jobs with DPS shooting up the top. If only a small gap exists between these jobs and ones like Black Mage, doesn’t that create a whole other kind of imbalanced ‘meta’? Why take Black Mage if you only do 200 DPS less as a Bard/Machinist for 10% of the effort?

because that line is bullshit, blackmage is not 10 times harder than any of the physical ranged, it isn't even twice as hard or whatever, if it where physical ranged would reign supreme at lower percentiles (hint: while there is some upwind even at 10% percentiles, so REALY FREAKING BAD they absolutely don't do so), see my post two posts above yours why people massively overstate difficulty of their own classes, things like positionals aren't nearly as bad as people make it out to be, and if theres only on blackmage (don't see why double blackmage should be encouraged) than its not that hard for a group to make it so that one does not have to move too much/blackmages aren' nearly as immobile as some people act.

I guess what I’m saying is, how could the ranged DPS role get personal DPS buffs without either invalidating other jobs or the buffs being too small to make an actual difference? Surely the most realistic option to create balance in this context in a way the devs can actually do is lower the potencies of the top jobs and not buff the lower ones? Would buffs to ranged personal DPS really solve anything besides making it harder to balance jobs between each other at the lower end?
[/QUOT] to the relative value of a blackmage (as you used that class as your example of "has to work a lot harder than say physical ranged) it makes literally zero difference if he is bought down 500/1000 dps or if everyone in the bottom 5 is buffed for the same amount, at this point it simply boils down to "buff 5 classes" or "nerf 5 other classes"

Like, what would buffs to the ranged DPS role look like to resolve this issue? Potency buffs? Adjusting Battle Voice / Tactician / Steps for rDPS gains? Adjusting the strength of job unique abilities (e.g Queen Automaton, Apex Arrow, Fourfold Feather)?

all of those/any combination of those. like i'm pretty sure most bards don't care if they get buffed by 900-1000 dps or get back foe's and the 2% passive crit on their songs, the factual dps gap right now is simply to wide is the problem

[Connor]

snip

I see my mistake then, since normally when I see ranged I think of ranged physical rather than both them and casters together. And I definitely agree that mobility doesn’t act as much of an advantage for the ranged physical jobs anymore, so that doesn’t work as a justification for their low DPS.

In terms of the utility part, I’ve said ‘imbalance’, but I more just mean a situation like 4.0 where a ranged was kind of required for stuff like Refresh (it definitely wasn’t impossible if you didn’t haven’t one, but it was very valuable). I can get why the developers don’t want to have this kind of the thing happen again. At the same time, you’re right that those kinds of utility can exist and not create that kind of situation, though the difficulties that come with balancing those kinds of abilities make it difficult to implement.

I think difficulty is ultimately a matter of perception. Bard feels extremely easy to me because I’ve been playing it since 2.0, and I feel the same way with Scholar. I guess, from the perception of someone who mostly plays Black Mage, it might feel they have to put in way more effort to do well as a Bard or Scholar than Black Mage if they didn’t play them often. So, it doesn’t seem like the whole ‘ranged are easier’ thing works as justification for lower damage.

That just leaves me wondering though, why did the developers have ranged so low on damage in the first place? I mean, there’s at least an argument about Red Mages being able to spam Raise, but there’s already plenty of other threads on why that isn’t really a fair ‘tax’.

But for Bard/Machinist/Dancer/Summoner, I wonder why they thought it would be ok for there to be such a big gap between them and the ‘top’ jobs when mobility doesn’t grant them a significant advantage, difficulty in execution is largely relative for any job, and raid utility doesn’t act to close the gap. Then again, it seems a common trend in discussing changes to any role that the main question is ‘what exactly were the developers thinking?’. It’s definitely there amongst most healer discussion too, I can’t say I know much about tanks so won’t try and speak for what’s going on in discussions going on in that role.

In terms of what kind of adjustments the role would get, i more meant ‘what do you think is most likely’ than ‘what would you like to see?’ Not that I disagree, I think most players in the ranged DPS are more concerned with the gap being closed than what they do to close it, which I can totally get.

Like, some I can think of from the top of my head would be increasing the maximum potency of Apex Arrow, which would help close the gap and not require making any adjustments to how the Bard plays currently. Dancer might get buffs to the potency of Cascade / Fountain, since they’re the most used abilities as the ‘filler’ abilities, which should give it quite a good DPS boost if they’re boosted high enough (possibly Reverse Cascade / Fountainfall buffs too).

I feel like, when they do make adjustments to jobs in the ranged role, the main concern will be to close the gap without making any adjustments to the playstyle. Not that I think there’s anything wrong with that, since it’s the most straightforward way to adjust the jobs whilst not upsetting the players that like the job how it is currently (DPS gap aside).