Ranged DPS role is about to be excluded from all content

[Kitfox]

seriously guys cmon, its the same old pattern again. iam sure they going to buff every class later, they just doing it one by one. first AST and MNK, now the NIN and SAM, so yeah give it time.

How much time? In Stormblood, MCH was released in a seriously underpowered state, it got mechanical changes and buffs at 4.05 and 4.06 that happened within 2 months, but then it remained in the shadow of BRD for 16 months until it was buffed at 4.5 to finally be on par with other jobs. Not really looking forward to playing a dead job for the whole expansion again. Not to mention, our ping issues haven't been fixed for like 2 years now. Since it took them over 4 years from NIN release to realize they might have a problem with latency, I'm not really holding my breath for MCH changes, but I really don't want to wait another 2 years until 6.0 to have those fixed.

So far they haven't even mentioned making changes to ranged classes so we definitely need to put the issues on their radar.

[Aiscence]

Can only confirm what lynn is saying. We were okay-ish during delta because casters were really bad and the only moment where we got a buff was when the content wasn't relevant again. (and i'm not speaking of the turret not attacking that took till 4.2 to be patched and the flamethrower couldn't crit or dh till 4.3 so HALF the expansion.)

[ForteNightshade]

seriously guys cmon, its the same old pattern again. iam sure they going to buff every class later, they just doing it one by one. first AST and MNK, now the NIN and SAM, so yeah give it time.

And the buffs they gave Samurai are laughable considering it still can't pull ahead of Dragoon, let alone Monk. I genuinely believe they think we pad Samurais, which is why they refuse to buff i. Which is absolutely asinine considering a cursory glance would show the jobs getting padded right now are Monk and Black Mage. Regardless, why should any job wait months—potentially years—because the dev team is too damn slow? They could literally keep everything the same gameplay wise and just slap an extra 800-900 potency on each of the weaker jobs; perhaps slightly more for Dancer, and that would solve this problem entirely. It's that easy. Will they though? Nope. It'll take the Range being kicked to the curb, potentially even in Ultimate, before they panic buff them. This begs the question. Why do jobs have to reach dire states before the dev team pays attention?

[CKNovel]

While I agree the range should be brought up, people cleared all content on week 1 with all jobs so I can't believe this is to be an actual issue.

My static has a Nin and a BRD and we cleared E2S on week2 with no dps issue (, and had we raid 2 more days the first week it would have been a week 1 clear)

So, yes they should be buffed, but any party not bringing a range because of that 1k difference isn't worth much.
If your group just has every player at 40% perf that should be enough to get a clear on any boss, especially with the 460 weapon

Personnal experience:
Our comp is MNK/MCH/DNC/RDM.
We have 2 rangeds, and the worst caster. We cleared E3S week 2. Any job is viable, aka you can clear content with it, it's not a dead job.

Our DPS was far from bad, we even cleared E3S on enrage after a Healer LB3!
But our Dancer was previously a Dragoon, he was tired of the job in SB and now he intend back to Dragoon because our DPS is low for the sole reason that we have 3 jobs that are not in the DPS Pantheon. In other words: You can't play the job you enjoy because you'll put more work on the rest of the party.
We have a strong desire to tackle Ultimate but without adjusments on ranged, we would have to work and perform more than half of the other comps because we don't have the right jobs, how is it fair? It's not like the mobility would make give us an incredible advantage.

We meet E4S DPS requirement with a small margin.
But because we have 2 ranged, our group cannot afford to make more mistakes than a MNK/DRG/BLM/BLM comp.
The irony.

[Akiudo]

a lot of people also have this idea that keeping uptime as a melee and doing positionals is this incredibly hard thing, i can only assume this comes from people that haven't played many non melee dps, at least not on a higher level than "hey, i cleared the normal mode raid on my bard once", as someone who has played his fair share of most dps classes in the game (yes, also in raid settings) i can say that this just isn't true, like yes, keeping in melee range and positionals both add a layer of difficulty, but so does (taking bard as an example here) having to watch out for procs and dynamically changing up your rotation based on those the whole fight instead of knowing the next 10 buttons you will press in advance.

Also the punishment for missing a positional or two is not nearly what people make it out to be. Napkin mathed it out yesterday, and at 75% percentile (took levi dps numbers here because no positionals=no positionals missed) as a monk if you would miss every single positional aside from bootshine, like intentionally move to the wrong position on a boss every single time you would lose around 500 dps compared to playing perfectly, and considering monk is about 1500 dps above the ranged at this point that leaves a 1000 dps buffer which means you could also miss like 8% uptime if you intentionally fuck up nearly every single positional and still do the same raid dps than a comparable ranged, people cant seriously argue thats fair because "staying in range and hitting positionals is hard"

[SaitoHikari]

We meet E4S DPS requirement with a small margin.
But because we have 2 ranged, our group cannot afford to make more mistakes than a MNK/DRG/BLM/BLM comp.
The irony.

That's the major thing that really worries me about the DPS gap becoming as wide as it is (plus the gap separating the top classes from the bottom five).

We all know Ultimate is highly tuned to require intense coordination and expects high performance from every single player in the team. But with a gap this large, it begs the question: What party comp will it be balanced around, which also means what level of damage should we expect to do to clear it? If the situation remains as is and all of the bottom five don't receive substantial buffs, the developers cannot seriously claim that the next Ultimate will be clear-able with any party composition at all.

(Arguing with FC friends about the situation resulted in a fair amount of people thinking that my interest in this was purely from a personal standpoint. But no, I always had a vested interest in future-proofing, and the situation now threatens to affect future encounter design in a big way. This is exactly why the uproar now is so much louder than it ever was before.)

[Connor]

I’m starting to get a little confused now with how exactly this issue would be resolved?

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, even if it’s like 200 DPS would it even move their position in the rankings? It would close the gap between the top and bottom, but it wouldn’t resolve the fact that DPS is the only measure of a jobs contributions because of job design, and thus the lower down the ‘rankings’ a job is the less valuable it will be compared to those at the top, unless the gap becomes so small that it’s negligible, which would invert the imbalanced to be weighted towards ranged DPS because of their apparent convenience. And while I do agree that the mobility isn’t an advantage like it was before, I do think there’s a case for the argument that ranged DPS are very easy to execute at an acceptable level compared to other roles.

Edit: I wrote a paragraph here weighting up the ‘ranged is easier’ argument and whether that would justify where ranged are now. And I eventually concluded that this really only applies to Bards. You have literally 3 GCD abilities that you’ll use like normal GCDs lol; Burst Shot, Refulgent Arrow and Iron Jaws. Procs are always one at a time, there are no utility abilities to managed, songs might as well apply automatically and you have no restrictions on any of your abilities (cast times, positionals, range requirements, mechanical restrictions like the time taken for Steps, resource costs or decision making). I wouldn’t argue there’s much depth in pressing Iron Jaws just before buffs fall off. Dancer at least has the Step system, decision making on when to use Feathers or Sabre Dance, and a set of procs that happen simultaneously (fans and Esprit) rather than one at a time. And Machinist, I’ll admit I’ve not played it in ages but I feel like dealing with squeezing as many attacks into Wildfire as possible is complexity enough lol. So I don’t feel like the ‘theyre easier argument’ applies outside of Bard

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?

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?

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.

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

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?

I guess what I’m saying (what I should have said 90 paragraphs ago) 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?


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)?

[CrashofZenki]

Its still safer and better to still take Ranged classes over NIN. 5.08 Still didnt balance anything. The only thing it did was make PFs open up for NIN.

[Kitfox]

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)?

The point is that the ranged jobs need to be within the role bonus range for them to be a valid pick for a party slot. They need to be the highest dps option without doubling up on other roles. Role bonus is supposed to help with this, but it's not enough with the dps gap being as large it is. Currently with total raid dps being around 70k-90k that would mean that ranged jobs like MCH that don't offer any utility advantages should be within 700-900 dps of the highest dps class or they risk being totally replaced, currently we're trailing rival jobs by 1500-2000 dps. I'd say as long as we're within roughly 70% of role bonus dps from the highest dps, we'd be safe from being excluded from the party. For example, if the ranged role bonus provides around 800 raid dps to a party doing 80k rdps, we shouldn't be more than 500 dps behind BLM.

Raise is a unique utility that the devs have decided should cost the provider max dps potential so in some sense it's justified that RDM and SMN do lower dps. However, ranged jobs don't offer any unique utility like that apart from fairly weak heals so it's not really fair our dps to be too low. Raise tax is a subject on its own so I'm not going to comment on it besides thinking that it's also much too severe of a penalty currently.

"Effort" and "difficulty" are really bad balancing factors due to their subjectivity. The fact is that being a mobile ranged brings no dps advantages at higher levels of play, the dps numbers are a testament to that, so it shouldn't be as much of max dps potential penalty as it is currently.

Nerfing or buffing both work fine, we just need to achieve balance, though I think SE is way too careful with nerfing classes so it might not happen.

The other way would be to give ranged unique mandatory utility, like Refresh used to be. That forces parties to take one and guarantees the party slot. Currently none of the ranged have anything like that though.

[Miminming]

They should consider lock contents with one melee one caster one range and one free slot to get a loot any party lack in the role wont have any drop...