Is Blm gonna be the only accepted range option now? :(

[Akiudo]

First and foremost, Machinist can never rival Black Mage and Samurai in damage due to their free mobility. While the "tax" shouldn't be anywhere near as high as it is currently, there still needs to be one otherwise it and the Range as a whole have a distinct advantage over Melee.

not trying to start an argument or saying i disagree, i do somewhat, but i will clarify that after my question, but what do people, be it you or anyone else that wants to chime in feel would be a fair tax ? preferably in current raidtier numbers, thats less abstract.

Reason why i ask is specifically the last part of you i quoted, "otherwise range as a whole have a distinc advantage over melee", because that gets mentioned often, but what is that advantage ? i mean obviously it is "can still deal full damage while running in circles" i get that, but i mean is this : as you yourself said the current tier it wouldn't be that bad, but generally speaking if samurai and mch both simply hit the boss like a training dummy and they are equal than the moment this isn't the case anymore mch (or "the ranged) will allways be better than the melee, that much is true and i will never deny that.

However, lets flip this around, if a semi competent melee can do a fight only losing 200 dps do to movement, and the ranged is 200 dps on a dummy fight below the melee, wouldn't that just reverse the situation that people call "ranged advantage" ? wouldn't their need to be a break even point where in fact the ranged does have the advantage ? Not talking about 99% here because at this point you will basically get the one try where the melee simply didn't have to move even though the mechanic generally exists, or the whole group catered the dealings of mechanics to a single person, but at the 90-95 range, so realistically the top. and yes, you could argue "staying in range" takes skill not expected from a ranged, but at the same time you could argue "doing your rotation perfectly while dealing with a mechanic so all melees can stay still and explicitly not deal with it" takes skill not expected from a melee

[ForteNightshade]

not trying to start an argument or saying i disagree, i do somewhat, but i will clarify that after my question, but what do people, be it you or anyone else that wants to chime in feel would be a fair tax ? preferably in current raidtier numbers, thats less abstract.

A fair tax would be somewhere in the 200-300 rDPS range. It should be small—just enough to compensate for potential tiers that aren't melee friendly and to not have melee screwed as much for non-uptime strats. Even this tier does have instances where melee lose some GCDs, particularly Titan. Personally, I would prefer they just gave support abilities back to the Range and let them have a separate niche. For example sake, if I were to tier each job...

BLM/SAM
MNK/SMN/MCH
DRG/NIN/BRD/RDM
DNC

And the DPS difference between Dancer and Black Mage shouldn't be too high.

[Kitfox]

not trying to start an argument or saying i disagree, i do somewhat, but i will clarify that after my question, but what do people, be it you or anyone else that wants to chime in feel would be a fair tax ? preferably in current raidtier numbers, thats less abstract.

I think anything below 5% would be fair. At 90k raid dps that's about 800 dps. That's about the maximum the role bonus can cover: tax greater than that makes triple melee and double black mage more competitive than bringing ranged. I wrote about this in my thread about ranged tax so I'll leave the quote here.

In case someone was as curious as I was to how the role bonus interacts with job strength, I made this little calculator that uses simplified dps distributions and custom inputs to play around with different weights for acceptable tax. It's easy to give a ballpark number of how much the role bonus contributes to raid dps but a bit harder to say much that is in percentage of rdps of a single player.

Role tax calculator

With role bonus set to 1% (or maybe a little higher to account for buff multiplication effects) and taxation set to ~90% of role bonus amount results in roughly 5-6% acceptable dps loss to stay within striking distance of the top dps jobs. So if a BLM is doing 100% dps then a ranged should do around 94-95% of that amount. Anything beyond 7-8% loss puts ranged at the risk of being totally replaced. Currently with ranged jobs being ~10% behind the high hitters means that ranged tax is closer to 150-170% of the role bonus amount.

There's an argument that can be made for 100% tax based on the fact that role bonus also gives bonus VIT and therefore HP, so breaking even would still grant an advantage. The tax could also be increased a little bit to account for rdps losses other classes would suffer when doing mechanics more suitable for ranged players, but mechanics like these are very few and far between and honestly quite negligible if it only costs a couple of gcds for the player. Not to mention if those losses can be turned into tank or healer uptime losses they become a lot milder than losses dps roles would suffer. I don't think a tax higher than 105% of role bonus can be justified because we're simply not pressured enough with ranged mobility mechanics.

Over 10% rdps loss for simply being a mobile class is not justifiable. Ranged classes pretty much need a flat 5% buff across the board.

[CKNovel]

I'd rather see the tax around 300 to 400 rDPS if ranged gets additionnal support.
Refresh would be useless in the current healers never running out of MP.
A dismantle like cooldown WITH Tactician would be so broken I'm not even sure 400 rDPS tax would be enough.

At max, 500 rDPS with additionnal support.
At min, 300 rDPS.

You have to take in account that currently the only ranged advantage is Tactician and the mobility. Minne's Nature and healing valse are quite weak.
The melee actually gains dps by having 2 ranged and would probably loose DPS with 4 melee but not enough for the tax to be punishing. I think without uptime strat and doing mechanics as if they were rangeds, melee would suffer a 300 to 500 rDPS at most. But don't take my word, I haven't made the calculations or tried this scenario.

[Shurrikhan]

It's still a significant disparity for now, but still one that you, personally, will only face if you happen to be at least nearly as good at BLM as at the other ranged jobs and if SMN and RDM can't offer much to your group that wouldn't be accounted for in rDPS alone.

[Igeso]

This is how I personally see a good dps balance for the game :

[Akiudo]

This is how I personally see a good dps balance for the game :

first and foremost, i agree with your general direction, and if real numbers would look like that than i don't believe there wouldn't be half as much complaints, or at least not half as much reason to complain, there is however just one thing i have to question, mind you thats not just to you but to everyone. so with that being said :

why do you think raid buffs (i assume you mean dps buffs with that) should be taxed higher than the dps a class factually lost ? if this is your 99, percentile i'm just gonna take your samurai and your ninja here as an example, both are melees and both offer absolutely nothing but dps,one through personal, one through raidbuffs, but still both offer only dps. so why should the ninja be taxed 1600 personal dps for a buff that only buffs the group for 1500 dps ? obviously they will never be perfectly balanced and all, but as we are playing wish fullfillment here right now, what use is buffing the group dps if even in a best case scenario (and i would assume 99% parses are best case scenarios) you lose more personal dps than your buffs will bring the group ?

and yes this would also mean that under totally perfect conditions dnc should actually overtake bard and potentially mch (don't know what "utility dancer has, like really no idea, can only say that by far the most usefull "utility" of bard is troubadour which mch and dancer both have their own versions off), again though, i don't want to bash on your numbers, i think the general direction is a good one, i simply fail to see the usefullness off "raid buffs" if even under perfect circumstances you pay more personal than the whole group gets in exchange

[Igeso]

Because rDPS is a "theoretical" value depending on how your team is performing, those numbers for contribution are only an average not the best ones, you can have a NIN outdpsing (rDPS not pDPS obviously) a BLM if the whole team is doing well (yes you can still do 99th with a bad team if your pDPS is high enough or do 99th with an average pDPS but a really good team).

The second reason is that death has a bigger penalty on a selfish dps than a buffer dps, the weakness buff is only applied on your pDPS, not the buff/debuff you're bringing.
here's an exemple (with those numbers) : if a SAM dies his weakness buff is applied on his dps and will do way less rDPS than a NIN who died, because the weakness debuff isn't applied on the TA (it can only be, in the worst case, a bit delayed depending on where and when you died. It will also be a bit less efficient because the user died).

That's my opinion, but well, those numbers aren't actually from me tbh, just something I found on some other forums and found interesting.

[Akiudo]

Because rDPS is a "theorical" value depending on how your team is performing, those numbers for contribution are only an average not the best ones, you can have a NIN outdpsing (rDPS not pDPS obviously) a BLM if the whole team is doing well (yes you can still do 99th with a bad team if your pDPS is high enough or do 99th with an average pDPS but a really good team).

well thats a point i would disagree with, you aren't entirely wrong with your argument, however you could just aswell say "a ninja is even more dependant on a good team, therefore in an ideal world he should get something out of it", (btw, an "average" ninja would by definition sit around the 50% percentile, the best group in the world won't push them to 99%) also yes these numbers are an average, of the literal top 1%, at this point samurai is superior in 99% off all cases, i really don't see why we should have this as the intentional design goal because "at the top 0,1% ninja may actually pull 20 dps extra" Also one should never take max parses for comparisons, at the very very VERY top their will allways be some way to cheese something, things like intentionally dragging out a fight 5 more seconds so someone gets his big 1500 potency finisher in or catering to a class in a way thats totally unrealistic like throwing shield after shield on a blackmage so he can stand in shit and whatnot

The second reason is that death has a bigger penalty on a selfish dps than a buffer dps, the weakness buff is only applied on your pDPS, not the buff/debuff you're bringing.
here's an exemple (with those numbers) : if a SAM dies his weakness buff is applied on his dps and will do way less rDPS than a NIN who died, because the weakness debuff isn't applied on the TA (it can only be, in the worst case, a bit delayed depending on where and when you died. It will also be a bit less efficient because the user died).

that one actually has some merit, however it misses one crucial point. if we are at the top percentiles there is no dead. you won't pull 99 or even 95 if you died, if you pull 95 with a death you obviously where on pace for world record before, got rezzed in seconds and where not at a critical part of your rotation where suddenly you lost all resources. there will be a bit less of a loss most likely, but seing as even for the really strong raid contributors buffs are like 11-13% of their total damage, that only dampens the actual penalty do to dying by a miniscule amount.

mind you, there are obviously also lower levels of play then 99% or even 95% parses, in fact out of a 100 parses 94 will be worse then 95% but thats exactly why i asked "if even in a best case scenario it is worse" , the aspect of "deaths being less punishing" is true, but only very slightly, and it gets less true the higher up you go.

In an ideal world i would say raidbuffs should overtake personal dps at the highest level of play while falling slightly short before that, you can actually see that happening with bard and mch as at 10% percentiles bard is about 1,5% below mch,than very very slowly is catching up until finally overtaking mch at 99% (by like 7 dps but whatever) in a perfect world i would say bard should be 1% below mch at the low end (so 10% percentile) while being somewhere about 0,5% above it at 95%+. Now obviously there are more than 2 classes, and even i don't think it would be realistic to have the real dps with everything included down to this level of optimization, but we are talking design goals here , not "is it realistic to hit that design goal exactly on point"

That's my opinion, but well, those numbers aren't actually from me tbh, just something I found on some other forums and found interesting.

and i would agree, it is interesting, and also i don't think the numbers are bad, i don't agree with them exactly, like i think (no matter what number that may be) that sam should actually be equal to blm, maybe even slightly above, as addle is more usefull than feint in most cases and i would also say the "mobility" tax is still like a 100 dps too high but that is arguing semantics, balance obviously can allways be improved and at least some things are subjective and thats fine, the whole reason for such a forum is for feedback and discussion

[Katie_Kitty]

first and foremost, i agree with your general direction, and if real numbers would look like that than i don't believe there wouldn't be half as much complaints, or at least not half as much reason to complain, there is however just one thing i have to question, mind you thats not just to you but to everyone. so with that being said :

why do you think raid buffs (i assume you mean dps buffs with that) should be taxed higher than the dps a class factually lost ? if this is your 99, percentile i'm just gonna take your samurai and your ninja here as an example, both are melees and both offer absolutely nothing but dps,one through personal, one through raidbuffs, but still both offer only dps. so why should the ninja be taxed 1600 personal dps for a buff that only buffs the group for 1500 dps ? obviously they will never be perfectly balanced and all, but as we are playing wish fullfillment here right now, what use is buffing the group dps if even in a best case scenario (and i would assume 99% parses are best case scenarios) you lose more personal dps than your buffs will bring the group ?

and yes this would also mean that under totally perfect conditions dnc should actually overtake bard and potentially mch (don't know what "utility dancer has, like really no idea, can only say that by far the most usefull "utility" of bard is troubadour which mch and dancer both have their own versions off), again though, i don't want to bash on your numbers, i think the general direction is a good one, i simply fail to see the usefullness off "raid buffs" if even under perfect circumstances you pay more personal than the whole group gets in exchange

I don't really have a dog in this fight because I'd be happy with what igeso posted (but also agree with you to an extent), but to play devil's advocate, there might be some additional value in being a job that people like to have in order to boost their own DPS numbers. With fflogs using RDPS now that value might be minimal or even zero now though.