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

[BarretOblivion]

My Bard is still very viable. People are freaking out too much. Our dps isn't that bad...it's still pretty much on par with where it's always been. In fact I think I crit a bit more than I used to. Also a Red Mage still does pretty good damage. It might not seem like it if you compare it to the damage a Monk does in a Raid but I can't solo lv. 70 dungeons on a freaking Monk the way I can a Red Mage. It's not all about Raid DPS. A lot of jobs bring different things to the table. If all you care about is pure dps then might as well run everyhting with nothing but Monks. People are also gearing up now so it's not near as big of a deal.

It is about raid dps though. No one cares about dungeons. Again, the point of the entire topic is that once RDM/SMN get the buffs they need then we got a slippery slope issue with physical ranged. All physical ranged are significantly behind BLM, without changes physical ranges will be pushed out in favor of casters or 3 melee. The bonus 1% means nothing if the job you pull in is behind almost 2k dps. This is also a result of the loss of refresh from ranged DPS. In SB it was basically mandatory you had at least one ranged for refresh to keep healers MP healthy if they were DPSing properly. Sure, we ran into an issue where physical ranged had too much utility resulting in double stacking physical ranged because raid buffs were more powerful than a class that could utilize buff to their best. Not only that but all physical ranged DPS got nerfed further than just losing refresh/pallisade. BRD lost thier 2% passive crit buff and foe's requim. MCH lost hyperdrive and dismantle. In the end neither BRD nor MCH got a dps buff to compensate and DNC was released baised off of ranged physicals. Either reintroduce BRD/MCH old raid utility and buff DNC personal damage or buff all physical ranged DPS to be close to casters. (MCH should deal as much as SMN or even slightly more)

[Dogempire]

I'd much rather have the Ranged just be boosted as a whole. Dragging down melee to just meet up with the same current standards Ranged has isn't going to solve anything and if anything seems like an insult imo.

It's more fun to have everyone playing at their best, so if the fights do have melee downtime the variety of buffed up range can cover the gap two BLM's would easily float over in our current state.

I mean that's a fair point, it's just that at the moment I can't really think of any raid in the current tier that has significant melee downtime minus maybe Titan, and even then it depends on how you handle mechanics and consequently enable melee to have more uptime. If raids are going to stay at around the current level of difficulty of melee uptime, I don't see any point in a ranged tax unless it's only 100 or 200 dps.

Optimizing uptime and maintaining a 35+ CPM rotation while on the move are both pretty hard, some people are just better at one than the other.

[ForteNightshade]

Having seen Savage raiders general attitude and behavior in game and here, you better change jobs. You certainly can clear with MCH and it would probably be much more fun for you, but unless you have a static that will embrace that, you will have a hard time finding groups and any time there is a problem you will certainly be blamed for poor dps. I would love it if the raiding community was inviting and willing to work together, but it all comes down to their individual clear and parse, and everyone else is just there to help them.

Casually glances at FFlogs and the fact Bard is currently ranked third in overall uploads; Black Mage fourth; Machinist fifth.

Yes, total exclusion.

[Shurrikhan]

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

Unless this chart is for perfectly sustained theoretical damage and in practice jump periods would otherwise skew results towards burst, so long as DRG and NIN are bringing only damage as their 'utility', they shouldn't be any lower in rDPS than a SAM, imo. If anything they should be faintly higher due to the difficulty needed to exploit rDPS jobs to their fullest (which is to say, you shouldn't balance rDPS jobs around absolute perfection, but simply a very, very high level of play -- better the 95th percentile as your basis than Max, assuming we already had damn near perfect balance). Or, to put it another way, you shouldn't tax damage for bringing... damage. Especially when the 'utility' damage you bring has more risk involved than the normal kinds.

Apart from that, though, I'd love to see about this range of balance and minimal taxation.

[Shurrikhan]

Having seen Savage raiders general attitude and behavior in game and here, you better change jobs. You certainly can clear with MCH and it would probably be much more fun for you, but unless you have a static that will embrace that, you will have a hard time finding groups and any time there is a problem you will certainly be blamed for poor dps. I would love it if the raiding community was inviting and willing to work together, but it all comes down to their individual clear and parse, and everyone else is just there to help them.

Odd how, with the exception of Monk, Savage fflogs parse counts far more closely mirror the player surveys of satisfaction in their jobs' gameplay than the relative rDPS of said jobs...

[Dogempire]

Having seen Savage raiders general attitude and behavior in game and here, you better change jobs. You certainly can clear with MCH and it would probably be much more fun for you, but unless you have a static that will embrace that, you will have a hard time finding groups and any time there is a problem you will certainly be blamed for poor dps. I would love it if the raiding community was inviting and willing to work together, but it all comes down to their individual clear and parse, and everyone else is just there to help them.

Except I didn't have any trouble finding a static as a machinist main and I'm sure most ranged mains don't have trouble either, sure there are more desirable jobs to bring, but if you're a good ranged dps consistently parsing high people are going to want to recruit you because you show skill.

Most statics are going to choose the ranged dps who does mechanics consistently well and pulls consistently high numbers over the melee dps who can't really handle mechanics as well and whose parses are all over the place, but, if you have a ranged dps who can play melee just as well, or heck only slightly worse, you're better off going with the melee job.