So...is the Ranged Role gone? Are we in a Reverse HW?

[Lastelli]

I mean, compared to melee having one opener, a fixed rotation, etc. you should know ranged are harder to optimize?

You talk as if it wasn't the same for ranged dps. MCH in particular has a pretty fixed rotation with some slight possible deviations because their resources can be used flexibly. But this flexibility makes the job easier and more convenient, not harder. You can even let drill and anchor drift as long as you don't miss uses and nothing changes in terms of potency per second. FFlogs data also tell us that compared to other jobs, the difference between the median dps and higher percentiles is much lower for MCH. With a few reasonable assumptions, this tells us that the role of optimization is smaller (=good play is less rewarded).

How would that be easier than simply increasing the Range's damage? Take what they have now and throw 500-800 more rDPS on them. Bam, you're pretty much done. There is nothing interesting about mechanics that force downtime for melee or tanks. Lemme tell you, Hello, World 2 without uptime strats was not fun. I got to sit on a marker and do absolutely nothing—to the point I was legit happy whenever we wiped on those pulls.

If you just buff potencies, you raise dps across the board and you're not giving anything to reward good play. You're rewarding mediocre players as well, which defeats the whole purpose.

[Aiscence]

You talk as if it wasn't the same for ranged dps. MCH in particular has a pretty fixed rotation with some slight possible deviations because their resources can be used flexibly. But this flexibility makes the job easier and more convenient, not harder. You can even let drill and anchor drift as long as you don't miss uses and nothing changes in terms of potency per second. FFlogs data also tell us that compared to other jobs, the difference between the median dps and higher percentiles is much lower for MCH. With a few reasonable assumptions, this tells us that the role of optimization is smaller (=good play is less rewarded).

If you let your drill and AA drift, it leads to them not being synched anymore during raidbuffs, which means a loss in optimisation. You get shorter windows to be able to HC because AA or drill are not where they should or making them be the last GCD of your WF, which doesnt work most of the time on our servers.

And it is smaller, but it's still super important if you want to hit those high percentile, and you cant allow any little mistake, be able to know when to summon your first turret to be able to summon a 100 one during the maximum raidbuff time but still have the last hit touch at its peak, etc. Like it's so bullshit for the so little gain I didnt even bother this tier to try to optimize (I even let a friend play mch for TEA, even tho i never wanted to swap from mch in the past).

Even worse when you were seeing a 95% mch during 5.0 having less dps than a high grey monk

[ForteNightshade]

If you just buff potencies, you raise dps across the board and you're not giving anything to reward good play. You're rewarding mediocre players as well, which defeats the whole purpose.

You're also punishing melee players which has the adverse effect of making the role less desirable as a whole. If the mechanics were bad enough to see a noticeable decline in damage or simply were just irritating, you'd begin seeing them locked out. So now it's double Casters dominating and we're back to where we started.

Buffing the Range is simply balancing the jobs across the board. You aren't rewarding mediocre players but simply bringing three jobs up so they do closer damage to the remaining seven.