Physical range dps damage?

[Vaer]

I mean, I guess ranged could remain as the ‘easy mode mechanics’ job, but then as others have said I have to wonder how much of an advantage ranged mobility actually affords, since it’s not like casters can’t bypass movement requirements with instant casts, or melee have absolutely no ranged attacks or gap-closers to mitigate disengagement downtime. Not that I’m saying they don’t need to consider cast times / downtime because of these abilities, just that they aren’t exactly rooted to the spot for whole fights at a time

Personally I think passive mobility and high uptime is a significant advantage when the game revolves on keeping the GCD going and the amount of positioning mechanics the game throws at you. Mechanic design varies and sometimes it punishes casters more than melee and vice versa, but ranged don't have to worry about that most of the time. Ranged can even stand in for melee positioning spots with minimal damage loss.

Disengaging on melee and cast interruptions on caster are decent potency drops. Dropping a cast at the wrong time on BLM is painful.

In a perfect world, all dps subtypes are using their support skills though. Addle, Feint, Second Wind, Bloodbath, Tactician line, Mantra/Minne/Waltz all support the healers.

It seems like they usually balance the subroles against each other first (the dev's version of the ideal dps comp is 1 melee, 1 ranged, 1 caster - enforced by the party stat bonus in an 8 person party). This is why RDM was buffed, it was seriously lagging behind BLM and SMN.

They then balance them all to make them all viable for the floater 4th spot. This spot has usually gone to melee recently but this tier there are a lot more 2 caster comps primarily due to SMN and the RDM buffs.

I think at most the utility penalty should be around 4-6% from the top depending on the type of utility, so ranged could probably use a slight buff.

Mostly I think they're probably a bit more conservative for the ranged subrole in general because it went through a bunch of expansions where stacking ranged was common due to the synergy with Dragoon and casters were the first to be replaced in those situations leaving the party comp as 2 melee and 2 ranged.