Physical range dps damage?

[SaitoHikari]

I’m pretty most people in this thread are arguing for either more personal damage, or more raid DPS contribution. Not both at once, or else you get what Stormblood Bard was, where I consistently topped the damage charts as a 90+ percentile Bard and offered ridiculous utility everywhere.

Simply more raid contribution via utility skills is vastly preferable, but all signs point to the devs giving up on that for the rest of the expansion. The one class that did get a minor party utility buff paid for it by an across the board nerf to their most consistent means of damage, something that hit them much harder than whatever the hell the Summoner nerf was supposed to be about. And it was to the point where it was only a slight benefit at endgame, and a brutal unnecessary hit to their personal damage in all content before that (to the level of doing 8-10% less personal damage in Stormblood ultimate raids today compared to pre-expansion, while everyone else saw significant buffs in older content).

So yeah, it’s not really surprising that ranged mains are a bit miffed at the devs, and are defaulting to just asking for more personal damage. They justify our low contribution because of our utility, but... Exactly what utility do they actually mean, when they already took so much of it away from everyone in the first place? Troubadour/Samba/Tactician? Then what does Addle and Feint mean to the devs on the balancing chalkboard? Does free movement really matter so much that it’s somehow acceptable that a 90+ percentile Bard will still provide less raid contribution than the Monk or Summoner that dies once during the fight?

(Oh, and speaking as someone who is on E8S prog, the ‘ranged uptime’ is highly overblown. There aren’t any mechanics in 5-7S that force melee and casters to disengage for any longer than a single GCD with the correct timing. Anything that could tends to affect everyone at once, with parties adjusting positioning to cater for maximum uptime, and melee/casters have enough tools to keep uptime for longer mechanics when played properly. Only 8S might present problems, but people are shifting to double caster comps for that rather than double ranged. That tells us that the issue there is melee are in exceptional danger for that fight, while casters don’t see much difference.

People tend to forget that double or more ranged party comps were only ever a response to stacking party buffs for maximum damage. The past meta was NEVER ever in response to mechanics or boss design, so to suddenly argue that it’s okay for ranged contribution today to be that far behind because lol uptime from anywhere is highly disingenuous. If uptime mattered that much to the point where party composition revolved around it, the consistent standard nowadays wouldn’t be two melee.)