Physical range dps damage?

[ForteNightshade]

Because we can dodge everything with no real danger involved. Melee is in constant danger of being hit, ranged isn't.

The issue is even despite these inherent weaknesses, Melee still beat the Range in fights where they are heavily disadvantaged. In fact, lets look at E6S—arguably the most unfriendly melee fight in years.

Summoner - 16,911
Black Mage - 16,575
Ninja - 16,325
Samurai - 16,214
Red Mage - 16,005
Monk - 15,950
Dragoon - 15,917
Machinist - 15,857
Dancer - 15,422
Bard - 14,970

That is the spread at 95%. Bear in mind, Monk and, especially Dragoon, have no way to mitigate disengagement. Meditation is meager compensation for a GCD loss and Piercing Talon is so laughably weak, it's actually better for a Dragoon to do absolutely nothing in most cases. So a Dragoon literally not attacking at several points does more damage than an optimized Machinist, Bard or Dancer. Bard, in particular, is so far behind in E6S, it's bordering on useless. We could somewhat justify this if utility such as Refresh, Foe's and the like still existed. Instead, Range "support" is Troubadour and friends. Are they really so much better than Feint to justify such a massive difference?

Now lets look at E7S, where Melee downtime is basically non-existent. Dragoon jumps to over 1,400 more rDPS than Dancer; 1,100 over Bard, and 800 over Machinist. Meanwhile, you'll notice the Casters have essentially zero issues regardless of the fight design. If positionals and uptime are going to be an excuse then Melee should deal the highest damage since they stand to lose the most. That isn't the case as no matter the encounter, Summoner is significantly ahead all but Samurai.

[EaMett]

snip

This!

An argument could have been made around the concept that perhaps the skill floor for the ranged physical classes was such that at lower percentiles the ranged did higher dps than other classes at lower percentiles (because while everyone is learning positionals,placements,etc the ranged can still dps). This would place the ranged physical in a "good for newer players not so good for optimized play" But that's not even really true. The only place you see this is lower percentile MCH doing roughly as well as lower percentile BLM and this has more to do with BLM doing very little damage at lower percentiles than anything else. Once BLM learns placements that's enough for mch to fall behind again.

[SaitoHikari]

-snip-

In regards to the E7S point, Bards have a huge advantage during add phase, where we can double dot 3 different enemies and maintain all for about the 2 minutes that the phase lasts, leading to drastically increased repertoire proc rates.

Even with this advantage, Bard STILL falls behind by a huge margin.