A summary of healer issues

[Absurdity]

Yep, and by making them all 2min, the potential choice of 'ok blow 90's and 2mins here, hold 3's we won't have another use of them so keep them till the pot window' is gone. In it's place, we have two options, everyone holds, or everyone blows em on CD. And the best part is, people still can't keep stuff aligned, because fight design gets in the way. Even with 30y range, the final fight has people spread so far apart for one of the 2min windows you can't hit everyone, which means a SCH or NIN can put their debuff on the boss just fine, but the DRG and BRD can't get their stuff out till a couple seconds later when the mechanic is out of the way.

So ofc, the SE solution is likely going to be 'Brotherhood range increased to 50y'

This. Good groups were already aligning their raid buffs, so all these changes did, at least in theory, was take most of the planning out of it by simply making all buffs have the same cooldown.


The same goes for the melee changes. Yes melees still deal more damage than ranged dps but a big part of the difficulty when playing melee came from keeping uptime with the relatively limited melee range while dealing with mechanics.
The changes to boss hitboxes eliminated that aspect of playing a melee dps entirely, so who was this change made for? Clearly not the people at the skill ceiling that were already capable of keeping uptime as much as possible.

The fact that melee dps still perform significantly better than ranged dps however is a case of them digging their heels in for no justifiable reason.

[tearagion]

The fact that melee dps still perform significantly better than ranged dps however is a case of them digging their heels in for no justifiable reason.

The justifiable reason is that range is still an advantage, even with huge EW hitboxes. Melee is the most populous dps role, with the most individual jobs. If physranged were equal to melee in damage there would be no reason not to run 2 of them in every fight. So melee dps being ahead of anything with range and mobility is healthier for pf and (theoretically) for job playrate distribution. Are there other solutions? Obviously, but the difference isn't completely nonsensical.

[ty_taurus]

How Ranged tax should work in general is that the tax should compensate for the damage melee jobs otherwise lose due to needing to move around--or more specifically, the average amount of DPS that melee is expected to lose. Optimal melee gameplay would still make melee overall stronger than ranged, particularly the better your teams strategy gets at maximizing uptime.

[ForsakenRoe]

A solution would be, even with these massive hitboxes, that melee have more damage swing. Between +5% over a ranged, and -5% over a ranged, based on how competent the melee player is at doing melee-specific things like, idk, positionals? So if you just stood on the boss's arse as a melee, you'd do the same damage as a same-skilled, same-geared ranged. If you do the positional dance, you eke out a little extra damage from your class. Except SE is deathly allergic to things that give players a way to express skill like positionals, hence they keep adding more ways to avoid having to deal with them, up to and including having bosses that just don't have any at all

[Semirhage]

The justifiable reason is that range is still an advantage, even with huge EW hitboxes. Melee is the most populous dps role, with the most individual jobs. If physranged were equal to melee in damage there would be no reason not to run 2 of them in every fight. So melee dps being ahead of anything with range and mobility is healthier for pf and (theoretically) for job playrate distribution. Are there other solutions? Obviously, but the difference isn't completely nonsensical.

If that were the case, why are casters behind melee? Endwalker Standard Fight Design is rapid, constant movement back and forth across the arena, left foot in, left foot out, left foot in, turn around, hokey pokey move move move move move gameplay that throws caster gameplay into the dirt, yet casters are balanced as if they're significantly easier to play than melee.

[tearagion]

If that were the case, why are casters behind melee? Endwalker Standard Fight Design is rapid, constant movement back and forth across the arena, left foot in, left foot out, left foot in, turn around, hokey pokey move move move move move gameplay that throws caster gameplay into the dirt, yet casters are balanced as if they're significantly easier to play than melee.

because we have one physranged pretending to be a caster, and a half-caster that is permanently shackled to them for all balance decisions. BLM dps is about where it should be imo.

[Semirhage]

because we have one physranged pretending to be a caster, and a half-caster that is permanently shackled to them for all balance decisions. BLM dps is about where it should be imo.

See also the "But Verraise" thread in the DPS section. RDM is being thrown to the wolves for utility Square has done its level best to make as irrelevant as possible, while also creating movement profiles that hate hardcasts with a passion. Monk has similar utility to RDM, and yet it gets to do way more damage. Because lolMeleewalker, all fight design absurdly caters to melee and Square gifts them huge damage bonuses they keep buffing more and more with each patch, for difficulty they keep stripping out more and more each patch.

[Shurrikhan]

That would mostly depend on how you define that. For example, unifying the buffs does not favor the lowest denominator, since it favors groups that coordinate their buffs since them being ABLE to be aligned means doing so generates a huge boost in performance over those who do not. That very much does not favor "the lowest denominator".

Previously, you'd hold CDs variably and coordinate compositions. Now, if you open even just not-too-stupidly, your CDs are synced to raid buffs automatically, because everything shares the same timers.

That's... objectively simplified.

The design intent there is to give advantage to the harder thing over the easier thing. That also is not favoring "the lowest denominator", as if the intent was to favor "the lowest denominator", it would be the Ranged allowed to do more damage.

Not at all. If people were enjoyed added difficulty, itself (at least as importantly, including whatever extra they may saddle their party with in their shortfalls while learning) there would be no need to incentivize the jobs that are harder to learn with greater on-paper damage so that they have parity for the average player while content is still relevant.

Rewarding what's harder allows you to have even significantly easier jobs --for better or worse-- without reducing the breadth of job choice available to even less-skilled players (who would otherwise feel pushed only towards whatever's easiest -- say, MCH/BRD/EW SMN).

[tearagion]

See also the "But Verraise" thread in the DPS section. RDM is being thrown to the wolves for utility Square has done its level best to make as irrelevant as possible, while also creating movement profiles that hate hardcasts with a passion. Monk has similar utility to RDM, and yet it gets to do way more damage. Because lolMeleewalker, all fight design absurdly caters to melee and Square gifts them huge damage bonuses they keep buffing more and more with each patch, for difficulty they keep stripping out more and more each patch.

I'm not debating balance, I'm inferring what I could reasonably believe SE's balance policy to be based on role distribution and developer comments, which is admittedly still spotty especially in RDM's case. Either way I don't think it contradicts my original assumption.

[Semirhage]

I'm not debating balance, I'm inferring what I could reasonably believe SE's balance policy to be based on role distribution and developer comments, which is admittedly still spotty especially in RDM's case. Either way I don't think it contradicts my original assumption.

I thought your original point was that melee's favoritism wasn't nonsensical, which it -absolutely- is given Square's systematic stripping of role-specific difficulty from them. "Range" isn't an advantage when there are five square yalms in the entire arena unreachable from max melee, which mechanic design never forces the whole party into (or makes the boss untargetable and forces downtime on everyone if ranged classes could possibly get a single GCD of uptime that the melees couldn't).

Advantages are only advantages if the game lets them be advantages. Square has spent all of Endwalker insisting that Range is an advantage large enough to justify a huge DPS cliff between melee and non-melee, while designing an expansion's worth of fights that let you punch bosses from the next city over and pretend that's not "range".