The unrewarding state of physical ranged

[Jirah]

Gameplay
The gameplay of MCH has been revamped due to 5.0 Rework, the job feels much better to play and it could be considered as the best MCH iteration. However, many MCH players claim that the job isn’t finished, that it lacks buttons and has boring gameplay. It mostly feels that the job has been designed for Dungeons due to all the AoE useless against a single target.
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wouldnt call it revamped, more so its just been cleaved of whole mechs and support to appeal to the broadest audience which is fine if its well structured which MCH is far from it. MCH issues is not only does it lack consistent juxtaposition to its other mechs but its also a job with alot of fat which is very strange for a job with the least amount of skills. You can casually brush off about 5 skills or so and MCH rotations wouldnt lose much which means its heavily padded. any changes to it would inevitably negative since it needs to trim this fat going forward or itll be a boring stagnating job with just a crap ton of CD gcds and Ogcds that dont mesh with its intial mechanics

[Jirah]

Abit Harsh on BRD since it didnt change much in terms of damage, sure it lost its TP/MP regens, palaside Foes, Straight arrow bar (essentially a weaker Slandered finish buff/ Old style Hotshot) and its Troubadour song based defensive buff changed to be more generic, but none of these are horrid deal breakers and the BRD from SB is still here just without a few things to worry about and dots being percentage based rather than criti based. I wouldnt say its the worst every becuase of these changed or the worst ever because you dont button mash like a toddler with MCH, or ur not supporting like a DNC or as easy like DNC

I do agree that they need serious work to make them more fun and less mindless, Ranged DPS shouldnt be easy mode

[Dogempire]

It is a constant cycle of complaints with no real satisfaction becuase the ideal DPS is one that is highly mobile, High DPS, and zero down time with constantly attacking the enemy.

So... summoner?

[Lastelli]

So... summoner?

You mean the lowest dps after physical ranged at higher percentiles?

[CKNovel]

So... summoner?

Forgot we didn't mentionned SMN at all due to Melee focus.

I'd say current SMN is as mobile as HW MCH/BRD while bringing good support to the team.
The heal provided is not amazing, but it was enough to beat E4S with no healers and some Paladins.
Addle works almost everywhere, I believe.
Res is good for prog but there was always a ton of debate about res that shouldn't be taken in account in job balance.

The SMN is deeply flawed but still gets 40% of unpunishable instant casts. I believe that we spend more than 60% of current savage being static, when bosses are targetable.

You mean the lowest dps after physical ranged at higher percentiles?

Obviously the first reason is the nerf. And all melees received a buff
But I believe this tier is quite melee friendly, allowing melee to have an easier uptime and E11S is harder to gauge due to all the downtime. Jobs like NIN seems to enjoy these to refresh their cooldowns.

Yet, the SMN remains at a healthy spot. SQEX might have nerfed it a bit too much or they should have made a choice between buffing other jobs and nerfing the problematic one.
But it's still healthier than ranged.

[Lastelli]

Forgot we didn't mentionned SMN at all due to Melee focus.

I'd say current SMN is as mobile as HW MCH/BRD while bringing good support to the team.
The heal provided is not amazing, but it was enough to beat E4S with no healers and some Paladins.
Addle works almost everywhere, I believe.
Res is good for prog but there was always a ton of debate about res that shouldn't be taken in account in job balance.

The SMN is deeply flawed but still gets 40% of unpunishable instant casts. I believe that we spend more than 60% of current savage being static, when bosses are targetable.



Obviously the first reason is the nerf. And all melees received a buff
But I believe this tier is quite melee friendly, allowing melee to have an easier uptime and E11S is harder to gauge due to all the downtime. Jobs like NIN seems to enjoy these to refresh their cooldowns.

Yet, the SMN remains at a healthy spot. SQEX might have nerfed it a bit too much or they should have made a choice between buffing other jobs and nerfing the problematic one.
But it's still healthier than ranged.

SMN has approximately 55% of its GCDs instant, but most of these instant cast are fixed because of weaving purposes or they're locked behind the demi-primals. Comparing smn to phys ranged dps in terms of mobility is definitely wrong. I'd say both RDM and SMN are at a very good spot right now and pretty much equivalent both in rdps and mobility. The big elephant in the room is actually BLM, as even with the indirect nerf due to the weird itemization of the last patch, its still quite a bit more powerful in terms of rdps. My point was that metioning SMN as and exemple of perfect job is simply wrong now. It's outshined by all melees and BLM and the only reason it's still so popular is because most casters use it for prog instead of BLM and BLM has a totally different BIS, so casters just stick with what they started with.
Anyway, please don't compare current jobs to old jobs, it's really pointless. HW was also a time where balance was completely out of the window.

As for phys ranged, I still don't get the complain about rdps. Even if all three of them get buffed by 3-4%, nothing would really change. You'd still bring one and only one. Buff them too much, and you bring 2 instead of a melee, which is clearly what the devs don't want to see. I agree on the rest though. Phys ranged dps just feel too shallow, unrewarding, incomplete, as if you still need to unlock some major key skills that give some closure to their rotation. All of them. But rdps is not the reason for it.

[Jirah]

As for phys ranged, I still don't get the complain about rdps. Even if all three of them get buffed by 3-4%, nothing would really change. You'd still bring one and only one. Buff them too much, and you bring 2 instead of a melee, which is clearly what the devs don't want to see. I agree on the rest though. Phys ranged dps just feel too shallow, unrewarding, incomplete, as if you still need to unlock some major key skills that give some closure to their rotation. All of them. But rdps is not the reason for it.

You hit the nail right on the head for me on this! Idk what players want and i blame the community's tendency to be of one mind about stuff like this, example being popular opinions are treated as law SMN complicated, BRD too hard, MNK is the worst, BLM is the best, RDPS is super low. hearing that alot and youll start to believe it. The Jobs are in such a balanced state they'd need to do something drastic to inorder to break it. We dont need HW ranged bs as balance was a major issue and many roles were locked for those meta heads

[lulunami]

The following are rDPS at 99th percentile.

E9S (Cloud of Darkness)
BLM, SAM. SMN is the lowest of the non-rangers but not by much.

E10S (Shadowkeeper)
BLM and SMN at the top. SMN is the lowest of the non-rangers.

E11S (Fatebreaker)
BLM and NIN near the top. SMN and SAM near the bottom for non-rangers.

E12S-1
BLM and SAM at the top. SMN and NIN are the lowest of the non-rangers.

E12S-2
BLM at the top with SMN, SAM, MNK trailing. DRG at the bottom for non-rangers.

The kill time at the 99th percentile for each boss and each job's damage rotation idiosyncrasies combined with uptime/downtime determines the rDPS numbers. The variance between the DPS jobs are still not that much, although BLM is always on top. The potency nerf on Tri-disaster really hurt SMN from ever competing against BLM.

The problem with the rangers are how unfun they are to play. The passive job role party buff is the biggest reason to bring them. Unless you are required to use Troubadour in a fight, there is almost no reason to bring them. However that is conundrum of most ShB job changes. They are balanced but boring to play.

[Grimoire-M]

Site that must not be named nonetheless was linked here.

99th percentile is unrealistic in terms of comparison. 75th is a bit more honest if you're worried about tuning at the top end, and while it generally it holds true to what you've noted there is some amount of shifting. Notably by the time you go down to 30th SMN, SAM, and NIN are the clear winners, and that covers most Savage clears period. I think that's more important to take note of. Those three have clear cut burst windows and excellent mobility options in their respective roles as well as minimal friction (less positional requirements and clear-cut disengage tools for NIN/SAM, flexible instant-casts and a lot of free damage compared to other classes for SMN) that make them easier to execute in most situations, and that's in spite of being considered 'execution heavy' by most players, they're still more accessible by the numbers. The important thing to note though is this doesn't change the overall position of Ranged DPS at all, in fact when you start comparing the overall statistics you see that these three and any of the top five DPS can be about a quartile behind on the ranged DPS and still be ahead overall. SMN in particular has the highest minimum damage output at the low range on most fights.

I think that's the real problem I have with the ranged tax. At that low end the stat bonus is barely breaking even, and we have to take into consideration that these logs already filter out non-clears, while Savage itself filters out players who don't know the basics of their job or aren't up to the challenge in general, which ups the competency curve a fair bit. There's a reasonable argument to be made that if you suck at ranged you're better off swapping to a caster DPS instead, Which isn't something that should be possible given how it could affect pugs.

[CKNovel]

As for phys ranged, I still don't get the complain about rdps. Even if all three of them get buffed by 3-4%, nothing would really change. You'd still bring one and only one. Buff them too much, and you bring 2 instead of a melee, which is clearly what the devs don't want to see. I agree on the rest though. Phys ranged dps just feel too shallow, unrewarding, incomplete, as if you still need to unlock some major key skills that give some closure to their rotation. All of them. But rdps is not the reason for it.

Yeah, HW and ShB have different balance and design, might not have been a good idea to compare different iterations.

It's not complex but not simple.
There's no reason to buff jobs and there's no reason to nerf jobs. All content are clearable with any comp. But that argument doesn't stop buffs either.
Jobs are chosen by gameplay. Ranged gameplay isn't great and their contribution is low.

The points is, a very good ranged is always less valuable than a good Melee/Caster.
rDPS alone is not the problem. The problem is that ranged contributes too little to the party due to support removal and rDPS removal.
If ranged were the god of support (not rDPS), I'd be definitely okay with the current rDPS. I mean, we lost dismantle... To be replaced with Tactician on 180s. I was really angry at that. And Peloton aswell, it should have been a free sprint for the team.

If SQEX handed me the wheel, I'd reduce that gap for sure. 600~700 rDPS bonus.
But I'd increase the utility:
-Tactician/Troubadour/Samba would get a bonus to healing receive or I'd reduce their cooldown.
-Peloton would be reworked, a short sprint that comes with shortened cast time for casters. A bit like Bahamut Trance.
-I'd bring back palisade and would rework it a bit. A damage reduction shared with the party. The less people are damaged, the more powerfull that reduction would be. Adaptable for tank buster/raidwide
-Refresh could be back and refill a portion of MP spent for healing/resurecting action. Even thought it might be useless with current healing design. It could be a res on 300s cooldown.

All of this is useless since we're not getting new savages/ultimate for this expansion, but that was just a bunch of idea. If mobility keeps being the main argument, then I want ranged to contribute for mobility.
If ranged had an incredible amount of tool to support the party, you can gut their DPS all you want. But right now they're just boring.