There's a huge Physical range shortage in PF and Statics

[CatboySweatlord]

There's a huge Physical range shortage in PF and Statics, this is due to the fact that Bard is incredibly good and the other two options noticeably not, the way they handle balance within the role is incredibly ass-backward and promotes Job locking, Last Expansion it was dancer being extremely broken, and the other two didn't catch up in popularity till the tail end of the expansion. Please buff MCH and DNC so they don't have a less than 10% playrate combined

[CKNovel]

Bard is not incredibly good, it only has damage.
The job suffers multiple problems, if they get punished a lot by KO, their dots deals only 8% of their total damage. They have 2 dots and it used to deal 11-12% of their damage.
There is also problems with the different song power, apparently Mage's Ballad is weaker (right after it got charges) and Army's Peon, the filler song, is among the strongest.

MCH and DNC, you know the story.
DNC is a weaker BRD.
MCH is a BRD but that only brings personal DPS lower than BRD.

Yet, during ShB DNC wasn't broken, it was much stronger than the two others when the group was playing near perfection.
Outside of that, if the group wasn't perfect it was MCH then BRD. BRD ended up taking the lead at the end of the expansion.

[CatboySweatlord]

This game suffers a meta where things that do the most damage are what get picked, when Ibsaw bard is good, it is good within the scope of the phys range role, if a phys range wasn't required double melee double caster meta would be real

[Lastelli]

I think it has more to do with the fact that MCH and DNC are...boring. Yes, sorry, that's what they are. BRD is the only one that has a modicum of complexity and fun in it.
They should probably focus more on giving them a more interesting gameplay loop. But yeah, given the current situation, some potency buffs are clearly needed for both MCH and DNC. It's not going to change much in terms of job popularity, I feel.

[Rika007]

Potency buffs are needed across the entire role. Bard isn't strong, it's just better then the other 2. The mobility tax is a freaking meme and is one of the most poor design choices ever implemented into the game, and the only reason ranged is still even brought to the role is because of the awful mechanic of the 1% role party buff. Which is no more then the equivalent of a parent telling their kids to play with someone they don't want too.

Until they start designing the raids to actually take advantage of ranged mobility that enforces melee downtime, people will continue to be disappointed with the ranged tax and have issues with it. In fact, current boss design pretty much enforces the exact opposite, as in any savage fight a ranged player not sticking close to their healer (who will be grouped up close with their melees unless there is a spread mechanic, which do not happen nearly as often as raid wide AoE's) will be met with some pretty irritated healers. Thus making ranged players deal with the same get in/get out mechanics as melees do.

The only mechanics melee's really still have to hold up as a true issue is positionals, and those are less and less as the expansions go on, especially when we get at least 1 sometimes 2 bosses a savage tier that has no positionals at all. That can account for a small gap between ranged physicals along with cast times on casters. But that gap should be small, 100 to 200 rdps at most and only at higher skill levels. Not over 500-100 higher between melees played terribly and a well played ranged player.

Role balance should be balanced around the support kit a job brings. Dancer and Bard should be at the bottom yes, but they should also not be getting out damaged by 500 or more by Dragoon and Ninja. Machinist should not be putting up the same numbers as San and Black Mage but it also shouldn't be getting blown away by Reaper and Monk, two jobs that also bring party wide healing buffs, damage mitigation, self healing, and raid wide damage boosts; when literally all Machinist provides is damage and one raid wide defensive buff.

[ssunny2008]

The mobility tax is a freaking meme

"Me, YP said, that class balance isn´t based on their difficulty. Mobility-tax is a lie!"

I guess nobody at SE is a RDPS main, so they just don´t give af.

[Hammerhorn]

I think it comes down to players don’t want to play the weaker class when u got Reaper who’s easy to play yet pumps out higher dps and has all the support a Bard / Dancer might bring. Then MCH who brings almost nothing to the table for group buffs is just not the shinning High selfish dps they are supposed to be. The 6.08 patch truly can’t come fast enough. I agree also that the “ranged tax” needs to go away it’s antiquated and does not reflect how we should be treating our dps now.

[CKNovel]

I think it has more to do with the fact that MCH and DNC are...boring. Yes, sorry, that's what they are. BRD is the only one that has a modicum of complexity and fun in it.
They should probably focus more on giving them a more interesting gameplay loop. But yeah, given the current situation, some potency buffs are clearly needed for both MCH and DNC. It's not going to change much in terms of job popularity, I feel.

MCH got a rework during ShB, DNC was introduced.
The popularity surprisingly fell off, it wasn't shiny anymore.

That's the cost of designing a job to make it appealing for everyone, players will move on the next shiny thing.
RPR and SMN will probably see a drop in the next expansion.

[Shuuli]

When party finder groups start blocking some roles the SE team should realize something is not okay... I have seen a couple of PF groups that lock BRD as ranged physical DPS role.

Thank god its not that big of a thing yet. And they did promise to implement changes.

[Kolsykol]

I noticed this too I had a really hard time finding groups as NIN and generally ended up making my own, basically every group I looked at needed a physical ranged dps lol.