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

[EdwinLi]

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.

That is kind of subjective in the end though. Some people love overly complicated jobs that make them constantly focus on multiple things just to do their role while some perfer the more simple and direct focused jobs to do their role function.

MCH has been my favorite job since its release in 3.0 and I have never stopped having MCH as my main job since. Probably because the job is Gun user job with the play style isn't overly complicated and just direct with what you have to focus on but that is just how I prefer my DPS being focus on DPSing over constantly focusing job mechanics just to dps.


While yes certain people find overly complicated jobs fun to play it also puts them under risk of focusing on fighting themselves to maintain their job mechanics over focusing on fighting their target instead. Boss fights now are also being more focused on trying to make players fight themselves by attempting to mess up their job mechanics in some way. There is also risks that certain players may never get use to the job mechanic and thus they find the job frustrating or they end up underperforming a lot because they can't fully adjust to what the job mechanic requires them.


Take Reaper for example, while it has high damage and the newest melee dps job, we also have to look at how mechanical it is in job play. Reaper is probably the most less job mechanic demanding melee DPS job in my opinion which does bring more people to enjoy it more if they only want to focus on damaging their target over fighting their own character's job mechanics.

Reaper's positional are also more in player's control since players don't need to focus on their positions in their 1,2,3 combo but instead just focus on using them when they feel ready for it as Off-combos then maintain the flow to their desire pattern. Entering burst mode is very short so mechanically players will burn through it before anything important happens during a boss fight.

[anhaato]

I said a while back that if brd's complexity dies then phys range as a whole dies.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[Thoosa]

It’s because the movement tax is no longer a thing and physical range don’t offer anything really unique, so you may as well take double casters and get more dps, since the casters don’t really suffer any movement tax anymore. It’s funny how the obsession for balance leads to unbalanced classes and lock outs.

[Quintessa]

DNC was never broken lol.

[Imoye]

u got Reaper who’s easy to play yet pumps out higher dps

Yes because MCH/DNC are hard to play /s

[Morkel]

People are overthinking this. Most of the community doesn't care about "best" or "meta". The simple reason is that Reaper and Summoner are essentially new classes and have drawn a lot of people away towards those classes. We saw this in the Extremes long before 6.05 "meta" was decided. None of the physical ranged had any changes that make it "new." Bard just extended their song phases to 45 seconds from 30 seconds. Machinist just added one additional "Drill/Air Anchor" GCD every 60 seconds. With Dancer, they just pulled 2 GCDs from flourish and replaced it with 2 other new GCDs during their burst.

[JanVanding]

So I read all this and....yeah people really aren't getting why BRD is being used over the other two at all.

1. BRD is consistent, something it has notoriously struggled with in the past, the changes to Bloodletter and how they generate resources has helped considerably instead of being entirely at the mercy of RNG as they were before.

2. BRD burst is deceptively strong, they get a very nice 1-2 punch combo in Apex/Blast arrow, they get to do it twice per full rotation and the one done under raid buffs hits like a truck.

3. SCH/BRD/AST is in insanely powerful buffing trio that when combined can push dps in burst windows to some crazy heights. They cover all based of Crit chance, Damage % and Direct hit increase.

Is this because BRD is broken? Nope, outside the plain obvious lacking in damage, DNC and MCH lack synergy with the group and that's their biggest downfall.

[Drekor]

BRD is overall a solid class provided the BRD never dies if they do everything goes to shit. It's also an annoyingly complex class for it's results.

MCH provides no group damage buffs and has the ranged phys tax so it's damage is also below average... no reason to bring them.

DNC is just horribly tuned atm. If they buffed DNC to do BRD levels of rDPS then you'd probably see a flood of them.

[Mysticunicycle]

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

It all comes down to the role just doing worse damage than the other roles overall. The role action is good, but it's not earthshattering. It's not caster rez, and it's not 10% higher damage that melee and BLM do just for existing. Double pranged groups are almost unheard of because the role does the least damage by far and doesn't have utility to compensate.

It's past time to balance all three roles to do comparable damage and get rid of pointless taxes. Melee have almost perfect uptime in every modern ff fight because that's how they design encounters nowadays. Melee don't need to do 10% more dps just because. If there were fights where ranged excelled due to melee mechanics, then I could entertain the argument that melee need more damage to compensate, but that is not the case, so I won't. Even in a group with zero melee dps, your tanks are still melee, so you'll always devise a strategy to get maximum uptime for melee players.

There is zero reason in 2022 for any dps role to do less damage than any other dps role. The fact that we have to run numbers to see if taking a pranged is worth the role bonus is sad. Melee already get more hp and self healing on top of feint, casters get rez (sorry blm) on top of addle, and pranged get the lowest dps on top of 10% DR (which RDM now also gets lol get rekt pranged).

It doesn't take a rocket surgeon or a brain scientist to figure out that pranged is getting the short end of the stick here. They have the lowest damage, and the lowest utility. In the event that the role bonus doesn't math out (SHB BLM did too much damage, so there were times where it was better to just not take a pranged), there's no reason to take one. Mobility is a non issue in this game. There are no mobility gimmicks that are required to execute mechanics (think stampeding roar, windrush totem, warlock gate from wow. None of these are required and fights are not designed with Expedient or En Avant in mind).

Every dps job in the game should do within ~3% dps of each other so that you can pick one of each role, and then double up on whatever you want. This will lead to more people playing the job they actually like instead of being forced onto something that they don't like but is "required" for the party to be somewhat optimized.

[Mysticunicycle]

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.

I think you know this to be true, but the wording you used may mislead some others.

MCH's personal dps is *much* higher than BRD's. Like, 1000 dps higher. It just has zero party dps gain, so its rDPS is lower because BRD's buffs are quite strong right now.