Quote Originally Posted by Sequora View Post
I feel like the ranged tax needs to be reduced. No one wants to play a class that’s just blatantly weaker with no upsides. MCH is in such a bad spot.
The underlying problem with MCH (and also phys ranged as a whole) is that, paradoxically, the ranged tax is pretty irrelevant at this point, but phys ranged also need to do the lowest damage out of the DPS roles. Imagine a world where MCH beats out jobs like MNK or RDM in terms of damage in order to compete with the other selfish DPS jobs; you would practically be griefing yourself by not bringing a MCH to the table since it would have full uptime on top of insane DPS. That would bring us full circle to "why play a melee class that does less damage than a phys ranged, it's blatantly weaker with no upsides, etc.".

BRD and DNC aren't really any better off despite how good their rDPS numbers might look right now. Since both jobs have abysmal aDPS, stacking a party with two of them will see diminished returns when compared to a party with two casters or two melee. I think this is definitely intentional on SE's part, and is a balancing decision meant to discourage parties from using them both/limit phys ranged DPS. MCH is just in a particularly awkward spot because it can't be designed to provide crazy rDPS like BRD/DNC as long as it's meant to be a selfish DPS job, and it also can't compete with the other selfish DPS jobs without making them irrelevant. Because again, if MCH was pulling aDPS numbers close to SAM, there would be zero reason to bring a SAM that requires melee uptime versus a MCH.

The root of the problem is that the ranged DPS tax has been rendered obsolete by various gameplay/system changes over the expansions, but the phys ranged role has never received any meaningful changes to compensate. In Stormblood we had Palisade, Refresh, and Tactician on top of the free movement, which were meaningful and beneficial to a party. You'd want to bring a phys ranged to your party not because they provided a passive 1% buff to the party, but because they had useful tools that were necessary to succeed, and that justified their lower DPS when compared to the other DPS roles. Now that those utilities have been stripped away and melee/casters have been receiving more and more QoL changes for uptime maintenance, there is no justifiable reason for the phys ranged to do so much less damage. If SMN is allowed to have nearly free movement with a raid buff and a raise while doing big boy caster DPS, why are all of the phys ranged cursed to live in all other jobs' shadows?

... Well, that's easy. If MCH did as much damage as the melee jobs, why would you bring a melee over a MCH with ranged uptime?