Fight Designs & Class Balancement - Why everything is wrong and favors Melee Fantasy

[Dzian]

The problem isn’t melee so much as it’s everything else.
However, encounter design breaks everything anyway.

Melee DPS should be strong and hit hard. but they also should have a level of toughness or survivability to eat a couple of hits because they are dangerously close to the boss.

Caster DPS should generally trade mobility for extra oomph to hit even harder than melee. While usually still having some limited level of survival through magic barriers or crowd control. bind, heavy or sleeping mobs to keep them at safe distances. Staying alive means sacrificing damage.

Physical ranged DPS Should hit super hard, have supreme mobility but typically have next to no survival. (often dubbed the Glass Cannon). get so much as a scratch and you're dead.

In XIV though everything has its oomph taken away in exchange for survival and the ability to eat predictable but unavoidable raid-wide damage. However, ranged classes gain absolutely nothing in exchange for that trade. Earlier iterations from previous expansions at least had some support and utility to compensate, but that's all been stripped away in the endless pursuit of braindeaded simplification and it's left the developers with nowhere to go.

They can't push ranged up because that will widen the skill gap. Especially on casters that can slide cast effectively and stuff. That's a big big no no and that goes against the focus on braindead simplicity above all else.