Thread: Patch 6.21 - DPS Roles & the State of Endgame Balance

The "Mobility Tax" and Encounter Design
Part of this balancing gap appears to come down to design decisions by the dev team on how damage output should relate to supposed job mobility and utility. Generally jobs that have an easier time moving about during an encounter or that provide benefits not standard to their overall role have dealt less overall damage in the past two expansions. You'll see this referred to as the "ranged tax" or "mobility tax" by the community at times. Melee (and less mobile casters) generally hit harder with their movement restrictions and positional requirements supposedly hampering their damage output in fights and evening the field with jobs that may not hit as hard, but don't lose uptime during encounters.

The problem is that the current approach to encounter design renders all of that moot.

The developers have been altering how they design encounters to facilitate ease of play for melee jobs. Boss hitboxes have grown massively in size, with P7S even having an omnidirectional hitbox that covers over two-thirds of the entire arena. The strength of melee has remained largely the same as it had been prior while the actual difficulty of maintaining uptime has plummeted. What's stranger is that, despite not touching DPS balancing, the developers actually cited the new ease of maintaining uptime when explaining their intention behind the Paladin buffs in 6.21:



Where Things Stand
This situation leaves a lot of jobs in a weird place and forces a double-melee meta for anyone trying to do early Savage or Ultimate progression. RDM is weirdly underpowered, while player numbers for MCH have plummeted and it's become somewhat common for Savage PF listings in NA to forbid the job from joining parties (hell, the world-first Dragonsong's Reprise team even explained why they'd never bring MCH to serious progression in its current state in an interview).

It's difficult to provide a concrete solution given how unclear the FFXIV Job Team's design objectives are to the community at this point. However, if encounter designs are going to continue to be more melee friendly going forward then there needs to be serious consideration towards tightening the melee/ranged gap or doing away with the ranged/melee distinction entirely in favor of more granular balancing decisions.