Let's redefine "damage taxes"

[Renathras]

OP, pretty much agree with that overall. I honestly feel like each of the main sub-roles (Melee, Ranged, and Caster) should have at least one of each (e.g. if BRD or DNC was mid-support). I'm not sure the solution, but it does seem a better way to think about it.

And this logic fails due to not considering actual difficulty. MCH shouldn't be doing as much damage as a RDM, just like SMN. Also all rDPS numbers being within 1% of each other is not true balance

SAM isn't much harder than MCH and has 100% uptime in fight design now. This perspective is invalid. Hell, RDM is harder than SAM right now.

Not to mention difficulty is 100% based on the person. I sometimes fight GNB easier than WAR since it's easy to NOT lose my place in the rotation and I don't have an upkeep buff that I tend to forget about (on WAR) that falls off. I find upkeep buffs and DoTs the hardest (or, more accurately, most annoying) kinds of gameplay since they're easy for me to forget about. (GNB's issue is like Ex4 fights where, right when you have your 30 sec Gnashing Fang ready to go, the boss forces tons of movement and disengagement, etc). So what people find "more difficult" highly depends on the person.

Not only that, but optimizing MCH actually ISN'T that easy, especially on high latency connections, where it may in fact be impossible. It's just the gap between low and high skill on the Job isn't super high because the Job's mechanics, not that getting the high end is easy, per se.

I'm also confused how rDPS numbers being within 1% of each other "is not true balance" as that...would kind of be a pretty good definition for what true balance IS, honestly. If you're going to go with "well, some have utility" - fine, then give every Job non-damage utility that's different but equal. There, we have balance and with 1% damage so no Job is blackballed by a community that cares about damage >>>>> all anyway.

EDIT:

I've sat through enough dissertations on the healer subforum explaining why WHM "properly" deserves to have the stupidest, least interactive gameplay (it's the intro healer!), and therefore deserves to have the weakest output (more effort properly means more damage!), while also having a non-advantage (but it's the HEALIEST healer! Never you mind that it isn't true and isn't an advantage either in a game where Squeenix wants all healing outputs to be adequate).

No. Begone with this. I've heard "this job I don't play only naturally deserves to be worse than mine in every way because because because wah wah blah blah yak yak yak" enough times to roll my eyes off a cliff.

This may be the only time I ever get to say this, Semirhage, so listen up:

I agree with you.

Only other solution I could think of would be to canonize the support role, make it yellow or something, and condenn assign whatever jobs SE has stopped considering DPS to it.

I feel like it would be Purple. not quite sure why, though. Yellow could work, too. I forget what DoH/DoL are (I think they technically have a color other than gray, but can't remember what, maybe one is Yellow and one Purple already...), so maybe Orange? Gonna have to go to ye olde color wheel here. XD

Honestly, they could make it a fourth slot but when quing content (dungeons/24 mans) it just ques like a DPS does. That way they wouldn't have to redesign the entire game and in 4 mans and 8/24 man casual content, it legitimately doesn't matter anyway.

But I do agree they should stop dancing around the issue and just make Support a role already. We already arguably have a Support from each of the categories as it is (DNC/BRD, SMN/RDM, probably NIN and maybe MNK - and if we want to get super frisky, PLD and AST, but they should stay Tank/Healer), so it's not like they couldn't populate this role fairly quickly.

Bonus, more people would have gearsets that straddle roles for them to pick up an alt if they want to do something different.

So Orange would probably be the color. It's Red when it needs to be.