Meleewalker to Meleetrail

[Valence]

I agree that phys ranged is the easiest dps role on average, but BRD is definitely more challenging than the other two phys ranged jobs, and more challenging than some casters and most melee.
Especially if you die and need to resync everything, it's extremely painful.

It's always amusing listening to melee brains that think the only thing to optimize is uptime. Either that, or bait to be honest considering the tone. I wouldn't bother. Shows how little they know about rphys.

( and i'm sorry but SMN is ten times easier than any rphys job, even DNC, and it's a "caster" )

If you die all of your songs are messed up and you lose all your damage and your reason for being there. Radiant finale buffs less, you do less damage and overall its incredibly punishing and so hard to recover from. It also means you have to stare at your song gauge often to see if your at the right time to switch songs so you can align with the 2 minute burst. If the game wasnt designed around raid buff alignment it would be more fine I would still hate it because this whole system reads Dancer far more to me then bard.

Is being actually punished for dying a bad thing in terms of design though? Unlike DNC that doesn't care at all since the gauge doesn't account for much resources or time and everything can drift without issues, BRD can suffer depending on when you die during the rotation yes (especially at the start of minuet of all songs), and the gauges are valuable resources. Dying at the start of a song leaves you songless until the next one. MCH is also punishing when dying, because you can drift tools that don't like drifting (chainsaw esp), because no part of your damage comes from allies unlike BRD and especially DNC, but more importantly because the gauge resources are insanely valuable in terms of potency. Losing a full battery is losing over 2500 (adjusted pet potency). Losing a full heat gauge is losing like 600-700 iirc. Potentially it can be more since all of this tends to be crammed under raid buffs.

But I don't think recovering from this is hard at all, except on numbers but that's a given when you die at the worst spot. The rotation can be salvaged relatively easily on both jobs if you know what to do. It's not like Stormblood MCH that was just you being absolutely worthless for a full minute either. We've seen a lot worse on death punishment. Of course if the argument is just the damage lost when dying as a rphys role, I do think it's warranted actually and DNC could benefit more from it as well, for the simple reason that we don't have uptime issues which makes us better at prog. Dying should be more punishing in exchange for it imo. Perhaps we could see our effectiveness re evaluated as a result.