Meleewalker to Meleetrail

[EdwinLi]

So then Physrange becomes the best and then people complain about that instead.

Sorry for late reply....

Anyways, Physical Range are not always the best in older MMO since they do design skills to provide more ways for Casters and Melee classes to maintain DPS despite having their limitations. This way they are still on equal terms with mobile DPS type classes.

Normally a Melee Class will get more engagement skills which allows them to rush back into melee range to maintain the "always in the enemy's face" encounters and defensive skills to allow them to stay in melee range for a short time and tank any heavy melee range AoE attacks so they can continue to stay in melee range. Viper actually has a example of this stay in melee range skill as one of their PvP skills but normally it should still allow them to continue to attack with their basic skills while still reducing damage for a short time. The high damage attack is the basic counter attack thing. Similar to Samruai with the Tengentsu but normally it would be a Anti-Heavy damage skill so Samurai can stay in Melee range to maintain DPS combos. Some reason they treat these skills more as Light Damage resist skills in FF14 rather than the usual temporary Heavy damage resist skills.

Mages are normally provided ways to protect themselves during casting so they can tank a heavy attack without needing to move or cancel casting their more heavy damage but high casting cost skills or turret stance. They already got the instant cast skill that is normally provided for some mobility.

Managing when to use these skills is the part players need to be self aware about and not treat them as DPS skills but skills to maintain their DPS engagements.

A lot of choices with boss design that SE made being focus on dodging AoE obviously did not go as planned when they added the Vulnerability debuff effect on most Boss AoE skills which is the situation we have now. If they add more Anti Melee and caster AoE focus bosses then melee and caster will complain they favor Physical Range more because they can dodge attacks while still attacking easily and if there is not enough Anti-Melee and Caster attacks on Bosses to put enough downtime for Melee and Casters to perform less DPS, people will keep saying Physical range are not needed because it is still easy to maintain High DPS in boss fight.

Also, people will always find a reason to say the development team "favors" one playstyle over another since individual perspective varies about a lot of things including when it comes to specific Job roles.

[Ggwppino]

If all melee is buffed considerably, or the PCT is nerfed the BLM remains as is and the hitboxes remain as large as the arena, I agree, it will be a Meleetrail.
If this is not the case, perhaps we will see the right balance, where those who actually have to sweat for uptime will be rewarded if they manage to optimize it.


As for the phys range, unfortunately they have been stripped of their importance because they are too stressful (according to the complainers and designers who listen to them) and therefore until they have a uniqueness (in addition to having 100% guaranteed uptime), sadly they will remain afloat thanks to only 1% raid buff.

[Lyth]

PCT is entirely responsible for BLM's current situation. The dev team wants to ensure that PCT gets used in raid content, which means that it needs to be unambiguously better than BLM. If the damage difference wasn't obvious, the tank-level raidwide mitigation tool should have been. We've seen them do this sort of thing before. It's certainly not done for job balance.

[Galvuu]

PCT is entirely responsible for BLM's current situation. The dev team wants to ensure that PCT gets used in raid content, which means that it needs to be unambiguously better than BLM. If the damage difference wasn't obvious, the tank-level raidwide mitigation tool should have been. We've seen them do this sort of thing before. It's certainly not done for job balance.

Naaah... SE is just really clueless. BLM could do 5k more adps and it'd still feel awful to play.
XIV has a history of baffling changes nobody asked for across many jobs. They just have no idea what they're doing.
Kaiten removal, the healer disaster of ShB, DRK getting gutted twice in a row, MNK losing it's GL and positionals, and the list could go on, but you get the idea.

[rewd]

PCT is entirely responsible for BLM's current situation. The dev team wants to ensure that PCT gets used in raid content, which means that it needs to be unambiguously better than BLM. If the damage difference wasn't obvious, the tank-level raidwide mitigation tool should have been. We've seen them do this sort of thing before. It's certainly not done for job balance.

This conspiracy theory could maybe (big maybe) make sense if there wasn't a balance patch scheduled with already announced BLM buffs.

[Ramiee]

My dude, you play the easiest role in this game and most of you STILL struggles to basic mechs lmao, and before being sarcastic about someone playing Sam, I'd advice you to try playing it in an optimized environment before being smug about it

I mean SAM is really easy. It's always been really easy but that's it's appeal. Wouldn't say it's easier than RPR or VPR though but BRD is certainly harder then SAM mostly due to how punishing BRD is. But this is more of the game Devs terrible design choices then any actual difficulty in how it plays.

[Lyth]

The 7.05 plan for BLM is pretty vague, to be honest. 'Plans to make further changes to action potencies' makes it sound like they've made part of their intended adjustments already. I wouldn't be making raid plans based off of that.

The crux of the problem is the schism within casters around access to raise. Raise is a powerful enough progression tool that it can guarantee a slot on its own. The fact that PCT was introduced without raise puts it in a fight for its life against BLM. I'm sure that BLM will be viable, but they're clearly pushing people towards PCT.

[Ramiee]

Snip

Punishment is good, but being unable to recover is just unfun. Everyones raid buffs at 2 mins all will always buff the same amount % bard is the only one who if they die loses the % buff and the damage from the attack afterwards. Due to how songs CDs work this might take a few buff cycles to realign or you will just have to provide no buffs for a while to force it to realign. Which makes you lose out on the gameplay changes they do to bard, making it really boring healer level rotation. It's completely different from losing battery from machinist because you will always have your 2 minute buffs. Bard who dies does become pretty worthless for that buff cycle, at least a dancer who dies raidbuff will be consistent, after all you don't take these jobs for their damage.

I just don't think song rotation suits bard at all. Dancer is so much more burst buff focused that I think giving it 3 dances for it's own radiant finale works better then bard having song rotation. idk if current bard is worse at recovery then SB machinist I don't know but I will say it's one of the worst in DT at recovering at death with maybe BLM being worse.

[Vhoxz]

The game's unwillingness to tune mobility and utility to their actual worth and instead just destroying the job's damage is one of my least favorite things about this game.

I'm still wrapping my head around them reworking SMN the way they did when they knew they were going to make it terrible lol

I don't think the initial summoner rework was terrible. Yes, it was a bit simple, but it was a nice start to build on. Now, however, it seems they're not planning on building on it at all. And it's the most boring job to play by far. There was a lot of potential... that they did nothing with.
I have to agree that gutting a job's damage is a sad way of trying to balance things. It's like a checklist for them. Ranged: -5% dmg. Have ress: -5% damage. Have damage buff: -10% damage. It's just a horrible way of doing things. The only reason I can see why mobile ranged classes are doing less damage is because they want to keep melee relevant in group content. Otherwise, everyone would just bring 4 ranged dps.

[Valence]

Punishment is good, but being unable to recover is just unfun. Everyones raid buffs at 2 mins all will always buff the same amount % bard is the only one who if they die loses the % buff and the damage from the attack afterwards. Due to how songs CDs work this might take a few buff cycles to realign or you will just have to provide no buffs for a while to force it to realign. Which makes you lose out on the gameplay changes they do to bard, making it really boring healer level rotation. It's completely different from losing battery from machinist because you will always have your 2 minute buffs. Bard who dies does become pretty worthless for that buff cycle, at least a dancer who dies raidbuff will be consistent, after all you don't take these jobs for their damage.

I just don't think song rotation suits bard at all. Dancer is so much more burst buff focused that I think giving it 3 dances for it's own radiant finale works better then bard having song rotation. idk if current bard is worse at recovery then SB machinist I don't know but I will say it's one of the worst in DT at recovering at death with maybe BLM being worse.

I don't understand your obsession with a loss of 2-4% on Coda tbh. This is such a specific thing to get bent upon... It's damage you lose, and it's part of the penalty for dying. Some jobs have more damage loss than others, sometimes it comes from pure resource based damage like MCH, sometimes it also comes a bit from Coda like BRD. I really don't get the issue, especially since Finale can still be used with even just one song registered.

As for the fun ruined by being songless for 30s until you can go back to the next song as if nothing happened, I really don't think it's a problem either, especially because when you get raised, you generally have other things to take care of than going back to full high octane APM with repertoire procs, but I do hear the argument.

I also don't feel that DNC is better suited to it either, that sounds like a purely subjective on "vibe" to me. And you'd translate to DNC what you find problematic on BRD right now, so I'm not sure of the point being swapping the system with DNC. What for? Just a vibe?