It's time to Lock Out Machinist from PF

[Connor]

Every rDPS gets that mitigation, it's a role action.

Yeah this, I should’ve made it clearer in the post but I meant ‘mitigation unique to the job’ and Troubadour/Samba/Tactician are much closer to a role skill than being unique to those jobs. I mean, Dancer doesn’t technically have mitigation itself either, but at least it has Improvisation to pretend it’s helping lol

It always boils down to all the facets of the game they axed and how barebones they have made the battle system today. It just doesn't offer any specific and important/mandatory niches to fill anymore for the role to be relevant in its current state. The only way to make it relevant in the current system is to make it like any other DPS, with average support tools and a good dps output. It sucks for identity, but that's the sad reality of the current battle system that doesn't accommodate anything else.

Editing to avoid double post. But yeah, I definitely think encounter design has a lot to do with the issues around phys ranged. As you say, with design the way it is even when jobs do have ‘good support/utility’ that really isn’t enough to make them attractive if they aren’t outputting the necessary dps. Ultimately meaning that no amount of defensive/utility support would really be enough if the actual dps output and balancing wasn’t addressed. Although, with that said I certainly wouldn’t complain if phys ranged got healing lb3 back lol. But even that still wouldn’t really make people want to take them outside of like very early progression. Plus a healing lb would make no sense for Machinist whatsoever lol.

And yeah, as sad as it is, I do agree that the current design really restricts how ‘different’ phys ranged can actually be in the grand scheme of things. Honestly I feel it’s begun to constrain the role’s ‘identity’ in the same it has with healers, in that it’s trying to be something that the battle system essentially doesn’t support anymore