Concerns Regarding DPS Balance: Physical Ranged, Red Mage, and Summoner

[Ayden]

I’ve noticed that physical ranged jobs, as well as Red Mage and Summoner, seem to have significantly lower DPS compared to other jobs in the current raid tier. While many players are saying it’s not an issue because all jobs can comfortably clear this content, I’m concerned about what might happen in future raid tiers where the DPS checks could be much stricter.

Right now, the lower DPS requirement makes the gap between these jobs and others feel negligible, which is why they’re still commonly accepted in Party Finder groups. However, what if the DPS check in the next tier is significantly higher? If the difference in DPS becomes more pronounced, are we going to see players start excluding these jobs from Party Finder simply because they aren’t able to keep up?

I understand that raid composition isn’t everything and that player skill can make a big difference, but I worry that a higher DPS check could make this a bigger issue. Do you think this is something that needs to be addressed by the devs in terms of balance, or am I overthinking it?

I’d love to hear your thoughts on this!

[Sensui]

It's never been my experience that jobs are purposefully left out. People that omit certain jobs are dumb.

[PercibelTheren]

It's never been my experience that jobs are purposefully left out. People that omit certain jobs are dumb.

I agree that it's dumb but it absolutely happens. MCH was locked out of PF in Endwalker for months until it got potency buffs.

[Supersnow845]

Leaving a job our just because they do like 2% less damage is dumb but the phys ranged are getting dangerously close to the point where subbing them out for another damage caster or melee is a DPS gain even accounting for the 1% they bring

A shoddily played melee with 70% uptime should not be out DPS’ing a physical ranged

[NightHour]

Leaving a job our just because they do like 2% less damage is dumb but the phys ranged are getting dangerously close to the point where subbing them out for another damage caster or melee is a DPS gain even accounting for the 1% they bring

A shoddily played melee with 70% uptime should not be out DPS’ing a physical ranged

Physical Ranged right now are basically "Play Perfect or get out DPS'd by Tanks."

And when I mean perfect, I mean perfect.

If a DPS class has to play perfect to not be out DPS'd by a SUPPORT CLASS something is seriously wrong.





Melee players in particular have this mindset that "Physical Ranged have buffs and utility" "Physical Ranged have freedom of movement" so they should do worse damage.



"Ranged have buffs and utility"

Right, ok... valid point but.......


What exactly is Feint? Mantra? Arcane Crest? Raid utility.

What exactly is Brotherhood, Dokimuri, Battle Litany, Arcane Circle? Raid buffs.


I'd understand being taxed so hard if melee raid buffs were weaker than PRanged's buffs but they're not.


"Ranged have freedom of movement"


Again a very valid point but a moot one at best.

Encounters are designed with melee uptime in mind, very rarely are melee forced off a boss for an extended duration of time to consider this "ranged freedom of movement" a benefit of being ranged.

99% of mechanics can be resolved either in melee range or at max melee also melee have so many gap closers now a days, so this bs about melee being unable to "move" is bollocks.


Also, Encounters are not designed in a way that utilizes this so called "Freedom of Movement", there's not really any distance based bait mechanics that take advantage of this "freedom of movement".





In no world should a 50% uptime melee who can barely hit his buttons properly outperform a physical ranged who's playing perfectly or near perfect.



Square really needs to re-evaluate how it balances jobs and role archetypes.




This is where WoW beats XIV imo - A Well played Ranged player can beat a bad melee and a well played melee can beat a bad played ranged.


On XIV it's A bad Melee automatically beats a well played ranged by default.



I am a strong believer that if the 5% did not exist - Groups would be running double caster

[Aco505]

A shoddily played melee with 70% uptime should not be out DPS’ing a physical ranged

a 50% uptime melee who can barely hit his buttons properly outperform a physical ranged who's playing perfectly or near perfect.

Uptime numbers of 70 or 50% would mean someone not attacking the boss for 30 or 50% of the time. In this situation, not even the strongest job will produce more DPS than a physical range. This is, I assume, a misunderstanding of the colored numbers in a certain website.

Uptime does not correlate to the colored numbers.

Physical Ranged right now are basically "Play Perfect or get out DPS'd by Tanks."

And when I mean perfect, I mean perfect.

If a DPS class has to play perfect to not be out DPS'd by a SUPPORT CLASS something is seriously wrong.

The best 99th percentile tank in cDPS in the current Savage tier, Dark Knight, only has higher numbers than the lowest DPS at the 10th percentile in the same category.

This is considering that DRK requires specific comps (as many buffers as possible) and kill times to produce such a number, as the other tanks are several hundreds of DPS below in the same situation.

Tanks never beat any DPS rDPS-wise at any percentile either.


Misunderstandings aside, I think we can all agree with the concerns. A short-term solution would be reducing the damage gap so that it's never higher than 5%.

Long-term solutions would involve rethinking the physical range role as a whole, as well as SMN and RDM's role within casters.

[VellAshe]

Misunderstandings aside, I think we can all agree with the concerns. A short-term solution would be reducing the damage gap so that it's never higher than 5%.

Long-term solutions would involve rethinking the physical range role as a whole, as well as SMN and RDM's role within casters.

Bumping this thought process. To make physical ranged more relevant in a high-end mindset, there should be a change in how we review the roles of DPS in the game.
We always talk greedy vs support DPS classes regardless of the roles, and in a perfect situation, we should be able to say yes to the following scenarios:

1. Can 4 'Greedy' DPS classes together clear this fight?
2. Can 4 'Support' DPS classes together clear this fight?
3. Can a combination of both Greedy and Support DPS clear this fight?

If you can answer yes in all scenarios, then it would mean that we've achieved some solid level of balance across all forms of DPS roles.

With the requirement of having specific roles filled out for the 5%, only two of these three conditions are usually met because we don't really have a good 'support melee dps' example. I'm pretty sure all Melees are just significantly strong across the board with minimal party buffs outside of 1/2-minute burst (MNK, RPR, DRG), or are greedy by design (SAM, NIN, VPR). Does that classify them as support melee? I don't think so.

Other DPS roles have significantly easier examples to showcase however; we can call MCH greedy in design, DNC is good for single-target support (greedy support? lol), and BRD is just full support, no greed.

Casters are even easier: BLM, PCT, SMN, RDM in terms of greed - support respectively. (Picto is just both; it's just that universally powerful right now that any class with a Pictomancer is just incredibly buffed.) But their support is still very subjective, and similar to Melee; burst DPS windows, and some mitigation similar to Ranged.

Do we lean more towards their defined roles (Melee, Ranged, Caster) and their utility going into raid, or more into their subjective roles (Greedy, Support)? Can we find a good mesh of both? I feel like that line of dialogue may yield better gameplay relevance for Ranged DPS.

[BabyYoda]

Bumping this thought process. To make physical ranged more relevant in a high-end mindset, there should be a change in how we review the roles of DPS in the game.
We always talk greedy vs support DPS classes regardless of the roles, and in a perfect situation, we should be able to say yes to the following scenarios:

1. Can 4 'Greedy' DPS classes together clear this fight?
2. Can 4 'Support' DPS classes together clear this fight?
3. Can a combination of both Greedy and Support DPS clear this fight?

If you can answer yes in all scenarios, then it would mean that we've achieved some solid level of balance across all forms of DPS roles.

With the requirement of having specific roles filled out for the 5%, only two of these three conditions are usually met because we don't really have a good 'support melee dps' example. I'm pretty sure all Melees are just significantly strong across the board with minimal party buffs outside of 1/2-minute burst (MNK, RPR, DRG), or are greedy by design (SAM, NIN, VPR). Does that classify them as support melee? I don't think so.

Other DPS roles have significantly easier examples to showcase however; we can call MCH greedy in design, DNC is good for single-target support (greedy support? lol), and BRD is just full support, no greed.

Casters are even easier: BLM, PCT, SMN, RDM in terms of greed - support respectively. (Picto is just both; it's just that universally powerful right now that any class with a Pictomancer is just incredibly buffed.) But their support is still very subjective, and similar to Melee; burst DPS windows, and some mitigation similar to Ranged.

Do we lean more towards their defined roles (Melee, Ranged, Caster) and their utility going into raid, or more into their subjective roles (Greedy, Support)? Can we find a good mesh of both? I feel like that line of dialogue may yield better gameplay relevance for Ranged DPS.

it is simple,

balance the boss damage and health based on party jobs

if we got 4 support then boss should do more damage and have less HP
if we got 4 dps then boss do less damage and more HP
if we got both we should have formula to calculate HP and damage of the boss.

it is really this simple

[Valence]

Bumping this thought process. To make physical ranged more relevant in a high-end mindset, there should be a change in how we review the roles of DPS in the game.
We always talk greedy vs support DPS classes regardless of the roles, and in a perfect situation, we should be able to say yes to the following scenarios:

1. Can 4 'Greedy' DPS classes together clear this fight?
2. Can 4 'Support' DPS classes together clear this fight?
3. Can a combination of both Greedy and Support DPS clear this fight?

If you can answer yes in all scenarios, then it would mean that we've achieved some solid level of balance across all forms of DPS roles.

All those scenari already happen and most fights (no, all fights really) can be cleared by any of those compositions. Yet balance remains scuffed, but the problem is that you're considering balance on a viability scale, where it works fine for what we have to clear ingame, but not on a logic, utility, and fair scale, where it starts to seriously fall apart and that's the crux of the problem. This is not a clear rate problem.

I've been starting to rethink the 'ranged tax' or uptime tax' as a positioning tax, and I say this as a phys ranged player, but a positioning tax does kinda have a point. Phys ranged have no positioning concerns unlike every other job in the game. They don't need to worry about being at the correct range or on the right spots on an enemy's hit box like a melee. They don't need to worry about standing still or minimizing movement like a magical ranged. They don't have caster concerns or be in range of other players to dish out heals like a healer. And they don't need to worry about being in melee range, and how their positioning will affect the enemy's position like a tank. The only time phys ranged have to think aout their positioning is when mechanics are happening, but that's concern for everyone. Why is there a role that don't need to position in a game where positioning matters?

It's like if there were a multiplayer shooter game that had a handful of damage characters or weapons that can hit their target anywhere on the map while being anywhere on the map, and they don't need to aim -- they would be unbalanceable. I think it would be healthier for the phys ranged role if it had some positioning responsibilities either through things like walking casts or positionals or both. Now, I think it would be cool to have like a mobility specialist job that doesn't have positioning concerns, but not an entire role dedicated to the same specialty.

We need to consider that rphys is no "positioning free" either. Beyond staying at range for heals and whatnot as a consideration, which every role has, there is no gap closer or teleports to help us move over crazy distances like it's nothing. If you position too far away or too angled for some mechanics, you're not gonna make it when a caster would just laugh at you while they do zip past you. Ranged casters don't have to worry about being "at the correct range" anymore than we do. Actually, it's less of a concern for them for the aforementioned mobility reason, but what is more of a concern for them is "being on the right spots to minimize movement" as you say, as in they do not always care about distance (depends of the caster, RDM and especially SMN do care more) but they do care about how much time they're going to spend moving. That's the big main difference between both roles.

I am not against more positioning considerations though. They have been however removed more and more from the game over time. That's legit one of the things they have consistently tried to "ease" or outright remove out of the game. Everybody and their mothers have gap closers now. Every is more mobile to accommodate for the crazy increases in having to move all around in modern encounters.

[NightHour]

Uptime numbers of 70 or 50% would mean someone not attacking the boss for 30 or 50% of the time. In this situation, not even the strongest job will produce more DPS than a physical range. This is, I assume, a misunderstanding of the colored numbers in a certain website.

Uptime does not correlate to the colored numbers.



The best 99th percentile tank in cDPS in the current Savage tier, Dark Knight, only has higher numbers than the lowest DPS at the 10th percentile in the same category.

This is considering that DRK requires specific comps (as many buffers as possible) and kill times to produce such a number, as the other tanks are several hundreds of DPS below in the same situation.

Tanks never beat any DPS rDPS-wise at any percentile either.


Misunderstandings aside, I think we can all agree with the concerns. A short-term solution would be reducing the damage gap so that it's never higher than 5%.

Long-term solutions would involve rethinking the physical range role as a whole, as well as SMN and RDM's role within casters.

5% difference between Melee and Ranged is imo fair.



RDM and SMN are hard bound by their resurrection abilities, I'm hoping in 8.0 they yeet them and give them meaningful damage.


BLM is the only caster in my opinion that deserves to sit with melees on damage.




I think the whole caster role needs rethinking.

Pictomancer is overtuned.

BLM is the greedy caster and does less damage than PCT which has a raid wide heal, a raid wide shield AND a raid buff.

SMN/RDM are being shafted because they have resurrection abilities.



Caster Hierachy imo should be BLM > PCT > SMN -> RDM.