All your opinions are wrong

[Valence]

Personally I'm fonder of the other solution: make melee and caster uptime a potential 99% if the player plays well, but only if they play well. Then find something that requires effort and skill on the side of rphys (and no, it's not casts, else just remove the role and make them part of casters). Seeing how bad the community seems to be when it comes to agency on the spot and DPS execution and rotations (as evidenced by M6S adds and non standard fights), then I'd surmise that adding more complexity and randomness/triaging/priority into rphys would probably generate a pretty steep skill curve in the community already.

[Carighan]

Personally I'm fonder of the other solution: make melee and caster uptime a potential 99% if the player plays well, but only if they play well. Then find something that requires effort and skill on the side of rphys (and no, it's not casts, else just remove the role and make them part of casters). Seeing how bad the community seems to be when it comes to agency on the spot and DPS execution and rotations (as evidenced by M6S adds and non standard fights), then I'd surmise that adding more complexity and randomness/triaging/priority into rphys would probably generate a pretty steep skill curve in the community already.

I don't think that'd work. It'd run into the usual issue in regards to higher-end content:

* Do these jobs, if played well, perform better or not than jobs that don't require as much "skill"?
* If yes, do you balance ultimates etc around them being played well, hard-excluding "non-skill jobs"? Or are they too easy if you bring those jobs and can play them well, because it's balanced around being able to be done with every job?
* If no, how do you prevent players from just excluding "skill jobs" from top-end and progress runs entirely, being a risk but with no gain to show for it?

It's a problem MMORPGs as a whole haven't solved in the past generations of MMOs since organized content first reared its ugly head. I don't think it's going to be miraculously solved by FFXIV, it seems an inherent problem of the genre.

[Valence]

Did I write something badly or? Because I feel like you're arguing against something completely different?

[Carighan]

It's the "if player plays well"-part. What does that achieve? Like, do you become stronger than what the fight was designed for if you do? -> whole slew of further balance issues
Or do you fail the fight if you don't play well enough to keep 99% uptime? -> whole other slew of further balance issues

[Valence]

And how is "99% uptime if skilled" is different from say, 95% capped uptime? You're talking about encounter balance in terms of dps checks. That has nothing to do with what I brought up above. You could have a cap at 10% and it would change nothing, fights would be balanced around that cap (even if ludicrous).
The only thing that changes is if your cap is piss easy to reach like in Endwalker with gigantic hitboxes so that every melee reaches it anyway, and it seems we're going away from this cursed model anyway.

[Carstien]

Just an incorrect opinion. I do think the ranged physical jobs should be doing more than they are now for sure, and not only by a little but should still end up below the melee, probably a little bit above where the casters with rez are sitting. Uptime is actually a huge deal and only one melee job doesn't lose damage for being at range and that's VPR. Melee have to fight for uptime and positionals especially in this tier so far and that's pretty fun, but the damage they do is reflective of that. Being able to sit back at any range and fully attack, even getting autos, while running around the arena in a big circle if you choose to is not the same. The penalty they get for it is way too high but they should get something.

I'd like to see them bring back the cast bar stances honestly. If they do that and you gotta stand still to increase your damage then I would see a valid argument for competing for top damage.

Some melee even have it worse than others. MNK has no ranged attack at all unless they are in burst and have reply of fire up, or reply of wind happens to be up but they do have six sided star to mitigate it. RPR has to use egress to get a functional ranged attack or they are all cast bars, which don't do much if you have to constantly move.

Ranged phys IS easier. Objectively easier. You don't have to like it for it to be true. They still should do more damage.

[Absurdity]

I'd like to see them bring back the cast bar stances honestly. If they do that and you gotta stand still to increase your damage then I would see a valid argument for competing for top damage.

Since phys ranged players still seem to hate the HW casting I thought about implementing something like Critical Distance from Monster Hunter, where you want to be within a sweet spot, not too close and not too far from the boss, to deal the maximum potential damage. It still allows for freedom of movement but puts some restrictions on it that then would justify increasing the role's damage.

But even with that you would run into issues with how they currently design boss fights. Since there is usually only exactly one safe spot for any role during a mechanic you would probably be forced out of critical distance and there is nothing you could do about it.

Now if burst windows weren't so incredibly rigid you could save whatever few abilities you have that ignore that distance requirement for phases where mechanics force you out of it. But with the current design that's just not going to work.

[Miohazuki]

Idc what anyone says. Machinist should be competing with viper and samurai. So should black mage. Shut up about uptime it's not as big a deal as you hyperbolic mouth breathers say it is. Melee like viper samurai reaper and dragoon are borderline Simon says and aren't harder than black mage or machinist. They should be competitive or get raid buffs or their current kits are pointless. Disassemble sucks. Enochian got nerfed 2 patches in a row because black mage isn't allowed to be cozier to play while being strong. Pictomancer was overturned but clunky and made double cast a viable option again. Now we're forced back in to two melees because square Enix only anders to melee. Bring back bard machinist viability with dragoon and a caster, make it so a res caster and a non res caster can party together too. This game is about being able to play whatever class you want so let's normalize the damage across dps roles. Keep it so we need atleast 1 of each but holy crap all the arguments I see saying ranged jobs are all easy mode and should do damage is ridiculous. All jobs except monk have gcd ranged attacks for disengage. its not op to be ranged anymore. I hate how out of touch the devs have been with phys ranged since they scared of them being slightly over tuned like in heavensward. The fact machinist got ANY potency reduction and no meaningful buffs or fixes to its kit like how disconnected it's are is from single target is pure bs. Delete crossbow, make heat BLAST aoe it's a flipping blast! Give queen aoe or get us bishop back. Stock market level crash out over.

You must be fun to have in a party if that is your attitude . The door is that way .don't forget to close the door behind on your way out

[Carstien]

Since phys ranged players still seem to hate the HW casting I thought about implementing something like Critical Distance from Monster Hunter, where you want to be within a sweet spot, not too close and not too far from the boss, to deal the maximum potential damage. It still allows for freedom of movement but puts some restrictions on it that then would justify increasing the role's damage.

But even with that you would run into issues with how they currently design boss fights. Since there is usually only exactly one safe spot for any role during a mechanic you would probably be forced out of critical distance and there is nothing you could do about it.

Now if burst windows weren't so incredibly rigid you could save whatever few abilities you have that ignore that distance requirement for phases where mechanics force you out of it. But with the current design that's just not going to work.

Critical distance would be cool, though only if you had some close and some far to make the free movement of the jobs important. They would need a True North equivalent too I think if they added a few crit distance attacks for each ranged phys job. That button would be what helps deal with the boss mechanics, just like it does for melee.

[Absurdity]

Critical distance would be cool, though only if you had some close and some far to make the free movement of the jobs important. They would need a True North equivalent too I think if they added a few crit distance attacks for each ranged phys job. That button would be what helps deal with the boss mechanics, just like it does for melee.

Don't know why a True North equivalent completely slipped my mind, yeah that could work.

The biggest problem would probably be creating a functional UI distance indicator that changes in real time and doesn't suffer from excessive delay, lol.