As someone who also plays archer on the side, I would rather have that than current archer. You take AoE for granted and are underestimating what it is like to have poor AoE. You are also underestimating value of virtually-immune-to-SP-debuffs.
And you are underestimating the value of having skills that consumes SP instead of being gated by cooldowns. For instance HS boosts your damage way more than it boosts HGs damage.
And you're also overestimating AoE in a 10-man party scenario when every class can deal with adds just fine. AoE is just one slight issue in BSN and for hard dungeons that no one cares about.
I would prefer it that way if I were 1man army carrying some chaos raid, but that's just mere matter of preference. I don't see how ad damage is "padding" when it's a requirement to clear the ads, and hg does that effectively while ignoring SP debuffs in BSN for example (biggest reason why I would want hg in my BSN party).
The thing is, if you do the dungeon mechanics like everyone else and never get a bomb in BSN you'll have trouble getting #1 Total Damage against stronger classes if you never touch adds like they do. If you go out of your way to pad add damage without bombs then you can have that easily even lower geared.
Of course in practice you do it in a balanced way, you help people clear adds when it's needed or when your positioning favors it.
But that's why you can see around so many HGs with sometimes 200m+ damage on adds alone while being very far bottom in the boss damage dps charts. That doesn't mean they're really contributing 200m more than everyone if they get out of their way to focus on a higher number of adds when the time could have been better spent into boss damage that have far higher HP.
Hg clearly has a solid role in raids and that's what matters.
And that happens exactly for this. HG get the bad end of stick of add killing that no one else wants to do. It's like being proud of being the bathroom cleaner.
EDIT: lemme quote what YOU wrote on another post:
Also, thanks for quoting that my post, it saves me some time on explaining.
During the class rebalance Fire Bomber was acknowledged as a bug that the fix would effectively buff the class in our current content with smaller bosses (still not optimal since it stays the same in future content).
But later the design of the skill was said to be intended so bug fixes on HG no more increases their damage as opposed to most people used to believe.
Then as concluded, we needed to ask for direct buffs from the start rather than being tricked into thinking something was going to be done about Fire Bomber donut.
You see, you yourself admitted u can just work around the bugs and it won't really affect your class after all.
Yes, and that's exactly why we need direct buffs rather than just bug fixing, otherwise the class stays the same.
Based on YOUR words I can say, 100% yes I want a class like that.
I'd rather be like a class that is strong and have no important bugs though, instead of being a class that's weaker and need to work around bugs (extra casts) as part of daily gameplay.
On the second thought, it wouldn't be unreasonable if hg's plasma tree would be buffed to the point it's clearly the better choice against single target
I think that'd be nice since it gives more variety. But the main issue of that tree isn't even on the damage side but also hugely on the bug and clunky targeting.
since plasma tree doesnt offer braindead ez knockback resist nor immunity against SP debuff.
And again, you're overestimating the SP case. Heavy Gunner have it worse on the Plasma tree too as HS also doesn't increase their SP efficiency compared to almost every other class that have SP gating rather than cooldown gating.
Archers have fire build that's trash at mobbing but better against single target, and have wind build that's trash against any single target that moves around but better for mobbing. If heavy gunners were buffed to be like that instead of the "one-tree-fits-all" most hg mains are crying for, then I ain't complaining.
Actually, if Heavy Gunners did bring party utility like Archers being able to give one of the most relevant buffs (as people run crit dmg on BSN) to parties people wouldn't complain.
And on top of that HG mobbing isn't relevant on most raid scenarios that you have all of the 10 other classes since utility classes like Soul Binder can bring utility and clear adds just as good and sometimes better than HG in most raids that have adds.
You currently can try to put HG (and most of other classes similarily) as utility because it has medkit, as pure dps because it doesn't have utility, as strong because it can pad total damage, as AoE because it can sell ramparts, as clunky because it's stuck in place due to extra cast bugs, as mobile class because of Plasma tree.
But none of these stands outs and/or is hindered by something else. Think about being bad/average on everything when everyone else does everything better.
All other classes have something they excels at, Heavy Gunners have no specific excel at or stand out thing.