There's no rhyme or reason with DPS balance anymore

This actually goes for every role at this point but since DPS has the most jobs I wanted to hone in on them for a second.

In the past, job overall DPS was determined by how much utility they brought to the party, with jobs bringing utility doing less and jobs with none or very little doing more. It made sense and you could, for the most part, justify every job you brought into a raid.

Now? For whatever reason Reaper, a job with literally copy pasted utility of Monk, is doing the most damage in the game while Monk is just above Ninja for DPS. SAM, a job that has no utility, is doing less DPS than jobs with utility. BLM, a job that brings no utility and has a high skill ceiling is doing less than Pictomancer.

It's not just a one off case, job balance just feels so messy it makes me think they have no idea what they're doing. All this in a game that pushes homogenization so strongly, you would think balancing the jobs would be the easiest part.

I actually will feel weird defending them here, but it's nothing new at expansion launches. It's always all over the place. Wait for the first patch adjustments.

I don't disagree with the feeling though.

While I agree with you, there is still a "ranged tax" that has no reason to be.

I love how nobody cared when they started exempting jobs from this rule on the tank role during Anabaseios but now that it's also being applied to the dps role it suddenly matters?

I honestly don’t think they even care anymore. The fact Pictomancer has came out fairly unbalanced really says it all. I genuinely think the only bar they set for DPS jobs now before pushing them to release is ‘does it look good’. Questions like, ‘does it actually work properly relative to other jobs in the same role/subrole’ clearly don’t cross their mind at all anymore lol