Exactly this :)
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Yes definitely agree with you.
All the jobs are currently well balanced in terms of interest/difficulty/reward and hopefully this will remain for the 3.0
Any supposed "easiness" of the BLM rotation is immediately balanced by the ability to maintain high DPS in movement-heavy fights. Some players excel at this and some fall flat when unable to remain a mere turret.
Hehe nothing matches the 1-2-3 rage of halone forever combo of paladin................ I really hope they get a combo ender for riot blade in Heavensward..... The class is incredibly boring to play.
The OP never said anything about mastering the class. He said performing averagely on, which, as much as I love BLM, is something I cant disagree with. But I would say that mastering Black Mage is probably the hardest out of all the jobs. You have no idea how many times I ran with close to full i130 BLMs while helping on FCoB who cant even break 430 DPS on T10 & 11.
For DPS, I would comment the following:
- BLM and BRD are both quite easy to play and perform with decent quality.
- DRG and MNK require a bit more effort into elaborating/understanding their rotations and therefore are a bit more complex to play.
- SMN can be quite frustrating if you don't know what you're doing, keeping the DoTs on can be as hard as crafting a rotation with a DRG and MNK.
Tanks are pretty straightfoward to play, but PLD is vastly easier than WAR because it requires only a good awareness of when to use the defensive cooldown abilities to perform nicely.
I can't really comment on WHM because I barely got the chance to play with it, but SCH is fairly painless to understand and the pet helps a lot when you are struggling to learn the tricks for the class.
As other posters have pointed out, this depends on what you mean by "perform averagely." If you mean which classes are the easiest overall in any situation, that's definitely BLM. BLM DPS stays sufficiently high even if you interrupt your casts to dodge AoEs every time they go out. In most dungeons, BLM just sits back and spams spells following a very simple pattern: Fire 3, Fire 1 until low MP, Blizzard 3, wait for full MP or cast a Thunder spell, repeat. If no enemies and Astral Fire is up, transpose. That's it. Very simple, and you do perfectly fine DPS for 4/8 man dungeons. If fighting crowds of enemies, just replace Fire 1 with Fire 2, and you do perfectly legit DPS. By no means are these ideal rotations, but they do sufficient damage with ease.
However, if you mean "perform averagely in a raid scenario" the easiest, that award goes to BRD. BRD can do full DPS while moving, so you don't have to learn to pre-emptively dodge mechanics. BRD isn't that much more complex than BLM, you just have to maintain dots with different durations and you have to actually pay attention to do so. BRDs also have a buff they need to keep up, which is a bit more complex than BLMs who don't.
Rotationwise, PLD is even easier than the above, but keeping aggro on multiple enemies is significantly more complex than just doing a BLM/BRD rotation. In my opinion, the very nature of the tank or healer role is significantly more complex than a DPS role, since tanks and healers can DPS on the side while doing the extra stuff for their role. That said, of course, PLD is easier to be average at than WAR by a long shot.
For early dungeons, you can heal as a SCH while afk. Just summon your fairy, and then autofollow a DPS. That's all it takes to keep everyone healed, even through bosses, in early game dungeons. So, SCH wins out over WHM for easiness. SCH in early content is exactly the same as an ACN/SMN DPS without a pet whose presence causes everyone to magically be healed. In later content, it balances out as both classes have to actually do things to heal. Honestly, I find managing the SCH pet to be far more complex than healing as a WHM.