I’ve seen DNC locked out. Not BRD.
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To be fair, all three physical ranged need to be looked at as they’re all fairly weak right now. And if 5.08/5.1 bring significant changes to NIN, SAM, and SMN, it’s likely double caster could be a thing. Party bonus be damned. That said, DNC is the lowest of the three and BRD/MCH are fairly even at 95th for most fights. I’ve never seen BRD locked out on Aether—but I have seen DNC locked out.
I strongly disagree, but I suppose it's just a matter of perspective...I'd rather see MNK and DRG nerfed a little bit to bring them in line with SAM level of rdps. Same with BLM and RDM/SMN.
Of course we know that whoever is in charge of jobs balance usually make some rather questionable choices, so I wouldn't be surprised to see something ridiculous like overbuffing NIN, SMN, RDM and SAM. Indeed this would doom the physical ranged role to irrelevance. At this point though, I'm just curious to see what absurd solution the devs will conjure up that will probably end up in a worse situation than what we have now. Honestly, I just lost all faith. Thankfully my static is good enough that we can just laugh at their bad decisions.
Unfortunately, the developers aren’t keen to nerf anything usually...
Since they addressed that SAM and NIN would get adjustments in 5.08/5.1, and since its very likely SMN may also see some work, the physical ranged will be at risk if the buffs to the latter are substantial. They’re balanced against one another (with DNC being slightly behind the other two), but that doesn’t mean they’re in the best of spots right now. They aren’t bad—but there is room for them to be brought up. It’s a fairly wide consensus amongst the physical ranged theorycrafters that they could stand to be buffed.
Speed kill groups are seriously considering running double BLM. That's how insane the gap between it and the Range are right now. If SMN receives any sort of buff come 5.08 or 5.1, they will immediately bench all three Range jobs at the hardcore level. It's bad enough DNC, and supposedly even BRD, are getting locked from PF alongside NIN. While nerfing the jobs you mentioned would help alleviate this problem. SE has shown a very strong aversion to nerfs. It's far more likely they slowly buff every other job and/or increase the party bonus to essentially force a Range into the party—the latter being a particularly awful choice. It would more or less be the equivalent of your parents forcing you to take your baby sibling with you.
The devs really nicked up this time, I think things like SAM, NIN, SMN, RDM and previously (before 5.05) AST and BRD honestly should have never happened. I don’t expect perfection but these jobs are legitimately in really bad places. Like SMN pre 4.1 is in a better place then 5.0 SMN.
And now we have the issue where is the caster spot in most PFs are BLM only locking the rest of us out and same for the NIN and SAM. It’s just a bit silly and sucks cause I’m at the point where I may just stop playing until 5.1, cause I’m not interested in being a BLM.
On the one hand, it’s really lame when this happens, on the other this is really absolutely nothing new for the games community.
In Heavensward Monk and Paladin got locked out of pug PFs from literally Gordias onward because of how weak they were. Warrior even was subject to this when Skip Soar or Disband memes were out in full force because it couldn’t cheese Wave Cannon. In Stormblood it was Samurai.
This may actually be the most imbalance the game has ever been since early ARR. While jobs aren't outright broken like 3.0 Astro. The sheer imbalance is remarkable if only because they've missed the mark so badly. The melee are a complete mess; Black Mage utterly dominates the Casters; the Range are on the cusp of getting benched as a whole, and despite being closer now in terms of balance, people aren't exactly happy with the healers. Hell, look at Monk. The 5.05 changes were literally what people had been asking for since Heavenward. So why did it ship with Riddle of Fire still having a slow that almost no one liked?
It just seems like a lot of their changes were destroying job utility, believing that would solve job exclusion. Ironically, they made things worse.