Bard vs Ninja - Higher DPS?

So currently there is some heated debate going on in my FC about who SHOULD be doing higher DPS, bard or ninja.

Let's assume both jobs are equally geared and melded and are over ilvl 255. Both players know their job and rotations perfectly. Which of the two should be putting out more damage and what should be the difference in dps numbers?

I've come here to ask as a mediator between two people in my FC as I couldn't provide an accurate answer myself. I do hope you guys can help me get this settled as it's being taken a bit too far.

It depends on the fight. Is there a lot of movement? Are there many adds? Did bard have to play ballad/army? Is there a dragoon or warrior in the party?

To say one job should out DPS is rather short-sighted, because every fight is different.

This is why the game has a party system and is not solo play (for the most part).

It depends on what kind of skill level you are talking about.

When played at it's best (90%+-), Bard easily overtakes Ninja in terms of personal dps, having a higher ceiling.
However, bard is a difficult job to play well, meaning the skillfloor is much higher than that of ninja. Ninja on the other hand is easier to get it on an above average level of play.

What this essentially means is, a well played bard does better than a well played ninja, but an average bard is worse than an average ninja in terms of raw DPS.

You can easily see this by comparing the average results on a certain parsing site. I'm not sure how allowed linking this site is, but it's easy to see there that on average, good bards outdamage good ninjas and average ninjas outdamage average bards.

Thank you both for your replies and input. I greatly appreciate it. Chevronone, I apologize. I could have come up a more exact scenario. For simplicity's sake, let's just use a dummy. And I agree that this does seem very short-sighted. We seem to have a holier-than-thou ninja that thinks his dps is the be all end all best there is. I personally feel the two shouldn't be compared due to how they are both used in a party.

Thoro, I know of the site you mention and I tried to go there and use it as a source for the two players to look at but I wasn't quite sure how to navigate it to find the numbers I was looking for. I'm not sure if this was due to me not having an account and being logged in or if I was just confused trying to navigate it on mobile. Perhaps I'll look again when I'm home on my desktop. But I do understand what you're saying in terms of skill. That does make sense. I'll use that when I present my findings to the two.

Thank you both again.

https://www.fflogs.com/statistics/13#

Don't think they care about it. Can adjust the percentile, 75th is usually the average of someone in BiS where NIN > BRD. 95/99th shows the top potential of the classes where BRD > NIN.

Thank you! I appreciate the link and understand it a bit more now.

If you just want a dummy comparison, you can just look at the SSS dummy hp's for each job. They are all different (obviously), the dummy won't have the same HP if you zone in as a machinist versus as a black mage, for example.

So it lets you see how SE 'ranks' the personal DPS output of each job internally. I don't have the chart with me now with the HP values, but machinist was the lowest with bard in second place if I recall right, so by that metric you might say that bard does 'lower' damage than a ninja.

Of course actual real world performance is a much more complicated beast. You have party buffs to account for, and different jobs are better or worse at dealing with mechanics while keeping up dps - the above replies cover that aspect pretty well, you'd have to look at player data to get the best idea.