Could Wildfire be a little bit more casual friendly?

[aabe]

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Comparing my BRD to my MCH dragoon-less A3S is like... ~70 DPS diff comparing one of my best A3 clears on BRD to a sloppy MCH clear where we had like 10 deaths and I have really limited experience playing MCH in raids, MCH's personal DPS is really quite solid in the face of bard though I think A3 is favorable for MCH thanks to bishop turret and extra stuff like grenado shot in add phase.

BRD can fall behind MCH off of mistakes comparable to messing up wildfires too, though it's hard to make a mistake on BRD that you can say is as huge as screwing up a wildfire really badly. That big of a loss on BRD would be more like a bunch of mistakes combined.
It's just that WF is such a big part of competent MCH DPS that a buff to it like what you're suggesting could potentially set it well ahead of BRD.

[Archaell]

It's just that WF is such a big part of competent MCH DPS that a buff to it like what you're suggesting could potentially set it well ahead of BRD.

The competent MCH players rarely screw up WF, so it shouldn't change much imo.

My concern is with less competent MCHs vs less competent BRDs. If the classes are supposed to be interchangeable they need similar penalties for screawing up, and they should be balanced across all the player skill levels.

I wonder if we still have many more Bards in comparison to MCHs just due to the ugly lunch box and magic stick...

[aabe]

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The competent MCH players rarely screw up WF, but a good MCH is right where they should be compared to a good BRD. There are many points of fights where WF is unusable or sub-optimal, and the job is still neck and neck with BRD. If WF was buffed to be better in the sub-optimal situations I'm describing, even if it was done with the intention of making the job easier for less skilled players, it could/would create imbalance at higher skill levels.

The skill floor is certainly a good bit higher than BRD but I think every job has bare basics, some core things specific to the job that players will need to learn, and everything beyond that is optimizing. Wildfire is one of MCH's cores, and so a less skilled player should look to get gud at it after they have the rotation down.

Going past that, tweaking jobs so that they're balanced around lower skill levels is a REALLY slippery slope and it just overcomplicates things especially if you're trying to look to keep things balanced at all skill levels rather than a specific one.
Going past that there is a decent level of competence you're expected to have if you're doing raids at all, the jobs are interchangeable at this level of competency, and going lower than that, you don't really look for an optimal composition in most content that isn't the raid. Basically any job is interchangeable with any job at that point.