What is the General Consensus?

[Aana]

Except that it doesn't, your appeal to "reality" here isn't backed up. There are several reasons why:

(1) We haven't had a time when tank dps and defensive utilities were balanced against eachother: I.e. Higher damage means lower utilities and higher utilities means lower damage.

(2) This isn't true for the dps meta. The highest hitting classes aren't taken over those which provided direct damage utilities.

(3) This isn't true for healers where astro is within the meta despite being the weakest damaging healer by a significant margin compared to white mage.

Utility wins, every single class in the meta brings a utility (either direct damage or defense utilities: read healer dps utilities). While it is very nice that you agree that dark knight is probably the weakest of the three, I find it disingenuous that you sit here telling people how much they should be complaining or how loudly they should complain while posting context free (and therefore misleading) factoids that don't represent the actual situation at the time. I'm not disagreeing with your conclusions that maybe people over state things, but having your constant detraction of "it isn't that bad" in every thread is really less than helpful after 10 months of complaints have gone unanswered.

"This isn't true for the dps meta. The highest hitting classes aren't taken over those which provided direct damage utilities. " I just said that damage dealt is the number 1 factor. When people talk about tank 'utility' (I know this term gets thrown around a lot so lets be clear what I'm talking about) it is usually in the context of veil, shake it off, TBN, cover, etc. Defensive utilities. That is how I was using the term. Forgive the confusion in syntax.

Trick attack is not a 'utility' skill in this context. When I say damage defines the meta that includes skills like trick attack. Like sch speed buffs. Brd: Magic damage up is damage. Removing a debuff would be 'utility' in my eyes. Utility gets thrown around a LOT but this is what I mean when I talk about utility skills. Maybe a better term is 'support' skills. Whatever, you get the point.

So when I say damage defines the meta, I mean exactly that. Trick attack is a strong, meta defining skill (read: Damage). Cover is not (read defensive). The meta has very consistently been the combination of jobs that provides the most damage. Drk/War provided the most damage in HW. Right now Drg/Nin provides the most damage. If Sam/Mnk brought more total raid damage to the table than Drg/Nin it would be meta. Mnk has only been meta in the past when it did the most damage. When it has fallen behind it was promptly kicked regardless of having (defensive) utility of mantra. While it was in the meta it was praised for mantra, but conveniently overlooked that it also provided the most damage. Remember double mnk combos? Triple melee+mch combo? All Brd combos in 2.0? Whatever gets the damage done.

As you stated. Combos with the most damage and utility are 'usually' meta. However, combos that provide the HIGHEST damage are ALWAYS meta. All squares are rectangles, not all rectangles are squares. Sure, drk/war had path/reprisal. They also crapped all over pld damage. However, Pld/War was also meta at 4.0 before shake it off existed and Drk actually had more defensive utility than war. (war had zero. Drk had TBN) because it did more damage. There has never been a time in FFXIV history that the combinations of jobs that did the most damage was NOT the meta. Many of those times overlap high defensive utility combos, but not all. The single constant is that Raid Damage is the only factor that follows the meta. Defensive utility does not have this record. Damage does.

I'm not disagreeing with your conclusions that maybe people over state things, but having your constant detraction of "it isn't that bad" in every thread is really less than helpful after 10 months of complaints have gone unanswered.

But that doesn't make my position less true. I could say the same about toe constant big fish exaggeration being 'less helpful after 10 months of complaints' too. I don't see how pointing out exaggerated complaints is somehow 'less helpful' than jumping on the QQ hyperbole train making issues appear bigger and scarier than they actually are. I'll leave that to the politicians and media.