An interview with Yoshida and his thoughts on healers in 5.0

[Hustensaft]

It would seem from interviews that SE believes ranged dps are all support dps.

I'd argue it's not SE, but the players. DNC makes that quite obvious with it's labeling as physical ranged/support DPS.

There is only DPS. Which is split between melee and ranged. Each DPS has personal DPS, and may or may not have DPS support abilities. The lack of support abilities is compensated by signficantly higher personal DPS. BLM, MCH and SMN have vastly higher personal DPS then NIN/BRD (two specs with the highest support DPS - yes, NIN provides equally high support DPS as BRD, and has equally low personal DPS.).

That's why argueing with DNC vs. BRD is inherently pointless. It's not DNC vs. BRD. It's any DPS job vs. 4 DPS slots. Whatever nets the highest raiddps should be the chosen raid composition. If it happens that the personal dps of MCH, SMN, BLM and SAM is the highest raiddps, then that's also just fine.

[Lozza]

I'd argue it's not SE, but the players. DNC makes that quite obvious with it's labeling as physical ranged/support DPS.

That's why argueing with DNC vs. BRD is inherently pointless. It's not DNC vs. BRD. It's any DPS job vs. 4 DPS slots. Whatever nets the highest raiddps should be the chosen raid composition. If it happens that the personal dps of MCH, SMN, BLM and SAM is the highest raiddps, then that's also just fine.

I don't think you've really been following what's been said about this. If everyone acknowledges that dps is dps then adding another dps regardless of flavour is meaningless especially when it clearly comes at the expense of a role not getting a shiny new toy for two expansions now. The interview with Yoshida clearly indicates that SE believes that physical ranged dps, is different to magic ranged dps, is different to melee physical dps. We can deduce this because they feel they need an extra ranged physical dps to "balance the number of roles out". Thus if SE feels phys ranged dps is somehow different to other dps so much so they need to give this group of players another option we can only ask why that is the case, hence why they feel the need to balance the number of options for physical ranged when there are already 9 dps jobs competing for 4 spots.

If we view dps as dps alone (since they do all compete for the same spots on teams) it seems insane does it not that SE added yet another dps to the game rather than 4/2, 4/2, 8/4 options which would make the numbers more balanced so far as choices are concerned.