The live letter suggested that Yoshi-P is still observing BRD discussions

[Cetonis]

wouldn’t giving ranged DPS more support make up for the DPS disparity?

Yes, it would. There's a bigger question of what on earth they're looking at that makes them as lost as they are re: balancing.

In theory, they ought to have something internally that resembles fflogs, possibly a tad more accurate in certain ways but ultimately the numbers they have should not vary all that much from the numbers players have. And whether they do or don't have that sort of tooling, they certainly have to know by now that the fflogs statistics page is what drives the playerbase's impression of job balance.

They may not understand how much or little players value defensive utility with respect to that, although things like i.e. the fact that they wound up constantly buffing RDM over the course of Stormblood should clue them in to the fact that even rezbot isn't valued that highly at the end of the day. Let alone things like Minne.

Still, even if there's some fuzziness with defensive stuff, all in all it should be very easy to see the large gap between the dps right now. Or at minimum, to see what the players see on that front, perception being reality and all that.

We can see the triple melee + BLM meta coming from miles away, and so should they. The fact that they don't seem to - judging by their comments about Bard, since as you note they have ample room to buff the ranged - is a major, major concern.

Not even in the micro sense - sure being a ranged is gonna suck for a while, but that happens to most jobs at some point or another. But in the bigger picture, how can they not know? They'd have to be purposefully putting their heads in the sand not to, and that's a troubling thing to see a game's devs doing.

[Connor]

Yes, it would. There's a bigger question of what on earth they're looking at that makes them as lost as they are re: balancing.

In theory, they ought to have something internally that resembles fflogs, possibly a tad more accurate in certain ways but ultimately the numbers they have should not vary all that much from the numbers players have. And whether they do or don't have that sort of tooling, they certainly have to know by now that the fflogs statistics page is what drives the playerbase's impression of job balance.

They may not understand how much or little players value defensive utility with respect to that, although things like i.e. the fact that they wound up constantly buffing RDM over the course of Stormblood should clue them in to the fact that even rezbot isn't valued that highly at the end of the day. Let alone things like Minne.

Still, even if there's some fuzziness with defensive stuff, all in all it should be very easy to see the large gap between the dps right now. Or at minimum, to see what the players see on that front, perception being reality and all that.

We can see the triple melee + BLM meta coming from miles away, and so should they. The fact that they don't seem to - judging by their comments about Bard, since as you note they have ample room to buff the ranged - is a major, major concern.

Not even in the micro sense - sure being a ranged is gonna suck for a while, but that happens to most jobs at some point or another. But in the bigger picture, how can they not know? They'd have to be purposefully putting their heads in the sand not to, and that's a troubling thing to see a game's devs doing.

Yeah, I’ve actually been wondering the same thing. Players have the statistics that allow them to see for themselves which jobs are where they should be and which aren’t. One would assume that the developers have access to the same or similar statistics, and I doubt that the devs would be getting numbers that are significantly different from what players see. So it does end up leaving me with the question, ‘how exactly are they making these decisions?’. Another example of this is Dancer and Astrologian, both of whom have raid buffs that still don’t bridge the gap between their DPS and their competitors. If the developers had the numbers to show them this, then how did they get released in that state? If the developers don’t have the numbers, what exactly are they basing their balancing on?

I’d like to hope it isn’t a case of sweeping it under the carpet and hoping nobody will notice too. But at the same time, they seem to be doing the same with Astrologian’s card system (trying to sweep the issues people have to one side), so it’s not easy to give them the benefit of the doubt.

[bass9020]

Never understood why people are so focused on changing the CORE of a job that they know going into would be overall not as "powerful". Like I get it you enjoy playing a bow class but this bow class leans towards support. This community has been so vocal and basically has destroyed all jobs identities, the devs just cant keep up.

[Cetonis]

Another example of this is Dancer and Astrologian, both of whom have raid buffs that still don’t bridge the gap between their DPS and their competitors.

They do come pretty close though, and at least in those cases you can imagine them not being fully fully optimized yet. When all is said and done, I don't think anyone (will, anyone amongst the speedrun crowd I guess) would be too super surprised if AST+SCH and DNC are all meta. The former probably a bit more likely than the latter though, it's hard to guess which gear bias is stronger with Dancer - groups lumping it up with the tanks and healers as a low priority job to give gear to, or groups loading up a BLM or something for partner reasons. Buffs to SAM would also shadow buff DNC, as I think they can more strongly leverage 2m bursts than MNK or BLM do iirc.