Quote Originally Posted by whiskeybravo View Post
And judging only the higher end parses of groups which have been collecting gear and optimizing over the last 6 weeks, compared to the more casual base which doesn't care about "the meta" is indicative of.. what exactly?
What each job is capable of when pushed to its near full potential. How is this so difficult to understand? Those optimized runs are precisely the data you want because it's the most accurate representation of the jobs' performance. For argument's sake, let's pretend Black Mage's max potential is 17,000 and Red Mage is 15,000. If you balance around these figures, the bottom inevitably increases for Red Mage, thus both the lower tier and higher tier benefit. Conversely, if you consider the lower tier where several mistakes and other outside variables occur, you can get a clouded picture—like Black Mage may be underpowered because at 30% Dragoon pulls ahead. This approach leads to issue like we've seen in the past with how insanely overpowered Warrior, Bard and Summoner all were at one point or another. Or asinine remarks like "we don't consider Dragoon when balancing Bard and Machinist damage."

Quote Originally Posted by whiskeybravo View Post
Bottom line is this. If you're a good player than it doesn't really matter what job you play, you can find a group and clear the content. Short of that all you're doing is looking for an excuse to justify either your lack of ability, the lack of ability of your group, or anything else in between - rather than looking at yourself. That doesn't mean SE shouldn't do anything, as I've stated repeatedly in my posts, but there are 2 sides to every story. If you can't complete the content it's not your job, or combination of jobs in your group. It's you.
The "bottom line" is you need to stop strawmanning. No one is saying you can't clear content. We're talking about how certain jobs are widely inferior to others, thus demanding more effort from specific comps not due to the content challenging them but their preferred job simply being weak. There isn't two sides to this story because it's a dichotomy. Either the jobs are balanced or they aren't.