Quote Originally Posted by alchemi80 View Post
I read this whole thread, and I do have an honest question as a newer player. None of this really matters if you're not parsing 99% and/or doing brand new progression, correct? A class doing 1k more dps than another is only a matter of perfect rotation, a.k.a. the professionals? Not meant to be a jab.
This is wrong. In fact, the worse your group is - or rather, the slower its progression - the more of a burden it is to play a gimped Job. In this case, playing BLM on progression basically requires you to just die a lot because you have to pre-plan everything you do around the flow of mechanics. This is compounded the more complex a fight gets, e.g., phase 1 of E4S has two different patterns and you have to learn the flow of each. For a group that does not raid much - maybe 6 to 8 hours a week - this is actually more harmful, because overtaxing the healers is the primary cause of wipes when you're progressing.

The underlying assumption of the argument you're advancing is that people who aren't "cutting edge 99% elitists" must all be a bunch of braindead "play whatever's fun!" sunshine-and-rainbow types. This is not the case. I don't have a huge amount of time to commit, so I only raid ~6 hours a week. But I want to kill bosses and be a team player. If there's no reward for the extra effort to play BLM, literally all I am doing is wasting the very limited time of my raid; that, in turn, limits the scope of content we can do together - if we are still doing Titan, we're not going to get meaningful time on Ultimates. Progression on bosses can drag into weeks (especially if people quit the static, or if you have retail workers in your static, or whatever other wrench life can throw at you) like this, and it feels horrible to have a sense that you're slowing the group down. On top of that, if you know that your group does not have the best players, part of being a team player is doing your best to compensate for that. This is something I know all too well, having played WHM up until ShB, and having to drop it on a few occasions in favor of AST because of bad tanks who couldn't hold aggro during prog.

And that's before we even get to talking about how the community develops narratives which systematically lock people out of statics or PUGs. This is where BLM has wound up during Ultimates in the past, where groups just wouldn't take you. ShB's changes did help mitigate some of the issues that caused this, but those are pretty much negated by the overtuning of SMN. Why bring something that does less DPS, is less mobile (and thus dies more), and doesn't have a rez to the hardest content in the game? For me, what's worse is the feeling of forcing a group to bring something that I know is inferior. It really sucks the fun out of it, because you're bringing nothing else to the table.