Quote Originally Posted by Harmonea View Post
As for who the job flow should be balanced around, certainly not the top 5%. Job changes in SHB have been pushing jobs toward more general usability and a lower gap between the skill floor and skill ceiling. If forced to choose, SE very intentionally balances toward the middle of the pack, and this has clearly been their philosophy since late HW when they admitted their AST changes would make the job OP in the hands of a highly skilled player before going on to specify that the average player who played whatever card they got, not the top end who painstakingly fished for Balance between pulls, was their balance target.
Uh... citation needed? To my knowledge they never once mentioned intentionally making Astro OP. The community more or less assumed 3.4 Astro was a desperate plea from the dev team to give the job a chance because it had been DoA for over a year by that point.

Balancing around the average player is pointless. They aren't going to push the jobs to its limits, therefore it won't provide an accurate assessment of their potential. The average player will consistently die, mess up their rotation or some other valuable that will not be consistent; making the data useless. Case in point, at the 50% margin Black Mage is pulling lower numbers than all four melee and Summoner by no small amount. This would suggest a serious buff is needed, yet if you look at the 95% range, Black Mage is beating out Dragoon and Ninja while only lagging slightly behind Summoner. Had they buffed Black Mage based on the average player... it'd be hilariously overpowered to the point you may drop the melee entirely.

Simply put, the data will never be consistent enough to make it useful.