SE needs to be more creative when balancing party damage utility classes.

[Akiudo]

The primary issue is that Tactician, Troubadour, and Shield Samba are easily the most powerful defensive CDs available to the entire DPS role and seemingly no one realizes that PhysRange will be balanced partly around this fact. In order to gauge where Physical Ranged classes should be, one has to consider how valuable these CDs are.

i would say remind me of this when smn stops being top dps while offering a rez, or monk either loses mantra completly or gets put in its "rightfull" place as the weakest melee. To be clear, i'm not saying your assessment is wrong, just that square has sadly proven so incapable of balancing around any kind of utility at this point i'm not sure if it wouldn't be better to just give everyone some form of it just to muddle the waters on class balance, that or just oficially reduce all classes down to "this is the damage they deal, be happy" and strip them of everything else. Its becoming quite obvious they don't really know what value to put on what kind of utility

Either the bonuses will be broken and force BRDs into parties, or they will have no significant effect and change nothing, since damage trumps all.

also this, its simply the game design. End of progress at the latest damage is > all. And really considering how small the amount of players that really do hardcore progress is, and considering these players will switch classes to whatever class offers what they need the most, be this dps/utility/the most consistency balancing around that crowd is a futile endeavor from the get go.