Thanks all for the detailed replies, it really helps and the community is great here!

Quote Originally Posted by CKNovel View Post
I'll avoid pluging back in the debate "Should ranged do more damage", the main points have been figured out.

I believe in WoW, it was always the opposite. Melees hard a hardtime and ranged were always on top. Be ready for the opposite during this expansion.
Exactly! I came from WoW which I played for years and whilst ranged classes have their own set of problems they do not suffer in DPS and can be very comparable to the other 'best' DPS classes. Which is the whole point of a DPS class in the first place... I do see why FF14 does what they do with a bard class - it's semi support class and it does have some nice buffs as outlined by the @CKNovel but I just don't feel like the buffs compensate enough for the DPS which it lacks. That's just my opinion and I won't open this can of worms again, haha.

This is exactly why I considered a Machinist instead of Bard which is supposedly a more pure DPS class. Yet it's outperformed by basically everyone according to the stats which I found online, usually picked last too, so yea. That's the annoying part - if one wants to go ranged DPS route there does not seem to be a viable enough solution in FF14 right now...

That being said, I've been doing a lot of instanced content lately and really working on my rotations and AoE damage and been outperforming almost everyone almost all the time with DPS especially when there's more than 1 target, haha. Some ninjas were double the DPS behind me at times due to their bad rotations... So it seems improving my rotations, albeit low level did help a lot too. Occasionally there will be this higher level synced person tank or summoner/black mage who outdoes me by a large margin which now I understand should be happening due to leveling and gear/sync stuff.

Let's see if I will be able to keep that up with all the skills at higher levels xD

TLR I'll stick with bard for now and work to perfect the rotations, if I will reach lvl 80 and still feel at the bottom of the DPS. I think I will work on an alt like a samurai or summoner just to have it leveled and give it a chance... Since FF14 seems to favor those classes for DPS. Hopefully, 5.3 will bring more balance to my favorite ranged classes, whether it will be with the support side of increased DPS, haha.