Ranged DPS jobs - disappointing?

[Akiudo]

snip

soooo.... bard was meta for so long, it doesn't matter if its utter crap today ? great argument...

while we're add it

bard during arr literally was running in a "no contest" category, there simply was no second physical ranged to fill that slot, and back than indeed the fights very clearly where designed with the free movement (heck back than it really was free) physical in mind, you had bosses/adds that where imune to either magic/physical damage at a rate clearly designed in a way for one caster and 3 physical dps, you had adds you just had to kite, and refresh (or mana song back than) was simply necessary, all this is true, however this had nothing to do with bard being overtuned, it simply ran in a category no other class was even competing in. its like making a game where monk is the only melee and than saying monk is op, literally everyone takes monk for the melee lb.

come heavensward mch actually ended up as strong if not stonger than bard, it was just that nearly no one wanted to play it, which in no small part was due to mch simply starting out way to weak, followed by a buffing arms race between bard/mch

-> stormblood may very well be when bard was at its most op aside from the original arr release(which got rectified in like week one) , i'm not even gonna deny this, however, and this is the fun part, saying "see, bard was so op" and using this as an argument for why a bard dealing actual damage breaks the game ignores so much the things bard lost. refresh in its current form would be useless, as mp regen got buffed after its removal, but back than it was every bit as big if not bigger than a redmage rezz, its other defensive cooldowns where stronger, and to top it all of bard scaling itself was way more exponential with the way reportoire proccs worked back than (i.e. on dot crits) instead of the fixed rate we have today. , also again it was mostly running no contest either way, as mch was loathed.

oh, and heres the other fun part, you know what also was allways meta ? dragoon, that allways gets conveniently ignored that it was only the extreme synergy between bard/dragoon that actually pushed bard over the edge. bard could deal exactly the same dps it did during heavensward before exponential crit scaling for final tier bis gear kicks in, and just due to the removal of the 5% piercing debuff+bards lesser reliance on crit nowadays paired with the removal of refresh it would be so much weaker a pick than back during stormblood its not funny.

was bard allways meta ? aside from a patch or two , yes. but bard also was running for its rooster position in a "no contest" category 3/5 of the time and still owed this meta spot not purely to its own strengths but also to the synergy it had with another class