SE are leaving BLM to rot by giving SMN and RDM even more utility

[Katie_Kitty]

And the other two could lose their raises and have their damage upped to compensate so no caster is better than another in terms of damage. Plus, as the other poster mentioned, people like safety so they'll naturally skew towards RDM/SMN atm and that's bad (more so in 7.x when SMN loses their raise and RDM is the only one that'll be wanted, which is why it's likely it'll also lose its raise or it'll be heavily neutered).

Sounds great. While we're at it we can remove all damage buffs and group mitigation and turn everyone into Black Mage.

[Rai_Takara]

Sounds great. While we're at it we can remove all damage buffs and group mitigation and turn everyone into Black Mage.

I mean SE could. Damage tuning is very easy to manipulate as it's pure numbers. What a job doesn't bring in buffs, they can get compensated for in damage and vice versa. The key point is all jobs will have equivalent raid DPS contribution. For example:

If Job A has brings buffs that let the party do 100 DPS extra because of them, while the job itself does 900 DPS, that's a total of 1000 raid DPS, or rDPS.

If Job B has no buffs, but does 1000 DPS, then it also has a total of 1000 rDPS.

Job A = Job B.

As such, really, all that SE has to do is tune these numbers so that all rDPS is the same, and whether a job has buffs or not doesn't matter because their contribution is always the same. This is the end goal which is why jobs are balanced within roles (caster, ranged, melee) as opposed to altogether.

The clear issue is raise is not something you can attribute an rDPS value to. That's why balancing it is impossible. There's a reason SE like to make RDM weak at start of expansions and only buff them at the end. To ensure RDM isn't just the de facto caster for the entire expansion.