Reaper needs additional buffs.

[MaaryZeleste]

Even with the buff it got it's still going to be worse than the other melees by quite a significant margin.
Pls make the job not bad <3.

[Lyth]

One interesting knock on effect of raising the 'average GCD' potency from 380 to 400 is that Shadow of Death is a bigger potency loss relative to your baseline combo, which in turn impacts its cost of use as a filler GCD. It further emphasizes the importance of entering your Double Enshroud windows with less than 9 seconds on Death's Design.

[remiff]

Even with the buff it got it's still going to be worse than the other melees by quite a significant margin.
Pls make the job not bad <3.

I think the reaper is in a decent slot, it's definitely the ninja and drg who should drop back down to reaper level, simply because they're just way too strong for the raid utility they have,
besides, I don't quite understand why they haven't been slightly scaled down.

[Engaru]

I think the reaper is in a decent slot, it's definitely the ninja and drg who should drop back down to reaper level, simply because they're just way too strong for the raid utility they have,
besides, I don't quite understand why they haven't been slightly scaled down.

By now I'm convinced that the balance team is either drunk constantly or it only consists of one chimpanzee that throws darts at random post-it notes and wherever the dart lands on, that's what they'll do.

[Godzillaxpowerrangers]

By now I'm convinced that the balance team is either drunk constantly or it only consists of one chimpanzee that throws darts at random post-it notes and wherever the dart lands on, that's what they'll do.

Maybe they are always drunk and need intern chip to do the picking stuff by darts.

[ZiraZ]

I think the reaper is in a decent slot, it's definitely the ninja and drg who should drop back down to reaper level, simply because they're just way too strong for the raid utility they have,
besides, I don't quite understand why they haven't been slightly scaled down.

Raid buffs are not utility, DRG doesn't even have a defensive and has no utility, NiN has no utility, meanwhile RPR has a very strong raid utility and defensive ability with a very short cooldown that can out heal some tanks.
I'd say that's pretty balanced if they are 1-2% behind in dps at the cost of having crest.

[MagiusNecros]

Reaper is fine. QoL changes for more Harvest Moon usage and a way to get 8 stacks of Sacrifice during Arcane Circle in 4 man content would be great though.

But they really only balance jobs around 8 man content so....

[wereotter]

Raid buffs are not utility, DRG doesn't even have a defensive and has no utility, NiN has no utility, meanwhile RPR has a very strong raid utility and defensive ability with a very short cooldown that can out heal some tanks.
I'd say that's pretty balanced if they are 1-2% behind in dps at the cost of having crest.

Raid buffs are exactly how they balance damage. If they had ninja get maximum possible damage, think black mage level, because it has no utility by your definition, no one would bring samurai into a party because ninja would do the same damage while also bringing mug. No one would bring monk to anything because monk would have to do less damage than ninja because it has mudra, and brotherhood isn't more potent than mug.

Dragoon has effects that increase the damage other party members do, and has more of them than other jobs with both battle litany and dragon sight, other melees just have one party-wide damage increasing skill while dragoon can increase the party's damage as well as a selected party member. Additionally while dragoon might not have a shield, its the only melee with passive healing as part of its regular rotation, so it is probably fine as far as they see the balance of this job and the others.

[Serpent1ng]

If they plan to keep reaper where it is as the absolute worst melee damage wise, then they should give Arcane Crest its higher potency again. At least that way there would be an actual utility to the class. As it is now, bringing a reaper is just a net loss over bringing any other melee, since it provides less dps by every metric.

[Lyth]

...

When people do comparisons on average job dps, they're generally looking at rDPS which intrinsically takes raid damage buffs into account. So when a job does less rDPS than the others, you can't really make the argument that it's balanced on the basis of raid damage buffs. The real reason why this is done is a function of job popularity. The role as a whole has a fairly close balance, but discrepancies encourages players to jump into other jobs. This will get rebalanced eventually as RPR falls out of favor.

My worry at the moment is how any potency gains will get redistributed. I don't think that raising the average GCD value was a good idea at all, when the job is so focused around resource/burst management. It also raises a question over the role of actions like Harvest Moon, especially in situations when you're allowed to maintain full uptime.