Current problems with machinist and being constructive.

[Seraphor]

Because neither have enough raid buffs for it to make a significant enough difference. At least ideal circumstances. Reiterating what I said before, Red Mage is actually lagging so far behind that it can't keep up with Black Mage. This is the first raid tier we've had in years where there's more Black Mage clears of P8S than Red Mage. Meanwhile, Summoner plays well into raid buffs enough to remain sort of relevant.



Samurai is the poster boy for playing into raid buffs to huge benefit. It's synergy with Dancer rivals the Dragoon/Bard love affair of old. The key difference though is despite being extremely effective at utilizing raid buffs, it doesn't overshadow the other melee. In fact, none of the melee contribute much in the way of rDPS relative to their aDPS: i.e., they're all largely selfish. Case in point, let's look at Ninja. In P6S, at the 90%, it's rDPS and aDPS are roughly 100 apart. That's within crit variance range. Now look at Bard and Dancer. Both have well over 1,000 separating each category. Which means a sizeable portion of their entire damage profile is baked into raid buffs. You can't balance a selfish job around that big a margin.

In order for Machinist to even be close, it's aDPS would need to skyrocket. Which, in turn, makes Dancer and Bard worthless. Why play two jobs whose damage relies entirely on other players when you can play Machinist and easily do consistently better damage? It's the Dancer problem now except reversed.

Put simply, even in a bad party, Ninja can still contribute meaningful damage. Bard and Dancer can't.

Once again... none of this is a reason against buffing Machinist.
It does not need to be buffed to SAM/BLM levels! It just needs to be able to compete with BRD and DNC.
Buffing Machinist by a couple percent to bring it up to a level where you are not so severely punished for playing MCH will not suddenly invalidate BRD and DNC.
You keep arguing in extremes, there's tons of middle ground.

[ForteNightshade]

Once again... none of this is a reason against buffing Machinist.
It does not need to be buffed to SAM/BLM levels! It just needs to be able to compete with BRD and DNC.
Buffing Machinist by a couple percent to bring it up to a level where you are not so severely punished for playing MCH will not suddenly invalidate BRD and DNC.
You keep arguing in extremes, there's tons of middle ground.

I never said you couldn't buff Machinist though. Frankly, it does still need one regardless of what they do.

My whole response was saying that buffing it won't fix the issue because even with a slight increase, it'll still do less than Bard and Dancer at the high end. The way SE has set up the Prange, a selfish job in that role simply cannot work. Bard and Dancer provide too much rDPS relative to their aDPS for Machinist to ever come out ahead outside of average PG groups. They need to either rework Bard and Dancer to have more personal damage ala what they did with Ninja or scrap the whole selfish DPS concept for Machinist and let the Prange be support DPS again. No amount of buffing Machinist will fix the root problem.