What even is the purpose of all those non melee/blm jobs?

[Lyth]

Equal rDPS... for what setting?

Keep it simple. You'll always see some variation in your personal damage based off of who you're paired up with, but if rdps is balanced then it all works out to be the same on average, because raid dps is just the sum of individual rdps values. Not adps. Not ndps. The other parameters only exist to help you understand where you can stand to personally improve.

Melee this tier is a pretty good example. The median to upper quartile values are all within about 100 dps of each other on pretty much every fight. That's good. There's a similar balance for tanks, although it could be tighter. What I don't understand is why we're arbitrarily discriminating based on subroles. If they can achieve this sort of a balance for melee, then all of the DPS jobs should be brought into the same rough proximity of each other. Why should it matter if you're a caster or physical ranged? In fact, I think these arbitrary subrole designations are just distractions. There are three roles that anyone should care about: tanks, healers, and dps. Put each of these on their own level playing field at baseline. You can play around with flavor after that.

In fact, when you start looking at the distribution of performances (i.e. the interquartile ratio) you start to realize that most jobs aren't really all that different. BLM is probably the one exception but it also has the largest positive skew, meaning that there's a much smaller subset of players who understand the basics. But when you're above the median those differences become much smaller.

[Mikey_R]

If I have a Dancer and no SAM/BLM, it will contribute less rDPS than if it was paired with, say a Monk or Dragoon. Reasoning being, SAM/BLM have no personal buffs, in a vacuum, the DNC will be able to take full advantage of this DPS when it comes to the buffs it provides, however, DNC gains virtually no benefit from MNK or DRG using Riddle of Fire or Lance Charge respectively. The same is true for any other, non permanent, buff. Following on, this means DNC will do less rDPS, which contradicts the initial claim that you want every job to be equal.

So, with the current conclusion that every job cannot be equal, the decision is then, what difference is considered adequate that will keep people happy. 1%? 2%? 5%? Upper bounds can be set, a job doing 100% more DPS than another is obviously not going to cut it, but bringing it back to reality, how about 10% from highest to lowest? Less than that? Somewhere, there is a value that most will agree upon, however, you will never please everyone.

[Lyth]

This is a common fallacy on this forum, but aDPS really does not matter when it comes to job balance. It's a fictional quantity, and you cannot correlate it to total raid dps. The only reason why it exists is to gain insight into how well you're lining with the standard raid burst windows. You might personally do more rdps in a composition where you're the sole buff provider in a group full of 'selfish' dps or vice versa, but the only thing that truly matters is your raid group's total dps, which is the sum of your team members' personal rdps totals. Because total raid rdps is what dictates clear times (or whether you clear the content period), and having a faster clear time boosts everyone's dps. And that's why balance around this parameter is so important.

In the event that it was impossible to get jobs within relatively close rdps values of each other, I would have argued in favor of swapping things up such that no job stays on top endlessly. But the dev team have shown that a really tight dps balance is actually possible (look at melee). This should be the standard across the board, such that it really doesn't matter whether you're melee or caster or ranged. I don't know why a ranged tax exists. If a fight is tougher on melee, I just see that as a challenge. I don't need any handouts from the devs. If a fight is harder on caster, you should see that as a challenge. Give us all a level playing field, and let the best player come out on top.

[Mithron]

You might personally do more rdps in a composition where you're the sole buff provider in a group full of 'selfish' dps or vice versa, but the only thing that truly matters is your raid group's total dps, which is the sum of your team members' personal rdps totals. Because total raid rdps is what dictates clear times (or whether you clear the content period), and having a faster clear time boosts everyone's dps. And that's why balance around this parameter is so important.

Give us all a level playing field, and let the best player come out on top.

Perfectly said. All that matters is how fast the boss dies. aDPS does not contribute to that, only rDPS does.

Emphasis on best player. Not best job.

[AlgernonBlackwood]

I don't see how you can consider it a "level playing field" when a significant chunk some job's rdps is largely based on the performance of other players while others are entirely based on their own skill. You can play absolutely flawlessly on Dancer or Bard, but if the rest of your party is playing poorly, your rdps contribution will still fall behind other jobs. You run into similar issues trying to compare healers based on their dps. A healer with a team that makes a lot of mistakes will lose dps through no fault of their own, aside from maybe ditching their friends for the sake of a better parse.

I personally think it's kind of silly to attempt to compare the rdps of people playing different jobs in a cooperative game in order to determine who the "best player" is. Jobs vary in difficulty (even if you think all difficulty is relative, you have to admit that different jobs demand different skills and a master BLM may struggle with MNK and vice-versa), personal vs. "outsourced" damage, challenges to uptime based on fight design, and other party responsibilities that don't show up in a parse like rezzing.

If you really want to get an accurate picture of your skill level, it makes much more sense to compare yourself with other players playing the same job. The best players are those who come the closest to reaching their job's peak output. What this maximum output is relative to other jobs should be largely irrelevant when it comes to assessing your skill at playing a particular job. Is the best SMN a better FFXIV player than the best BLM? That's an unanswerable question, imo, and equalizing the maximum damage output of both jobs wouldn't bring you any closer to answering it.

Yes, the disparity between ranged and melee should be decreased in order to make it feel less bad to take BRD/DNC into DF content and to make 2 melee a choice rather than a requirement, but this is an entirely different concern from differences in rdps being a problem because they give some players an "unfair advantage" in some imaginary contest that 99.99% of players don't care about.

[Mithron]

I don't see how you can consider it a "level playing field" when a significant chunk some job's rdps is largely based on the performance of other players while others are entirely based on their own skill. You can play absolutely flawlessly on Dancer or Bard, but if the rest of your party is playing poorly, your rdps contribution will still fall behind other jobs.

That is a choice you make when playing those jobs. I don't see the problem. Some people like that.

[AlgernonBlackwood]

And some people (and by "some", I mean the overwhelming majority) like playing SMN even though its damage output is notably lower than BLM.

Playing a job with a lower skill ceiling and playing a job with a lower personal contribution to rdps are both choices people consciously make, and the popularity of jobs like SMN, WAR, RPR, and WHM at every level of play demonstrate that the vast majority of players don't have a problem with the sacrificing a small amount of potential damage in exchange for ease of use or utility.

Again, I think the DPS should all be closer together, but there's no nothing wrong with some jobs doing a little more damage due to having more difficult to reach skill ceilings. At the very least, we can pretty clearly conclude that the size of the gap between SMN and BLM (the biggest gap within any role) isn't significant enough to discourage the vast majority of people from playing it.

[Semirhage]

One of the elephants in the room is that, for the most part, total damage output is the only thing that "matters" in FFXIV. Squeenix's design philosophy for years has been to hack and slash at anything else that might matter even a little, or to put a cursory effort toward something that makes it unimportant anyway (see also: TP, MP, enmity, etc. None of those have ever been "strengths". You either have enough or you don't, just like all the other "strengths" and "weaknesses"). Because a job's DPS contribution is so overwhelmingly more important than pretty much anything else, that's the only thing you can balance on.

It's led to this obnoxious back-and-forth between people who main the "complex" classes and those who play the "simple" ones. The distinction is arbitrary, as Summoner mains can attest. Unless you're a BLM, your job could very easily be re-designated a "simple" one with a relative snap of the devs' fingers. Yeah, the argument that "harder" classes "should" do more damage than "simpler" ones makes sense on paper.....and then you're left with the converse situation: you have a lower caste of designated baby jobs, and an upper caste of jobs that are just superior in every single way, because it would be "unfair" to make them weaker. And yet we have people who unironically argue that the latter situation is "good". And since DPS output is the one metric that matters most, you can't budge in either direction on it.

It's nonsense either way you slice it, but some people have a vested interest in arguing that the status quo is a good thing. Sure, if you want a designated forever-meta that only benefits the upper caste of jobs that will always be superior to the others, I guess it is. I'd personally like it if there were a way to make things work out so that the solution isn't "oh well, imbalance always exists and it's only fair if it permanently favors this set of jobs."

[AlgernonBlackwood]

you have a lower caste of designated baby jobs, and an upper caste of jobs that are just superior in every single way, because it would be "unfair" to make them weaker.

Except this doesn't happen. SMN is the most common caster at every level of play outside of dedicated speedkill teams, which run weird min-max comps like double DRK. WHM and WAR are a little less common once you get past prog, but they're still very popular, even in week one clear parties. In other words, a job's perceived difficulty doesn't have any perceivable negative effect on its playrate. It actually appears to be the other way around, with relatively few savage and ultimate players running "hard" jobs like MNK, AST, and BLM. I browsed through a lot of recruitment posts before finding my static, and I can tell you with certainty that I never once saw a group blacklist a job because it was perceived as too easy.

If this so-called "caste system" exists, its only on message boards like this one, where everyone tries to argue that their job is the hardest and deserves to do the most damage. There is zero reason to believe it impacts the jobs people choose in the actual game.

The reality is that no one cares how much damage your job can do against a training dummy in the hands of the best possible player, they care about how much actual damage you can do while successfully completing mechanics, and the average player does much more damage and completes mechanics much more consistently with a job like SMN than with a job like BLM.

[Azuri]

Except this doesn't happen. SMN is the most common caster at every level of play outside of dedicated speedkill teams, which run weird min-max comps like double DRK. WHM and WAR are a little less common once you get past prog, but they're still very popular, even in week one clear parties. In other words, a job's perceived difficulty doesn't have any perceivable negative effect on its playrate. It actually appears to be the other way around, with relatively few savage and ultimate players running "hard" jobs like MNK, AST, and BLM. I browsed through a lot of recruitment posts before finding my static, and I can tell you with certainty that I never once saw a group blacklist a job because it was perceived as too easy.

If this so-called "caste system" exists, its only on message boards like this one, where everyone tries to argue that their job is the hardest and deserves to do the most damage. There is zero reason to believe it impacts the jobs people choose in the actual game.

The reality is that no one cares how much damage your job can do against a training dummy in the hands of the best possible player, they care about how much actual damage you can do while successfully completing mechanics, and the average player does much more damage and completes mechanics much more consistently with a job like SMN than with a job like BLM.

Hello, I'm No One. Nice to meet you. I care. Quite a lot, actually. I consider myself pretty decent at RDM, one of the "lower" caste jobs. I also consider myself a competent player that won't take long to learn any other job in the game since in the end mastery is largely about familiarity and repetition. But I don't even need mastery. I can hop on BLM and simply obliterate any amount of damage I do on RDM. I can drop the dot, interrupt six casts, have 70% leylines usage and maybe even drop AF/UI and still deal more damage than a 99th percentile RDM parse. What, the skills are transferrable between different casters? No worries. I can do the same on SAM too. Why you ask? Because those jobs are the "higher" caste.

The lower caste job is never the correct answer. Objectively. Never to be wanted, just tolerated.

So no, nothing in your post actually refutes Semirhage's point. "Ah, but some players are bad so easy jobs with less damage are ok for them!11!!" is not the dunk that you think it is.