How much difference in damage should the tanks have?

[Rithy255]

got time to kill while waiting for the reset, so let's do this: (i'm not going to include SAM since it's purely an ADPS job, which makes the balance more finicky)

P5S = RDPS: highest = 11.954, lowest = 11,524 (3,7% diference) / by ADPS: highest = 11.977, lowest = 11.873 (less than 1%)
P6S = RDPS: 12.094 and 11.716 (3.2%) / by ADPS: 12.162 and 11,964
P7S = RDPS: 11.958 and 11.530 (3,7%) / ADPS: 12,077 and 11,708
P8S1 = RDPS: 12.209 and 11.922 (2.4%) / ADPS: 12.375 and 12.124
P8S2 = RDPS: 12,437 and 11.887 (4.6%) / ADPS: 12.664 and 12.191 (3.8%)

so as we can see, only one fight has the highest melee and the lowest melee with a difference higher than 4%, with the outlier being NIN (the others are very close in dmg)

why did i not include SAM, you might ask? that's because comparing the damage between a job with raid buffs and a job without raid buffs doesn't make much sense, since they fulfill different niches in the party. but as it so happens, none of the tanks have raid buffs so we only need to balance around ADPS

4% is a pretty significant amount when it comes to ff14, it feels like you're underplaying it, also considering DRG/Reaper/Ninja/monk give different types of ADPS I don't really think it's a fair comparison.

Even if let's say all Melee dps were 1% apart, that's mainly due to how the jobs are easier to balance as Burst Jobs which in part goes back to my original point, the best way to "balance" the game is to make jobs play very similarly and cut out differences that "don't fit" into the game, despite a job being perfectly viable. I can admit theirs still room for unique Jobs in a burst meta, but at the same time it very much limits Jobs away from being a burst for the sake of "balance".

at the end of the day, if we wanna argue or not, it's not going to be "very easy" to balance the game without taking away aspects of Job identity, Looking at PLD a Big part of it's identity was Damage over time, that's being took away for "easier balance".

Balance for the sake of fun and uniqueness is generally the direction a lot of things are already going, but I rather not push a game where every job "has" to perform the same amount of damage numbers because it will come at the cost of a lot of what makes the game interesting.