Quote Originally Posted by JakkuPM View Post
I mained SAM in Stormblood when it was one of the "worst" dps in the game, and i also enjoyed it the most out of any job i've played since.

In my opinion, playstlye matters quite a bit more than effectiveness. Mastery of a certain playstyle is all you need for that kind of enjoyment. Playing a job just because it's optimal isn't fun if i don't enjoy how it plays.

The only time it's fair to feel like you're bringing down your group by playing a sub-optimal class, is if you're going for world 1st or a top of the charts speedrun. It really doesn't matter otherwise.
I completely agree.
Picking a class that will result in overall better party performance (and I deliberately say party performance because higher personal damage doesn't mean shit if it drags combined party dps down) is a thing that is completely understandable in world first races and speed runs - or in cases of poor boss HP & class balance very early into the tier, which is why I completely understood any WAR main going DRK for part 2.
But outside that, raw damage in itself isn't a reward. It's not even a reward in the abovementioned scenarios, it's simply a necessity and the reward is the successful clear/ speedrun rank.

Because what would happen if a class had hilariously high damage but accomplished it with a very barebone and repetetive rotation? People would drop it.
Generally, players choose to play a class that's fun for them to play first, something they like the gameplay style of and then look at damage but only if they're noticeable behind and doing content where it matters. They usually don't look at "Oh, but this class is 5% ahead of me, I could be contributing more by just playing that class". You still had a reasonable amount of BLMs in ShB in PF doing Savage even when SMN was so hilariously far ahead it was basically a BLM but better in every single way including raw damage which was supposed to be BLM's defining feature as a selfish DPS.
It's fairly rare for people to pick a class for raw damage, not even after hundreds of hours of gameplay. Gameplay becomes even more important the more you play it which is why so many veteran healers are salty about the lobotomized healer gameplay.

Of course reasonable DPS balance is important but I disagree that raw damage itself is a reward.