Quote Originally Posted by brinn12 View Post
I've elaborated about this on the first page. Every new expansion, the game scraps the work the balancing team has done, increasing the ranged tax and heavily favoring melees.
MCH isn't competing with melees unless the gap widens so greatly as to be worth both the loss in raidwide constant primary stat benefit and LB generation. It's competing against other Physical Ranged DPS.

Square Enix only work with buffs (PCT case being a rare exception), therefore they're going to buff DNC and BRD for the entire expansion, since any non-MCH buff favors them.
If they only buffed the underdogs in pure damage, then likewise NIN, DRG, and MNK would have been buffed to keep up with SAM/VPR, invalidating them. That hasn't been the case though. Nor has it ever been the case for any whole expansion's length.

There is 0 chance SE will ever sort this out by keeping it a pure DPS.
Yes, there is. It's at most about 5% short of being balanced against the best in competition in ST, with that 5% needing to include substantial AoE buffs to make it balanced in multi-target fights. None of that has to do with lacking raid buffs, though; it's a simple tuning issue. We got hit with random AoE nerfs that frankly should have been aimed at Dancer, if anyone, and haven't gotten the basic minor potency buffs we need elsewhere.