State of jobs question for new player....

[kyuven]

XIV is remarkable in that, for PVE play, the jobs are mostly balanced. The only one sort of in need of help is SMN, and it's mostly an itemization issue (they get next to nothing from Spell Speed, and it's on almost everything)
All the "RIP" posts are in reference to recent announcements about new abilities for the jobs in 3.0, which isn't even out yet.
It's the kind of stuff you see joked about. And most of the threads ARE jokes (the BRD thread is mostly "What are you talking about? This sounds awesome!") with SMN getting the brunt of it because people want it to have more summons that are gigantic graphical messes from beyond the stars that poop laser beams (i'm exaggerating. I hope)

But as it stands right now, the difference between the jobs in terms of viability is mostly academic. There's absolutely no reason a SMN can't do Final Coil well, and everything is tested to be able to be done with any job set up (look up some of the infamous 7 SCH or 7 MRD runs to see the dire half-dragon version of that)