Quote Originally Posted by RapBreon View Post
It still doesn't address the point that MCH/BRD can't be optimal without a DRG. Not a tiny bit either; a good 10% of their DPS.

This game has class dependencies intentionally. As I said, it's the size of the gap between them that matters. Before the buffs their personal DPS was less-than-or-on-par with Dragoon and offered nothing. If DRK couldn't apply INT down it would be NINs benched and complaining. Or groups just toughing out the extra damage, like they do now. Now that it's weeks in and MNK got buffed its not a big deal anymore.

Melee balance is very good though.
DRG is just in a very good spot right now, due to Battle Litany being a raid-wide crit buff which added on to the fact that they get a piercing debuff, it makes it hard not to bring a DRG.

If we take a normal 8-man composition with 4 DPS slots open, a BRD/MCH is needed for progression mainly for MP/TP regeneration due to lower ilvl gear when starting out in progression leading to a huge sap in MP/TP resources. Then in order to counteract the innate DPS loss of bringing a BRD/MCH, a DRG is required to offset that so that makes up 2 of the spots.

The balance between casters and melees come into play at this point. It's really nicely done at this point because for a caster to be on-par with a melee DPS on single targets, they need either a MCH/BRD for their magic-damage debuff which makes them a viable choice to bring along instead of a BRD/MCH + DRG + 2 melee composition otherwise.

And as progression groups start gearing up and grasping the fights better, they eventually could drop the BRD/MCH and go for an additional melee or caster although even then, it's still a close overall DPS due to MCH/BRD providing the magic-damage debuffs.

Also, because stacking multiple of the same jobs aren't as beneficial, job diversity is almost always guaranteed as it outweighs any potential DPS differences provided by having a certain combination.

The problem comes with the current situation with tanks where bringing 2 Warriors which is supposedly detrimental to the group due to LB gauge penalty is still considered a possibly better option than bringing a different tank. But, that is all pretty much history as changes are coming in 3.1 which will hopefully address that issue.