Lets nerf WAR :D

[RapBreon]

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.

Exactly, this is essentially 'mandatory synergy'. I said this earlier; the reason its not complained about so much is because you have four DPS slots instead of two. It exists in the case of tanks, that is WAR. Same balance issue, just compounded by the smaller amount of spots.

Taking WAR out of a team only makes NIN mandatory ultimately. The problem definitely impacts more than just the Tanks. I think the problem is all the tanks do the same damage type; which makes WAR undisputed king. I'm not sure if spreading the damages types would help however. You would just force other set-ups to be optimal; I guess that's the problem with having class dependencies. I do enjoy the design choice however, I feel obligated to keep my debuff up for my MCH even in times where I'm not sure I'd want too.

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.

I agree that 2 WARs would represents a very serious issue. Class stacking in general is a pretty bad outcome. Though I'm not sure if two WARS outweigh the LB gauge penalty, I feel like if it were, we'd have seen it more in the earlier weeks. Being said I haven't looked into overly, so you could be right.

As for balance outside of early progression? I personally don't care; primarily because once you begin to over-gear those imbalances transition from 'progression stopping' to just 'git gud'.