Quote Originally Posted by Syll View Post
MCH and BRD suffer from their weapon damages being 10% lower than every other class, by default. The ballad/paeon and Promotion damage penalties only exacerbate this, but it is a constant.
I don't disagree with this, but with a Dragoon, both Bards and Machinists get an extra 10% to all their direct damage dealt via Disembowel. While this does not affect dots, it does bring the ranged classes up-to-par (or relatively close) to most other damage classes in the game. On this meta, both Bards and Machinists outdps Ninja players of similar skill with ease if they have a Dragoon in their party.


As for the potency of the skills, we have to remember that being ranged theoretically enables a higher activity% during the fight. FFLogs shows, that both Bard and Machinist are more than capable enough of doing damage on top of their valuable support, even with the nerfed Weapon Damage. In fact, the agreed "best" overall composition of DPS players atm is NIN/DRG/BRD/MCH.

But this is getting derailed now. The thread wasn't about Bards, Machinists and the earlier discussion was about non-Minuet Bard in 2.x. This will be my last post regarding this topic.