Samurai and Red Mage

[Shurrikhan]

But it is possible to balance them as well, at least to the extent that Dragoon, Ninja, Bard, Monk, and Summoner are permissible.

I have to correct you there, SMN is the only job that has a chance at the meta, MNK is not meta except for 1 fight, where as smn is better than mnk in the other 3.

To clarify from the quote to which you are responding:
"At least": To an extent equal or greater than that of set n. "And": Concerning or applying a condition in common among all elements of the mentioned set.

I.e. to what common extent are the listed jobs permissible? I want at least that extent of viability.

Until the latest buffs, and likely still thereafter, Samurai certainly had not meet that extent, nor had or does Red Mage. If Samurai and Red Mage could each be a top contender on even a single fight, and a highly viable contender outside of perfectly optimized speedruns for the others, as the worst per fight among Dragoon, Ninja, Bard, Monk, and Summoner remains regardless of those fight-specific failings, that would be a drastic improvement. And while I don't think it that's the upper limit by any means (hence the "at least"), especially as mobility and functionality increases, that would be a goal worthy of due adjustments to Samurai and Red Mage. Why call job balance an inherently lost cause when the current balance of Bard (buffed), Dragoon (greatly buffed), and Ninja (indirectly nerfed through the power creep of others' enmity tools) all stand as proof that the relative positions of jobs are susceptible to even very small changes.

Also wow yes, anything could be meta if you tweak the numbers high enough.

Right. That's called balancing. There is are only two key balancing factors: job rDPS and total compositional rDPS. Typal skills like Disembowel aside, the latter is simply the sum of the prior. So how could the optimal composition, or the number of compositions within standard per-attempt deviation from each other, not be adjusted by "tweaking the numbers"? You're acting like there's some inherent advantage to indirect contribution and multiplicative stacking that doesn't boil down, clearly and simply, to rDPS. There's is none. It's a numbers game, and any balancing will therefore be by "tweaking the numbers", even if that will rarely create a solution that would work across multiple encounters if left merely to potency adjustments (in case that's what you mean, despite the focus here being on practical rDPS...).

At a fundamental level, jobs that offer more should be the best because they offer more, the problem is that they gave too much utility to Bard and Dragoon is required for bard and thus it spirals from their.

Could you detail what you mean by "offer more"? Generally, I would also argue the opposite: Ranged is required for Dragoon.

Also Ninja is hanging on by a thread is easily the most balanced meta job. they have pitiful personal dps and trick attack is the only thing keeping them viable. Enmity tools are nice but ninja is a fair amount behind the other 3 melee. This job doesn't need to be touched or adjusted anymore

I agree. But that's just it. Ninja wasn't adjusted. Enmity combos and Diversion were, essentially tossing out much of the rDPS value, especially in terms of visible by-event breakpoints, of its enmity skills except upon add phases that spawned outside of viable delayed Diversion windows. All is susceptible to external factors, and much of Ninja's initial dominance had a great deal to do with Bard burst enmity during progression (before popping Refresh mid-opener for an extended Foes). And that's not even touching on the massive issue the lack of Lucid Dreaming left for non-casters. Those blaring red flags in Role Action distribution and the like aren't job balance issues per se, but they've nonetheless greatly impacted compositional viability.

[Wayfinder3]

Jobs Such as RDM and Bard should be highly valuable to groups because of their vast utility, however bard does too much damage alongside it's utilities, RDM doesn't have enough damage to sustain it's utilities.

The fact that bard is the best receiver of alot of this games damage buffs, is a problem. BLM and SAM should ideally always be the best, brd burst should be weak as should it's dps since it's overwhelming amount of utility is already strong enough to warrant a spot in any group. This job is overtuned while rdm, one of the mediocre users of the same damage buffs, has nowhere near the same amount of raw utility and damage. SE put a large amount of this jobs value into a raise.

Yes you could tweak the numbers to make any job "meta" however what job isn't meta, is going to end up here crying for the same thing, Wanting your job to be meta isn't balancing the game, trying to remove unhealthy synergies is far a bar better alternative and is generally the only way we'll move forward where the meta won't be heavily dominated by Bard and dragoon. Nerf Bard's dps or remove disembowel. the latter would only cause mch to compete in a losing battle against bard.

[Bhearil]

RDM "vast utility"? Really?

I dont think that having a heal in exchange of stop atacking (that is quite expensive to boot) and a puny buff (Embolden each 2 minutes 10% buff for 20 seconds with a 20% damage loss with each 4 seconds so its quite annoying to coordinate, Trick atack is so much better isnt even funny) that only affect physical users compensate the damage difference between a RDM and a SMN, and mind that no team should need more than 1 res per minute from a dps class, so the heal and Embolden are the "extra utility" a RDM has over a SMN that deal much much more damage.

RDM utility is useful for soloing/doing 4 men content but pretty useless on endgame because on a good team you only have Embolden as utility to compensate that you have the lowest damage of all dps classes, even Bard outdamages a RDM despite having more and better utility.

On endgame RDM spam ressing will help at best to see a bit more of the fight when learning it, but nothing else, plus RDM has the worst mp regen of all mages as well, so ressing takes a heavy toll on his mp bar which in turn reduces his damage even further

[Wayfinder3]

Functioning Heal and Chain Rez, Viable damage Buff to a best 5/8 members of your party, red mage has powerful utility no matter what you say, it's just limited in scope, it is the best dps for progression however it's a one trick pony. Having powerful but limited utility is NOT the same thing as having poor utility or none at all. red mage was not design around 4 man content, it's utility just translate there better than other jobs. Red mage doesn't have the best mp however lets look at the context. BLM has the best MP because it cannot run out, SMN has better MP control because majority of it's damage comes from ogcd usage where as rdm does more of it's damage on the gcd and even then it's not like the job is starving for it. Im an rdm main i've cleared almost every piece of content and i hardly ever run into serious mp issues.

Having the worst MP doesn't mean it's necessarily bad, someone has to have the worst. 98% is worse than 100% but does that mean 98% is bad?

Comparing RDM to BRD is not the same. RDM is balanced too much because of raise, BRD isn't balanced enough is the sole most broken job in the game. BRD is even more powerful then MCH, by a sizeable margin because of their utility.

[Lastelli]

You can't look at delta fights to see if samurai is doing fine, unless you meant os6 and os8? Those fights have no adds O.o

Ops, sorry, I clearly wanted to say o6s and o8s (god kefka). In those fights, considering only the data of the last few days, you'll notice sam is the top dps and way over mnk. So it seems the buffs were enough to make it the top single target dps.

[Bhearil]

Functioning Heal and Chain Rez, Viable damage Buff to a best 5/8 members of your party, red mage has powerful utility no matter what you say, it's just limited in scope, it is the best dps for progression however it's a one trick pony. Having powerful but limited utility is NOT the same thing as having poor utility or none at all. red mage was not design around 4 man content, it's utility just translate there better than other jobs. Red mage doesn't have the best mp however lets look at the context. BLM has the best MP because it cannot run out, SMN has better MP control because majority of it's damage comes from ogcd usage where as rdm does more of it's damage on the gcd and even then it's not like the job is starving for it. Im an rdm main i've cleared almost every piece of content and i hardly ever run into serious mp issues.

Having the worst MP doesn't mean it's necessarily bad, someone has to have the worst. 98% is worse than 100% but does that mean 98% is bad?

Comparing RDM to BRD is not the same. RDM is balanced too much because of raise, BRD isn't balanced enough is the sole most broken job in the game. BRD is even more powerful then MCH, by a sizeable margin because of their utility.

If you need to rely on RDM to heal the group is doomed to fail no matter what, same if both healers and more people manage to die at the same time and need to be ressed by a RDM, it has some niche utility when soloing or doing 4 men content but nothing else. You cant say that you need your group to be worthless to have utility. There was another class who happened to suffer the same issue, being super good at easy content while being garbage at harder ones: The 2.0 WAR and everyone knew what he needed love badly despite being able to not need healing at all with his HP gain skills on easy content until scaling showed up and warrior self healing no longer was able to compensate his weakness. Before 2.1 everyone was running double PLD and even on some dungeons keeping a WAR alive was a nightmare (Andapor Keep for example until the power creep arrived)

RDM has 0 mp regen skills, thats right, you depend on slotting Lucid Dream to have extra mp, which makes RDM super weak if he/she dies while Lucid on cd, and even doing it perfectly you will eventually need external help with MP faster than any other magic dps. Also that both healing and ressing have high mp costs. 98% might be better than 100% but on this case is 100% and everyone else is 70-80% at worst on mp management...

BRD is pretty balanced, having the most utility while dealing low damage (MCH has less utility but more damage and it has been buffed recently, so they want to enforce BRD: More utility than damage and MCH: More damage than utility). Its the RDM that sticks like a sore thumb having the lowest damage of all the dps despite having mediocre utility only.

Honestly they could put RDM res on 60 seconds cd and 99.9% of the time you wouldnt notice the difference

High End content was cleared first with DRK despite being on a garbastic spot compared with WAR and PLD because all jobs are designed to be viable on all content. Thing is, why bother with a viable job when you can get any other job and do more with less effort? You only do that if you really love that job and yet you would have to squeeze it much more than any other job to avoid being a burden to your group.

Thats like saying "its viable to make a hole with a small toy showel, despite having a real one near to dig with" We are not speaking of small differences (there will always be better and worse jobs no matter what) but considerable ones...

[silentwindfr]

it's clear that right now brd is overtuned and some jobs need some adjustement.... but do they really care that the question.

the change of the SAM of the 4.3, outside the reduction of hate, are mediocre and barely enough for make the samurai more wanted into group.

and the trouble is mainly because of the defense debuff that make all the meta rigid.

[Bhearil]

BRD and MCH get huge benefits from Dragoon debuff, probably that needs to be fixed before balancing those jobs, to also give more flexibility to 8 man builds instead of instalocking 2 dps slots already.

Right now having a DRG with a BRD/MCH is a no brainer with so much free damage they get from piercing debuff

And anyways both BRD/MCH performance, doesnt affect RDM/SAM since they contest for different dps slots (Damage with some support and pure damage slots respectively). Those two are the only support heavy jobs amongst the dps after all, and they will be always in demand unless they nerf them to hell

[Shiroe]

the reason why sam 4.3 isn't quite as desirable as it should be or as blm, is maybe due too mnk being to OP when played well..

but nerfing mnk would just maybe make it lose its new validity in pfs.., nerf mnk, nin and drg altogether??.. but than just might as well buff sam more (but that might break blm too)

[Remedi]

buff sam and caster iin general, make brd less mandatory to a group