Why give the ability to lockout classes for Raids?

[Eli85]

Phantom Train (99th): 2nd, under SMN (though SMN can pad on the adds in this fight easily)
Chadarnook (99th): 2nd, under MNK
Guardian (99th): 1st
Kefka (99th): 1st
God Kefka (99th): 1st

That being said, however, you’re looking at almost the absolute top, with the absolute best players. 99th percentile means they are better than 99% of players that upload to FFLogs. You cannot apply the play of 99th percentile to the average player, which goes back to what others are saying when they say BLMs have the potential (read that as personal potential, not job potential) to be the Top DPS. But not every BLM can live up to 99th percentile standards.

I'm going to respond to this and this alone. Others can read this and treat it as a reply as their quoted comments to me.

Choosing the 99th percentile was very intentional. The upper-tier echelon of parses will give you very definitive answers of what the job—not necessarily the average player playing the job—can accomplish. To talk about "well this job has the potential due to player skill" is entirely unhelpful. You can know, say, the best Red Mage ever—they may top your own static's damage metre, but to suggest that they are the top parsing DPS based on that is rather silly. It's the same thing here, when we talk about "well the player can be that, but anecdotally, so many players don't."

It's not helpful, at all. Mostly because your anecdotal evidence really doesn't mean anything.

Instead, when we look at statistical date, pull out the averages from the top-tier of players, it's much easier to say, "hey, BLM is the top parsing jobs when player skill is taken out of the equation." Sure, most players you run into won't be able to do 99th percentile parses, but instead of playing the "well in my experience jobs A B C are bad from puggers," we can instead talk about what the jobs, objectively, are capable of, rank them, and use that as a guideline.

Also, BLM is not hard to play effectively, and its lack of ability to perform well is very over stated. If someone plays BLM poorly, it's not because the job itself has problems, it's the players are, well, playing poorly. So we should be shaming poor play, not shaming any individual job.