Quote Originally Posted by lulunami View Post
At the launch of 2.0, Bard did more damage than melee DD's while having buffs and freedom to do mechanics with minimal uptime loss. As a result, many groups chose to bring a 2nd Bard and only took the minimum amount of melee DD (1) if they even took one.

Many of FFXIV development team's balance decisions have drastically favored melee DD buffs so that 2 melee or 3 melee DD compositions were desired. Melee DD's are pretty much worthless if they did not do more damage as they take a lot more time to optimize and create strategies to accommodate melee DD's. Melee DD's are generally terrible to do mechanics with and lose a lot of damage if they were not catered to.

Traditionally in MMOs, ranged DD's are just better in every way.
Except a good ranged should be able to compete with a good melee. As it currently stands at equal gear ranged dps have no chance of beating a melee dps unless they're really good at the job and the other melee dps is subpar or below mediocre at their job.

If I knew that the disparity between ranged and melee was going to be this ridiculous I would have just gone with a melee job for this tier. At least then my damage wouldn't feel like such a joke for an item level 468 job.