Quote Originally Posted by whiskeybravo View Post
Not really. Ideally you have 2 melee, a physical ranged and a caster so that you at least get the full party bonus. Telling your caster to be anything other than a caster, in this situation, is detrimental to the rest of the party by way of flat damage loss. Furthermore, unless you're such a hardcore elitist that relationships mean jack shit, if the caster you've run with 2 years decides to go RDM instead of SMN (because SMN has mostly been a dumpster fire this expac), who are you to force them to play BLM instead? What if it's not even leveled because they never liked the job to begin with? You're going to what, kick that person you've been raiding with for 2 years because they don't want to play as a chad BLM so you can bask in the glory of 1000 extra raid dps? Get real bruh. We did just fine with RDM, we absolutely smashed minimum damage requirements. If you can't do it with a RDM then you got bigger problems that have nothing to do with how RDM performs or it's contributions (about 800 dps in our physical heavy comp) to the raid group.

And a final point, RDM is never the catered-to job. It is usually always one of the caterers. For example, RDM doesn't get much benefit out of Brotherhood. They would get more out of Trick, but who's running Ninja these days, how many groups are feeding cards to their RDM? Nobody lol. Meanwhile the 3 top jobs you're referring to get fed in nearly every group. I don't mind comparing apples to oranges but at least recognize which is which.
Two things:

1) Why would it be "ideal" to bring two melee? There is no reason why two melee would be inherently better except that melee are currently tuned to be far stronger than everyone else but BLM.

2) I'm not sure why you're bringing up raid buffs. Catering and padding are not a factor in this at all because fflogs shows rDPS (personal DPS minus buffs received plus buffs given) which means padding is not considered, and in fact rDPS should be biased in favor of jobs like RDM or NIN over BLM or SAM because they bring raid buffs to the table. The fact that the top jobs absolutely obliterate them even in rDPS with padding removed demonstrates just how insane the gap is.