Dancer Flourish is badly designed and not actually enjoyable to use

[Harmonea]

Uh... citation needed? To my knowledge they never once mentioned intentionally making Astro OP. The community more or less assumed 3.4 Astro was a desperate plea from the dev team to give the job a chance because it had been DoA for over a year by that point.

Balancing around the average player is pointless. They aren't going to push the jobs to its limits, therefore it won't provide an accurate assessment of their potential. The average player will consistently die, mess up their rotation or some other valuable that will not be consistent; making the data useless. Case in point, at the 50% margin Black Mage is pulling lower numbers than all four melee and Summoner by no small amount. This would suggest a serious buff is needed, yet if you look at the 95% range, Black Mage is beating out Dragoon and Ninja while only lagging slightly behind Summoner. Had they buffed Black Mage based on the average player... it'd be hilariously overpowered to the point you may drop the melee entirely.

Simply put, the data will never be consistent enough to make it useful.

You've got an incredible talent for multitasking; you're both misrepresenting my position (by saying BLM must need potency buffs if it's below melee at 50%) and further derailing the thread.

AGAIN: Like it or not, balancing around the average player is not pointless. No, they're not going to give BLM a potency buff, but why exactly do you think changes like drastically lowered cooldowns on abilities like transpose, aetherial manipulation, and between the lines happened? It wasn't so the top 5% could uptime more gooder, it was so the average player didn't feel awful every time they had to move and lost a load of DPS as a result. Why do you think ice spells now have zero cost in fire? After all, GOOD players knew how much they needed to cast a Blizz3 and didn't let themselves fall under that number. Now they've made it so not only is it not punishing to drive yourself to zero MP, it's the entire point to end your fire phase with Despair.

Why do you think blood of the dragon now has a self-sustaining effect in that its CD is lower than its duration? Why do you think Anatman is a thing? Losing your main buff and having to do the ramp-up all over again feels punishing. Top end players don't have to deal with that on the regular, but they got added regardless. Why do you think tank stances had their DPS penalties removed? Top end tanks were proficient at stance dancing and knew exactly how much hate they needed to get before they could turn it off, and some burden of responsibility was shifted onto the DPS and healers, which again, top end players had no issue executing, but those all got nixed, too.

Notice I didn't point out a single potency buff? These are all about job QoL and flow. When an ability feels clunky for a large enough portion of the playerbase, SE is going to take a look at how it fundamentally works, regardless of whether the top 5% think it's perfectly fine.

Which is the entire premise of this thread, so can we get back on topic? Dancer? Flourish?

As for a source on the AST thing, it was in the Q&As surrounding the Vegas Fanfest in Oct 2016, which were about a month after 3.4 and the AST buffs. That Fanfest footage is trapped in the awful paid streaming service they used that year, so it's not feasible for me to find at work, but that should be enough for you to get looking... if you're actually interested.

Is it possible that we’re arguing two separate things, then? I’m arguing job potency—how strong they are, and why they should be balanced around higher play to prevent balancing issues in strength. You seem to be arguing job design.

The premise of this thread literally is job design so.... Yeah, obviously that's what I'm discussing.