Machinist class is dead

[HyoMinPark]

So if MCH is better than Bard and Dancer, please explain why you'd ever want those classes then?

Raid buffs. The same reason why buff comps take NIN and DRG over SAM, or AST and SCH over SGE and WHM.

If MCH does less than Bard and Dancer, please explain why you’d ever want to bring it to a party. What is it offering? Even if it does the same damage as BRD/DNC give, what is it offering the party?

Simply changing which phys Ranged DPS is the lowest won't fix the problem that someone has to be at the bottom. So lets put the classes that already take tons of personal DPS penalties, require near-perfect execution of teamates performance during buff windows and make them lowest in group situations too? How does that make sense?

Because you don’t balance around that. You balance jobs around other jobs within their role performing at the same level. You wouldn’t balance MCH against a BRD or DNC that is in a group of grey-level parsers. That is an unfair comparison. About as unfair as balancing a grey-level DNC player with an orange-tier MCH.

Not to mention you're only comparing clear data. During actual progression DNC and BRD perform much worse because people aren't optimizing, people are dying, MCH can actually outperform BRD and DNC here, its only after the prog when everyone is executing well that it starts to shift to the buff classes pulling ahead. And what's wrong with that?

You don’t balance around progression either. WHM used to be the best progression healer, but it has never been in the healer meta. That has always been AST/SCH. AST, WHM’s direct competitor, has always brought more than WHM when it comes to a party. WHM at least had personal damage and recovery going for it in the past, so it wasn’t entirely griefing to bring them. But right now, if you bring a MCH over a BRD or DNC to your group of the same skill, you are actively hurting them.

EDIT because daily post limit—haven’t hit that in a while.

Is this your opinion, or did SE literally say this somewhere? I find it unlikely the company feels gameplay should only be balanced for the top 5% of players in content less than 10% of the player base even participates in and only for clears with no consideration taken on what it takes to get there? And again i am not denying that MCH is in a bad spot and does need buffs. Making DNC or BRD take their spot isn't the solution tho.

Okay first of all: most content in this game doesn’t require any thought to it whatsoever. You don’t need to parse 99th percentile to clear dungeons; you can literally clear them auto-attacking with an AFK healer and a tank that only does their 1-2-3. Hence why most balance discussions center around the high end and how each job performs there and what they bring to the table.

But the premise of this thread and MCH’s problems comes from a high-end level. You do need to balance jobs around the high end because that’s when what they do and what they bring to a party actually matters. rDPS and aDPS does not matter outside of the high-end. Raid buffs do not matter outside of the high end. You can complete dungeons with barely a pulse, hence why you generally shouldn’t consider balancing around them. I usually pick 95th percentile because it shows high level play without getting into min-maxed territory or crit-fishing territory. Lower percentiles generally have rotational issues that affect performance, which therefore affects balancing. It’s necessary to eliminate these to get an understanding of true job performance at a high level.

You certainly do not balance around the low end. That is what causes balancing issues and job design issues. If you are implying that that is how things should be done, I’m sorry but you are wrong. Balancing around the lowest common denominator is never the route to go. The developers do not have a good track record when it comes to job balance. Considering they outright admitted back in SB that they did just balance BRD and MCH around piercing resistance down, and then couldn’t fathom why both wanted DRGs in their party. Or why both did so much more damage than expected when a DRG was around.

It’s also a huge issue with healers. Since the developers said they replaced a healer with EX experience because they were “too good” to fit into their “bare minimum” dungeon tuning metric. And, as a result, healers are mind-numbing boring to play at any level that isn’t “drooling on keyboard” levels.