Easiest class rankings?

[Tsumdere]

I feel like the only somewhat obective thing you can look at is the spread between lowest performing players to highest performing players on the balance section of the site that shall not be named. The higher the spread, the more difficult to achieve high perfomance objectively. Its not a fully perfect metric but it generally goes along with community perception (BLM having the highest spread by far for example and jobs like SMN and MCH having the lowest).

It's not objective and you can't glean much information in the way of difficulty from variance. There are other factors that play into why a job has a high/low variance.

Variance can be altered by number of parses (DNC has triple the parses of MCH), influence of crits on the job, flat out mathematical damage potential capping the ceiling, job responsibility (did you know RDM has a higher variance than all melee but DRG, sometimes the second highest variance behind BLM depending on the fight), and the fight itself.

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If we are to take damage variance as the actual difficulty of classes (based on savage), it would be:

BLM > BRD > DRG > RDM > DNC > RPR > MNK > NIN > SMN > SAM > MCH

And for fun so you can see the affects of how it can change drastically per encounter:

DSR: DRG > BLM > MNK > SMN > SAM > DNC > RPR > BRD > MCH > RDM > NIN
Criterion: MCH > SMN > SAM > DRG > BLM > RPR > NIN > DNC > MNK > RDM > BRD
TEA: BLM > RDM > NIN > DRG > SAM > DNC > MCH > MNK > SMN > RPR > BRD

It's kind of all over the place with only two consistent factors (DRG/BLM in top 4). If we were to take the data at face value - SMN is harder than SAM, DNC is harder than MNK, NIN is a melee for brainlets, and DRG shitstomps over the other melees in difficulty.

[ChaozK]

It's not objective and you can't glean much information in the way of difficulty from variance. There are other factors that play into why a job has a high/low variance.

Variance can be altered by number of parses (DNC has triple the parses of MCH), influence of crits on the job, flat out mathematical damage potential capping the ceiling, job responsibility (did you know RDM has a higher variance than all melee but DRG, sometimes the second highest variance behind BLM depending on the fight), and the fight itself.

-

If we are to take damage variance as the actual difficulty of classes (based on savage), it would be:

BLM > BRD > DRG > RDM > DNC > RPR > MNK > NIN > SMN > SAM > MCH

And for fun so you can see the affects of how it can change drastically per encounter:

DSR: DRG > BLM > MNK > SMN > SAM > DNC > RPR > BRD > MCH > RDM > NIN
Criterion: MCH > SMN > SAM > DRG > BLM > RPR > NIN > DNC > MNK > RDM > BRD
TEA: BLM > RDM > NIN > DRG > SAM > DNC > MCH > MNK > SMN > RPR > BRD

It's kind of all over the place with only two consistent factors (DRG/BLM in top 4). If we were to take the data at face value - SMN is harder than SAM, DNC is harder than MNK, NIN is a melee for brainlets, and DRG shitstomps over the other melees in difficulty.

All of those outcomes make perfect sense.
If there is one thing where people lose most of their dmg, even in the current tier, its still good old uptime. RDM with its castbars is still able to lose more uptime than most jobs, thats why in the current tier it can be a bit harder to play optimally.
DRG has been consistently the second to third highest variance behind BLM, which may come as shocker to some people due to how simplistic it is, yet it has been known among the more hard core crowd to be difficult to play optimally just due to its rigidity and strictness.

And naturally the difficulty of optimizing jobs would shift due to encounter design.