Easiest class rankings?

[Aurora428]

Easiest: whatever you play.
Hardest: whatever I play.

Strongest: whatever Yoshi P says is hardest
Weakest: whatever Yoshi P says is easiest

[Aikaal]

Strongest: whatever Yoshi P says is hardest
Weakest: whatever Yoshi P says is easiest

Funny, because Yoshi-P hasn't been this distant to FFXIV this much since he's been in the FFXVI project that gets released mid-2023.

[Aurora428]

Funny, because Yoshi-P hasn't been this distant to FFXIV this much since he's been in the FFXVI project that gets released mid-2023.

I'd agree if it wasn't for the monk buffs when they were already top 2 in damage to account for "how busy they are" when DRG and NIN were still on the struggle bus.

The entire foundation of the game's balance is just an opinion on how hard one job is compared to another.

Every single balance discussion just turns into an argument of "how easy your job is compared to my job" because everyone knows that is essentially the sole determining factor in how well you will be able to perform

It's a little silly honestly, and has ironically put BLM, pretty unanimously the hardest job, in a situation where they have to be weaker than melee to not gap SMN/RDM hard enough to shove them out of the role entirely.

[Housinginneed]

Since you're asking for personal opinions.... (savage difficulty)
BLM > MNK > RPR > BRD/RDM > DNC/NIN/SAM/DRG > MCH/SMN

Basically, any job with a rotation you can pretty much memorize doesn't feel too difficult personally. (I feel like NIN/SAM/DRG/MCH/SMN falls in this category, but just could be because I played it more than other jobs)

people say ranged and RDM is easy, but I personally find it more difficult than some melees with strict combo/rotations since I'm not good at keeping track of procs, and am better at memorizing rotations.
They are not the most difficult jobs obviously but, I just feel like most people play DNC/BRD/RDM on casual content with 0 optimization and post on forums "all ranged is braindead ez" yes, they are if you're trying to parse gray but not if you're actually trying to optimize in savage.

[Raikai]

I keep seeing this argument where if a class is easy and simple, it should do the least dps.

So I am curious, how would people rank the dps classes in terms of difficulty?

Melee definitely does not feel harder these days, double true north, huge hitboxes, bosses without positionals at all or few positional requirements, gap closers, I do enjoy reaper but I cant pretend it is some ultra complicated class.

If anything I would imagine black mage is the hardest class to play perfectly, even machinist would be harder than some melee with all the things that need to be tracked and timed appropriately.

So if you were to rank DPS classes in terms of difficulty to play optimally, how would you rank them?

I recently started to play DNC more seriously, going through Savages and all. People always said it was a braindead job, but actually...

I realized that the Simon Says TS/SS game is actually pretty challenging during prog, because it not something you can memorize, and taking your eyes off an ongoing mechanic might cost me either the mechanic or missing a step (or both in panic situations). It gets better with the learning stages of the fight, but still.

My modus operandi has been glancing at the steps, and repeating the color order in my head as I look back to the fight.

[Alex1337]

Assuming full uptime SMN > SAM/RPR > NIN/BLM > RDM > MNK/DRG > BLM in pf

Easy to hard

With respect to phys ranged I can’t in good conscience rate them since I’ve never raided with them outside of an unreal or 5 on DNC. Kinda weird to gauge a job u got to 90 in dungeons, never touched again and call it “easy”.

Ygritte would say you know nothing.

[Tsumdere]

It's subjective per person and changes per fight. Perceived difficulty also changes dramatically when entering savage/ultimate and even more when optimizing. I'll only really touch on the 4 DPS I actually play frequently.

SAM is insanely easy. Smooth brain extreme. Can do disgusting damage even if you ignore positionals. RPR is also monkey brain when it comes to full uptime, but does suffer from the same issues as MCH with downtime fights. Now without Kaiten, SAM is definitely easier than RPR. It has tools to recover from minor mistakes with minimal DPS loss where RPR, like MCH, is gauge based and minor mistakes become massive annoyances that you spend too much brainpower on to recover from.

MCH is easy to optimize in full-uptime fights, but suddenly it becomes one of the hardest jobs to optimize in fights with downtime (see DSR). It's a very rigid gauge job so one flubbed input and your entire rotation and gauge is thrown out the window. You broke a combo by accident? Congratulations for having fucked up Queen for the rest of the fight. For me, MCH was leagues and leagues harder in DSR than DNC.

DNC is very easy on the surface, but starts gaining a lot of depth the more you look into it. There are a lot of choices to be made on the fly while playing DNC and many, many opportunities for micro-adjustments.

Personally I think DNC blows SAM/RPR out of the water when it comes to optimization complexity. MCH is a per fight basis - can be fairly easy on something like P6S/P7S but becomes the absolute worst on fights like P8SP2 and DSR.

[CKNovel]

With respect to phys ranged I can’t in good conscience rate them since I’ve never raided with them outside of an unreal or 5 on DNC. Kinda weird to gauge a job u got to 90 in dungeons, never touched again and call it “easy”.

I've been progging as a ranged from late HW to late ShB.
Since Stormblood the phys ranged mobility is completely useless, since late ShB hitboxes and uptime are so friendly the range feels useless.

Since EW I'm playing tank and had no troubles maintaining uptime. In 6.2 I haven't pressed the ranged attack more than 5 times in the whole tier.
Ranged are basically melees (or melees are now like ranged) and melee jobs complexity isn't flying very high.

MCH is easy to optimize in full-uptime fights, but suddenly it becomes one of the hardest jobs to optimize in fights with downtime (see DSR). It's a very rigid gauge job so one flubbed input and your entire rotation and gauge is thrown out the window. You broke a combo by accident? Congratulations for having fucked up Queen for the rest of the fight. For me, MCH was leagues and leagues harder in DSR than DNC.

Basically this.
MCH has a static rotation, you have different openers but nothing changes.
The problem is that MCH rotation is inflexible and offers little to no room for mistakes. Any delay might result in loss of heat/battery and you're forced to delay barrel stabilizer.
Any time a content forces a delay, the job suddenly becomes a headhache.

[Arkdra]

The correct answer from easiest to hardest is

SMN, MCH/DNC, BRD/RPR, RDM/SAM, DRG, MNK, NIN/BLM

A / represents a tiering separation due to various factors

I more or less agree with this list, though I would swap rpr with dnc and nin with mnk personally. Dnc has more going on than rpr and I feel like their burst phase is wilder. I personally have more trouble dealing with all the if/thens of the monk basic rotation than I do the high apm and ninjutsu combos of ninja.

[ChaozK]

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).