Quote Originally Posted by Valence View Post
BRD and MCH have never been broken in SB, DRG was. BRD and MCH without its piercing debuff were subpar, and even with it they still had that ranged tax already, and were not competitive with melees already (except perhaps bard when it got out of hand from crit itemization in alphascape). HW was a different story due to cast times, but it was counterbalanced by losing damage when MP/TP supporting the party, which could be mandatory.

I do agree that the battle system was better and more intricate and flavorful in SB, but let's not fall into the rose tinted glasses syndrome either.
To be fair, Machinist was literally completely broken, or do we not remember the fiasco that was the heat bar and its extremely technical, extremely limited burst rotation that required a 10ms ping and a ton of finger walking to execute correctly? The joke for MCH was that there were dozens of MCHs playing. DOZENS! It is one of only 3 examples of truly broken classes. AST from HW was also broken (couldn't heal content, literally dead on launch,) and SMN (hw and SB, buff stacking and buff snapshotting let it do so much more damage than intended combined with a rotation so hard for most people to merely approach made it impossible to balance. Esp. since so many skills were shared with Scholar at the time. For SB+, using oGCDs to get more wyrmwaves out of bahamut.)

Also, if I remember correctly, the meta comp for much of stormblood was, actually, drg+mch+brd+smn with war/drk and AST/SCH as the final picks. The buff stacking was actually bonkers, ranged tax or no. And with the buff gods aligned, MCH could put out absolutely ridiculous wildfires due to just how, exactly, it was broken in that expansion.