Quote Originally Posted by CrystalAurora View Post
Ironically enough you're revising history because BLM was a top tier DPS job the entirety of Shadowbringers, going neck and neck with SMN (Pre nerf) and never dropping out of the top 3.
You have to go back to pre Alphascape in Stormblood to find a time in which the job wasn't getting buffed for an extended period of time during a time in which it was struggling.

Even when it was "Weak" Last expansion it was just weak in that it wasn't a top 2 DPS job... It was just below some of the melee while being on par or above a couple of them without the gap ever being massive between it and the top dps job.
SMN was arguably the most powerful dps job in the history of the game in patches 5.2 and 5.3. It had the highest rdps- beating BLM consistently on all percentiles, if you check the data for Eden's Verse- with the added bonus of a rez and somewhat superior mobility compared to BLM at the time. Every top 10 fastest kill on any boss in Verse except 3 had a SMN in it (so 3 out of 40), the strongest presence out of any dps job. Of those that had a SMN, roughly 1/3 ran double caster, the rest was standard double melee.
In Gate, you have a 6-4 split between SMN and BLM, which seems to show they were comparable, but both were beneath melee during 5.05 through 5.1 (though technically roughly balanced against each other, even though SMN had a small rdps lead compared to BLM). Since everything BLM brings is damage, the moment another caster overtakes it or even matches it, it's arguably in a rough spot.

So, from 5.05 to 5.4, BLM was either more or less tied with SMN in terms of rdps, or consistently behind it, with SMN having some added utility and slightly better mobility. I don't know how this is congruent with "BLM gets massive buffs when it needs them", since those buffs usually only arrive during the last floors of the entire expansion. Fwiw, the situation in SB was mostly similar- although the difference is that SMN and BLM synergized quite well back then, so when BLM got its buffs in 4.4, double caster could actually compete with double melee, and both comps had equal presence in the fastest kills (in fact, it was a roughly three-way split between double melee, double caster and triple melee).

Not that this aside matters for the topic, which I don't exactly agree to begin with. It's definitely shaping up to be a tier where melee uptime isn't free in the slightest.