【Suggestion】MCH "Pure DPS"

[Shurrikhan]

Plus doesn’t making [MCH] a pure selfish dps make it literally unbalanceable?

Not really, or else it'd be impossible to balance MNK/DRG against SAM, within the melee role.

Any buff to MCH is going to be a buff to BRD too

That's not how buffs work, though.

Yes, MCH and BRD would have to be able to compete with each other, but you're conflating intra-role and inter-role balance here.

Intra- and inter-role balance are two different beasts (or, at least, two very different steps). Moreover, we already have a fully selfish MCH and that doesn't make the problem of cDPS parity across its role any more confusing than between SAM and MNK do for theirs, so it's not as if the one necessarily bottlenecks the other to some unique degree among Physical Ranged.

Likewise if Machinist’s personal dps is higher than the rDPS Bard/Dancer output, it just invalidates their existence.

Judging by the typical standard (95th percentile Savage logs), MCH's rDPS is already (barely) higher than that of BRD or DNC, to be fair. Though yes, that would be a (slight) problem (dwarfed by the relative underperformance of the role as a whole) if it didn't at least flip in favor of BRD/DNC nearer to perfect play. [Honestly, aside from PIC, intrarole balance is really solid.]

Ideally, assuming equally valuable utility, jobs should have, across sufficient sample sizes, roughly equal cDPS within their roles on average across a given tier and none too sharply different cDPS across individual fights given near- (but not necessarily wholly) perfect play.

I mean, I highly doubt people would give their melee/BLM spot to a MCH just so they could also take a Bard or Dancer (which is impossible anyway because I think it’d still break lb generation?)

For that, one may as well simply collapse all Ranged into a single role, LB-wise. I'm not sure why we have 3 melee sub-roles and 2 ranged sub-roles but force said 3 melee roles to compete for 2 slots while forcing 1 each of the ranged sub-roles to be taken.

Granted, since physical ranged would then have to compete with magical ranged, we'd have to buff the physical ranged to be more tightly competitive (instead of relying on an arbitrary shoehorn).

And if that then meant you had jobs easier to get near-full (and sufficient for all contents even with minimally viable gear) value out of than others, you would want to slightly raise the skill expression available to the easiest somewhat as not to discourage use of harder jobs among skilled but imperfect players. But I'd argue Bard, Dancer, and Machinist would more than likely each be more enjoyable for having done so.

(For MCH, my preference would be to actually make the different weapons, you know, feel at least remotely different. Give me the shotgun, the sniper from PvP, etc., as real and meaningful options with branching ideal timings. Imo, MCH should be about having the right tool for nearly any situation -- noticeably so as long as you know how to prepare just right in advance to maximally leverage it.)