Or even a brief rundown of where each class is at for endgame static raiding / casual dungeon play / pvp.
Last time I played warriors were the gods of tanks, astrologians were the gods of healers, and black mages were the gods of dps. But this was way back in the early 3.x patch days.
Posted Nov 22, 2017, 11:05 PM UTC
In general:
PLD > WAR > DRK
SCH > AST/WHM
NIN > DRG/BRD > MCH/SMN > RDM/BLM/MNK/SAM
Also BLM was never the "god of DPS" back in 3.x.
wait. Is this list based on difficulty or "which class is the strongest"?
Most to least desirable for savage raiding.
I should preface this by saying that the bottom tier jobs in each role are, like, 5% below the top tier jobs. Every job is viable and you can clear Savage with DRK/DRK/WHM/WHM/RDM x4 if they all know what they're doing. That said, if you're interested in what bleeding - edge raiders are up to or if you're the type of raid leader who tells his players what to play...
The meta comp for savage right now is PLD/WAR/AST/SCH/DRG/NIN/BRD/MCH or SMN.
Tanks are PLD and WAR because they're marginally stronger in general than DRK right now. Only by a hair though.
Healers are AST/SCH because WHM (which has better personal dps than the other two) doesn't enable dps to hit harder like AST and SCH with balance/chain stratagem. This plays nicely into...
The DPS comp of DRG/NIN/MCH/BRD. DRG puts up piercing resistance for the ranged and gives an eye to the NIN, who makes everyone hit hard with trick attack. The BRD puts up damage songs for everyone and the MCH hypercharges their turret. Combine this with chain stratagem and spread balance and you get a massive surge of raid wide burst damage. Sometimes you see a summoner in place of one of the ranged; SMN saw a buff in 4.1 that makes the job hit fuuuuuckin' hard, and they also bring devotion and radiant shield for the raid wide burst window.
Drg also has Litany for even more critness!
DRG gives sight to the MCH, not NIN.
Raiding:
Unless you're doing Ultimate Bahamut (hint: you're not), you can clear anything with anything played well.
Casual:
Play what you like, who cares?
PvP:
Its dangerous to go alone, take this- ./points at the party list.
Conclusion: Unless you're top tier, being a meta-slave is just pretending. The true meta is playing your class well.
edit: Formatting
Having the meta comp with even semi decent players will result in higher raid dps.
He's right, even if the meta downvote bullshit will carry on. The meta only results in more DPS if people actually bother to play properly and well. And for most content it doesn't matter anyway. I'll take a non-meta guy who knows his shit above an anal meta raider who can't do 3k DPS on dummy.
Get your own sub for talking meta shit, it's always the same threads.
I mean if you are taking a random player and you dont know anything about their ability. The meta build guy has as much of a chance at being good as the non meta guy, why would you not take the meta guy in that scenario? The risk is the same and potential reward is higher.
What people also miss in meta discussions is that even if the meta person isn't great, the meta Jobs are all loaded with utility. So all things being equal, they provide some safety buffer for the group even if people aren't optimally stacking raid cooldowns.
Meta comps still work better even if players aren't super hardcore. Of course in some cases, someone might be, say, a great SAM/BLM but not able to play something else as well.
I don't think the disparity is big enough to exclude anyone outright unless you're going for speedruns or Ultimate. But it's also wrong to avoid looking at the Job's kits objectively and what they bring just because someone's feelings might get hurt.
When looking objectively, you can adjust for skill accordingly.
A tier list?
S-Tier
Bard, Ninja, Dragoon, Scholar, Machinist, Astrologian, Warrior, Paladin
+A
Summoner
A
Monk, Samurai, Black Mage, White Mage, Dark knight
+B
Red Mage
I'd argue UCoB is pushing SMN to S tier as well
Summoner isn't up there yet. The reason it has been so prominent in UCOB is that is has nearly the raid dps of Machinist, but it offers an extra combat revive. It would have been Red mage, but summoner downright outclasses rdm now.
Drop BLM down to B+
Speedkills is the only meta.png
Speedkills are the main meta. When people refer to meta, they are generally talking speed kills. Now, there is a meta for prog. In reality the only difference is that i would move DRK further down, bump summoner to S tier and red mage to A tier.
It really doesn't matter. Everyone says DRK is the worst tank, MCH is the worst DPS and SCH is the worst Healer, yet the world first Bahamut Ultimate group had all 3 of them.
Any class can be the best if you know how to play them well enough.
Dark is absolutely the worst tank and probably the worst job in conparison to others in its role.
Nobody says machinist is bad now. After their potency buffs going into savage, they have been in the meta comp. Hell, when speed runs were a thing in susano and lakshmi, the top run had double ranged.
Scholar was never considered the worst. Chain strat and the fairy were too good. White mage retains its niche as the least desired healer. Scholar was clunky on stormblood release, something that has been fixed with the addition of miasma II and mana cost reductions.
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As an AST main who also had WHM at 70 with full 340/345 gear, I would argue that WHM is probably fractionally above AST right now.
With average card rolls, AST raid contribution and WHM raid contribution are extremely close (AST contributes about 500 rDPS in raid buffs on average, and WHM has about 500 more personal DPS). AST is a luck based class, so this won't show up in speed runs where they can just "wipe until you get balnce draws, then upload that parse".
I would argue that when a class is random, we should tier by average performance, not casino highroll.
And while the raid contribution DPS is very close, WHM is better at healing, better at MP management, better at avoiding GCD clipping, more mobile. AST does have more mitigation tools in Collective, (and sometime even Bole) granted.
World firsts for O4S had WHM. The first six or so clears of Ultimate Coil had WHM. So raid performances seem to back this up.
I love AST, but it probably is fractionally weaker than WHM right now.
In speed kills, which is the meta for which my tier list, Astro edges out White Mage. Top speed kills don't bring White Mage.
Astro is good at MP management. It has slightly less healing.
White mage is good in prog. Its always in the world first group for every tier. As said in another post in this thread, if I were discussing prog, white mage and summoner would be S tier and Red mage would be A.
I mean, if you are defining tier lists by world record speed runs, then sure.
But the way most people play the game, a prog tier list would be more valuable IMO. Like...if someone is a newbie who hasn't even cleared O4S yet and wants to know if they should switch classes to clear O4S, a prog tier list would help them way more than a world record speed run tier list.
World record lists are always going to lean towards high variance classes like AST and BRD. But if someone is having trouble picking a class, I don't think the best advice is "pick classes with high random variation".
???
nice bait
Weren't they? I thought every raid group always had 1 AST for it's offensive buffs before they nerfed balance and then either a sch or a whm depending on encounter.
Early 3.x they were considered garbage due to RNG reliance of the buffs not adding as much rDPS as an SCH, having weaker shields than an SCH, not having enough healing throughout to come close to WHM, and too make matters worse they had pretty poor MP management. They could do either role, but could not do them as well as the other jobs, which caused them to get lost in the dust (though if I remember correctly they might have been preferred over WHM for speedruns).
At the end of 3.x they got a pretty massive buff (in addition to more minor buffs throughout 3.x) and the end game content was toned down so the healing throughput and shields (which were now bigger than a SCH minus Deployment Tactics and Crit Adlo) were no longer an issue. Just one of the changes may have been enough, but both of these together made them very very desirable.