This has been a popular topic of discussion for roughly 5 months now. Many conversations or discussions on all sorts of forums regarding higher battles devolve to 'just use smns'. The playerbase largely thinks of it as a running joke. Now, common opinion does not make something true. Fortunately, we can easily quantify the requirements for a successful SMN burn as opposed to other jobs.
When setting up a SMN group, you simply need 3 SMN, a RUN, a GEO, and a COR. The SMNs need competitive gear to be sure, the other jobs do not. Given that 3 SMNs can output enough damage in 30 seconds to kill many high end targets(Warder of Courage, Kirin(Escha-Ru'aun), Albumen, Teles, Zerde, Vinipata, Erinys, Schah), and RUN's level 96 ability 'Odyllic Subterfuge' reduces the chance of the monster landing any status effects to the minimum value for 30 seconds, you have very little risk of failure. This setup is not only the fastest and easiest to create, but the fastest and most reliable in execution.
For most of these NMs, 6-man wins using any other strategy are nonexistant. The ones that have been done require a level of gear and coordination far exceeding what SMNs need to do so. Schah in particular is problematic, as the encounter seems to be designed around clearing a succession of 14 adds. SMN does so much damage that players can skip this entirely, reducing what should be a complex and challenging fight with many different damage and status effect sources to 3 macro presses each for a RUN, GEO, COR and spamming a single macro for 3 SMNs.
Furthermore, SMN burns are exclusionary, requiring you limit the number of non-SMNs to a bare minimum to keep the monster's hp low enough that it dies during the duration of special abilities. That's right, SMN does so much more damage in this case that no other job can even hope to replace them. In the event other jobs besides the bare essentials are brought, it's primarily as a 'leech', someone who is contributing nothing to the fight and only allowed to be present by virtue of the SMNs. Allowing one job to have all this power over the rest is ridiculous.
Traditionally, when a setup has dominated all others, an adjustment has been made to either bring other setups in line with it or reduce the dominance. Given new content is few and far between and Reisenjima NMs are a large part of current endgame, I believe reducing the dominance is the better path. Buffing every job to the same level would simply remove any challenge left in this game.
This has been brought up before, to no response. I'm sure if there is a reason it is being left as is, players would be glad to hear it. Many people I know have quit, feeling their jobs no longer have a place. Please consider the damage output when stacking the following abilities:
-Astral Flow
-Astral Conduit
-Indi-Torpor(Idris enhanced)
-Geo-Frailty(Idris enhanced)
-Drachen Roll
-Beast Roll
in combination with Volt Strike throughout the duration. SMN can reach numbers exceeding 700,000 damage in 30 seconds. Unless players are missing something, no other job is able to create half of that damage in that timeframe, even with twice as many support jobs enhancing their damage.
My suggestion is to reduce the attack/defense ratio cap for avatars by roughly 40% and reduce astral conduit to a maximum of 5 blood pacts. With this adjustment, SMN would still be capable of creating the highest spike damage of any job by using their ultimates. Understandably, SMN ultimates have a history of being used in this manner and it makes sense to continue it. However, allowing them to defeat the hardest fights in the game with no opposition from the monsters is ridiculous.
Thank you to anyone reading for your time, I understand this is a lengthy post for a short problem, but I wanted to be as thorough as possible in underlining the issues with it.