Quote Originally Posted by SpankWustler
This is an important point. It looks like Soothsayer staff has a real chance to pull ahead for a while when the formula for Elemental magic changes. Maybe the Soothsayer Staff was even designed with those changes in mind, although that's kind of odd given the staff came out months before the adjustments.

By that time, however, or shortly afterwards, every job that uses the staff could have more Magic Attack Bonus stuff and/or more INT stuff. Will those jobs have any Affinity stuff then that degrades the Magian staves? Highly doubtful. The kind of progress made in other slots isn't kind to Magic Attack Bonus/INT weapons compared to Affinity weapons.
Magians pretty much always win for AM2. It also doesn't take much above current top-end gear to push Magians ahead on AM1. However neither AM nor AM2 are commonly used nowadays, and their MP efficiency remains poor compared to any other spell tier in the new magic system (though there could potentially be uses for them). I'll ignore them for now as "not representative of likely spell usage".

Also not going to consider -ra spells for now, since geos really have no time or MP to nuke stuff.

Adding 50 int over current top-end gear (so ~160 total Int from gear, not counting staff) for a Taru blm/rdm only pushes Magians ahead of a rank 15 Soothsayer on T1 spells (and that's largely because T1s gain nothing from dInt 100 to 200, so a good chunk of the Soothsayer's damage is wasted); Soothsayer wins on everything else.

Adding 40 MAB over current top-end gear (~125 total without staff) pushes Magian ahead on most T5s, -jas and -ga3s, though Soothsayer still wins on the lower elements. At +30 MAB, Magian is just starting to be relevant.

Essentially, if total MAB from traits+gear pushes past ~175 then Magians become realistically competitive again for most major nukes. At 160+, they're competitive for high-element (low efficiency) nukes. Compare that with your current nuking sets to get an idea of how far you'd need to go to reach that point.

While we can't really rely on expectations of what SE is likely to introduce, adding an extra 50 int or 40 MAB above and beyond rank 15 Bokwus Robe, Yaoyotl Gloves, Akasha pants, etc, seems somewhat unlikely.


Caveats:

This is from the perspective of the new damage formulas. With the current formulas, Magians have a somewhat stronger presence, though damage on all fronts is much weaker.

This comparison only applies with the rank 15 Soothsayer. Lower rank Soothsayers are far more easily beaten by Magians.

This is subject to a particular dInt value based on the target mob. The lower the dInt, the more strongly things will be weighted in Soothsayer's favor, since the Int on the staff becomes a much stronger damage factor.

The best word to describe the overall balance: situational. Which spell you're casting, on what target mob, and with what gear can all influence which is the better weapon.

Of course this does go back to the issue that SE didn't manage to make an overwhelmingly powerful replacement weapon for nuking mages, but instead just a sidegrade or inventory saver.