Ah, this kind of thread will always follow by a group of people playing these jobs against it. Also Songen completely misunderstood the point but I think my point applies to other anti nerf people.
What happened here is the "rich gets more rich, poor gets more poor" scenario. You either level SMN, merc aeonic, make 50-100m a day or you don't. Once you reach the point to make gil that easily, you can literally gear up any job with full REMA/DM aug/HQ in a few weeks and face roll any content with any setup.
If you make the effort to lv other jobs, JP them and equip them to be event ready, you aren't going to take nearly as much advantage in terms of character progression.
It can sound salty but I'm just pointing out facts to people that may not be aware of it.
Thanks to some aeonic trolls on AH forum, these weapons are mostly very underratted. I can name a few weapons that I think it's either game changing or useful:
- Horn: Absolutely one of the most game changing weapon in game, besides Idris. There's a pretty massive difference in terms of DPS in semi high level content between a pt with BRD and without. From my experience, whether your BRD+GEO is NQ or HQ, often makes MUCH bigger difference than avg REMA DDs.
- Sword: It's an underrated weapon thanks to massive amount of bandwagon BLUs spamming CDC with it and parse low, that's not the right way to use it. Aeonic savage build is quite possibly RDM's best DPS option, probably BLU in high buff situations too, as long as you're not taking the advantage of CDC light SC.
- GS: This weapon is very game changing for RUN. Without it, RUN can only tank, DDing on RUN isn't even worth it. With this weapon, RUN become a competitive DD with great survive-ability and ability to emergency tank. I also believe this weapon is better than epeo III for tank/DD hybrid playstyle, on spreadsheet with 50% PDT- hybrid DD set, Lionheart is only 20~30 DPS behind epeo III in same PDT-, considering Lionheart doesn't need AM3 upkeep and reso SC light, I wouldn't be surprised if DD better than epeo III in PDT- 50% gears.
- Gun: It's my preferred choice for /ra last stand spamming over 119 III armageddon in 90% of situations, due to extra SC dmg and not having to maintain AM3.
Idk about other jobs, but from what I've read, polearm, GK, GA, Katana, Scythe with CR builds are all situationally useful because of their SC abilities, or TP bonus. I wouldn't consider these weapons anywhere close to bad considering there are some things that can only be done with aeonic weapon.
So you want SE to buff every DD job so they can kill Schah in less than a min as well? No thanks.
Those NMs are designed to provide challenge, they are one of the hardest NM in game. What's the point to buff every DD job so everyone kill the hardest NM in game and.....quit?
If killing the hardest NM 20 times faster than other DD isn't an evidence, what other evidence do you want?
You are taking this personal. Sometimes people suggest making job adjustments, doesn't mean they're salty because they can't win or anything like that, nor have some irrational hatred about a job and want to "tear" it down.
I participated in job discussion a lot, and most of the time I'm being hated for presenting my opinion. I still do it anyways, because I believe that everyone in FFXI should have equal opportunity and respect regardless of jobs that they choose to play. End game community often determine a player's value based on jobs that they have, and most of the time it's favor of the month DDs, or jobs that allow them to kill the hardest content in the easiest manner. And the only way to solve this issue, is to provide suggestions to SE to better balance jobs.
The issue with SMN is that some job in this game, has strong "zerg" abilities that allow them to deal massive DPS in a very short time. Such as BST, SMN, WAR 1hr, or THF SATA rudra back in 2014. Once a player's gear progress to a certain point, their zerg ability allows them to bypass the NM mechanics completely.
THAT may be the reason why you don't see SMN zerging the hardest content 1 year ago, but now that people start to reach certain level of gear, SMN's zerg ability start to output certain level of DPS that kills NM before the mechanic even happen. In the case of Schah, it's dead before adds pop, which is supposed to be part of mechanic.
In terms of SMN zerg, IMO the concept itself isn't broken, since the job is much weaker than melees without 1hr, and there's massive cooldown between each 1hr use, plus pets are susceptible to status ailments, so you can't just run around on SMN and outparse every other DD 24/7. The problem is content and NM mechanics, the way they design the content, allows SMN to reset 1hr between pops, and mechanics (pop adds after a min, need to deal with adds) just favor zerg jobs. You either zerg it down in less than a min, or suck it up and deal with adds.
If those zergable content isn't one of the highest ilv content, then it's not that much of an issue. But since it's T4, which directly relate to merc gil generation and endgame content longevity, it's a bigger balance issue than SMN doing BCNM fights back in the day and get clear.
Considering SE did nerf BLU in past 4 months via Omen DD gear progression, NM evasion nerf and BRD buff, I do believe SMN nerf will happen eventually. It's just that SE probably won't nerf the job by directly handing out JA or DPS nerf, but in a more subtle way, such as implementing NM mechanics that can't be zerged.
I actually liked the way SE solve balance issues with BLU very much. Instead of nerfing the job as a whole and make BLUs unhappy, they do it by making the balance adjustments from a bigger pov, and indirectly lowered the advantage of BLU. IMO the best way to solve this SMN zerg issue without making SMNs unhappy is to implement mechanics that can't be zerged in the future.