Quote Originally Posted by TybudX View Post
You guys need to understand that it isn't about being 'elitist'. I'm going to say this because BG gets a bad rap by people who don't understand the culture. It's a community based on learning how to play FFXI better, and a big part of that is understanding game mechanics and how they work as part of a strategy. It's not a community for elitists, it's a community for people that understand that they need to change in order to be more successful. There are very few people who post on BG who have 'perfect' gear or always make 'perfect' parties. If they were perfect, there wouldn't be much point in playing anymore, right?

So this is it. When you discuss game mechanics, and specifically job performance, you need to understand how the job can perform at it's absolute peak. You have to remove player 'skill' from the discussion. It is hugely varied and impossible to quantify, and for practical purposes it has no place in an unbiased discussion. At the same time, comparing A to B when A is perfect and B has no idea how to gear a job properly doesn't make sense, either. Comparisons like that aren't going to get you any useful information.

This is what is going on right now, in this thread. There are people who are showing you that SMN can not perform it's 'duties' on the same level as any other job in the game, period. At best it is tied for healing capacity with other jobs that only have healing due to /whm or /rdm (COR). Aside from a few niche buffs (EA, PD) the buffs it does have are either not unique to the job (Haste, Stoneskin) or are significantly weaker than alternative job buffs, to the point where even if you add up the entire potential a SMN can add to a party, any other job capable of a similar role will perform better. This isn't a failing on either of you as players, it is a failing of the design of the SMN job. No matter how much you enjoy the job, no matter how good you are playing the job, it is still a sub-par job.
Firstly I have no problem with the BG crowd(don't even know who you are really or what you guys do, if you're even one of them).

-I'm not using the following to try further my point please don't waste time yours and mine responding to it as so-

You can't really ignore skill because it works both ways. You could have a player on a 1st pick job who doesn't know a real thing about the job and isn't going to perform well at all or you could have a player on a 2nd-3rd pick job who geared the hell out of it and knows exactly what they're doing. In this case the 1st pick will perform poorer than the 3rd stringer. Individual skill will always be a large factor in the jobs performance, it's why finding people worth running with can be trial and error. I'd party with Al because he seems intelligent whereas I wouldn't party with Dallas because.. well he's Dallas and this is regardless of job selection, this shows that skill is an important factor in any pick.

-end-

I wouldn't compare a super A to a gimp B, because that just skews the numbers and invalidates the test. This is true most of the time other jobs in a support role will out perform SMN I've been saying that all along. But SMN can still perform the role well enough that the differnce is negligible(in normal setups not talking about the top 1% groups that cap haste etc. and most jobs aren't welcome in those anyway) the party will still run very smoothly.