Damage over time appeals to a lot of people.
Stop posting stupidity.
The Summoner is the least-played job. Trying to fabricate a link to DoT damage is idiotic.
Printable View
Try them all out and go with what YOU like playing the most. Screw what your FC thinks they need more of and what other people think is the "best dps". If you really like the job you play, you will shine at it and people will notice. There are too many people that rush to the forums to see what patch X has done to job Y and only play it because its "the new thing", resulting in awful players that post garbage because they don't know what they are doing.
When do you ever need a smn in coil?? They are lukewarm at best.
Turn1:
With current iLvL any job can do it but you want at least 1 melee for LB or 2 melee for double tail baiting
You'll want a brd if your ilvl doesn't allow you to brute force it for slime feeding and ballad, or foe, silence (you need that silence)
Smn does pretty darn badly on slimes, and you may even run the risk of killing to early with too much dotting
Turn 1 summary: smn low on the totem-poll
Turn2: Enrage method makes everyone but the healers and bards moot. 1 Melee for single target LB, 3xhealers normally, and brd up.
turn 2 summary : smn mid-low on the totem-poll
turn3: why bother..
turn4: brds and pld are the only real requirements, but you need at least 1 physical, and 1 magical, and frankly blm's really shine here, since smns got nerfed(both the lost of thunder and the bane reflect was patched) Sure you have shadow flare, but that's pretty minor, and you will never beat a blm with the 3-target bane restriction on phase 3.
Sure you can have titan-egi to bait the rook, but ilvl makes those older tactics kinda...
turn 4 smn summary: mid-low. Blms are just that much better when you have the brd(and it's more or less mandatory)
Turn5: You can do a lot of baiting with pets, and Bane is really really good here, but it's less job specific these days with the ilvl decently good, and the burns are not as crazy.
Turn 5 smn summary: middle
In summary the best dps class in coil is still bard.... only turn1 really can you skip the bard. The others losing a brd is a painful experience.
BRD is necessary? Interesting. The only reason we bring a BRD to 1-4 is for Silences on ADS since we have PLD/WAR and no MNK (and our "main" BRD is actually a meh-geared alt of one of our DRG, only used for ADS; he doesn't even BRD Caddie), OR we're down a DPS for the week and since BRD gear is the only gear we don't need, we grab a BRD (MNK gear is claimed by someone).
We've downed T4 many times without a BRD (in fact, our best ones have been DRG, DRG, MNK, SMN, don't even have to worry which Dread eats the bugs in P6 with that set-up), and probably will only need one when we actually start trying to down T5...until we know the fight, which then the BRD will be useless again.
And yes...we have a SMN in our Static...and he's more than able to be the only magic DPS in T4.
There is something important to understand from Raid leader point of view, diversity is far superior to stacking regardless of jobs need & want. The reason behind this is for progression, the more flexible the team is the more options you have tackling end game contents. It does not matter if someone killed the boss before you and posted the strat, what matters is how your own group handle the boss and create their own unique strat.
SMN brings a lot to the table, like every other job in the game. In Raids damage is not everything, otherwise for Titan ex stack 4x MNKs/DRG or Bards for ez mode kill. So yeah SMNs are important not because of their damage but what they bring to the table overall. I mean you can't say for T1-T2 I will stack Job X and then for T4 I will find me a BLM to face roll T4. It is a static after all, not rental service (for the lack of a better term).