Can someone give me an in-depth explanation why Summoner is arguably the worst DPS?

[Avia_Frost]

Why not play the job/class yourself and come to your own conclusions?

This ^

A lot of the posts on this thread were made by people who don't even really play SMN as main class and think they know it all and sometimes described the class incorrectly/not being played at its best.

Good smn will do just as good dps as good blm, but it's just rare to find one, especially with so many changed to play other classes.

[Alberel]

This ^

A lot of the posts on this thread were made by people who don't even really play SMN as main class and think they know it all and sometimes described the class incorrectly/not being played at its best.

Good smn will do just as good dps as good blm, but it's just rare to find one, especially with so many changed to play other classes.

Sorry but this is just flat out untrue. There are enough parses in comparable gear now that prove BLM has higher ST damage than a SMN over a long period of time; significantly higher at that.

The problem as I see it is that BLMs were balanced around their AOE DPS originally and SMNs were supposed to be the single target kings. Eventually SE buffed the single target damage of BLMs though and did nothing to compensate SMNs. Unfortunately the fallout of this change is only just coming to light now due to stat scaling reaching ever high numbers that make the differences ever more obvious.

A 'good SMN' won't do fine because a good SMN is left to make an impossible choice between running out of MP or doing less damage to restore a miniscule amount of MP. Compare that to a BLM who has that built into their astral/umbral mechanic for MP management. Yes SMN has utility but none of it has any use in Final Coil. If anyone dies in Final Coil it will 90% of the time result in a chain reaction of unrecoverable deaths. Having an extra raise serves no purpose there.

In my opinion SMN should be balanced around having to use energy drain every so often, but our overall potency should be increased so that we can afford to take that regular hit to DPS. Making that choice should be part of the way the job works but it shouldn't punish us. The real problem is that there are few ways to buff SMN that won't break SCH. Increasing pet DPS as many suggest is a band-aid fix that would ultimately solve nothing as the problem would just resurface later down the line.

It is, I believe, too late now though. If there are any major changes coming to SMN they will be coming with the expansion now, hopefully with a class-system overhaul that can split SMN and SCH entirely.