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

[Leonus]

it's not meant to be easy to be top dps and dying to it is not an excuse, but ...

The good melee players dodge things, so I don't know what you guys are getting at when you say this kind of stuff. The ones that don't dodge mechanics are bad, and THINK they are good and are attempting to look good with their numbers which are more often that not still mediocre at best. This really doesn't just apply to melee dps either.

Parties just want to keep melee dps up, so tanks try to position the boss to where the melee have as much uptime as possible. Melee can and sometimes do handle all the mechanics that parties assign to rdps (which honestly isn't much in FCOB, anyone who says otherwise is a fibber) and the most you see it in is T12 with the fountain (who goes in it).

Why have a melee dps run away from the boss, into the fountain and do nothing instead of having a rdps do it that can still attack while he's in the fountain? Who can get in and out faster too because of sprint?

Can melee do it? Yea, but why? It's not the most efficient way of playing your parties strengths. Unless the tank's wanna move the boss to the fountains so the melee can keep up their chains/dot (s). Hell, me and the mnk in my static will step into the fountain if it spawns close enough to the boss and we can still attack it instead of having a rdps move since it's already right there.

Everyone that plays dps wants to be the top dps, they don't want to feel inferior. This mentality gets in the way of team play and breeds selfishness. Most people aren't willing or to make the sacrifices needed to better the team as a whole. Then you have other people who gloat about their high ass numbers and not realize that there are other people in you team that helped make that possible for you to even achieve.

[Minorinz]

The good melee players dodge things, so ...

It's dps optimization, not just about melee eating damage but for example, positioning on T10 for melee and the charge, when the person with the charge is closer it's better for melee but it's more movement for ranged due to heat lightning, so many things could go wrong if it's not done correctly, it's not that big of a deal but that's one example. Another example is t12, our healers eat 3 stacks for fountain so melee doesn't have to touch the fountain at all. One more would be on t13, Cover used on melee whenever possible to avoid movement such as earthshakers. I could count all the mechanics that requires casters to move around the area for mechanics because ranged and well not so op at single target while having melee being dps bots and ignore some of the mechanics. I'm not asking for a melee nerf because it doesn't make sense but it's not balanced especially if it's better at one point to just pick up melee dps instead of a caster because single target is better and sustained. Also, I know that SE designed some of the mechanics to force the party to pick up a caster type class but when the party is highly geared you can just disregard that.

[Viridiana]

Some attribute the damage per potency differing due to physical and magical defense of targets. Personally, I suspect that Ifrit's physical attacks use the Physical Damage stat of the weapon, such as Dreadwyrm Grimoire having 82 MD and 58 PD (Although it's not shown in game), but I haven't done any significant testing to support such a claim.

The latter explanation seems much more likely, unless someone wants to explain why ladybugs outside Ul'dah should have the same defense stats as Bahamut.

[Akiza]

I don't know Akiza, I feel that 30 seconds would have a bigger impact than you are thinking. Even sneak attack with 500 potency is on a minute cool down. In a long fight like Bahamut not so bad, but the rest of the game.... I can picture running dungeons and dropping rouse/spur enkindle on large pulls for 500-600 potency per mob, every single pull. it would be more "summonerish", but that is a whole other conversation. We are currently not a nuke class and that would start us on that path.

If you take just the Summoner without taking into account the mage they're attached to it's a nuke class also Summoning Magic hits harder than Black Magic the trade off is they have poor mp management. Classes shouldn't be balanced around dungeons they should be balanced around the hardest content.

[Skeith-Adeline]

SMN doesn't hit harder than BLM either...?

[Viridiana]

SMN doesn't hit harder than BLM either...?

I assume he means in other FF games, where SMN gets the big mega-attacks that tend to be more powerful than even Flare.

[Romsca]

Akiza, along with a lot of other players, has this grand vision of what Summoner should be and it differs from what SE wants it to be. It's fun to speculate on how to improve our class, even imagine new abilities, but the truth is, we, the players, have no way of testing any changes we suggest nor do I think would SE devote time and money to coding and testing them. We don't even know if SE is even going to give summoner some tweaks before Heavensward. Well, SE certainly is not speaking to it's NA playerbase.

[Judge_Xero]

Yeah, depending on what they have planned for 3.0 it's probably not worth changing anything now.

It's at the point of
- is SMN the "best choice" for FCOB? No

- does it still complete content fine? Yes

3.0 please look forward to it

[Wizarus]

Akiza, along with a lot of other players, has this grand vision of what Summoner should be and it differs from what SE wants it to be. It's fun to speculate on how to improve our class, even imagine new abilities, but the truth is, we, the players, have no way of testing any changes we suggest nor do I think would SE devote time and money to coding and testing them. We don't even know if SE is even going to give summoner some tweaks before Heavensward. Well, SE certainly is not speaking to it's NA playerbase.

What exactly is SMN suppose to be then? Someone in another SMN thread said SMN is just Arcanist with Fester, and that's more or less what SMN is. Looking at SCH, all 5 abilities are unique and the pets changing completely with different abilities seperates it from Arcanist.

[Romsca]

What exactly is SMN suppose to be then? Someone in another SMN thread said SMN is just Arcanist with Fester, and that's more or less what SMN is. Looking at SCH, all 5 abilities are unique and the pets changing completely with different abilities seperates it from Arcanist.

If that's how someone wants to see the current smn class that's how they see it. Are we discussing lore of the class or the gameplay mechanics? Could scholar do with out the pet if we boost the heals? If we didn't have the pets with acn/smn/sch would the class still be viable? I think so. The class called summoner, without the pets, is a multi target sustain damage dealer. It shines when there are multiple monsters that, for whatever reason, can not be grouped together, prohibiting the use of abilities like flare, fire 2, holy, rain of death, etc. Currently we do not have a lot of content catering to summoners strength, which I add is the weakness of the other classes, a black mage can't be in two places. This is what we have and I have strong doubts we will see any redesign of the class mechanics.

Let's do this. Remove the pets, change Arcanist to Poisoner, Summoner to Arcanist and come up with 3 new job skills to replace summon 3/spur/enkindle. Radical enough for everyone?

Or even better, next producer Q&A event everyone go pester SE with questions on what their plans are for summoner.