Quote Originally Posted by Nominous View Post
Right now, I don't know that I can say SAM is in the best of spots, because the highest SAM damage we've seen is in the 4600's, but are EXTREMELY lucky Crit/DH+Cit heavy runs. We're starting to see some other Jobs produce numbers VERY close to that (SMN in the 4400's, DRG above 4100, NIN in the 4200's). So SAM is operating, at best, around 10% higher than the majority of Jobs.

Let's take that away from SAM, and say that's it's utility, and that they just deal 4100 DPS like everyone else. That's 400-500 total rDPS contribution, is what I'd consider that. Compared to the 300-ish from Disembowel+Sight+Litany. Compared to the 400-500 rDPS contribution from NIN. You could go on and on. That gives SAM very little wiggle room. Put everyone more consistently in the 4200-4300 area, and SAM is basically worthless.
Well just using DRG as an example... DRG's raid utility is purely based on increases the raids overall damage. Litany, disembowel, and Sight. Altogether, like you say, this is about 300 overall raid dps increase (give or take average). However since SAM is doing roughly 600 more dps than DRG, again average from extreme parsing, you could surmise that bringing a SAM right now would net your raid about 300 more overall raid dps than if you brought a DRG.

Add to this, that disembowel requires you to have a bard in the group to benefit, and has no bearing at all without one. Also job variation with crit being useful or not varies as some benefit more than others, making litany only extremely valuable to comps that feed on crit. This means DRG being valuable is dependent upon your raid group composition.

SAM, on top of having 300 average more dps than DRG for the raid, also fits into any composition without being reliant on other jobs to perform well.

You could do this comparison to other dps jobs as well and see similar results. I will not say that SAM is outperforming every other dps job, for example Ninja is performing extremely well at the moment with high dmg and great raid utility, but it is definitely outshining some others at the moment.