Is this what balance looks like?

[Wyndam]

I'm impressed with the results. Damage-wise, the jobs are balanced.

Now, some of the posters here have said things are not balanced based on the differences between the number of players of the various jobs. I can only answer that different people like different things.

BUT, there is validity to the argument. Machinists and Summoners are both way too underplayed. This points out that there is something about these classes which makes them less popular.

Is it overcomplexity? An unpopular job mechanic? Community bias?

I don't know. I haven't played Summoner much and Machinist is a HW job and I'm not there yet. Yeah, I'm a slacker.

Anyhow, experienced players of these classes will have to lay out their observations before the developers and the rest of the community should support their requests for the fixing of these two jobs. It does no one any good when two jobs sit more or less in the garbage bin. Something must be done to correct this issue.

Something is really out of whack here.

The impression I get is that for MCH and SMN they're getting hit with everything you mentioned. It's complexity, and unpopular mechanics, and there's a selection bias. And then machinist has the additional disadvantages of having the strictest unlock requirements of any DPS plus I'd wager their aesthetics probably do them more harm than good. Dark Knight and Astrologian don't hurt as much from being behind the Heavensward story requirement because there are fewer tank and healer options. There are many alternatives to Machinist.

In fact you kind of need to look at class representation in separate categories for the different roles. 35k paladin parses makes sense when you consider there are two tank slots per 8 person raid and only 3 options for tanks. 2/3rds of your tank classes are present for every parse. Same with healers. DPS have double the raid slots for triple the classes so they should have less representation for any given class. Meanwhile for DPS there are two runaway success stories with bard and red mage which happen to fill the same party slots as machinist and summoner.

Edit: There was a third paragraph in the middle. The character limit ate it and I can't remember what I said there...