So about Summoner...

[xxPheNoMeNa]

It’s not “optimized raiding” when people stop dying—that’s just a byproduct of learning the fights enough to not fail mechanics or heal checks. A group can clear content with zero deaths and be far from “optimized”. SE has already shown that they’ve failed with the “selfish DPS” job balance, and they have failed just as much by this “niche value” that RDM seems to have: a value that goes away the minute people stop dying. And, as Dualgunner already said, SMN is still better for prog.

How many groups can clear a fight within one pull, cleanly, every single week? But regardless, what is "forcing" you into SMN beyond that? Savage content doesn't lock you into a caster like Ultima does, you can reasonably play with any composition. You can easily bring double ranged which is still argued by some for speedrunning purposes. The only purposes where SMN matters are for what I mentioned earlier, the 1% of optimized play (and funnily enough, SMN still isn't seen 100% of the time even at our level). Some world prog groups for Ultima still brought RDM and cleared with it, and for speedrun meta SMN is only a confirmed lock for 2 fights this tier right now (monk being better for 2 fights and mch is questionable for the last)

I don’t see anything wrong with all jobs having equal or close to equal balance. And as I already said in response to someone else who said RDM has it’s own niche in content (PotD), jobs shouldn’t be balanced around niches like that, nor should they be balanced around the lowest common denominator.

Balanced compared to "what" though? Because what I'm getting from threads like this, is that the community wants classes to be balanced around their skill level rather than what these classes are capable of at the highest level of play (which is the true example of how strong or weak a class can be). Do people understand that "buffing" RDM or nerfing SMN would actually create another balance issue? Because RDM would be absolutely overpowered for progression as it was during deltascape... and so long as it holds the raise and heal utility that it has, it will NEVER have similar damage output to classes like SMN or BLM nor should it. Instead of complaining about "SMN being too strong" (which it isnt btw), people should be asking for a class rework for RDM because frankly the issue is the class itself and what they attempted to do with it.