So about Summoner...

[Neela]

And this problem will always exist so long as the community continues to have this mentality about numbers and blindly follow what we're doing without any reason to. You can make all the balance changes you want, no game will ever be "perfectly balanced" and we will always find an optimal comp. So as long as this mentality continues, the community will continue to blindly "exclude" any class that we do (simply because they see us doing it and they'll hear us say that one comp is stronger than another) even though there's literally no reason for them to be doing so.

yeah... its smn now... and another cls if smns time to shine fades some day... for rdm, well I'm with you but you see most of raiders won't accept advantages out of prog or savage at all. rdm will always ask for more dps... with the same arguments ever since. you can remind the com as often as u want its no reason for them to see it through.

and about being overpowered... smn still was strong at release of 4.0 Eirene & a handful of "true 1%" smn showed that already, while casuals and (wannabe-) pros cried for balance. now smn is way easier and more people with less skill/motivaiton can archive those numbers -> building an op status around a cls which was nearly as strong with release but harder to archive. same with blm, the best blm perform great - but those who aren't that perfect in play cry for balance again.

and this will continue with every cls in every major update... thats why top fflogs parses are actually not the best "argument" at all but well... like Pheno said numbers is all what matters, and mostly (I'm not saying all) don't even know how/what those numbers tell...

its not the last thread where people will throw fflogs on the table and say "thats it look at it I'm right you are wrong!"... "oh no you can't count that cause xyz – better look at this one here!" "you both are clueless its all about uwu!!!" - but is it really the point? is it really the point for 99% of the com which aren't in world first races or hall-of-fame-speedruns statistics?

[xxPheNoMeNa]

and about being overpowered... smn still was strong at release of 4.0 Eirene & a handful of "true 1%" smn showed that already, while casuals and (wannabe-) pros cried for balance.

It wasn't really "strong" at the start of 4.0, it appeared strong because a lot of classes needed buffs. Think how bad DRG and MCH were at the very beginning of the expansion, and others like BRD, BLM, etc. received buffs as well. Even we asked for balance changes because there "were" glaring issues with the class, although a lot of it revolved around aspects like mp management and recovering after dying (dying on SMN was just far more punishing than what other dps classes would suffer). The other issue is that radiant shield procs were factored into parses, so when people swapped to Ifrit and you saw these higher SMN parses, that was in part because of radiant shield being added to it. Imagine a ninja having their trick attack contribution factored into their parses and not individually to every person. See how easily that can be flawed? The moment DRG and MCH received their buffs, the meta immediately went back to double ranged comps and even with the 4.1 changes to SMN, a lot of people still questioned whether it was better than MCH. So people "thought" SMN after 4.1 was overpowered, but the very best groups still favored MCH... Was it really that overpowered or are other casters just undertuned (more specifically BLM)?