Quote Originally Posted by Capn_Goggles View Post
Black Mage is in a fine spot. This is the first time a DPS with zero utility deals enough damage to justify its own existence rather than being flat out useless because it's completely overshadowed by raid-wide damage buffs. The real problem is that the bottom half of the jobs are underperforming to a pathetic degree. I'd also like to point that despite being closer to the bottom of the DPS charts, SMN only does 800 rDPS less than BLM at the 50th percentile, and only 1200 less at the 95th percentile, so if a black mage is overshadowing you by 2-3k they're just playing better and/or are better geared (or you're a dancer)... Theoretically anyway, because I would never think about looking at aggregated date from an unsanctioned game addon.

I'm not saying this to insult your skill level either, only that you shouldn't be discouraged from playing your job because of Black Mage being exactly where it's supposed to be at.
This is actually incorrect. Black Mage either matched or outright exceeded Summoner by Alphascape, and consequently, saw far more use than it ever throughout Stormblood. The issue was FFlogs maintained a pDPS ranking, thus it always benefited your parse to have utility jobs. With the recent shift to rDPS, that is no longer an issue. Nevertheless, Black Mage isn't fine. No job should be leading another by over a thousand rDPS. "Only 1,200? at 95th percentile"? That's absurd. What use does Summoner have when it gets utterly demolished despite rDPS purposely accounting for both jobs' overall contributions? Attempting to dismiss these numbers because you dislike their source is, frankly, disingenuous at best... unless you have statistics to offer. Now that isn't to say FFlogs is the end all be all, but it's what we have publicly available. And it's what the vast majority of the raid community uses.