Is Blm gonna be the only accepted range option now? :(

[Capn_Goggles]

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.

During Deltascape summoner consistently put out higher personal DPS than Black Mage while also bringing party DPS utility. In Alphascape we finally saw black mage pull ahead of summoner, but by this point if somebody *was* going to bring a caster DPS they'd still bring summoner because the rDPS it brought still beat black mage out by a solid margin. It wasn't until Alphascape when Black Mage provided a viable alternative to Summoner by offering MORE personal DPS than summoner's rDPS. So yes you're correct that Black Mage was finally viable by the end of the patch cycle AFTER all of the balancing.

Also when I say "just" 1200, what I'm trying to say is that black mage isn't pulling 3k higher than other jobs like some people like to exaggerate. The issue is that Summoner and Red Mage are NOT where they are supposed to be at, and the solution isn't to nerf Black Mage because you're just going to create another expansion where nobody wants to bring along black mage because its difficulty of play and lack of party utility doesn't make up for the damage that could be brought by playing a better job.