Summoner is doing too much in 5.10

[Trunks]

I read this whole thread, and I do have an honest question as a newer player. None of this really matters if you're not parsing 99% and/or doing brand new progression, correct? A class doing 1k more dps than another is only a matter of perfect rotation, a.k.a. the professionals? Not meant to be a jab.

This is wrong. In fact, the worse your group is - or rather, the slower its progression - the more of a burden it is to play a gimped Job. In this case, playing BLM on progression basically requires you to just die a lot because you have to pre-plan everything you do around the flow of mechanics. This is compounded the more complex a fight gets, e.g., phase 1 of E4S has two different patterns and you have to learn the flow of each. For a group that does not raid much - maybe 6 to 8 hours a week - this is actually more harmful, because overtaxing the healers is the primary cause of wipes when you're progressing.

The underlying assumption of the argument you're advancing is that people who aren't "cutting edge 99% elitists" must all be a bunch of braindead "play whatever's fun!" sunshine-and-rainbow types. This is not the case. I don't have a huge amount of time to commit, so I only raid ~6 hours a week. But I want to kill bosses and be a team player. If there's no reward for the extra effort to play BLM, literally all I am doing is wasting the very limited time of my raid; that, in turn, limits the scope of content we can do together - if we are still doing Titan, we're not going to get meaningful time on Ultimates. Progression on bosses can drag into weeks (especially if people quit the static, or if you have retail workers in your static, or whatever other wrench life can throw at you) like this, and it feels horrible to have a sense that you're slowing the group down. On top of that, if you know that your group does not have the best players, part of being a team player is doing your best to compensate for that. This is something I know all too well, having played WHM up until ShB, and having to drop it on a few occasions in favor of AST because of bad tanks who couldn't hold aggro during prog.

And that's before we even get to talking about how the community develops narratives which systematically lock people out of statics or PUGs. This is where BLM has wound up during Ultimates in the past, where groups just wouldn't take you. ShB's changes did help mitigate some of the issues that caused this, but those are pretty much negated by the overtuning of SMN. Why bring something that does less DPS, is less mobile (and thus dies more), and doesn't have a rez to the hardest content in the game? For me, what's worse is the feeling of forcing a group to bring something that I know is inferior. It really sucks the fun out of it, because you're bringing nothing else to the table.

[alchemi80]

Thanks to all of you. That was very enlightening and explained a lot of things that are kind of hard to grasp for a new player, most specifically about the culture behind raid progression and taking meta roles. I didn't expect such detailed responses for a question with a likely obvious answer to most of you

[Myon88]

And that's before we even get to talking about how the community develops narratives which systematically lock people out of statics or PUGs. This is where BLM has wound up during Ultimates in the past, where groups just wouldn't take you. ShB's changes did help mitigate some of the issues that caused this, but those are pretty much negated by the overtuning of SMN. Why bring something that does less DPS, is less mobile (and thus dies more), and doesn't have a rez to the hardest content in the game? For me, what's worse is the feeling of forcing a group to bring something that I know is inferior. It really sucks the fun out of it, because you're bringing nothing else to the table.

Also, there's something I think worth clarifying about the relationship between smn and blm and how welcome they are in raids. By and large, summoners doing high dps are not the reason black mages aren't taken to progression, the reason black mages aren't welcome in prog is because they don't have a raise. This may sound like I'm just saying the same thing in two different ways, but it's actually two separate issues.

The thing is, there is no amount of dps you can give a black mage that will make people bring it as the only caster to prog as long as they don't have a raise. That's just how good raise is. The first time my group got to see octet in ucob, it was because I managed to raise a healer who got to lb3. All because of 1 button press, we got valuable practice on a new phase instead of throwing 15 minutes of work away and staring at twintania again.

No amount of buffing black mage could allow them to pull that off. With SE's current fight design, access to raise is a qualitative advantage, while potency changes will always only have a quantitative effect.

Yeah, we had eden Titan week 1, but in many regards that was an outlier due to that fight being mechanically easy but numerically (tuning wise) difficult. It won't happen in ultimate, and I guarantee you groups that switched to blm to make the dps check still brought in rdm/smn for the learning pulls before they reached the enrage. As long as raise exists, you will never escape the need to know how to play rdm/smn for progression. You'll never avoid situations where your group is thinking "Maybe we wouldn't have wiped here if we had a rdm/smn".

If it's about stereotypes, if anything we should be asking why people are so fixated on 2 melee 1 range 1 caster, when you can do 1 melee 1 range 1 caster and still bring a black mage in the flex spot. Addle is very strong, nothing has changed about black mage that made it so strong in eden 1-4. The 1/1/1 party buff setup in Shadowbringers is explicitly designed to allow for compositions like this. While the casters are squabbling, the melees are laughing all the way to the bank. In many ways, it's almost more about how people view blm vs melee, and involving summoner in the dispute is kinda like involving an unrelated party. They are not mutually exclusive picks. You could delete summoner now and people will still choose red mage instead. As long as you don't have a raise, you are competing with the melees/ranged and not the other casters for a spot.

[Dahlinea]

Also, there's something I think worth clarifying about the relationship between smn and blm and how welcome they are in raids. By and large, summoners doing high dps are not the reason black mages aren't taken to progression, the reason black mages aren't welcome in prog is because they don't have a raise. This may sound like I'm just saying the same thing in two different ways, but it's actually two separate issues.

The thing is, there is no amount of dps you can give a black mage that will make people bring it as the only caster to prog as long as they don't have a raise. That's just how good raise is. The first time my group got to see octet in ucob, it was because I managed to raise a healer who got to lb3. All because of 1 button press, we got valuable practice on a new phase instead of throwing 15 minutes of work away and staring at twintania again.

No amount of buffing black mage could allow them to pull that off. With SE's current fight design, access to raise is a qualitative advantage, while potency changes will always only have a quantitative effect.

That is why Raise should have never been a responsibility given to specific DPS jobs in the game. This is a too heavy resposibility to give only to specific jobs outside of healers. It's better that all party members carry it equally, maybe in the manner of using specific items that can be crafted or bought with GC seals or whatever, with cooldowns high enough that allows only one use for each player, same range of the spell, instacast, oGCD. Having 8 raises plus the original Raise spells pertaining to healers only are good enough for progression and the responsibility evenly distributed.

This "Raise Mage" thing (for SMN and RDM alike) needs to end.

[Nemekh]

That is why Raise should have never been a responsibility given to specific DPS jobs in the game. This is a too heavy resposibility to give only to specific jobs outside of healers. It's better that all party members carry it equally, maybe in the manner of using specific items that can be crafted or bought with GC seals or whatever, with cooldowns high enough that allows only one use for each player, same range of the spell, instacast, oGCD. Having 8 raises plus the original Raise spells pertaining to healers only are good enough for progression and the responsibility evenly distributed.

This "Raise Mage" thing (for SMN and RDM alike) needs to end.

Months ago in The Balance I talked about the concept of such a consumable combat-only raid item and called it a Phoenix Pinion to separate it from Phoenix down. Phoenix Downs and Pinions are an incredibly flavoursome Final Fantasy way to raise, it removes the vice grip if everyone can use them once per encounter, or once per long cooldown which effectively becomes once, sometimes twice per encounter. It even means if all healers and current-raise-casters are dead the run isn't over as a tank or anyone else could raise a healer to help recover.

[Myon88]

If it's about stereotypes, if anything we should be asking why people are so fixated on 2 melee 1 range 1 caster, when you can do 1 melee 1 range 1 caster and still bring a black mage in the flex spot. Addle is very strong, nothing has changed about black mage that made it so strong in eden 1-4. The 1/1/1 party buff setup in Shadowbringers is explicitly designed to allow for compositions like this. While the casters are squabbling, the melees are laughing all the way to the bank. In many ways, it's almost more about how people view blm vs melee, and involving summoner in the dispute is kinda like involving an unrelated party. They are not mutually exclusive picks. You could delete summoner now and people will still choose red mage instead. As long as you don't have a raise, you are competing with the melees/ranged and not the other casters for a spot.

Don't mind me Alexander time traveled to the past to bring this post back.