Some views on DPS balance that everyone cares about

[SaitoHikari]

You could not have picked a more irrelevant metric. So we're balancing based on popularity now? If you look at the page on a certain site you pulled that information from, you'll see that other jobs like samurai, dragoon, and whm are similar outliers that far outstrip their peers. Guess you're just outta luck huh, if your job is padded with people looking for their 'pure healer fantasy', or people looking to play iconic final fantasy jobs. Here, these are total number of parses per job in Eden2 so far:


Summoner 24,815
Black Mage13,194
Red Mage 13,834

Samurai 21,945
Ninja 16,560
Monk 11,998
Dragoon 25,837

Machinist 17,712
Bard 14,272
Dancer 16,393

It's nice that you chose one sentence to argue over while ignoring 80% of the post. And the other guy replying to you at the same time.

Population is usually a metric of where a class stands design-wise and balance-wise. People are bad at explaining exactly what's wrong, just that we know something IS off about the balance and react accordingly. The Bard population was extremely high back in Stormblood for one, while Machinist was low. But now it's the other way around, though the gap between both isn't as big as it was back in Stormblood IIRC (which could also be somewhat explained by some Bards switching to Dancer).

The point being is that Summoner is so dominant within their role now that their population makes up nearly half of the total casters (24,815 recorded logs VS 27,028). The other roles don't have this large of a population disparity within their roles at all, unless you're cherry picking the melee by emphasizing Monk - which has more to do with how that class has a high skill ceiling as well, not to mention that Monks on these forums swear up and down that their class has had fundamental gameplay design problems for a while. In that case, the perceived gameplay of Monk is enough to keep their population low even though they're relatively well off damage-wise - in the same way Machinist population at the end of Heavensward was still very low even though they were buffed into the stratosphere in that era.

Still though, one class making up some 47% of the total population of a role tends to indicate something is up, especially when compared to the relatively even distribution of classes in the ranged role in comparison. Summoner should really just have Raise taken from them then, which would strengthen Red Mage's position as the 'hybrid' caster, rather than their objectively weird identity-less limbo they're in now.