Some views on DPS balance that everyone cares about

[Silverquick]

Well, what you said is a bit reasonable. I don't know how to reply, but I still feel a bit wrong.

BLM: Poor mobility, without team assistance and resurrection, but in exchange for high firepower.
SMN: Good mobility, with team support and resurrection, but also high firepower, and the gap with BLM is small.
RDM: Poor mobility, with team assistance and resurrection, medium firepower.

So I use these to suggest that the firepower or mobility of debuff SMN to maintain this relative balance can not allow SMN to monopolize many professional characteristics advantages.
Of course Bard needs to boost his firepower to make him similar to Dancer.
I think we can all look at the problem from these perspectives.

Thats the part you actually have wrong. It should read this...

BLM: Poor mobility, without team assistance and resurrection, but in exchange for high firepower.
SMN: Good mobility, with LOW team support but has resurrection, but Moderate firepower. (This is what those things I linked actually showed, it does not have "high" firepower except in High Mobility situations where other jobs CAN'T use their actual high firepower)
RDM: Moderate mobility (exactly between BLM and SMN), with Moderate team support, including Buffs (Embolden), Dual Casted Heals, Dual Casted Raises, medium firepower.

You overstated Summoner and understated Red Mage.

[Myon88]

Raise should be cut, and nothing else changes. That would be balanced enough. Blm can dominate a fight that isn't multi target, smn will dominate the fights that involve multi target and adds (which will likely be at least 2 fights in a tier).

So the adds phase in e7s, and the first two phases of TEA. If that's what you consider 'large', then I can see why your views on balance are so distorted.

Has it occurred to you that a strength in long term multi-target situations also comes with a corresponding weakness in short term ones? Take the adds phase in e8s. They don't live long enough for dots, and ruin3 hits for a piddly 200 potency because part of your power is baked into those now useless dots. A blm meanwhile just goes ham right off the bat with 540 potency F4s.

Care to rationalize that for me? This isn't something you'll see in logs, but it absolutely translates to easier clears. Bards are a liability on that phase for the same reason, ask any bard who went mch or dnc just how much smoother that phase became. Perhaps 'rapid target switching' should be a niche that blm needs to be taxed for, hmm? Or maybe, multidotting already comes with its own weakness built in to keep it in check. Imagine that.

As long as SE designs single target fights as the main course, I will continue to regard that as the primary factor for comparison. As proof, look at the ifrit+garuda phase in e6s, where they reused the firewall debuff from o12s. They're well aware of the potential for jobs to pad in those situations, and if so inclined, they have fight specific solutions baked into the fight itself. Much more elegant, don't you think? Your solution would fix what ain't broke, and cripple summoner where it actually counts (which are the actual 'large portion of fights'), all for the sake of a useless niche.

But you would like that wouldn't you? Or perhaps you truly think the 4 fights every 6 months we get are enough design space for multidotting as an actual niche. So, naive, or disingenuous, which one are you?

Reminder, unlike most of you, I actually have played all three casters, and unlike most of you I actually value all of them. Your arguments would hold more water if some of you weren't blatant one-trick ponies. And you deign to lecture me on being biased, how laughable.

The difference is I appreciate them in context of their respective niches, instead of selfishly trying to shoehorn my one job into every situation. Some of you, in contrast, lack perspective and it shows. Yes, we're in a caster golden age alright, and be it wanton nerfs or removing raise to homogenize the casters like the ranged, what a shame if it ended because of your greed and narrow-mindedness, when a better solution was right in front of you; just get better at the game and adopt a more healthy, holistic outlook.

[SaitoHikari]

SMN: Good mobility, with LOW team support but has resurrection, but Moderate firepower. (This is what those things I linked actually showed, it does not have "high" firepower except in High Mobility situations where other jobs CAN'T use their actual high firepower)

'High Mobility situations' is as much of an oxymoron as 'raise tax' too, when you consider that this is basically Savage/Ultimate in a nutshell by default. It's as others in this thread keep arguing, Summoner is a high skill ceiling class that excels in high end content because they have enough firepower combined with having specific quirks that basically allows them to more easily ignore the limitations set by this game's raid design. Those quirks have become even more strengthened over time, especially now that summons can no longer take damage from boss mechanics, and so today's Summoners have one less thing to worry about being penalized over.

(For the record, I still think 'raise tax' is a thing that should be quantified, but not to the tune of being behind by around the ridiculous ~1k rDPS that Summoners struggled with earlier this expansion. Given how much the devs buffed Summoner in recent times though, it seems like the devs are acting as if the tax doesn't exist for them any longer.)

Still, the mobility part isn't the thing that should be emphasized. It's the DoT and indirect damage that should be focused on in these arguments. Being a class whose damage is mostly loaded into summons that attack for you along with DoTs that continue ticking damage at any time short of invulnerability phases acts as a buffer against mistakes and situations that force everyone to drop what they're doing and react accordingly - a contributing reason why Bard was considered busted in prior expansions, for slightly different reasons but in fundamentally similar ways.

I wonder, why is it that throughout this game's history, it's the classes designed around DoTs that are always considered the unbalanced ones? You even saw this among healers with the Scholar domination in Heavensward and Stormblood. It can't really be a coincidence that the devs saw fit to remove most DoT skills from the game leading into Stormblood too (though they had a bonus advantage of being designed around mitigation while the other two healers were focused on raw healing). It just happens to be a coincidence that the classes focused on DoTs had higher mobility baked into their design as well. Seems the only point in this game's history where this doesn't hold true is the very beginning of each expansion.

-snip-

While I agree with this point about add phases not really being something that should be emphasized too much, the E8S add phase is also a bit of an oxymoron for the point you're trying to make there. While some classes have an advantage over others there, the health of the adds in that phase is low enough that it barely matters how much firepower each class has at the end of the day, so long as you have enough to comfortably kill everything before they reach the crystal. So I really wouldn't be using that phase as a barometer for anything. So it's as you say later, most balancing should be done in the context of single target fights.

Yet it is still absolutely undeniable that IF a fight contains a significant multi-target phase with enemies that aren't nearly as fragile, Summoner is one of two classes most equipped to take advantage of it in ways the other classes cannot touch - the second class being Bard, way on the other side of the single target spectrum in comparison.

A better point of comparison is the adds phase in E7S, the phase that's considered the big wall for most groups in that fight now. Over the past two weeks, I figured out that I could comfortably maintain my DoTs on all three adds (a hint for everyone: mechanics happen in that phase as the main add reaches each corner of the arena and stops moving, so when everything is moving, you have a short window to safely move out as well and refresh DoTs). The Summoner in my group also figured this out yesterday, so after our groups killed the split adds in that phase, we noticed that our combined DoTs that kept ticking on the third add throughout the entire phase had actually brought it down to ~55% HP when it came time for our split groups to merge and take it down - resulting in much less pressure on the healers during the heal check there and the rest of the DPS could afford to save their cooldowns for when the main boss returned after.

Now -that- is an actually huge advantage that most of the other classes cannot hope to replicate.

[ReiMakoto]

Thats the part you actually have wrong. It should read this...

BLM: Poor mobility, without team assistance and resurrection, but in exchange for high firepower.
SMN: Good mobility, with LOW team support but has resurrection, but Moderate firepower. (This is what those things I linked actually showed, it does not have "high" firepower except in High Mobility situations where other jobs CAN'T use their actual high firepower)
RDM: Moderate mobility (exactly between BLM and SMN), with Moderate team support, including Buffs (Embolden), Dual Casted Heals, Dual Casted Raises, medium firepower.

You overstated Summoner and understated Red Mage.

This is untrue summoner does have high firepower, when you reach 90+% classes are not being harmed by movement at all cos, everything has near 100% uptime and mobility, any high end black mage parse has used instant casts to be mobile exactly where they need to be, SMNs numbers are just overtuned.

This is why in a fight like ramuh, even at 99th percentile they are only just beaten by black mage, even though ramuh has basically 100% uptime on all classes and no adds to pad on

[Myon88]

While some classes have an advantage over others there, the health of the adds in that phase is low enough that it barely matters at the end of the day. So I really wouldn't be using that phase as a barometer for anything.

Hold on, you don't appear to have beaten e8s yet, so I urge you to temper that confidence until then. It may appear low now that we have 5 weeks of gear and tome weapons, but it was, after light rampant, the most mechanically challenging part of the fight in week 1. Ask anyone you know that cleared the fight in the first week and they will tell you the same. The e7s adds phase was a joke in comparison.

This is why I say your experience colours your perspective. But yes, whichever way you view it, either multidotting is important and it already has checks like this place, or it isn't and you shouldn't be taking it into account. This really isn't a difficult concept to grasp, and it's disappointing to see people try and spin it to suit their agenda.

[SaitoHikari]

Hold on, you don't appear to have beaten e8s yet, so I urge you to temper that confidence until then. It may appear low now that we have 5 weeks of gear and tome weapons, but it was, after light rampant, the most mechanically challenging part of the fight in week 1. Ask anyone you know that cleared the fight in the first week and they will tell you the same. The e7s adds phase was a joke in comparison.

This is why I say your experience colours your perspective. But yes, whichever way you spin it, summoner is hardly at fault here. Either multidotting is important and it already has checks like this place, or it isn't and you shouldn't be taking it into account.

I mean, I can imagine that without being a twat about bringing everyone else's experiences into account (especially checking logs during a time that, for the past two weeks, parsers have been broken due to patches every Tuesday). It was obviously harder in week 1, but apparently not hard enough for the world first group to have cleared with both a Bard and a Summoner in their party to get through the hardest phase in the fight, is it?

That phase is about as accurate as a barometer for balance as week 1 party clear compositions are - as in not at all, as it's a niche and unusual part of fight design, while fights with meatier add phases are more common in comparison.

[Myon88]

No, this is not me being a 'twat', this is me holding people to account for their opinions. You do not have the experience to back that statement up, plain and simple. Try that phase in a full party of i480 people and tell me if dots are not a liability there, and in week 1 you had to let absolutely nothing through because we were all under the assumption that the buff was needed to clear.

This is a 100% verifiable fact, ask anyone that experienced it, watch any of the vods from that week and you will see it to be true.

[SaitoHikari]

No, this is not me being a 'twat', this is me holding people to account for their opinions. Try that phase in a full party of i480 people and tell me if dots are not a liability there, and in week 1 you had to let absolutely nothing through because we were all under the assumption that the buff was needed to clear.

This is a 100% verifiable fact, ask anyone that experienced it, watch any of the vods from that week and you will see it to be true.

Alright, so then let me ask you this: Why, exactly, would you consider week 1 balance to be more important than week X later? While it's true that class balance would matter more for week 1 clears as that's when fights are at their hardest, it's also worth noting that you're leaving out the part where this phase is the only part of the raid tier where Summoners are challenged - conveniently leaving out the other 95% of the raid tier where everybody else might not have as many answers to as Summoners do.

You accuse people of spinning agendas, but the rest of us are arguing over more general terms - while you apparently decided to keep hyper focusing on a small point in this game's history and on a very specific phase on the last fight of a raid tier.

(Also, snipping at someone for 'lack of experience' due to not having cleared E8S yet and admittedly likely never will - and will also likely have to give up raiding very soon due to being a health care worker in a world being ravaged by coronavirus - is really not a good look. Then again, I imagine a lot of us are going to be giving up on a lot of things very soon... Also, speaking as someone that has also cleared an ultimate, judging someone based on their progress and cleared fights isn't really a good barometer to be beating people's heads with too. I only see it as a representation of how much time one is willing or able to invest in this game, and I find it tacky as hell to be showing that off - especially in a forum argument about class balancing.)

[Kabooa]

Reminder, unlike most of you, I actually have played all three casters, and unlike most of you I actually value all of them. Your arguments would hold more water if some of you weren't blatant one-trick ponies. And you deign to lecture me on being biased, how laughable.

The thing is, you are.

And denying that means you either can't see that, or you do and you're being inherently misleading. Neither are positive points.

In one breath you'll say Black Mage is overpowered, and not mention Summoner. That's blatant omission. Summoner wins in every scenario that isn't strictly a training dummy (And even then, will still win out against some of them)

You praise the power of Verraise, and never once mention that the Summoner's version covers almost all the scenarios Verraise does at a fraction of the cost compared to every other job's access to it, ignoring that you'll quickly downplay any advantage the raise provides if it threatens to result in a damage loss.

You're biased.

That's okay.

We're all biased.

[Silverquick]

This is untrue summoner does have high firepower, when you reach 90+% classes are not being harmed by movement at all cos, everything has near 100% uptime and mobility, any high end black mage parse has used instant casts to be mobile exactly where they need to be, SMNs numbers are just overtuned.

This is why in a fight like ramuh, even at 99th percentile they are only just beaten by black mage, even though ramuh has basically 100% uptime on all classes and no adds to pad on

Incorrect,

If SMN had "high firepower" it would be ruling over all of those instances I already linked on the first page... yet it is NOT doing so.
In fact in some cases its towards the bottom of the list. That can only mean one thing.

It does not have "high firepower"... its got moderate firepower. If it had high firepower in ALL situations you might be correct, but its only got "high firepower" in ONE specific type of combat. That specific type of combat is combat that requires High Mobility where the other jobs cannot utilize theirs to their potential.