Some views on DPS balance that everyone cares about

[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.