Summoner Needs to be buffed

[Shurrikhan]

The "Ranged Tax" is a myth that needs to die because melees are capable of getting almost, if not a 100% uptime in fights and they have plenty of mobility tools to play with now.

Job difficulty shouldn't be a factor either.

Let's say two jobs have equal skill ceilings and output ceilings. If one nonetheless can get to where they do 95% of the theoretical maximum of their job with a quarter of the effort required to do so one most others, all you've done is made the job OP for all must the very highest end of players.

To say that job difficulty shouldn't be a factor whatsoever is just to, in practice, make the easiest jobs obligatory. If SMN puts out as much rDPS as a BLM and RDM, then you'd simply find BLMs increasingly barred from the caster slot for the sake of reliability and RDMs still discouraged unless the party expects their less calculable utilities (Magic Barrier and more than one instant rez per minute) will be of use.

There is no case by which "all jobs are equally competitive" at every skill level. You balance their maximum DPS (aka, balance for 'Max', as opposed to the 95th, 90th, or 80th percentiles), sure, but for jobs with greater ease of average play, that last step towards mastery should also be that much more demanding and consequential.


"Mobility tax", on the other hand, is not worth thinking about unless an entire expansion's worth of encounters designs mechanics as to be necessarily rDPS-taxing to all but the most mobile jobs at the time (and even that would only either make them overpowered up to the point they are contextually useful, as to highly encourage their being taken for X slots, and highly discourage their being taken on fights without such contexts or in excess of that number).

Outside of that, having unfettered mobility is simply to have one fewer possible area of difficulty/complexity and ought follow the same rules in balancing for a given likely percentile.