Summoner Needs to be buffed

[Shurrikhan]

If we're going to use this logic then Reaper should be the weakest melee. Not only does it boast the best utility among melee in Arcane Crest, it's incredibly easy to pick up and play even at a fairly decent level. Additionally, it has no odd optimization quirks like Samurai or suffer from animation lock like Dragoon.

And yet it's not only the best Melee but the best overall DPS job in the entire game. So the difficult logic simply doesn't work.

By your logic, that whatever's the best must deserve to be the best, then Summoner surely deserves to be where it is, too?

Otherwise, why would you say that SMN should be buffed, which would indicate that the devs are not infallible in their job tuning, even as you indicate that Reaper's place, equally subject to fallibility, proves that difficulty must be a non-factor?

Summoner deserves to be a bit higher on the basis of having little utility. Reaper deserves to be lower than, say, SAM or BLM, however.

Note that damage buffs are already accounted for in rDPS; if Monk were to deservedly fall behind SAM, it'd have to be because Mantra and in-expansion applications of Riddle of Earth in serious content amount to more utility than any difference in optimization complexity between them (if any exists in Monk's favor at all) is considered by the devs to be worth.

If Monk instead happened to be noticeably more complex to optimize than SAM, then it wouldn't be an issue for their contextual dps to be neck-and-neck despite Monk's having Mantra and a slightly stronger defensive (assuming the raid damage isn't frequent enough for Third Eye to push SAM ahead and is high enough for a 20% mitigation skill to actually somehow save a healer GCD despite that GCD almost certainly being AoE, if used at all).

[ForteNightshade]

I would hardly call Arcane crest the best its good but i wouldn't put it over brotherhood or trick

That's Arcane Circle. Arcane Crest is their mitigation. which gives them a 10% shield and 100 potency raid wide heal upon breaking. All on a 30s CD. No other Melee comes close to this sort of utility. Shadeshift is the closest comparison, which sits on a 120s CD. Dragoon has absolutely nothing while Mantra only works on GCDs healers don't want to cast but doesn't have a shield component. In a vacuum, this is fine... but when Reaper also brings damage utility and boasts the highest DPS by a mile.

By your logic, that whatever's the best must deserve to be the best, then Summoner surely deserves to be where it is, too?

... you might want to reread what I said because that wasn't my logic in the slightest. The whole crux was to illustrate why the difficulty argument is flawed. You cannot, in good conscious, say Summoner deserves to be incredibly weak due to its ease of play yet ignore that Reaper is both the best Melee DPS and arguably the best DPS overall in the entire game while also being among the easiest. If we're going to hold that over Summoner, then Reaper needs to be pulling less than Ninja. Once again, this is why balance around difficulty doesn't work and isn't something the dev team ever consistently follows.

[rewd]

That's Arcane Circle. Arcane Crest is their mitigation. which gives them a 10% shield and 100 potency raid wide heal upon breaking. All on a 30s CD. No other Melee comes close to this sort of utility. Shadeshift is the closest comparison, which sits on a 120s CD. Dragoon has absolutely nothing while Mantra only works on GCDs healers don't want to cast but doesn't have a shield component. In a vacuum, this is fine... but when Reaper also brings damage utility and boasts the highest DPS by a mile.

Mantra works on healing actions, which include oGCDs. I would still rate it worse than AC, but I wanted to clarify this.

[ForteNightshade]

Mantra works on healing actions, which include oGCDs. I would still rate it worse than AC, but I wanted to clarify this.

My mistake then. At least that puts it closer to Arcane Crest but still not better. Frankly, Crest needs to either lose the Cure potency or have its CD doubled. It's a bit silly how they essentially made it a better version of Shadeshift but on a fourth of the CD.

[Shurrikhan]

You cannot, in good conscious, say Summoner deserves to be incredibly weak due to its ease of play yet ignore that Reaper is both the best Melee DPS and arguably the best DPS overall in the entire game while also being among the easiest.

I haven't. I literally just said that Reaper is most likely the outlier in early design and deserves to be nerfed. Which then means there is no <the devs have everything tuned per their intent already despite this being the start of the expansion" warrant by which to insist Summoner must remain as low as it is.

If we're going to hold that over Summoner, then Reaper needs to be pulling less than Ninja.

I already agreed with this.

Once again, this is why balance around difficulty doesn't work and isn't something the dev team ever consistently follows.

No, that tuning is, at the very launch of an expansion, unfinished... in no way indicates that complexity cannot ever be a factor in how the devs tune jobs.

When was the last time Machinist was a top-tier rDPS? When it was complex.
When was Summoner a top-tier rDPS? When it was complex.

... you might want to reread what I said because that wasn't my logic in the slightest. The whole crux was to illustrate why the difficulty argument is flawed.

You used Reaper an example (of equally early tuning) to indicate that it must be indicative of the dev's balancing logic --insisting that Reaper must be ranked where it is because the devs meant it to be ranked where it is-- even while complaining that Summoner, equally an example of early tuning, must not deserve to be ranked where it is.

Neither should be where they are. Reaper provides too much utility and too little complexity to deserve to have the highest or second highest rDPS. Summoner provides too little utility, even given its low complexity until being perfectly min-maxed, to be as low as it is.