The current State of Casters 6.05 edition - balancing discussion

[Gruntler]

Then you just expose yourself at being extremely biased and wanting Red Mage to be overpowered compared to other casters

Let us have this! We've had to go with being bad at the start of every epxansion so far! Let us our moment! Kappa

[Azuri]

One of us will always be "you don't need a meta team to clear, play what you like"-job. Assuming BLM takes the flex DPS spot, there are two casters for one caster spot.

You don't have to present world prog team choosing the "prog caster" as some massive revelation to me. My problem lies squarely with that "prog caster" stigma RDM gets. Being better in prog doesn't justify being the worst pick when prog is over. I don't want to switch to BLM or SMN (which as you and others have noted I feel nothing but contempt for) just because what few deaths do occur are entirely within healers capacity to handle (so whatever raising ablity I have is useless) and we now have 20 extra ilvls worth of defense and HP (so whatever mitigation I have is useless). At this point RDM is left... With the worst damage. The one metric that matters when all is said and done.

In the end, the job with the least damage will always be the one feeling unwanted and useless.

[MrJPtheAssassin]

One of us will always be "you don't need a meta team to clear, play what you like"-job. Assuming BLM takes the flex DPS spot, there are two casters for one caster spot.

You don't have to present world prog team choosing the "prog caster" as some massive revelation to me. My problem lies squarely with that "prog caster" stigma RDM gets. Being better in prog doesn't justify being the worst pick when prog is over. I don't want to switch to BLM or SMN (which as you and others have noted I feel nothing but contempt for) just because what few deaths do occur are entirely within healers capacity to handle (so whatever raising ablity I have is useless) and we now have 20 extra ilvls worth of defense and HP (so whatever mitigation I have is useless). At this point RDM is left... With the worst damage. The one metric that matters when all is said and done.

In the end, the job with the least damage will always be the one feeling unwanted and useless.

That a pretty selfish and biased look at it.

[Sequora]

The problem is that red mage can do everything a summoner can do better, with SLIGHTLY less mobility. They can chain rez, their damage utility is stronger, and they also provide damage damage mitigation now.

This on top of them also dealing more damage.

I’ve always thought of summoner as the bard of casters. Black mage is the selfish caster with no utility, summoner has a little utility, and slightly less damage than black mage, and red mage is a little lower than summoner, but has a lot of utility.

This appeared to be the direction they were going in until the expansion actually came out. Red mage got magick barrier which in my mind was proof they were pushing red mage further into the support role.

[Makrar]

One of us will always be "you don't need a meta team to clear, play what you like"-job. Assuming BLM takes the flex DPS spot, there are two casters for one caster spot.

You don't have to present world prog team choosing the "prog caster" as some massive revelation to me. My problem lies squarely with that "prog caster" stigma RDM gets. Being better in prog doesn't justify being the worst pick when prog is over. I don't want to switch to BLM or SMN (which as you and others have noted I feel nothing but contempt for) just because what few deaths do occur are entirely within healers capacity to handle (so whatever raising ablity I have is useless) and we now have 20 extra ilvls worth of defense and HP (so whatever mitigation I have is useless). At this point RDM is left... With the worst damage. The one metric that matters when all is said and done.

In the end, the job with the least damage will always be the one feeling unwanted and useless.

Being the best "prog" caster (and by a huge margin i may add) absolutely justifies having the least caster role dps in both inside and outside of prog. It shouldnt be by a lot but it should be an measurable difference. If Red Mage isnt the lowest caster dps role then the other casters can end up being "worst pick" in both progression and speed clears which is an awful place to be.

[MrJPtheAssassin]

Being the best "prog" caster (and by a huge margin i may add) absolutely justifies having the least caster role dps in both inside and outside of prog. It shouldnt be by a lot but it should be an measurable difference. If Red Mage isnt the lowest caster dps role then the other casters can end up being "worst pick" in both progression and speed clears which is an awful place to be.

Completely agree!

@Azuri I know you said you don't like it where rdm gets thown out bc prog is over well how would you like it if rdm was thrown out before prog even began? Thats where smn is right now. In both prog and speedrunning rdm is better in both over smn so why should anyone take smn? Do you see the problem here? You are having your cake and eating too which isnt fair to smns at all. At least before EW rdm had a place even if it was just for prog, but smn right now doesn't even have a place at all.

[dinnertime]

Like, I wouldn't mind it either if SMN and RDM switched places where SMN is the support/utility DPS with less DPS than RDM, who'd have less support but more DPS, but that's essentially not the case. RDM right now has BOTH.

Anyway, nobody (or at least nobody sane) is saying RDM should be nerfed, but SMN needs to at least be on par or slightly higher in DPS than RDM because SMN at its current state is just completely outshined.
Also I really do not get RDM mains complaining about having the worst damage again if SMN gets buffed. You're going to be at a favorable level of DPS compared to back then where RDM was actually weak (and the DPS gap was just too high in general). I don't think it'll hurt if SMN was slightly above in DPS this time.

[Aikaal]

Completely agree!

@Azuri I know you said you don't like it where rdm gets thown out bc prog is over well how would you like it if rdm was thrown out before prog even began? Thats where smn is right now. In both prog and speedrunning rdm is better in both over smn so why should anyone take smn? Do you see the problem here? You are having your cake and eating too which isnt fair to smns at all. At least before EW rdm had a place even if it was just for prog, but smn right now doesn't even have a place at all.

Not only that but how do you expect all job to be the top dog when there is 11 DPS job class with 4 spots available. Jobs should be close enough to it matters little. But right now, people aren,t even questioning if RDM is superior to SMN. It's pretty obvious to the naked eye that Summoner lack support that RDM have, they lack damage that RDM has and worst of all, they have anti-synergy which I have to deal with in P2S because my group DPS optimize pretty hard. It is to the point my two options are to either take all raid pieces because I need a ludicrous amount of spell speed to have Bahamut up after the downtime or that I just swap to Red Mage. It isn't like I can't play Red Mage at top level but that's telling you how little my options are.

Pointing out Red Mage is straight up the superior progression pick in this thread isn't a threat to nerf Red Mage. It's a plea to have this unbalanced meta fix. I swear Summoner isn't the only bad job right now. Many are suffering but I'm a main caster so I want my role to be balanced.

I believe a long cooldown on the raise button and making it instant would fix the problem. It would allow recovery without making Red Mage straight up broken in progression. It would allow them to have much more similar power to Summoners.

@Azuri, I saw your reply and like some other mentioned, it is some sort of petty of you to try and force people to believe why Red Mage should just be superior to Summoner. That's now how it works. If you want to post in those sort of threads then provide useful comments and suggestions. If you feel Red Mage should have this much power, then suggest tuning down your utility! Because Mobility doesn't equal power, it never did. Just look how terrible the ranged phys role scene is. 88% of the top 50 breakdown of P4S boss 2 are Bards.

To sum it up, it's just not a good argument to claim Summoner should be weak for mobility tax because they feel they have the same mobility than a different role when they are not from this role. You can't balance a caster around the same balancing than physical ranged DPS without completely destroying the balance.

Also, if they decide Summoner should have more support than Red Mage, then yeah I won't mind having less damage on Summoner. But I sitll want them to fix the over simplified and super restrictive rotation that nobody asked for. Having those new abilities is great, I think everyone can agree that having access and tapping to elemental primal powers is way better than a cheap DoT warlock ripoff job. But the rotation was designed poorly and it will likely required the full expansion to fix.

Hearing Yoshida saying that he feel Black Mage needs a buff while he didn't speak about the glaring issue of Summoner was a stab in my heart. Now, I see that it was said because your job wasn't named doesn't mean it won't have adjustment.

So now is the perfect time to put a list of what we feel should be done to fix summoner.

- Fix the restrictive rotation with an oGCD button with charges to let us use our elemental primals without having to burn Bahamut/Phoenix
- An increase of potencies to put Summoner slightly above Red Mage because Red Mage just have superior utility (If you check my post with Kiona from TPS, if they had got similar DPS, Red Mage would have been picked because it has better utility)
- Or simply tune down and fix the whole raise problem. I get that it's canon for jobs to have abilities. Red Mage taps in both black and white magic. Well, wouldn't it be canon that white magic has lesser offensive power so Red Mage should just be a weaker job than pure Black Mage or Summoner? I don,t think any Red Mage wants that.
- Tune down the mobility on Summoner. We want to trade that absurd, useless over the chart mobility for power.

[MrJPtheAssassin]

Not only that but how do you expect all job to be the top dog when there is 11 DPS job class with 4 spots available. Jobs should be close enough to it matters little. But right now, people aren,t even questioning if RDM is superior to SMN. It's pretty obvious to the naked eye that Summoner lack support that RDM have, they lack damage that RDM has and worst of all, they have anti-synergy which I have to deal with in P2S because my group DPS optimize pretty hard. It is to the point my two options are to either take all raid pieces because I need a ludicrous amount of spell speed to have Bahamut up after the downtime or that I just swap to Red Mage. It isn't like I can't play Red Mage at top level but that's telling you how little my options are.

Pointing out Red Mage is straight up the superior progression pick in this thread isn't a threat to nerf Red Mage. It's a plea to have this unbalanced meta fix. I swear Summoner isn't the only bad job right now. Many are suffering but I'm a main caster so I want my role to be balanced.

I believe a long cooldown on the raise button and making it instant would fix the problem. It would allow recovery without making Red Mage straight up broken in progression. It would allow them to have much more similar power to Summoners.

I love to see a long cooldown rez for all casters just so we can stop talking about the rez tax. Personally, I wish I had the option to switch but I don't since my group already has an rdm this tier. I was given a choose play smn, blm, or one of the phy range. I really dont like BLM and the only phy range I like is dnc and it's not in the greatest place right now either. Also I have been a smn main since I started seriously raiding and I love the job, just want to feel like I'm helping the group and not just sandbagging them.

[Azuri]

So now is the perfect time to put a list of what we feel should be done to fix summoner.

snip

So after 5 pages of back and forth, your solution exactly aligns with a statement I've made in my very first message of this thread?

Summoner belongs below Red Mage until it requires more than one brain cell to play.

If we were to re-introduce player skill into this discussion, and align it at the point where SMN can have higher DPS, but only in the hands of a skilled player, I would have way less issues with your insistence on it. I would also have an entirely justifiable defense against being forced to play SMN once prog is over. Because a skilled RDM player would still perform better than an average SMN. The same way it works in regards to BLM.

Right now this is not the case. Anyone can just pick up the grimoire and mash that "50 Shades of Ruin" button to win. You have admitted it yourself. Just one thread over.

People never asked restrictive gameplay which does not engage the player to think. That what was good with old Summoner and that people saying "Old Summoner was better" feel

SMN is the single brain cell, "follow the rails SE has set up for you"-job. Again - your words - not mine.

On a more tangential note, I would generally be way more receptive to your argument if it wasn't filled with hypocrisy and self-contradictions.

You claim that RDM is the easy job with easier optimization, while immediately stating that "you have options to work around". Is optimizing how you utilize those options most efficiently not the difficult part? You then proceed to complain about how hard SMN is to play in P2S (Btw, I get it, really, can we stop with that singular example?) because your rotation is highly restrictive and static. And the solution to this problem is just different gear in which you will execute the exact same on-rails static rotation but slightly faster. While figuring out that specific GCD and optimal set for this GCD might be a challenge, it has nothing to do with your personal performance in the fight.

You say that mobility doesn't justify a heavy damage tax, but keep on drawing a hard line between SMN and Physical Ranged despite them being exactly the same in this regard. Just because a job belongs to a different role it doesn't get to play by different rules. Either Physical Ranged and SMN are below all the other roles because of their mobility or mobility doesn't matter and they should all perform at a comparable level (with MCH being BLM levels, btw). Pick one.

And in that list of solutions you want to trade mobility for power. Why would you have to trade if you beleive it's not supposed to be a trade in the first place?

You are equally as defensive of your preferred job as I am. At least I have the decency to admit it.