Quote Originally Posted by Aikaal View Post
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Not to bypass your entire post as it has merit, but if Summoner is a caster then Samurai is a caster. That's the degree of impact their 'casting' has on their actual rotation. I'll be the first one to say that is one of many mechanical incongruities with the job, but I'm not about to introduce another overtuning era for the third expansion in a row to justify a 'role slot issue'. That hasn't mattered since Stormblood where Piercing/Slashing maintenance rightfully died and Brotherhood and Embolden both got their necessary fixes since then. (On that note: Refresh your job guide pages. Red Mage Embolden is 5% for 20s per 2m, Searing Light is strictly better purely due to its duration. Searing Light also happens to be the second or third best group raid buff right now, depending on how you look at Bardsongs).

If you need proof of that role slot issue, consider that there are top 10 parses with both Bard and Summoner in the group right now in Week 2 where the overtuned grey parsing Reaper is the one holding them back. Player skill, item level, and fight/class familiarity still matter way more than which class has the most DPS. But if we're talking about balance for the purposes of having their tuning reflect the value and the difficulty and friction inside their toolkit (which frankly speaking applies to all DPS comparisons, not just caster to caster)? I'm absolutely okay with Summoner being in the bottom two with Dancer for the exact same reasons I think BLM and SAM should be top two, and yet it's also why I think Machinist and Red Mage should be similar in rDPS contribution. I felt Summoner was overtuned the last two expansions and it was the faulty argument being made in this thread that got them there every time. At least they had some reason for it. Many of them are present in the points you've gone over, and many are not. For example Raid DPS is easier than ever to line up properly across a group which naturally increases its value. Every Job has natural 1m/2m spikes for it and we have two healers with their own buff, and a healthy heaping of extra filler potency on the two that don't to keep them in line relative to their contributions.

For a point of average comparison that highlights the role differences, let's look at Ninja compared to Machinist and Red Mage. Ninja goes above them primarily but not only because Ninja is a melee job. It is a utility/burst focused job with a lot of positional ease for correcting mistakes and maintaining uptime relative to the other melee thanks to Shukuchi and Raijus, but it's still a melee uptime job. The dealbreaker quite literally is NIN still being a relatively tough melee job to execute well despite all of its inherent flexibility as despite its relatively straightforward burst phase all the little parts make it very prone to getting out of sync. Additionally, Ninja doesn't have Raise utility like Red Mage does, but it does have a highly consequential channel that is actively used in its single target and AoE rotation alike, nevermind it's distinctly weaker defensive utility over both. What could edge Red Mage out over it depends purely on how you evaluate their Raise utility relative to their inflexible cast rotation and occasional melee requirements. I happen to evaluate it quite highly because I've turned hard-cast Resses on Summoner into clears that shouldn't have happened on Summoner in the past and have no problem seeing how Red Mage would enable that with less overall cast time cost, even when its MP was worse than it is now.

For an in-role contrast, Red Mage has nearly every advantage Summoner does, but has an actual rotation with things to think about, and trades a faster raise and extra mitigation for a distinct lack of AoE healing. Unfortunately it is AoE healing from DPS roles that precisely let Shadowbringers Summoner break E4S and Reaper break the Elder Primal Extremes (on top of their ridiculous damage tuning in both cases). I don't think those situations or solo-heal ultimates should happen at all. And that's not because those aren't cool as hell. They are. But they are proof something went wrong with the healer jobs and encounter design somewhere that allowed that to happen. And if SE isn't fixing healers (lol) or encounter design (signs point to no), then DPS taxes or outright gutting and/or removal of those AoE healing mechanics on DPS is in order. Personally, I want the defensive utility on all DPS to have its place, so Summoner gets its tax for that weighted higher along with Reaper. And I consider that fair with the context of preventing that specific situation. But it's not the tax causing the problem. It's a bandaid over it.

But let's look back at the extremes of the DPS role as a whole for a moment. When compared to Summoner Samurai gets to be better than it due to a combination of melee uptime, cast bars in melee range, and having to adjust their sen alignment without any of the explicit affordances a Summoner gets to guide them through an otherwise similarly lockstepped rotation. And we haven't even gotten to Summoner's utility or healing at all. I consider Samurai an easier melee job to pick up for casual freestyling but I don't consider melee uptime or its fight-specific optimizations easy to figure out. You have to play Samurai a fair bit to really understand why the guides say what they do about how it lines up and more importantly how to break that without losing damage somewhere when you need to. That's ultimately what it consistently has over other jobs that justifies its spot near the top. And the jobs that don't? Raid DPS. Utility. Range. And immediately understandable complexity. Summoner ticks all those boxes.

Think about it. No, really. I bet if you went and picked apart then compared every DPS job pair in the game right now and evaluated it on an individual case by case basis with every factor considered and ranked them you'd put Summoner somewhere in the bottom two because every other job has a good reason to be ahead of it. Many have multiple. It's purely this false assumption that every job within a subcategory of DPS needs to be balanced relative to the others within that role that's making you evaluate it incorrectly. SE is designing around the bare minimum where it matters while trying to eliminate gear problems, so limiting your discussion to casters only without the context of every other DPS job -is- a problem. Reaper and Monk are overtuned relative to Black Mage and Samurai which must go up a bit. Dragoon's fine if the latter happens. Ninja's fine. Red Mage could use a small tune up to help the ranged gap a bit but should remain below Ninja. Summoner is more than fine. It would be overtuned if Ranged DPS weren't in such a bad spot to begin with that it literally comes down to "Bardsong and stats or Raises" for their presence in the flex slot. And I sure as hell don't think that comparison favors Bard over Summoner.

Degrees of gaps between DPS can be a problem, sure, I'll allow that, but preserving overall ranking is also important, and the degree problems with Summoner are entirely due to Reaper and Monk being wildly out of rank. No one else is in a good spot relative to them right now. And if you want SE to close those gaps, go for it. If SE wanted to they could just nerf those two and Dragoon below Black Mage. And I think that would make the tier better overall if they did. It actually would be easier for them to implement too, but player reception to nerfs is bad on average, so EVERYONE GOES UP instead. I'm expecting the degree issue to be solved in 6.08. What I don't want to see SE take threads like this out of context of 6.0 or 6.05 and use them to justify further buffs to Summoner and Red mage that put it above the ranged DPS and/or into the melee tier in order to 'keep up' with BLM or 'justify a caster slot'. It has what it needs to compete on that front for the times it actually matters. And it frankly doesn't make sense until 7.0 to re-insert casts back into Summoner if you've paid any attention to how long it has taken pet AI to get to precisely where it is right now, why it prior iteration was kneejerk abandoned for Resummons, which is the root cause for every single issue brought on by the rework. They forced the kit to always be about doing the same baseline DPS so the only impact of your choices was on how those micro phases functioned in an encounter environment. That way you wouldn't deviate from spamming Demi-Summons as soon as possible when fights screw you with downtime.

Reaper Carby is the future of the job because it allows SE to fix those issues with Summoner by re-implement good pet gameplay AND better Summons that can actually be hardcast Summoned. Despite the clear failure in its design and my desire for another rework asap, Summoner nevertheless is in fact, very pretty looking, takes a long time to alter or rework compared to other jobs and is completely fine in its current state tuning wise. Their rDPS is more than enough to handily get the clear with a Bard and a bad Reaper/BLM combo. And while Red Mage may have gotten World First, it was ultimately due to Raise that it happened to be there in the first place. If you want the degree of differences between DPS to be squished further, I'd start mentally pairing and/or grouping up jobs that you think should be roughly equal and demanding fights that actually take advantage of their different nuances. For example, I'm totally okay with melee punishment and casters not being able to cast. Summoner just doesn't do that right now, so it's DPS should be lower than other classes, pound for pound. And that's fair.