Summoner - Why the new "buffs" are not working

[Gruntler]

Fire IV rotation always dealt more damage, and I'm glad they're willing to push it more with balance patches. My preferred change would be increasing the transpose CD as this would also curtail alternate lines that rely on either counting or addons to accurately hit mana regen ticks, though this would be a more contentious change. I think that that variety of deviation-from-standard gameplay would be better delivered through nuanced abilities than counting to three.

To be fair, the problem was two-fold. BLM wasn't putting out quite enough damage AND they were starting to gravitate towards a degenerate meme rotation. When presented with those twin problems, solving the former (buffing BLM's damage suite) happening to solve the latter is win/win, whereas fixing transpose would have done nothing to solve the bigger problem.

This also gets entirely invalidate once progression is over.

This might be a hard truth pill to swallow but SE's never balanced based on farm parse parties, they balance based on the requirements to get your party to farm which includes a) the first clear, and b) clean up on subsequent clears. Once that total progression is over, you can go in with 8 warriors and SE will give less than 1/8 of a fuck per warrior, totally a total number of fucks given of less than a single fuck, so long as things don't get absolutely degen.

So RDM paying something for its ability to raise (which still matters in pugs, where the 'clean up' still happens even in week 20) still makes sense from their standpoint. We can argue about how much, but the fact is, RDM steals clears and makes parties more reliable and if they balance based on clear rates, RDM will be balanced on those lines. As a caster, it has the casting design tension so it still has to work around mechanics so that puts a negative pressure on their clear rates. So this is why RDM doesn't do massive damage, but it's never going to be doing ranged damage.

Contrast with 6.0-6.1 when RDM did absolutely dumpster damage and they had missed the mark in the low direction and had to keep buffing RDM to where they felt it was no longer a liability to clear, using data they have that is more exact and has more metrics than FFLogs (by necessity, FFlogs does its heckin best with what it gets, but there's a limit to accuracy it can possibly have)