I'm One Of The Filthiests Of Casuals And Even I Can See How Dumbdown FF14 Has Become!

[Renathras]

Has "overpowered" ceased to refer to producing the same output at lesser risk and effort, or greater output at the same risk/effort?

No.

It can't cease to have that definition since it's never had that definition.

Overpowered is defined as being too powerful for a given type of content or experience. For example, if BLM Flare did 999,999 damage, that would be overpowered since it would clearly make encounters easier than intended. Overpowered has never been defined as "relative to effort". Ever. I'm starting to wonder if our conflicts are less because we disagree on things and more because you have definitions of words that no one else shares...

What you're talking about is risk/reward or feeling something is more rewarded than it should be. Neither are related to the concept of being too powerful for content.

Shadowbringer's vs. Endwalker's SMN's 95th+ percentile damage is relevant... to those vying for the outputs of a 95th+ percentile caster in that era. Which is not the majority of players.

Agreed. And those are the only people that care SMN does more damage than RDM. Casual players literally don't care. RDM and SMN are both highly played (and far higher) than BLM in casual content. Point being: This isn't why people are picking SMN, exactly the point I was making. People aren't picking SMN because "it's easy to do high damage" except for a very small portion of the playerbase, who would have been picking SMN for that reason before in ShB, meaning it cannot be the driver of the difference now.

And when a player can put out a good 10%+ more playing a middling SMN than playing RDM to the same degree of effort, especially while doing more complex of fight mechanics, yes, differing ease of output becomes a relevant factor that does have to be accounted for.

Again, this isn't relevant for the majority of the playerbase. AT BEST, it's relevant for a sliver of the midcore.

Which makes the player numbers not nearly so cut and dry to analyze as just 'the simpler, the more enjoyable'.

I agree it's not 100% "simpler = more enjoyable". But that's not what I'm saying.

I'm saying the people saying "simpler = LESS enjoyable" are wrong. That is, simpler is at least part of the calculation, and for lots or even a majority of players, the lion's share. You have zero evidence to oppose this other than you don't like simple (and you're part of that "Which is not the majority of players" group), and seem not to want it to be true since it makes arguments for changing SMN far more difficult if the bulk of players actually DO enjoy it because it's simpler. In other words, it's an attempt to defuse an opposition to your position, but a very poor one.