Summoner needs a quick fix too

[Sleigh]

Gotta love these L2P posts from people who haven't used SMN T10 - 13 and assume a SMN running low on MP is doing it wrong. News flash: staying decent on MP in the second half of these new fights means you're doing it wrong, or getting Ballad.

I'm on T13. I can't justify, no matter how much I'd like to, playing SMN on any turn so far over BLM, from an efficiency standpoint: if you have full upkeep you WILL run out of MP, or have to sacrifice DPS willingly to keep your MP afloat. T10 is 9 minutes long without a break, T11 is 10 minutes long with almost no breaks (very slight breaks, less than a GCD each break), T12 is 12 minutes long with only a very short break going into adds and about 20s of downtime in the form of two dodge phases, T13 is nearly 14 minutes long with only a couple breaks, about 30s of total downtime.

SMN lasts about 4 minutes playing normally, a bit longer if you're very conservative with R2 usage but you still go dry relatively quickly, and if you don't go dry you're throttling your DPS a bit. Add in multi-DoTs, which every turn has, and the go dry point comes up much quicker. Compare this to BLM who in this same time frame will never go dry and you'll see why most groups are running BLM right now. SMN MP issues weren't a problem before 2.4 because virtually every end-game fight had long enough breaks in them or were short enough that running out of MP truly was a L2P issue. The one exception was T8, where SMN was and is one of the weakest DPS to bring. Now, all the fights are even more of an MP drain than T8, and much like T8, Ballad is not needed past progression ... thus SMN is in a bad spot.

It's a shame too because SMN is pretty well designed for the new coil, and I'd like to think BLM's higher raw damage and AoE but less mobility and consistency with mechanics balances itself out pretty well to SMN's slightly lower damage but higher mobility, multi-DoT damage, and ability to get targeted by a mechanic with much less of a dip in DPS. However, since SMN can't actually do its full upkeep of damage without a huge dip in DPS while BLM has infinite resources, and any intent to sing solely for a SMN's MP could be more Foe's or Paeon's, SMN's undesirable in otherwise well-designed content.