SMN...and SCH broken

[Gumbercules]

I am in a weird place with SMN cuz I started to level it cuz of all the complaining, and i actually ended up enjoying the job. In HW I just got it to 60 and shelved it cuz I did not enjoy its class mechanics and synergy. That said alot of the complaints seem to be about "muh deeps" and since I am used to bard, I just see SMN as a dps with good damage and good group synergy (using my bard as an example that would be great group synergy with ok damage) Ironically one of the "insults" ive seen chucked at MMO class design is the "need" to make every class pull the same numbers some devs (wow cough wow) opt for, and imo FF 14 atm is doing a good job of creating group synergies around a "support" structure vs DPS. Issue is i guess that everyone just wants to be "big $%#^" DPS ing it :P

The people trying to convince me "balance" was a mess directed me to the FFLOGs site and that gives a pretty good correlation of performance to "class identity" in actual situations. Quite frankly the balancing is freakishly good if you go by the logs. ( i strongly advice you "look" before reacting to seeing them and make sure you are seeing the actual numbers not the percentiles alone)

[Ariomi]

I am in a weird place with SMN

Quite frankly the balancing is freakishly good if you go by the logs.

Freakishly good? Not quite. It took Buffing Summoner's Tri-Disater from 800 potency to 1000 potency for Summoner to get close to Red Mage.
The Balance is Better, after they buffed Summoner's dots by 20% but Summoner should be higher damage then red mage, or should have better buffs. Devotion being laughably bad.
Currently Summoner will only outdps a Red Mage when either A. There are multiple targets for the Summoner to attack, or B. There is an instance where the Red mage, is unable to attack whereas summoner can attack via dots, or pet. Example of this? Susano ex Lakshmi ex O1s and O2s. Red Mages outperform a Summoner in these circumstances. No reason to Bring a Summoner here, when Red Mage personally out damages a Summoner, and boosts raid damage more with Embolden.

In o3s, Summoner squeezes ahead of red mage because of Add fluff, (Literally like a group of Ninja's show up and an Iron Giant that Summoner's can fluff their numbers with deathflare/ahk morn.) Then also get a slight advantage when the party is forced to turn into different animals. Red Mage has no dots, and if a red mage isn't casting, they do effectively 0 damage. Summoner can apply dots and their pet attacks for the duration of that time, keeping more damage uptime on the boss. O3s has several mechanics, such as forced march where a red mage is doing 0 dps. And even then a Red Mage is boosting the overall raids dps with embolden which makes the dps difference, non existent.

This is obviously assuming that A. The summoner doesn't die. If a Red mage and a Summoner were to both die, the Red mage would have much higher dps with weakness then a Summoner would.