Regarding SMN's current condition

[crashoverdrive]

Physick ... Why I still have this spell in my power list ??? ^^

[DaulBan]

I had a long post on reddit about SMN and balance, but to make it super short...

Living in a world where BRD/NIN/DRG/MCH exists, SMN's current dps looks pretty silly but only barely makes it a class worth bringing now in terms of the '''meta'''. By that I mean people fighting for Ultimate clears are trying it out here and there over MCH.

Personally speaking I think that if SMN still is < MCH (and the new raid tier's data will tell us what's what) then it's probably about balanced at its current state, despite how high its current DPS is.

So speaking of BLM, if they really want to make it more competitive with SMN they should probably look into some 500 DPS (super rough number, but whatever) buffs to even things out a bit to at least help out with its case of pDPS. (whether this comes from straight potency buffs or fixes to mobility is kinda important, though it'd probably need to be a combination of the two)

[Remedi]

Tbh I've seen more MCH+SMN than SMN+BRD in ultimate

[NovaLevossida]

While balancing jobs can be hard and fine tuning all those numbers, I think it's a no-brainer that your jobs without utility / raid DPS buffs and only really bring their damage as an asset (BLM and SAM) shouldn't be outdamaged by jobs that have utility / raid DPS buffs. It was apparent before those SMN buffs that BLM needed love and that even SAM wasn't far enough ahead of the other jobs in DPS to justify its lack of utility / raid DPS buffs. I don't even know how you get to a point where SMN is doing the things it's doing while BLM and SAM damage outputs aren't addressed.

[Remedi]

It's possible they overbuffed SMN to make it more popular, just like how they did to AST in 3.4, remember ferom 3.2 AST was already meta but the majority of ppl only started following that path after the 3.4 balance buff and now they reverted that change since AST place in the healer balance is fixed (and you could say healer balance does wotk atm)

[zuzu-bq]

And they might buff MCH again. They have a really bad habit of overbuffing stuff.

[Remedi]

That's why I think it's a strategy, there class adjustments seems inconsistent since they are capable of preicision balance sometimes while doing some blatant things in other occasions.
Which leads me to believe they are idd using our egos of liking OPness to restore popularity to some jobs and then returning them to a more balanced state when necessary.
It seems to be effective because honestly no matter what they did on AST to keep it in a balanced state seemed to work and only when balance become 20% rather than 10% ppl started to really embrace them despite the fact that they were already meta since 3.2 as I said.

That said it's also true that they cave too much to buffing requests especially from support type jobs, honestly they should draw a line and stop this, if a support-type job feel underwhelming they should buff something else instead of their dmg