Samurai and Red Mage

[Shurrikhan]

The interesting thing here is that Samurai was great at launch. It's raw damage potential was huge when compared to other classes when played properly, but Square started buffing other jobs while leaving Samurai alone and now the job is nearing the same murky identity Monk had through all of Heavensward. Square set out a philosophy of what should determine the amount of damage a job should do, and they really need to stick to their guns on it in order to maintain balance. Certain jobs have been over buffed (Dragoon for one) resulting in utility jobs doing more DPS than they should and non utility jobs doing less than they should.

Red Mage is an interesting one since it's one of those low skill ceiling, but low skill floor jobs. It's good enough, and not terribly complicated. It seems the job is being punished on DPS for lack of complexity over anything else as vercure, verraise, and embolden are not nearly as impactful as utility skills compared to a summoner's utility kit, while they also have higher damage.

At least the quality or quantity at high quality of self-maximizing DPS and the like has increased to the point that if a class really does have raw power, someone will prove it relatively quickly. It took only a week for the buffed Monk and BLM to hit 7.4k in this tier's continuous (save for 2-3 GCDs) fight, O6S. It just scares me that SAM has yet to do so after a month, showing appropriate promise only in 8S. Short of a double-Ranged comp's DRG contribution, RDM, and SAM, jobs do seem to be meeting very even and seemingly intended number relationships. But that's exactly what makes these two jobs' throughput levels so problematic to me. I still think BLM needs to lose a little less damage to forced movement, keeping its lead over SMN even in movement-scattered fights like O7S, but on the whole it does all that a raw DPS turret should.

I'd like to hear from some RDM mains how often they find themselves losing uptime to movement, and at what interval between or under what circumstances, and if those circumstances are viably mitigateable through change in play. It seems especially strange to me how low RDM parses in God Kefka, finally falling well below NIN. One other change idea I've been playing around with may provide a reasonable solution, depending on why and how frequently uptime is lost.