Quote Originally Posted by Neela View Post
and about being overpowered... smn still was strong at release of 4.0 Eirene & a handful of "true 1%" smn showed that already, while casuals and (wannabe-) pros cried for balance.

It wasn't really "strong" at the start of 4.0, it appeared strong because a lot of classes needed buffs. Think how bad DRG and MCH were at the very beginning of the expansion, and others like BRD, BLM, etc. received buffs as well. Even we asked for balance changes because there "were" glaring issues with the class, although a lot of it revolved around aspects like mp management and recovering after dying (dying on SMN was just far more punishing than what other dps classes would suffer). The other issue is that radiant shield procs were factored into parses, so when people swapped to Ifrit and you saw these higher SMN parses, that was in part because of radiant shield being added to it. Imagine a ninja having their trick attack contribution factored into their parses and not individually to every person. See how easily that can be flawed? The moment DRG and MCH received their buffs, the meta immediately went back to double ranged comps and even with the 4.1 changes to SMN, a lot of people still questioned whether it was better than MCH. So people "thought" SMN after 4.1 was overpowered, but the very best groups still favored MCH... Was it really that overpowered or are other casters just undertuned (more specifically BLM)?