Ranged DPS, choose a weakness that would justify a buff

[Myon88]

As a side note, SMN's insane mobility makes them to usually have the lowest variance between skill outside of Physical Ranged.

Hm I don't know about that. If you peruse this tier's combat data in a certain place, and look at the interquartile range of the box plot for each job's dps output, I think you'd find summoner is pretty much dead even with rdm and the melee jobs. That is to say, for the most part people are roughly as good or bad as each other at playing each job.

The only outliers are (as you can guess), black mage having the widest difference between good and bad players, and the physical ranged having the smallest. In short, when people are bad at black mage, they're really, really bad at black mage. And the physical ranged having simple rotations and a low skill ceiling mean there's not as big a difference between a good or bad physical ranged player (ouch). So, stuff we all know already.

Unless, you have some other methodology that points to a different conclusion? I'd certainly be interested to see it.

It's popular to say that summoner is now 'easy' because of the buffs to their mobility in 5.1. From a movement standpoint, that's certainly true, but it's far from the whole picture of what makes up a job's difficulty. As I have said before, people have a massive, massive blind spot when it comes to identifying what makes jobs difficult. Things to do with movement or 'uptime' are overrated (because they're easy to understand, you can't hit something = no damage), and things to do with depth or rotational complexity are underrated (for the opposite reason, people who don't understand it won't see it).

Now, it's rather unfortunate for the physical ranged that despite this being the case, their actual rotation is rather easy too, so there's not a lot you can argue for them there either. Happily, that isn't the case for summoners, and you need only look at the countless examples of people mangling their trances and demi windows and tri-disaster resets to see that.

But you don't have to take my word for it, as I've said, the combat data for this tier already encapsulates all that information. There are people out there making these mistakes right now and recording their performances, and if those errors weren't costing them as much dps as I claim, it would be shown clearly in the percentile spread.