Some views on DPS balance that everyone cares about

[Myon88]

They should of buffed the damage and kept the rotation the same, or Lowered the damage when they simplified the rotation, there was no reason for a buff with simplification of their rotation

Careful with that talk, you're a dragoon. You know what they say about glass houses. Some of you may not remember, but it's easy to forget just how much melee and black mage gameplay has been 'casualized' over the years. More buffs and dots to upkeep? Random wheeling/fang positionals? Buffs like botd or enochian actually being at risk of falling off if you played badly, instead of being 25s cooldown, 30s duration (lmao) 'Press this button to be awesome' abilities? Better not let the ranged players hear about this, since half the threads on the front page are y'all telling them how hard you have it. Happily, I no longer play ranged, so it's someone elses' problem now.

RDM isn't even really support Oriented, for one, they supplement Melee Compositions the most, while summoner has a flat damage bonus that works with all compositions which makes their RDPS Superior in all compositions

Care to explain to me how a smn rdm brd mnk comp got world first e8s then? That's not one but two of the jobs that the community dunks on now, and that was the hardest dps check we have seen since gordias/midas. Seeing that result I am satisfied that rdm's tuning is well within acceptable margins. But you know what they say, you give an inch, they take a mile...

You are lucky and spoiled that you can even SHARE GEAR with any other job, My Job requires me to INDEPENDENTLY GEAR.

Exactly, congratulations on reading what I wrote. It's an amazing time in the lifespan of this game to be playing casters, you should be enjoying it instead of quibbling over being slighted 0.5% dps that you don't even deserve. And you should be playing all the casters, precisely. That only makes my argument stronger. What reason is there to not be an 'omni-caster' player when you can freely switch between all three of them? Well, one-trick ponies only looking out for their own jobs of course - but I said that already.

It's nice that you chose one sentence to argue over while ignoring 80% of the post.

No, how nice of you to write all that only to put forth one single ill-informed point. Go on, read what you wrote and tell me what else was in there besides anecdotes and opinions? You literally started your second paragraph with 'I think'.

[Risvertasashi]

Summoner just has everything.

Superior raw DPS output, but it also gives DPS buffs for burst windows.
It can res like the caster of lower DPS output, which BLM can't do at all.
It has exceptional mobility, to the point where I've seen people call it "like physical ranged DPS, but flashier and not-garbage damage."

SE seems to be pretty happy with the status quo, however. They didn't do much in 5.2.

[Kabooa]

I wouldn't use world first as anything more than "they figured it out first".

Summoner and Bard had world first in E4s, and Summoner / Bard were world first on TEA too. If the logic is "world first so they're fine", 5.0 Summoner was "Fine" too.

[Silverquick]

Summoner just has everything.

Superior raw DPS output, but it also gives DPS buffs for burst windows.
It can res like the caster of lower DPS output, which BLM can't do at all.
It has exceptional mobility, to the point where I've seen people call it "like physical ranged DPS, but flashier and not-garbage damage."

SE seems to be pretty happy with the status quo, however. They didn't do much in 5.2.

That's because what you're saying is incorrect.

SMN only has dominance in Savages and Ultimates (8 Man content), NOT Normal Raids, Alliance Raids, End Game Dungeons, or even Normal Trials. There it depends as generally you see BLM or SAM sometimes even DRG. You can check that against the various things in FFLogs at the 90th percentiles.

Why?

Because Savages and Ultimates are almost catered to every strong point of the Summoner Job. First of all, like BLMs they don't have to "fill their guage". They have their strongest technique usable right out of the gate the way BLMs have Enochian off the bat.

Second of all EVERY SMN technique is set out almost perfectly for any scenario that requires a LOT of Movement, the ONLY exception is during the Bahamut trance and even then they can sacrifice damage for movement.

Both DoTs and Pets are automatic, and done server side on a per tick basis... ergo are not affected by Lag, I don't care who you are, you are not playing right next to the server so no matter what technique you use its going to have latency. The largest portion of the SMN damage does not and never will. SO they have a leg up on ANY content where movement becomes a factor where even a Split Second away from DPSing is going to count... (aka a Savage or Ultimate). Remember if you're parcing you are doing it from your machine, not at point zero on the server. So their activity rate would appear the same as anyone else's even though its not.

SMN damage is actually lower than most other jobs, when you compare direct damage to direct damage. So until they change the way Savages and Ultimates are done, SMN will alway dominate even though they do not in other forms of content.

You have what is called a content balance issue not a Summoner balance issue because the type of content you are tunnel visioned into.... plays to EVERY strength of the Summoner job.

[Risvertasashi]

That's because what you're saying is incorrect.

Nothing I have said is incorrect and you went on a wild tangent. I never said SMN is dominant. Not that I'm saying it isn't either, but you're arguing your own made up point that was never in my post.

But to address your post anyways:

On a striking dummy, I can clear things in SSS on SMN that I can't on physical ranged. I play physical ranged a lot better than I play SMN, as I have far more practice on it. My overall DPS on SMN, even in this striking dummy scenario, is far far higher.

Yet SMN also brings the raid buffs, rez, and so forth. This isn't SMN "playing into the content."

This is summoner being brokenly overpowered and not having weaknesses to counterbalance its strength. Its DPS output would be fine if it did not have rez, did not give DPS buffs, and didn't have mobility. But then it would basically be black mage 2.

I wouldn't use world first as anything more than "they figured it out first".

Summoner and Bard had world first in E4s, and Summoner / Bard were world first on TEA too. If the logic is "world first so they're fine", 5.0 Summoner was "Fine" too.

Bard is great in TEA because of its AOE. Bard AOE is actually really, really good, but in high end content besides TEA, this doesn't matter so much.

As for e8s, well, the standards there aren't very high. Yes, they cleared with a bard. They could have done better with a Dancer or anything else. World first ultimate in Stormblood also had a DRK, but that doesn't mean DRK didn't have issues.

So, yeah, basically I agree. So many people on these forums do seem to think a sample size of 1 is a good basis for saying something is balanced, though...

[Myon88]

I wouldn't use world first as anything more than "they figured it out first".

Summoner and Bard had world first in E4s, and Summoner / Bard were world first on TEA too. If the logic is "world first so they're fine", 5.0 Summoner was "Fine" too.

My group was there on day 2 and very nearly made top 10 (which I am pretty happy about, but that's another story). There was nothing to 'figure out', the whole fight had been seen for hours at that point by all the top groups and it was just bashing your head against the enrage. E4S's check was practically quaint in comparison, especially since uptime strats were much easier to figure out, on top of things like being able to caster/ranged lb the healer gaols. In contrast, there's nothing you can really cheese with Shiva, and all the uptime losses were coming from the phases that were very difficult to optimize on the fly in week 1.

By the weekend, even most of the 'midcore' groups on my server had Titan down. Those same groups didn't get their e8s clear till week 2, 3, or even 4 in some cases. It would not be the case if it was as simple as 'figuring it out' and then collecting your clear.

We've been handed a double caster meta on a silver platter for this entire expansion, and even now people are trying to undermine it for their own selfish gains, how truly disappointing.

[ReiMakoto]

Snip

BLM has to "fill" their enochian gauge to use xenoglossy.

The Latency point is meaningless as long as youre not missing gcds using the buffer system, more latency isn't going to harm your dps unless its so bad it causes gcds to clip, the only big thing lag effects is double weaving, which summoner has to do a lot of, so its effected most by latency if anything. You're not making any sense about latency I don't think you understand what youre talking about, dots tick every 3 seconds, and pets have a gcd so smn doesn't have a magic leg up in this regard.

Also content IS balanced around savage, normal raids and alliance raids and such are a by product of the balancing done FOR savage, which means it is a balance issue, because jobs are only going to be buffed or nerfed based on how they perform in savage.

Also at 90th percentile in normal raids its summoner who's on top so I don't understand that point, also people dont compete for ranks in normal raids and their uploading is just a byproduct of people mass uploading logs after savage

You seem to be very uniformed about all of this, and im not sure what point you're trying to make? SMN is the strongest in savage, which is where balance matters most, saying it not as good in normals and dungeons (which it is by the way) doesn't matter as that content is so undertuned it can be beaten by 24 healers or tanks week one or 2 in terms of alliance raids, and e4 normal was beaten by literally 2 people its first week of release.

[Silverquick]

Nothing I have said is incorrect and you went on a wild tangent. I never said SMN is dominant. Not that I'm saying it isn't either, but you're arguing your own made up point that was never in my post.

But to address your post anyways:

On a striking dummy, I can clear things in SSS on SMN that I can't on physical ranged. I play physical ranged a lot better than I play SMN, as I have far more practice on it. My overall DPS on SMN, even in this striking dummy scenario, is far far higher.

Yet SMN also brings the raid buffs, rez, and so forth. This isn't SMN "playing into the content."

This is summoner being brokenly overpowered and not having weaknesses to counterbalance its strength. Its DPS output would be fine if it did not have rez, did not give DPS buffs, and didn't have mobility. But then it would basically be black mage 2..

So then you can explain THIS right?
https://www.fflogs.com/zone/statisti...ty=100&boss=71

And THIS...
https://www.fflogs.com/zone/statistics/31

And This...
https://www.fflogs.com/zone/statisti...524&metric=dps

And this...
https://www.fflogs.com/zone/statisti...520&metric=dps

And this...
https://www.fflogs.com/zone/statisti...523&metric=dps

And this.. .
https://www.fflogs.com/zone/statisti...difficulty=100

And this...
https://www.fflogs.com/zone/statisti...ty=100&boss=66

I do not know where you got this idea SMN was dominating ALL types of content... but whoever told you that was lying.

What SMN dominates in is content with a LOT of Movement.

[SpeckledBurd]

All sorts of factors affect what job people choose to play. You have reasons like monk not being 'flashy' enough for most melee players, or astrologian being less straightforward than the other two healers. By your logic, we're going to need to buff monk even more too, as if they weren't monsters already.

Monk is underplayed because it was basically a failure in every aspect of design except it's performance in raids. In terms of evolution the devs followed up the expansion where Monk was so poorly received that they said on stream that they took it in a bad direction by fixing none of the problems players had with it (RoF's slow on Launch, redundant actions, continually pruning actions without replacement), doubling down on some of the problems we already had with it (too many GL upkeep actions, GL upkeep being terrible in spite of all the upkeep actions, no new actions for our rotation), or outright repeating the same mistakes as last expansion after removing them (Enhanced Fists of Fire and new Riddle of Wind has the exact same problem as Stormblood Tackle Mastery had on Launch and the problem the fists have had forever in that there's one dominant fist stance). Even after the 5.05 fixes to make it playable, I'd still say that Monk is the worst designed (not performing) of the DPS and it's got a solid case for being the worst designed job in the game full stop. It being the least played job in all content other than TEA shouldn't be a surprise to anyone who's paid attention to it.

[Kabooa]

My group was there and very nearly made top 10 (which I am pretty happy about, but that's another story). There was nothing to 'figure out', the whole fight had been seen for hours at that point by all the top groups and it was just bashing your head against the enrage. E4S's check was practically quaint in comparison, especially since uptime strats were much easier to figure out, on top of things like being able to caster/ranged lb the healer gaols. By the weekend, most of the 'midcore' groups on my server had Titan down too. Those same groups didn't get their e8s clear till week 2, 3, or even 4 in some cases.

I'm just pointing out it's kind of a flaw to make that assertion, because there's basically no world first that hasn't had Summoner and also usually Bard in it.

World firsts are about who figure out the mechanics quicker and the compositions generally reflect the jobs that are more flexible or bring better utility for blind prog. The DPS check this time around is higher almost certainly because the average expected DPS of the jobs is higher (Just about everyone that wasn't top 5 at the time of Titan has gotten increases), but also "we did normal tuning this time"

Like, you can point out that the world first Tea also had a Black Mage, but it's also Sfia, and I doubt it was his class choice that lead to their huge lead on the world first kill, but I also doubt putting him on any other job would help or hinder them either. Mainly because there's a Summoner for the potential battle raise, and you treat the blam like you do a Sam, Drag, or Ninja.

By contrast, Black Mage is present in the first kill, and the next 24 absent. There is one red mage. There are 25 summoners in the first 25 kills.

Expand this out to 50 and you get 4 black mages, 3 red mages, and 50 summoners.

Compared to E4S, we still see a majority of summoner in its less than desirable state, but you see more Black Mages and Red Mages as well.

Unfortunately they don't seem to be running progress keepers in this tier, maybe because they didn't have time to set up like previous, so it's more arduous to do these checks for Shiva, but it wouldn't surprise me if you saw a similar case of an ultra majority of double caster being Summoner + the other.

TLDR; Get rid of the raise.

If there is a constant to expect in anything regarding summoners, it's me saying that.