Caster has honestly gotten the shaft in this game as far as I’m concerned. Black mage was really solid from the reworks in ARR and has remained a near perfect job.

Summoner felt like a very rushed addition to the game. The developers admitted this in an interview. They wanted a new job and knew they didn’t have a lot of time. They polled the community and summoner won popularity wise, with ninja coming in second. The job was a lot of reused assets from the old thamurturge plus heavy inspiration from other necromancer type mmo pet classes. It has struggled to find a balance between gameplay and balance.

Red mage is a near perfect job as well, but raised the concern of a DPS job with too much utility.

This has created this weird caster balance where they’re balanced around non DPS utility like raise, meaning you have “progression” jobs vs “speed” jobs.

In an ideal scenario, black mage is straight up better than red mage and summoner because you shouldn’t be relying on a caster to rez.

Then the added layer of summoner’s mobility being taxed, putting it in this weird position where red mage is just better because it can do everything summoner can, but better.

Hoping for an interesting new caster in 7.0 that’s more on the selfish side, that isn’t BLM.