From Meleewalker to Meleetrail

[Shurrikhan]

Semantically I chose "equalize" as a term for quick understabdability to the conversation at large. Of course the problem crops up exactly where I said it does: Black Mage got a massive, MASSIVE damage buff this patch, now one of the top damage dealers in the game, and yet it is still used at less than half the rate of SMN the past two weeks. There are two chief reasons: rotational ease and mobility.

Rotational difficulty is a gimme, its much easier to pick up a summoner and do its rotation perfectly. Mobility wise it is (almost as, lest I be called on another technicality) mobile as a physical ranged; when making and executing strats there is no learning curve for the summoner's casting to account for unlike BLM and RDM.

In TOP the past two weeks, SMN doesn't just double BLM, but BLM and RDM combined. This makes sense particularly because p1 of top is actual hell for casters, but SMN instead only needs to align its rotation so its casting can happen during a downtime spot of p1, rare as those are.

Same with DSR although that content is aged and SMN only outperforms RDM and BLM combined, not RDM+BLM twice over.

I submit that the sheer mobility advantage is a major contributing factor to these patterns. Therefore if all ranged were clumped into the same 1% buff, with no change to move RDM and BLM closer to the middle mobility-wise, the jobs would become enthusiast-tier and little more.

Sorry if that came off as a nit-pick; I had thought you meant "mobility ought to be equalized" much more literally across the then-merged Magical Ranged and Physical Ranged... not just that they should follow more equal criteria for how much mobility is permitted relative to each other when having equal or greater utility, ease, and rDPS (since it seems like even Caster itself doesn't have any consistent balancing criteria).

I fully agree that SMN is presently overpowered, and would like to see its mobility come slightly more at-cost and with less ease of optimization. I'd also like to see RDM's Verraise come a bit more at-cost (such as by capping Dualcast at 4s cast time reduction, or as an indirect consequence making RDM's gauges more interesting) and its rDPS be increased to SMN's.