You're only just noticing this in Renewal? You're a few years late mate. My pure forger has been feeling neglected for a loooooooong time:
- Alchemist Homunculus added to help them level easily a pure potter. Blacksmith get... nothing, go pay for leech or use mercenaries.
- Sages and TKMs Mild Wind added for endow weapons. Blacksmith elemental forged weapons value plummet.
Personally I still bought and made elemental weapons since I couldn't afford an alt account back then. But yeah... Gravity has been favouring Alchemists for quite a long time now.
Homunculus only helps BASE levels. and the homunculus branch is 11 job points total ( vaporize 1, res 5, aid pot 5 - since you fail if your homunc dies or runs out of SP ).
Renewal's sad for blacksmith classes in general.
The BS class just whines too much. A non god stacked BS can out damage a non god stacked genetic 9/10 times. Lets see here, arm cannon - relies purely on ATK so only STR is needed, pile bunker has huge ATK... BS does more damage with less stats.
HP mods, BS gets WAY more HP than genetics.... hell my damn 44 vit SORCEROR gets as much HP as my 100 vit genetic at 150. BS gets hovering, takes much less damage from traps and ETC - avoids ankle snare maybe?
BS gets that slide skill, can slide over traps.... genetics get to run fast and can't avoid traps.
BS gets nuetral barrier, reduces damage, magic damage and takes no damage from ranged attacks... hello GoH / CS, nice to see you are now obsolete against mechs.
The only thing that genetics get that is decent is howling, and the catalyst is stupid rare on non over botted servers, 150-300K per cast and you are lucky if hunting em you get 1-2 / hour. Thorn wall is OK in WoE but costs ~500K - prickly fruit in ymir is ~200K( 200K x 10 / 4 ).