I'm not setting out to disparage the optimiser's guides. Just pointing out what my players have found to be some of their limitations.They are good sources of focused analysis for their specified purpose. They are helpful but should not be taken as gospel.
The experience of my group is that, in fact, this is not always optimal. My players' party does not exhibit any lack of ability to take on significant numbers of challenges, including combat challenges, without a long rest. But they do not particularly emphasise focused fire or single-target damage. Mobility and control, and synergies of positioning and condition-infliction, tend to be more important.The optimizers guides are designed to show how to eliminate opponents as quickly as possible (pile damage on single targets, rinse and repeat) which in turn mitigates damage to your "team" (less attackers remain).
I'm not sure I have a fully-worked example that springs to mind, but the general idea is that controlling who enemies can attack, and hence where damage lands; and controlling enemy layout, and hence who is subject to the PCs' damage- and condition-inflicting AoEs; is very important. Exercising this sort of control often requires attacking multiple targets rather than focus fire. Mobility is also important for bringing melee/close burst attacks to bear, and for ranged PCs (of which my party has 3 of 5 - sorcerer, cleric-ranger and invoker/wizard) to keep out of melee where possible. And at 29th level, the fighter and paladin have about twice as many healing surges as the invoker/wizard, each nearly twice as potent. So getting damage to land on one of those defenders is quite important: one way to look at it is that every hp dealt to the invoker/wizard is four times as costly in terms of party capacity.
the guides have limited/narrow usability in a game that does not always heavily focus on combat
Combat is a fairly big part of our game. I'm not sure whether the threats are "symmetric" or not - they at least tend to be more numerous, which probably reduces the symmetry.I think a fair bit of the inclination for CharOp kind of optimization is premised upon the majority of encounters being fairly narrow combat scenarios with symmetric threats.
I just had a look at the Invoker book "Art of the Covenant" - it says that controllers don't use their at-wills all that often, but then ranks Mantle of the Infidel poorly - whereas Mantle of the Infidel has range 20, and hence is situationally highly useful, and being situationally useful isn't a bad thing for something that you don't use all that often!
It also ranks Astral Step, 6th level daily party teleport, as average, and rates Symbol of Hope (a temp hp generator) higher. But Symbol of Hope (like Wall of Light, which also gets a better rating than Astral Step, and which Symbol of Hope is compared to) depends upon the PCs remaining within a given position. If two allies are within its area, it generats 10 temp hp per turn. As the PCs gain levels, that becomes an increasingly irrelevant number of temp hp, whereas the strength of Astral Step (which adds INT to the teleport distance for a Preserver) just grows!
The invoker in my party, who has Astral Step and who spent a feat to get Arcane Gate via multi-classing, would never think of dropping those mobility powers. They are situational to an extant, but then daily powers can afford to be because you're not going to use them every time! When they are used, they are game-changers in a way that Symbol of Hope is unlikely to be.
I'm not saying that the Guide is hopeless or anything like that, but I do think that it has a somewhat narrow conception of what optimisation looks like, even within the combat sphere.
I think from the player's point of view the benefits of skill training aren't narrow. The PC is trained in 8 of 17 skills, and has an average +25 skill bonus compared to the average of +19 to +21 for the other PCs.Kinda surprised about the skill training thing. Usually I'm so incredibly starved for feats, I'm trying to find excuses not to take something with such narrow benefits.
These skills complement the character's rituals.
The character is not uber-powerful in combat (although with 1x/enc close burst domination he's not weak either), but is very effective as a sage and ritualist, which in my view is an extremely viable character and a useful one for the party.