I'm One Of The Filthiests Of Casuals And Even I Can See How Dumbdown FF14 Has Become!

Um you can't adjust the level 90 summons sizes or change them to just look like carbuncle, I find the full size summons get in the way of playing but that's my preference rather just use the carbuncle

I really dislike when people defend smn design by the volume in which it’s being played in high end content.

It’s not for any of the right reasons and the job is actively holding all ranged classes at gunpoint like a terrorist. But people will celebrate it because it isn’t shadowbringers SMN. Just bad mentality

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Originally Posted by Ivtrix

It’s not for any of the right reasons and the job is actively holding all ranged classes at gunpoint like a terrorist. But people will celebrate it because it isn’t shadowbringers SMN. Just bad mentality

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To be fair, we don't KNOW the reasons. Anyone using this argument you are assumes the reasons, but has no proof to support them. For everyone you might say plays it because being "braindead" makes it easier to raid with, there could be 5 people that simply ENJOY playing it. We genuinely have no way to know. All we DO know is that it's very popular.

So the only conclusion we can make is the change increased people engaging with/playing it. Until you figure out a way to parse out why everyone's playing and determine which reasons are "the right" reasons to enjoy/play a thing, you really can't argue against it. What we do know is that the change increased people playing it from how many did before. That's it. We don't know the reasons, so we can't conclude they are "not for any of the right" ones.

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Originally Posted by Atelier-Bagur

Oh well, if it keeps the old Summoner peeps happy.

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Honestly, if I had a magic wand, what I'd do is add a class called Evoker and make it what old SMN was. That or Green Mage/Green Caller.

Leave SMN and SCH to be "for people that like easy stuff" (I guess?) and have something else to capture the "BLM, but with DoTs instead" playerbase that thematically makes sense for it. Much as people give it flack, Green Mage as a debuff/debilitating Job with some party utility would probably be right up the alley of people that actually enjoyed what old SMN had to offer.

Old SMN was not a SMN in ARR or HW at all. Until Bahamut in 4.0, it didn't actually have a single summon, and I don't recall in FF7 Cloud fighting for 2 minutes using a bunch of DoTs and a random assortment of disjointed abilities unrelated to each other to then instantly summon Knights of the Round at the 2 min (SB Baha) mark and then try to fit in as many oGCDs as he could within the next 10 seconds to maximize damage. I don't recall that from FF7. What I DO recall from FF7 was the instant cast Summons and shenanegans with 4x Magic and the Mime command. I'm old enough to remember in ARR people complaining about how SMN wasn't a Summoner and in HW feeling that building up to channeling a bit of Bahamut for Deathflare (FF16?) felt KINDof summoner-y, but not really; and then how excited people were in SB to actually finally get their first "real" summoner summon.

Most FF games, the summons are more like new SMN's Primals - fire and forget. Some had cast times (FFTactics), some did not. The "you control your summon" was only present in FFX of the mainline single player games as far as I can recall. 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, and 9 they were fire and forget things. FF8 was the only one I can remember having a specific travel time. 7 and 9 didn't even have cast times in their ATB systems. FF12 they follow you around like the Demis for a minute then leave with an ultimate (kind of the reverse of Baha/Phoe where you use their ultimate when they first arrive), FF13 was kinda like that but they were also transformers, and 15 were fire and forget but mostly random.

There's not any incarnation that was like old SMN, a DoT mage with a pet that once every 120/60 seconds summoned a bigger pet. I don't think that existed in any of the other FF games. None I can think of, at least.

That's why people say new SMN feels more like a SMN. It has both the FF3-7&9 big magic nuke component and it has the FF10/12 demi-minion component. For all the hate it gets, is the most faithful version in FFXIV's history to the actual Summoners in the series' history.

ARR/HW SMN was a WoW Warlock
SB SMN was a WoW Warlock with a bit of FF12 Summoner every two minutes.
ShB SMN was a WoW Warlock with a bit more FF12 Summoner every minute.
EW SMN is a Final Fantasy Summoner, a marriage of both the "fire and forget" summons of most of the series and of the "minion" summons of 10 and 12.

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Originally Posted by Snorky

Um you can't adjust the level 90 summons sizes or change them to just look like carbuncle, I find the full size summons get in the way of playing but that's my preference rather just use the carbuncle

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Whilst you cannot make them look like Carbuncles, you can 100% make them smaller;

/petsize "all" "small"

Replace small with medium or large (large is default, small makes them carbuncle sized). You can also change individual ones (info here: https://eu.finalfantasyxiv.com/lodes...d/ded8f6e43d6/).

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Originally Posted by VentVanitas

I'm kind of tired of seeing things like "it's a real summoner now", the frequency of summoning doesn't make it any more or less of a summoner. if anything EW SMN is the biggest iteration of ruin mage we've had yet.

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ya apparently you werent a real summoner last xpac with bahamut and phoenix. only now that you press legos every 5 sec are u a real summoner!!

All the 6.0 Summoner has are fancy animations, everything else needs a complete rework.

Titan, Garuda, Ifrit don't contribute much strategically (they're no-brain),
even though mobility is something nice, here it feels unnecessary and seems outdated in the caster category,
(summoner 5.1 was overpowered, but it was highly mobile without unnecessary mobility).

Here, it almost seems to belong to the Physical Ranged DPS category; it's completely out of place.

Furthermore, the Carbuncle has been reduced to a useless figurine, etherflow management is no longer a true resource management, and you only need to save them to use 4 of them under Bahamut+searing light,
The rest of the gameplay needs a complete revamp, and personally, I believe it needs additional buttons, resources, and a reduction in the GCD between elemental summons because the gameplay is painfully slow, thoughtless, out of place in the caster category,
and especially incomplete.

Even at level 90, it feels like you're at level 60.

How do you know? you are an Archer lv 30

Don't play one then.

Well, most people disagree with you TC. Players generally like things easier, with the option for harder stuff. Which the game provides.

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Originally Posted by Ivtrix

I really dislike when people defend smn design by the volume in which it’s being played in high end content.

It’s not for any of the right reasons and the job is actively holding all ranged classes at gunpoint like a terrorist. But people will celebrate it because it isn’t shadowbringers SMN. Just bad mentality

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Dancer was doing that long before Summoner did it, and still is. Nobody discusses that elephant in the room though.

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Originally Posted by Tanis_Ebonhart

Well, most people disagree with you TC. Players generally like things easier, with the option for harder stuff. Which the game provides.

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For some jobs, yes. Not all jobs get that option of 'it can be harder if you want to push yourself', and over time it feels like more and more are having their 'optional maximum' curtailed

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Originally Posted by Bonoki

Dancer was doing that long before Summoner did it, and still is. Nobody discusses that elephant in the room though.

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DNC has levels of skill ceiling optimization that SMN doesn’t have, especially with Tillana.

DNC dps also noticeably lags behind mch and brd, while SMN damage is comparable to RDM which makes absolutely 0 sense

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Originally Posted by LittleImp

The statistics of SMN are complicated.

On top of being known for its really low barrier of entry, it's also the only 2-for-1 job in the game with SCH, so it ends up being widely leveled/boosted due to the perceived 'value'. Other 'Easy' jobs see this as well to a lesser extent, as when many players are looking to pick up a single job in a category, they will often pick the easiest one.
...
Notice though, none of these things are really tied to how 'fun' or 'loved' the job is. I know a lot of people who run SMN during Ultimate and week 1 savage prog, and none of them actually identify as a 'SMN main' even though its the job they play the most, which is pretty telling.

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I guess this is a question that really needs to be asked - because it really does cut to the heart of the matter:

How do we know people DON'T find easy fun?

The going argument critics of SMN (and other "braindead" Jobs) use is that they're highly played - so we all agree that easy Jobs are highly played - but they try to write this off as easy isn't fun. So everyone playing them is doing so for other reasons, such as easy leading to reliable in terms of raid output and performance. This is very odd way to view them, I think. For starters, they're widely played by people who aren't raiders, too. WHM, WAR, and SMN are the most played Jobs in each category, and DNC seems to be for the Ranged group. These are widely considered the easiest Jobs in each role. Before EW, RDM was the most played in the Caster role, and at the time, was the easiest. Insomuchas Melee has an "easy" one (it doesn't like the other roles do), it would be RPR and SAM...and those are also the two most played.

So we know and agree that the easy Jobs are the most played.

If this meant they were the most liked, it would outright shoot down the argument of people who believe that "harder = more fun = more liked". So in comes this defensive argument "well, they're not liked because they are fun, they're liked because they are easy", which implies that easy gives players a lot of things they want but SPECIFICALLY not fun, and that players AS A WHOLE find harder fun and find easier less fun.

...what is this based on?

How do we know players don't find easier more fun and harder less fun?

How do we know players only play easy Jobs for other things ease gives and specifically NOT for fun or because they find them fun?

How do we know players don't love Jobs because of them being easy and straightforward?

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Originally Posted by Renathras

I guess this is a question that really needs to be asked - because it really does cut to the heart of the matter:

How do we know people DON'T find easy fun?

The going argument critics of SMN (and other "braindead" Jobs) use is that they're highly played - so we all agree that easy Jobs are highly played - but they try to write this off as easy isn't fun. So everyone playing them is doing so for other reasons, such as easy leading to reliable in terms of raid output and performance. This is very odd way to view them, I think. For starters, they're widely played by people who aren't raiders, too. WHM, WAR, and SMN are the most played Jobs in each category, and DNC seems to be for the Ranged group. These are widely considered the easiest Jobs in each role. Before EW, RDM was the most played in the Caster role, and at the time, was the easiest. Insomuchas Melee has an "easy" one (it doesn't like the other roles do), it would be RPR and SAM...and those are also the two most played.

So we know and agree that the easy Jobs are the most played.

If this meant they were the most liked, it would outright shoot down the argument of people who believe that "harder = more fun = more liked". So in comes this defensive argument "well, they're not liked because they are fun, they're liked because they are easy", which implies that easy gives players a lot of things they want but SPECIFICALLY not fun, and that players AS A WHOLE find harder fun and find easier less fun.

...what is this based on?

How do we know players don't find easier more fun and harder less fun?

How do we know players only play easy Jobs for other things ease gives and specifically NOT for fun or because they find them fun?

How do we know players don't love Jobs because of them being easy and straightforward?

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There are no answers to any of this in either direction without a job satisfaction survey with public results.

It is a completely pointless conversation because it's just going to be anecdotes being pitted against anecdotes.

Also, "harder=more fun" is an unfair oversimplification of a much more nuanced conversation about skill expression and job tuning.

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Originally Posted by Ivtrix

DNC has levels of skill ceiling optimization that SMN doesn’t have, especially with Tillana.

DNC dps also noticeably lags behind mch and brd, while SMN damage is comparable to RDM which makes absolutely 0 sense

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It's skill ceiling optimizations are so meaningless that even parse runners don't even do some of it because of how annoyingly obtuse they are. The options are there for those that care but I've met very few that do. Most pick up and play and call it a day; and walk away just fine by dance partnering the right party member.

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Originally Posted by Mikey_R

Whilst you cannot make them look like Carbuncles, you can 100% make them smaller;

/petsize "all" "small"

Replace small with medium or large (large is default, small makes them carbuncle sized). You can also change individual ones (info here: https://eu.finalfantasyxiv.com/lodes...d/ded8f6e43d6/).

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Thanks for this Mikey, I knew the old ones could be changed but the last time I played my smn was when I returned and CGI command wasn't working. I will give this a try when I go back to playing her

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Originally Posted by LittleImp

There are no answers to any of this in either direction without a job satisfaction survey with public results.

It is a completely pointless conversation because it's just going to be anecdotes being pitted against anecdotes.

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So why mention it raise it as a point, then?

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Originally Posted by LittleImp

Also, "harder=more fun" is an unfair oversimplification of a much more nuanced conversation about skill expression and job tuning.

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I'm trying to make shorter posts these days. But this is also true of almost everything. It wasn't intended as a slight or bad faith unfairness, just a shorthand. The short upshot of it is "less easy = more fun", however one wishes to define those things. Fair enough? The words will be a complicated collection of thoughts and ideas, but typing out the entire body of what constitutes that in any post discussing it would have people capping the character limit right and left. You seem to have understood what I was getting out, so it seems to have been a functional shorthand.

If you have another of similar brevity, please share it, but that's missing the forest for the trees as far as the discussion goes.

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Originally Posted by Bonoki

It's skill ceiling optimizations are so meaningless that even parse runners don't even do some of it because of how annoyingly obtuse they are. The options are there for those that care but I've met very few that do. Most pick up and play and call it a day; and walk away just fine by dance partnering the right party member.

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Also this. It's similar with RDM. We also have to consider that RDM and DNC both got harder in EW vs their ShB selves (to fully optimize). SMN now is similar to RDM an expansion or two ago. Quite a few Jobs in ARR were simple compared to modern ones, and a lot of the optimizations weren't known (since parsers hadn't become widespread at the time to analyze) and difficulty was generally more related to mastering clunk than it was the Jobs having a lot of nuanced, complex, and interesting kit interactions and fight optimizations to make. The bar is always moving.

In general I’m in favour of optimisation being there if people want it but modern DNC is probably an example of when it really doesn’t work

DNC has two levels of optimisation
-Intuitive optimisation such as dance partner swapping during downtime and saving feather for Tech step (does that even count as optimisation tbh)
-completely unintuitive messy optimisation that doesn’t actually add almost any meaningful damage- the biggest one here is using tilana to alter your standard step timeline

If optimisation of a job is that unintuitive and can be covered by a lucky crit on a random skill then there is an argument to be made it’s not really good optimisation design (still better than SMN), it’s why BLM is such a good class; because like optimisation can actually massively increase your DPS

So if 60% are now playing summoner....than the *dumbdown* was a fantastic change....si the majority are playing the dumb down version lol

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Originally Posted by ValkyrieL

So if 60% are now playing summoner....than the *dumbdown* was a fantastic change....si the majority are playing the dumb down version lol

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I don’t understand why “it doesn’t work in the content where game balancing matters” doesn’t make sense to you.

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Originally Posted by TheRealMadruck

I'm One Of The Filthiests

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Balmung Quicksand awaits you. xD


And yes, the summoner is relatively easy to play now. And i do not wonder why 60% of the players pick the summoner. You can level two jobs at once with it. IMHO it is a huge factor.


Cheers

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Originally Posted by Aldath

Its gameplay remains consistant from the moment you grab it to the moment you hit 90. Yes, Summoner at 70 feels better than before, but getting a lower level trial or dungeon in roulette makes you see how the job feels more complete at lower levels than pretty much any other DPS, making the transition less grating.

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Sorry but no.. I played summoner for EW MSQ this time around.. its rotation was stale until I reach 86(when you get thr bonus action for the 3 summons) anytime going under that level made the job feel awful

The job needs the extra actions for summons at a lower level in my opinion.. maybe around the time you get all 3 summons.. otherwise it's just ruin spam and that's pretty simular to the healer problem but on a DPS..

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Originally Posted by Larirawiel

Balmung Quicksand awaits you. xD




Cheers

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Even I don't go to The Balmung Quicksand. I don't need 15 people literally inside me. It's too crowded. It may be a game but I still respect Personal Bubble Spaces.

This forum is dead. Much more than the game they try to make people believe is dead.

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Originally Posted by Jeeqbit

I find Summoner fun tbh. It's an actual summoner now.

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100% my take as well. I also don't have to remember convoluted rotations or openers anymore with it. Come back from a break? SMN is easy to jump into, play, and do decent numbers.

I admit I never played the old Summoner, so I have no baseline to judge, but I really enjoy Summoner now. IF you have your full kit. Under the cap it can be really awkward. I've been playing Eureka a bit, and there's a weird delay in my cooldowns with Bahamut just not coming off CD fast enough, so I have to cast a few ruins back to back, which feels a bit weird. If you go lower, it only gets worse. With how the game handles roulettes, you can often find yourself playing with less than a full toolkit, and that doesn't feel great.

I do like though how the full rotation is simple. I don't believe that all jobs have to be complex (hell, playing some Astrologian lately as well, it feels pointlessly complex, even at low level). It's sort of like Garen vs Zed on League of Legends. One is super simple while the other has a ton more skill expression, and that's okay.

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Originally Posted by Kansene

I mean if a huge amount of people now love the summoner I'd say they made a smart move.

And if they made it as its own thing rather than essentially deleting another job to make it, I'd condone it.
I don't have an issue with some jobs being way simpler than others, it's all about having options imo.

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Somehow missed this until now, but Kansene, I think you nailed it.

Having different difficulty Jobs is good for the game, not bad. The two important caveats to that rule is that there IS a spread (e.g. SMN and BLM both exist) and that they not take away things (e.g. rework an existing Job into something of a completely different level, alienating existing fans of said Job and its feel/difficulty/etc.)

If they had introduced new SMN as a new Job OR at least introduced something like Green Mage to have the old SMN's mechanics alive and well in the game for players that enjoyed that sort of gameplay and complexity, it probably wouldn't have been nearly as big an issue. If they're going to do the work to add in effectively an entirely new Job, it makes sense to just add a new Job at that point.

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"it's all about having options" is the key, absolutely.

I guess we'll find out in the media tour where they're going with DT with the Jobs.

Not sure if its the flashy "summoning" animations that people enjoy more or the "gameplay" of pressing 3 buttons for 12 minutes straight that have so many people playing the job.

It's the only dps job that I find more boring to play than healers.

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Originally Posted by Avoidy

Devs are chasing mass appeal

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Your regular reminder that if you think an MMO appealing to more people rather than fewer people is bad, you have lost the thread.

Thank you for your time.

The problem isn't really that the job is simple, it's that they took a job that was relatively complex and turned it into the simplest job in the game. So naturally people who enjoyed the previous complexity are going to be upset about the sudden change.

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Originally Posted by TheRealMadruck

Sincerely, we have all seen the situation currently going on in FF14 regarding Endwalker relics as there are already a plethora of vids and posts about it...

But holy crap...how could they have butchered Summoner so bad to be the joke of a job that it is?!?!

I hadn't touched Summoner all expansion until recently to work on my caster gear and GD...

Like, your single target rotation consists of 4 phases: You spam only 3 buttons during each phase and then press one button to go into another phase and rinse repeat. That's it!

It's no wonder why over 60% of the players who are casters on my server are nothing more than Summoners when I do a player search per each job...its a brain dead dps. Why play a Job that actually has some dynamic parts to it that takes a measure of competency to play it but instead play a job that take the least amount of skill!

I sincerely hope SE does something to Summoner and a few other jobs that I also consider somewhat braindead to make it at least comparable to other DPS in its category so it takes some metric of effort to play!

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You're the guy that can't move out of AOE's and can't read castbars while other tanks can no?

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Originally Posted by Rolder50

The problem isn't really that the job is simple, it's that they took a job that was relatively complex and turned it into the simplest job in the game. So naturally people who enjoyed the previous complexity are going to be upset about the sudden change.

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Sure, but I'm wagering MORE people are playing SMN now than before, making it a net gain for the class. SMN has been a problematic class and heavily criticized through all it's iterations. Usually only after it's changed do those fans come out to talk about how much they liked it.

I've played SMN since ARR and I think a lot of it's prior iterations were messy and incongruent.

In many ways, SMN feels to me like what you'd get if you took the philosophy behind healer DPS kits and instead applied it to an actual DPS job.

I play SMN not because I think it's fun, but because someone in the group asks, "cAn oNe oF YoU PlEaSe pLaY A CaStEr?" and I'm the first to cave.

I play current SMN because it's far and away the best job for grinding FATEs, and it's overtuned as hell in MiNE content even without the rez on top.

Short cooldown on your major burst ability that has AoE baked in. Ranged. Self heals and shields. Very, very overturned until other jobs catch up in the 80+ level range.

It's too bad, because I hate it (favorite versions were HW and ShB 5.1+) but I'm probably showing up as a happy SMN enjoyer on their metrics.

I'll go out of my way to play any other job if I think the learning group doesn't need a rez.

Please don't accept jobs like EW SMN. At best it's like 50% of a well designed job, and they released it as is because they knew what they wanted to do with it in 7.0 since before 6.0 and just decided to save theirselves the trouble of having to be creative again by not implementing half of the job until DT to save on half the effort.

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Originally Posted by Equitable_Remedy

Your regular reminder that if you think an MMO appealing to more people rather than fewer people is bad, you have lost the thread.

Thank you for your time.

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Not to be too inflammatory but I'm going to say it anyway, there are a lot of people who really don't care about the success or longevity of this game and care more about being able to laude over others their skill and proficiency. They want a game that routinely washes out or alienates players with intentionally difficult and obscure mechanics and rotations so that they can say how much better they are than them for having learned them.

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Originally Posted by SieyaM

Not to be too inflammatory but I'm going to say it anyway, there are a lot of people who really don't care about the success or longevity of this game and care more about being able to laude over others their skill and proficiency. They want a game that routinely washes out or alienates players with intentionally difficult and obscure mechanics and rotations so that they can say how much better they are than them for having learned them.

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And well, those people don't matter all that much. If we look at what the devs are actually doing, it's not making anything more complicated. It's possible it's because some of their fanbase is up to a decade older at this point and doesn't care all that much about claiming they have some difficult class that presses more buttons in an MMO, and they have data on class usage to back it up. Just a guess on my part tho.

Game started being dumbed down once stat squish came about. And removing TP.

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Originally Posted by AngelCheese77

And removing TP.

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And nothing of value was lost.

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Originally Posted by TheMightyMollusk

And nothing of value was lost.

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Yeah idk I think anyone crying over the removal of tp has their priorities wrong personally

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Originally Posted by ZephyrMenodora

Sure, but I'm wagering MORE people are playing SMN now than before, making it a net gain for the class. SMN has been a problematic class and heavily criticized through all it's iterations. Usually only after it's changed do those fans come out to talk about how much they liked it.

I've played SMN since ARR and I think a lot of it's prior iterations were messy and incongruent.

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Using raw player counts in this instance is pretty silly. It's the simplest job in the game even including tanks and healers. Obviously the lowest common denominator job will have the most people. Not to mention you get it for free with Scholar.