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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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.
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.
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.