More people are playing Summoner now than they were when it was a job without an identity and didn't function like the Summoner fantasy. Which is summoning. Which is does currently, way better than before.
If this is the summoner fantasy then you can buy a gallon of paint and get the same experience wherever there is a wall
Honestly, job balance is actually pretty good relative to how bad it's been in the past. I remember BCOB prog wanting us to stack up on Bards and Casters, or having to babysit the DRG through prog because they had such comparatively low magic def that raidwides would kill them. Or previously successful world ranked prog teams failing spectacularly in Gordias for the sole reason that their leader wanted to stick with AST and A3S wasn't having any of that. There's the misery of how squishy Drks were back in the day, and not long after, the comical death of SCH with the launch of SB. I could go on...
The point is that as things stand, every job in the game is entirely viable. You don't join a group, see a class and worry that content is going to be unclearable anymore. A good performing player in an underperforming job is going to be far better than an underperforming player on a good job.
The game's heavy emphasis on DPS above all else kind of shines a harsh light on just about any damage discrepancy now though. Even in the case of healers, their healing potencial is irrelevant because you never need it, it's their damage output that counts, same with tanks. I'm not a huge fan of that but what are you going to do at this stage.
As for job identity, that's a difficult one. In one regard, visually yes the jobs are fine. Even with the weapon hidden, you can look at a job and tell what they are from the animations almost instantly. Gameplay is where the problems start and things get a bit too sameysamey.
https://i.imgur.com/r555k1H.png
https://i.imgur.com/AL1uopf.png
If you're behaving this dumb, don't be surprised when people call you out for it.
Kinda hard to be taken seriously when you double down on saying that GW2 is f2p (which is clearly not), try to claim that PLD has more bloated rotation than DRK (what are you smoking), or now these summoner claims (it's pretty good job if you need one free hand, ngl).
https://i.imgur.com/Kff6cKV.png
Free to play btw, guy who never played it said so, so it must be true.
Once again, stop speaking out of your ass and people won't feel the need to insult you. What a pathetic attempt at gotcha argument when all you needed to do is 10 seconds of googling.
Honestly that's basically the entire game.
All flash no substance.
Job design encounter design, boss design story design no substance just lots of oooh sparkly shiny effects.
That's why so many skills lack weight or impact. They don't do anything except pop some sparkly sparkly.
Stormblood SMN had the SMN identity more than EWs SMN, the biggest issue was pet ai being a pain and that the current job direction was at breaking point by SHB.
People also take issue that's gone from one of the hardest jobs to play to a braindead job with very little optimization.
Well I have no idea about GW2 but there in the picture it says: "Guild Wars 2 - Base Game - Free". "Play for free and begin your journey in Tyria!"
But how free is it? Actually the whole base game? Or limited like here in FF14 where you can't use many base functions of the game like trading, /tell and so on?
It's not really free, it's trial very similar to FFXIV. Haven't played on f2p account, so take it with grain of salt. I think you're locked out of anything from expansions, so you have base class without specializations and no masteries, which should mean you're locked out of mounts too. You're free to level up to max level though, but there are other limitations, like less bag space, less character slots, and I think you can't use marketplace and whispers for non-friends are limited in some way. In general, I would say it's roughly similar to FFXIV, but with different upsides and downsides. But just like in FFXIV, there is no time limit for this trial, and in both games there are some f2p players who maximize the content they can do for free.