Quote Originally Posted by Duelle View Post
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Let me repeat myself: It's pretty easy to say "they can make it work" when you yourself can't make it work. Especially when what exists already works.

You can't just say "SMN only looks good on damage meters, that's why everyone plays it!", because if it was only good at damage and nothing else, it wouldn't attract people as it does. Other classes can output higher sustained damage than it, and I'd say it's far more soundly designed than it was in 2.5 by a long shot- by the addition of further damage abilities not tied to pets. You can say it's not what you want, and that it's not a reskinned WoWlock, but saying it's not soundly designed seems pretty far off base to me.

A great deal of your argument as well is "balance is only numbers, concepts are simple to put together it's just the numbers that make it seem tough". Well, let me let you in on a secret: Everyone is an "ideas guy". Everyone has some idea on how to fix the class to their own specifications, and how to "fix" the class with the highest playerbase in the game. No one has solid mechanics on how to do so, and why it's broken in the first place other than "It's not what I personally want". Anything they request is, at best, a request to fully dismantle a class that is not only functioning perfectly well, but to an extent that the changes you vilify made it go from the single least played class in the game to the single most played, and replace it with mechanics akin to what made it so underplayed to begin with. Now, I don't mind you requesting what you want personally, everyone is entitled to that, but there's no reason to get rid of what exists when it functions exceedingly well in reality. If it is not broken, it does not need to be fixed.

In line with your thoughts on balance and ways to implement new egis, the thing I notice most is that you and most other folks who want a radical redesign of the class just want more stuff. There's very little "Change" and a great deal of "add" to requests, and having 5-6 egis all with some special niche means that you have a class that either is overspecialized into using just one of the egis commonly, or has too wide an array of skills to justify doing the damage they do, and would have to lose something to compensate. Every class has a niche, and some ways to support- giving a single class all the options and unparalleled flexibility on top of the high burst potential summoners already have would be an absolute disaster for balance as a whole, and would have precious little to do with numbers.