Quote Originally Posted by Zareshi View Post
The team usually does a good job of leaving the feeling and fantasy of that job while allowing it to fit into the game, with summoner being the biggest odd one out given egis and dots instead of massive one time nukes.
You can pretty much criticize every job in the game for not having kept some of its iconic identity that made them popular in the franchise: Bard is a glorified Archer. Red Mage has lost almost everything regarding supportive White Magic. Dragoon is a glorified Lancer. Black Mage has lost its elemental weakness exploit aspect (because the game abandonned this mechanic), which is key with Black Magic. Etc.
Saying that it indeed does change in FFXIV doesn't make it a good thing. Not even a desirable one. It's not a positive argument, it's just a cold and straight fact: jobs change and often lose some of their identity when being introduced in FFXIV.

When it comes to SMN in particular, I have a good example for it. Yuna was recently releaved for Dissidia NT. As you can see, she mostly use magic, and barely do any summoning. This pisses me off. Why? Because that was her gameplay in Dissidia 012. Literally 100% of her attacks were performed by summons. So, yeah, Summoners can be done without that "one time nuke" idea. If they managed to do that with FFXIV's SMN, people wouldn've have been so mad at what they did with the job. But they didn't. They went far below what Yuna in DNT will do. They made it a pet job with DoTs and slapped a "Summoner" label on it. People weren't happy.

You asked (in short): "what if your favourite job was limited?". I answer you by asking another question: "what if your favourite job was being butchered so much to fit in the mold that it'd lose all of its identity and most of what makes you love that job?".

When it comes to BLU, my answer is that I'd prefer a good limited Blue Mage than a trash version of a non-limited Blue Mage. Especially a job so gimmicky, weird and quirky. Which is why I can't understand people claiming that they've been waiting for the job for years and that they wanted to main it, even without knowing anything about how it'd play and how much it'd ressemble Blue Mages. At this point I think that people would main anything as long at it had "Blue Mage" written on it.

But in the end it all comes down to individual preferences and tolerence in regards to how does someone values a job's identity, and how much of that identity they are willing to give up when it's pressed into the FFXIV's mold.