The Shadow Summoner: Bringer of Patch 4.4 Feedback

[Lauront]

I totally agree with you. For me, SMN is the one job where SE did not only not manage to sustain the job fantasy many people had from early games (I-IX), but they also failed to give it an interesting job design.

It's literally a ruin-mage with two burst phases put on top of each other.

It was kinda fun in ARR since it was the dot class and felt good if you liked that sort of playstyle.
In HW they were like:"Don't know what to do with this job...Let's put a burst phase on it..."
In SB they were like:"Don't know what to do with this job...again...Let's put another burst phase on it and scrap some dots..."

I still think SMN would be way more fun with the summons beeing actual spells of your rotation, building up resource for a big attack (Bahamut, Alexander, Phoenix etc.).

I personally struggle to get what the idea's "job fantasy" is. It's readily apparent in other FFs. In this game, it's almost like a "throw in the kitchen sink" mage, even though that's what you'd think BLU is by nature. This is the biggest issue I have with SMN and why I tend to stick to BLM, even though it has some design issues as well. I do like its "job fantasy" a lot more but I could be swayed to switch to main SMN if it had a more coherent theme.