Quote Originally Posted by Dyvid View Post
Never said I wanted FFXI SMN, that version was garbage. I liked what we had but 5.XX needed adjustments to make it play more smoothly. And as you quoted, based on what we saw none of the issue we have are being addressed. In fact by moving Egi Assault from pets to Summoner you increase the delay of the attack lol. My click to action is basically 1.5s to 2s. Regardless, even if you use Earth Stance as a strawman argument, you still have a global cooldown that equalized it.
Nah, see what you're asking for, and what they've been attempting, is much closer to FFXI SMN than literally any other FF. No other FF actually has the summons as pets, it's literally just XI. This version that we're getting now, while still needing some adjustments to make it deeper gameplay wise, is much closer to the traditional SMN, and I'm saying that as someone who absolutely adored StB SMN. The only thing it really even has in common with Geomancer is that is uses elemental attacks, which could be said about BLM and RDM as well, so that's really a false equivalency.

The bottom line is that the limiting factor for SMN and to a lesser extent SCH is the absolutely horrendous pet AI coding, combined with the baseline action lock delay. They've tried multiple times to fix it, and given that it hasn't really gotten that much better since the ARR beta, leads me to believe that the limiting factor on the AI isn't with the AI code itself but rather the base code and function for the game, and that changing that code or function will cause more problems than it will fix. Ergo, given that they are unwilling or unable to fix the limiting factor of SMN as it stands right now, which is a coding function, I'd rather they move to something where those inherent coding/function problems aren't an issue.

Now that's not to say that they couldn't have solved these problems. They could've had the summons all use ranged attacks with unlimited range, and just had Bahamut and Phoenix stay where they're summoned, but I'll say that the system they've come up with has far more potential than what they've been working with and works far better as a baseline they can build upon than what they've had so far.