New Summoner looks really nice, but...

[aveyond-dreams]

"It doesn't fit" argument ironically doesn't fit in there.

No one who has a general understanding of how summoners and summon magic work in the Final Fantasy series thinks of a dot poison focused mage when they hear the word “Summoner.” The entire power fantasy of the job revolves around big flashy attacks and powerful entities.

People weren’t asking for a carbon copy, they were asking for thematic consistency. We hear Summoner and think of Rydia, Yuna, and Garnet. Naturally, people want to play something like this:



We do not, nor have we ever, imagined *this* when we think of summoner:



Sadly, up until recently Summoner did in fact feel like a warlock or poison mage, when it should have never been at all. It was aesthetically underwhelming for those of us who know what an actual summoner is and it's gameplay was bad. Crying over old summoner is akin to crying over the loss of tank stance dancing. It's bewildering, but when we point that out we get accused of being casuals or bad at the game and told to leave when we point out the obvious flaws in their logic.

I guess they feel what a lot of us felt in 2013 when they turned one of the most iconic classes in Final Fantasy into a ghost of its former self. Now that it's closer to what it's actually supposed to be, they're all taken by surprise. Their arguments have been torn apart time and time again, and there really is absolutely nothing left to say at this point. Here's one last ancient meme I found, thank goodness come 6.0 it'll be a relic of the past:

[CKNovel]

We hear Summoner and think of Rydia, Yuna, and Garnet. [/IMG]

Rydia is a black mage with summons.
Yuna is a white mage with summons.
Garnet is a white mage with summons.

What XIV designed is a mage with summons.
And to not copy on BLM, they chose to focus on dots.

I do agree that SMN currently has mechanics that don't tie very well to each other.
But BRD has both dots and songs, it works. The point stands.
Sure they would've reworked the dots mechanics for SMN.

The rework is and was needed, as new actions happened, SMN was more and more bloated with unrelated mechanics.
Now it only has one mechanic, summoning. There is definitely rooms for anything else.

Oh and your meme is either old or forgot you actually Summon Bahamut and Phoenix. You will still get the gummy egi before you actually summon the big ones.
Finally the topic is not about SMN being a SMN and how your summons look. It's about the job mechanic.

[Shikiseki]

Rydia is a black mage with summons.
Yuna is a white mage with summons.
Garnet is a white mage with summons.

Actually it's the other way around - in their respective games they were specifically the main summoners in their game that played an integral part to the story with their summons and not with their magic. Yuna is not called a high White Mage after all ;P

The summoner we had so far was an Arcanist primarily with added summoning (as if the summons were added through other means like G.F.s, FF7 materia or FF6's magicite system) - which explains why we had spells like Bio, Miasma and Shadow Flare.

That being said, our FFXIV version is now a Summoner with arcanist as secondary role with an added flavour of Garnet's trance summoning style being able to channel parts of the summons as attacks.