Summoner is a Final Fantasy 14 summoner (not a warlock wow clone)

[Grimoire-M]

-snip-

As one of those mains, I'm not concerned with relearning the job. That's the easy part, despite the walls of text in their new tooltips suggesting otherwise. I am concerned I'm going to be bored as hell after a week because it's too easy. This thread has been 12 pages of "Graphics good Mechanics bad" for a reason. The people who are happy about the Graphics have refused to penetrate the walls of text required to even explain the rotation in the tooltips themselves and that is proof that they don't get it.

I prefer the Shadowbringers iteration from a mechanical standpoint primarily because it presses different buttons more often and gives me things to think about that actually matter. I also prefer the Shadowbringers iteration from a thematic standpoint because it reflects the common thread of Summoners having subjobs throughout the series, and takes the two job archetypes I personally love (Arcanist and Sumoner) and gave both a spin that directly feeds back into the way Primals are uniquely represented in XIV's lore, as it has been in every other Summoner iteration prior to XIV. That lack of uniqueness in the new Summoner rotation is a major problem for me. The Egi summon sequencing is just Bard Phases that borrows aspects of Gunbreaker, Machinist, and Black Mage while stripping back the mechanical flavor tied to Arcanist, and even the core mechanic that has made Casters as a role engaging to begin with, hardcasting spells. Nor does it solve the pet AI problems, only reduces them to singular instances that have already proven to be frustrating for average players within the current and prior iterations. It doesn't even solve the one-button Ruin spam. In fact it exacerbates it by removing a ton of oGCD management as well as consolidating everything down, and like Red Mage I don't see a clear path forward for the job from here, either. It's built to completion on a rotational path that leaves it on rails. That's not a sustainable place to leave a DPS job in the long run.

Frankly speaking, it's a mechanical failure on nearly every front imaginable, and aesthetically too, at least if you consider the former iterations valid. And I get some people don't, but saying ARR-ShB Summoner wasn't a Summoner? Objectively that's incorrect. It has been Summoner for 8 years. And frankly speaking, I think it better represents Summoner as whole than the prior iterations do by actually making you care about how they work mechanically. The common citation for prior iterations (3-6) had narrow mechanical limits. And though I adore those games, I do not think they should remain the basis of the job from a Mechanical standpoint. Golden Sun Djinn system did a better job at representing Summons mechanically than FF ever did, and I still think that's too basic.

Even if I completely agree that this is graphically the best Summoner has ever looked, to pretend that the criticism of the mechanics and even the aesthetics within its Endwalker kit isn't warranted is a big problem. It only harms the job's ability to grow from here given how SE only seems to listen to launch feedback and bank it for later. And that isn't good for anyone. Personally, I never argued against people who wanted the Demi-Summon graphics. I did argue that Demi-Summons should have been the focus of this expansion's improvements instead of bloating the rotation like this because I wanted the gameplay to match the aesthetic of 'Big Honking Summon Attacks' like players have been complaining about. Specifically by having the player execute Akh Morn repeatedly the way the majority of the dragons do. That is a cool moment that encapsulates the aesthetic of Summoner both mechanically AND graphically. Phoenix was a decent attempt but I think it would need more work to distinguish it as we have less to draw on beyond "here's some utility". To me, that would have been a better use of development time. Actively satisfying the gameplay element that's been missing from the job by making the burst window actually feel like burst, while using the filler to cast your attention to the corrupted nature of the primals and turn that power against them. That's the aesthetic we've lost.