Quote Originally Posted by Grimoire-M View Post
If you think 5.0 SMN was hard by any definition I'd hate to remind you of literally every iteration before it.

The job has been dumbed down a lot, and I don't consider 6.0 an accurate representation of the Fantasy of a Summoner mostly because it doesn't make you care about your pets as more than aesthetic baubles. And that bothers me when at least prior iterations were -trying- to integrate them directly into your core rotation. And of all those iterations, only ShB succeeded in a manner that made them actively interesting. And it had more room for scalability compared to the current iteration precisely because the 'filler' in 6.0 takes up -all- of the space available GCD wise. I don't consider that good for long-term management, graphics be damned.
Summoners in previous iterations were basically just casters with fancier animations. You use a summon, it uses its ability and then it disappears. This was how it worked in every single game until FFX. FFX it replaces your party and you have full control over it. It wasn't until FFXI that it became a semi-pet class. There has never been an iteration where the summoner had a tiny little pet that followed it around and mostly just does auto attacks.

The 6.0 version of summoner is a combination of the older (FF3-FF9) and newer iterations (FFX, XI, XII, XIII). We have Garuda, Ifrit, Titan summons that appear, use their respective signature attack, and disappear, and then we have our demi summons, that are closer to summoner in the more recent games.

I think the bigger issue I've had with pre-endwalker summoner, is the poison aspect that we had. Why poisons? Is it because they based the job off of other MMO pet classes that were typically aligned with demons and disease? Why not have DoTs that match up with our summons? The summons felt like an afterthought. We were poison mages with a pet with really basic AI that were unresponsive.

While I do agree that this version is simpler, I hope that we build complexity from this version. 2.0-5.0 summoner was artificially complex. The complexity came from the jank. You were literally fighting with the job, hoping that when you pressed a button, that it responded.