Quote Originally Posted by rewd View Post
SMN just doesn't have an identity anymore. It is essentially the foolproof caster job for those who want to get into the role. You have a couple of casts so you can get used to them and then play the more serious and more rewarding Black Mage. You have a GCD in melee range so you can get accustomed to the hybrid nature of Red Mage and its peculiar tempo.

SMN just stands there: easy, boring, unsatisfying, unrewarding. An empty shell with pretty particle effects. Particle effects you want to tone down if you want to see anything on the battlefield, I might add.

What a pity to see your main job reduced to this.
Quote Originally Posted by Niyuka View Post
I think SMN just fills the role of the most newcomer friendly caster, with RDM being a step up, and BLM being the advanced magic DPS class.
You can see this pattern in other roles as well. SE seems to be horrified of the idea that players may be overwhelmed and scared away by the least amount of complexity and decision space, and tries to create these crowdpleasing jobs that just tell you the pattern of buttons to press to do well enough. Ask the Shb Dancers how that felt.
To be fair, if the people already at cap are to be believed, it's gets somewhat more interesting around 86, but at that point the question becomes: Why does it take that long? It's not like the jobs beats you over the head with complexity. Which is fine in itself, but having to wait for the bits of complexity that are there just makes the Job feel stale.
And why is it only that one ability anyway? Why was Aetherflow left hanging in that disconnected space instead of being adjusted to function like a low level Astral Flow, if not as an additional Primal Spell altogether. Not like the Job suffers from button bloat

Leaving the job to sit there and get stale from 22 to 86 is just objectively bad design.

It's like they wanted to rework it but we're afraid to put actual effort into it in case it gets badly received; and now most of the bad reception comes from players that feel like SE didn't even try.