New summoner is unacceptable

[Skiros]

I hate to break it to you, but they ABSOLUTELY DO think this is the way to design jobs now. Come on over to the healer forums...we've been spamming 1-button dps for 2 years now. It really sucks!
If you're angry and want someone to blame--look at Yoshi P. This design philosophy is his brain-child.

funnily enough I healed until early Shadowbringers and ShB completely gutted my job so I swapped to DPS. Went with Summoner towards the end of the expansion and now it just became healer 2.0 lol.

I don't think it's a design philosophy. I think it's because they want to cater to casuals. Yoshi P probably doesn't personally want this kind of job design, hence the design of Black Mage.

What they don't understand is: you can cater to casuals and veterans at the same time. Design a job that does not punish you hard and is intuitive, does not suffer from button bloat, and yet has surprising room for optimization that requires skill. Design a job that is highly accessible, and yet has a high skill ceiling (but NOT high damage ceiling). In other words, low skill floor, high skill ceiling. ShB RDM was intuitive but really optimizing on the mana and oGCD drifts was not really a trivial exercise.

6.0 SMN has the potential to be the apex of good job design. It is highly accessible, and honestly has a lot of surprising room for optimization in a group setting. But let's be real here - that "surprising room" is vanishingly small, but the trace of it convinces me that if SE put a bit more effort into it they can flesh it out to be an incredibly complex job that casuals can nevertheless pick up easily. Alas, they seem to think that should not be the way.

[Velnora]

Ya know, it's really weird. They prune jobs, making them incredibly simplistic to play, then you look over at jobs like Reaper that is designed so well, everything just flows.

[Jybril]

I played some more because I'm 82 now, but yeah...It's pretty underwhelming.
I miss DoT's firstly, and while the skills look pretty cool, I'm still bored of using the same 3 summons all these years.
Even though, these summons now pretty much play exactly the same now as they once again
stripped everything down to the ground and can be played without much thought.

I need to see how 90 is since I heard it's better, but I feel bad for players having
to get to 90...just to have a pretty fun class to play. I think it's 1 step forward and 2 steps back for me
and I don't think max level will really change how the class plays itself. :/

[zcrash970]

And a lot of people love it. Looking at the numbers, I'd say the lovers win by a huge margin. Never seen so many summoners around, and not only levelling.

Depends on what circles you are in. I see more people hating on it or just generally disappointed from it

[aveyond-dreams]

Depends on what circles you are in. I see more people hating on it or just generally disappointed from it

Yeah we're aware that like 10 people on the forums that constantly bump each other's posts really really hate that their poison mage got taken away, along with all of its wonderful complexity. Meanwhile in game it's a different story. In the times that I've been able to log in and run roulettes Summoner is right up there with Reaper and Sage in terms of its popularity, even in low level content where surprisingly, Summoner is not the only job that feels incomplete at that point.

Levelling with it has been a blast so far, and I'm doing it on multiple characters on top of that. Even some of the haters I see didn't hate new Summoner enough to abandon their former main completely. I had to do a double take when I saw some of them in Limsa, it was truly a sight to behold. What the job needs moving forward are the summons that it's been missing since Heavensward when they should have added the remaining primals instead of doubling down on Bahamut Trance. As ogcds. As jewel or demi summons. It doesn't matter. Just get it done.

In Shadowbringers my experience with Summoner was a disastrous levelling experience when it was my first 80 that caused me to abandon it not long afterwards and now that Summoner will be my first 90 (assuming I get to actually log in and finish the story) I cannot imagine having any other class as my main. I can't wait to tackle endgame content with it and come 6.1, boost the alts that are too far behind for me to level the job all the way from scratch so I can max them out as well.

[RocciaSolida]

1. It's the FotM job alongside Reaper, we will see in a few months' time
2. It's not just the "same ten people on the forums" that dislike the new SMN but rather the majority of players in every endgame-related community at which you don't hang out I guess

Stop creating strawmen please

[Duskane]

imagine thinking reaper is flavor of the month

[RocciaSolida]

imagine thinking reaper is flavor of the month

It'd be absurd to deny that it's been picked up by pretty much anyone because its aesthetics are incredible and becoming a "demon" sounds amazing.
That doesn't mean that every person that is playing it now is going to stick with it in the long run

[Skiros]

1. It's the FotM job alongside Reaper, we will see in a few months' time
2. It's not just the "same ten people on the forums" that dislike the new SMN but rather the majority of players in every endgame-related community at which you don't hang out I guess

Stop creating strawmen please

Well to be fair I think most endgame players like new SMN too. It's really only the top players (and I mean top as in mentality, because I know a lot of players who don't have time to raid hardcore but still love to perform well and use their brains) that dislike new SMN.

There is a huge gulf between the two though. The top raiders I know basically never interact with the wider community because, to be frank, parts of the community makes us lose brain cells when we read their illogical comments. So the dissatisfaction with new SMN really is not something that regular players would even notice because, well, there's this gulf.

[Miles064]

While I do like the new smn more than the old one, it feels like rdm used to. Use it for new fights and switch to blm after you have a good idea of what you need to do lol. Old smn just felt clunky but new smn does feel pretty hollow. Blm just feels more satisfying to pull off well and it doesn't really have a super complex rotation or anything but you do have a good amount of flexibility to tackle fight changes/errors and such.

Like I said before, new smn feels like a WoW class without talent rows filled or borrowed power systems online. Like you get to 90 and look around saying "neat, now where is the rest of it?"