I thought people might be exaggerating about SMN

[kejakalope]

And for the sake of argument even if the old smn was not the most popular class does this warrant a removal which will upset a small part of the player base so u will make the class more popular by a larger part of the players ? With that logic in the end we will all get the same generic jobs.

So, I get that you're upset. And not without valid reason: they tore out your favorite job. That sucks. Just, straight up, that sucks, you have every right to be upset at Square about it, and it is entirely Square's fault for putting *themselves* in a bad situation by building Summoner wrong in the first place.

That said, you need to understand that the reason this happened is that Summoner is one of the two most popular jobs across the entire Final Fantasy IP as a multimedia brand (with Dragoon as the other major contender for the #1 spot) and that many customers took it as a betrayal of the implicit promise of "a job-based Final Fantasy MMO that captures what you love about the series" for the summoner to be a Miasma Mage with nigh-irrelevant little plastic doodads that follow it around. Demi-Bahamut and Demi-Phoenix helped but they were like putting a band-aid on a shotgun wound as far as the "feeling like a classic Final Fantasy Summoner" issue went, and they gave the job a really scrambled, weird gameplay rhythm that many people found very off-putting.

So Square has had a long-standing and very specific problem with Summoner: They built something that [i]should[/i[ have been a crown jewel of their game, but which instead most often provoked the reaction "What the fuck? this isn't a Summoner. This isn't what I wanted."

...

[kejakalope]

...

I think they deserve criticism for stubbornly sticking to the base Arcanist design for expansion after expansion after expansion even as it became clear the majority of the players who wanted to be playing a Summoner in Final Fantasy XIV had rejected it. By doing so, they strung you along by giving you something you were enjoying, but in absolutely the wrong place, while pissing off everyone who wanted them to deliver on the inherent promise of the job.

Well. Here we are in Endwalker. They've finally built a Summoner that everyone agrees looks and feels like FFXIV Summoner ought to, even if there is some disagreement on whether the rotation is satisfying. Clearly, they made a conscious choice to make it as accessible to as many people as possible, because they knew it had the potential to have possibly the widest conceptual appeal in the game, and clearly, that's paying off right now. (I have my doubts about how much longevity it'll display; I do think it needs a bit more meat than it has right now.)

This all came, of course, at the price of screwing you over personally, and everyone else in your situation. Again, that sucks. Again, you have every right to be pissed. Again, this is Square's fault for making a mistake and then dragging their feet for eight years before fixing it. And I do feel like they owe you back a good caster job with a DoT-management-based playstyle and high burst.

But all of this happened for reasons that are utterly specific to Summoner itself, and its positioning within the Final Fantasy brand and series history. It is not indicative of a larger trend of just uprooting jobs completely. If anything, the fact that they held back from doing this until they'd exhausted literally every other option suggests the opposite.

[Jin-]

Regardless... There are more Summoners now than ever before. So while some may be disappointed; it's clear that the majority seem to be enjoying the changes.

And there is more reapers and sages than ever. Why is that?

[Genbe197]

Yes because old summoner with its 2 dots and then ruin spam and using 2 GCDs was really SUPER busy. This one with OGCDs must be less busy >.>

[Equitable_Remedy]

Nope. The job is dead.

Anecdotal, of course, but I have never seen more SMNs in groups ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[Equitable_Remedy]

I dont understand how people can defend the current state of the SMN, since if anything, it shows the trend of the game, making everything "dumber" and more "streamlined" so we can accommodate every person

Endwalker SMN is an interesting dichotomy.

SMN seems (anecdote, not data) to be more popular than ever - I certainly see more than I ever have before. One explanation for that is that it's fun, which is good because this is a game.

On the other hand, many people play games like this to feel elite, and SMN being accessible is itself a problem for such players because they feel like playing SMN doesn't sufficiently distinguish them from non-elite players or allows non-elite players to get results on a par with them. There's nothing wrong with feeling this way, but it probably isn't a great idea to build a game around it.

The good news is that the game has a range of classes that vary along multiple axes (including accessibility), so people can sort themselves into the classes they like most while still allowing everyone to play the same game together - seems like a good outcome to me.

[golstat2003]

...

I think they deserve criticism for stubbornly sticking to the base Arcanist design for expansion after expansion after expansion even as it became clear the majority of the players who wanted to be playing a Summoner in Final Fantasy XIV had rejected it. By doing so, they strung you along by giving you something you were enjoying, but in absolutely the wrong place, while pissing off everyone who wanted them to deliver on the inherent promise of the job.

Well. Here we are in Endwalker. They've finally built a Summoner that everyone agrees looks and feels like FFXIV Summoner ought to, even if there is some disagreement on whether the rotation is satisfying. Clearly, they made a conscious choice to make it as accessible to as many people as possible, because they knew it had the potential to have possibly the widest conceptual appeal in the game, and clearly, that's paying off right now. (I have my doubts about how much longevity it'll display; I do think it needs a bit more meat than it has right now.)

This all came, of course, at the price of screwing you over personally, and everyone else in your situation. Again, that sucks. Again, you have every right to be pissed. Again, this is Square's fault for making a mistake and then dragging their feet for eight years before fixing it. And I do feel like they owe you back a good caster job with a DoT-management-based playstyle and high burst.

But all of this happened for reasons that are utterly specific to Summoner itself, and its positioning within the Final Fantasy brand and series history. It is not indicative of a larger trend of just uprooting jobs completely. If anything, the fact that they held back from doing this until they'd exhausted literally every other option suggests the opposite.

I like the new summoner. As a person who grew up on FF it feels like what Summoner should have been all along. With that said yeah, it could use some improvements for those who liked what it was prior to EW.

[golstat2003]

Anecdotal, of course, but I have never seen more SMNs in groups ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Pretty much this. It seems to be more popular than ever. I've seen them more in recent history then in the last expansion.

[NoxLumina]

It gradually went from a niche and complex job, that was both punishing and incredibly rewarding, to a sleep-inducing and underperforming shell of its former self.
A shiny shell, mind you, but as many have pointed out, that's more annoying than anything.
God, i miss Stormblood.

[LittleArrow]

The last time I played smn seriously was probably Heavensward, so that's where I'm coming from. I leveled scholar to 80 b/c I was just too confused by smn to figure out how to play it. I was really intimidated by how many skills / trances / etc that was involved with smn.

However, I just tested it out after reading this thread, and I do enjoy where they're going with it. It does feel like a level 60 job, but that's how I usually feel about every new job they add (rdm / dnc feel very minimal to me in terms of skills / rotations), so I don't think that's a bad thing.

I definitely see why people who used smn as their main before this change would be upset, but I suggest to please be patient. They completely and utterly ruined brd during heavensward and I just switched to a different class until they fixed it the next expac. I don't think smn is that bad at all, but I can understand the frustration.

The biggest suggestion I would give for the class is to at least let Carbuncle auto-attack. He looks really silly just standing there, and his auto-attack could be included just as if the player were to auto attack.

[EDIT] I did want to add, I really disliked XIV's version of summoner before this change. The whole dot caster made zero sense to me as a longtime Final Fantasy fan. DoTs / debuffs were always the domain for red mages from what I remembered. I do agree with the change and I'm happy to see them finally embracing what a summoner has generally always been in the Final Fantasy series. It'll nice to see them build on the job from here, I think.