Quote Originally Posted by tearagion View Post
The Ruination effect was introduced in Stormblood, it was only named in Shadowbringers. Your wait for a Demi is actually a couple second longer post-death now, until that you're basically doing the same thing as before which is spamming Ruin, only this time it comes in three flavours. Finally Blue Mage is entitled to all of it's spells as overlap with summons has existed since FFVI with most notably Tsunami.

You've also conveniently left out that all skill expression has been removed from SMN, but I guess that's another positive to you.
You can choose to view the different Rite/Catastrophe spells as the same or not (even if they each have/trigger different effects, but anyway). To me, they are unique enough but I would like for them to be more distinct at lower levels. Hopefully they can devote some resources towards this. Rather than spamming Ruin to me it feels like I get to use spells akin to Rydia's black magic -ga nukes, so I'm pretty ok with that. Elemental magic is usually functionally the same in rpgs apart from their specific element, so if we want to reduce things that far then each ability in-game is nothing more than attack or magic commands with pretty animations.

And sorry but no, Blue Mage is entitled to 0 spells themed after the Summons so long as Summoner still can't even summon Ramuh or Leviathan. Though I despise Blue Mage with a passion I will say this. It was a better Summoner than the SMN of the past was for the longest time because honestly it had cooler abilities despite the fact that it can't call up Bahamut or Phoenix.

When it comes to the alleged "skill expression" of old SMN that came more from juggling glitches and systems stacked on top of each other, while some took pride in that there were ultimately more people who found that style of gameplay annoying. For every person attracted to the job for its "skill expression" 10 people took a look and decided they would rather play another job. Old SMN is the last job I could possibly recommend to anyone interested in this game. There was no justifying the state of the class prior to the rework other than niche preferences that were unfeasible to cater to any longer.