Quote Originally Posted by xAFROx View Post
In the sense that an iconic summon appears for a brief attack and vanishes afterwards, yes. It now acts more in reminiscence of classic SMN from the franchise. The main line games and tactics included, SMN typically acts the same, though I wouldn't compare things like cast times in a turn-based game to a game that goes in real time, nor would i think they're comparable by range.

In tactics, summons hit a large area of the map. Maybe not the whole map, but a large area for massive damage. But in xiv, the slow but strong caster is already taken by BLM. They aren't going to make two immobile turrets, else that would alienate more players who already avoid BLM for the 'difficulty' it has.

Its a step towards looking more like classic SMN, but only that. A step. EW smn is the bones from which the job will have structure later. At least, that was the interpretation I got from playing the job.

As for SAM, most of the numerous threads are just folks who are brand new to the forums, like myself, doing what seemed to be an open invitation to 'provide feedback' which basically amounts to most of them saying 'we do not like the changes', so.. yeah. They're new. I'm new. We never had reason to check the forums before now.
You do make some good points, even though I would argue with some of them. I myself said it's impossible to make a direct translation of one iteration of the Job to another — which ultimately means XIV Summoner could have been whatever it wanted to be, for the very same reason. One of the things that is impossible to bring to our game is the sheer adaptability of the other versions of Summoner, which were different due to all the utility they provided, something which doesn't agree with an MMO like XIV where even having a Resurrection option has shown to cause debates. Still, as far as the feeling of summoning goes, I've already said the current direction may be good and I'm not amongst those who say "just go back" — which is unrealistic, let's face it. It's nonetheless bad, as has been said numerous times, that a lvl. 90 Job is considered a "step" that "will have structure later".
What I keep bringing up is how annoyed I am at the removal of a semi-complete toolkit that needed just a couple of tweaks to stand on its own feet as an independent Job without Primals, Bahamut and Phoenix — which is the point I made in the (already drowned) thread I opened recently.

About SAM and being new and wanting to voice opinions, that's perfectly fine. It's the number of threads that is a "problem", if anything because it diverts attention and creates repetition. I'd say a single thread with an OP that gets updated, plenty of views and contributions is better. Granted, the healer section has one such thread and in 2 years its only "success" has been dps-neutral Misery — if you could even say the thread in question had any merit. But the overall state of healers is unchanged. In the end no amount of feedback is really useful if the people in charge don't want to listen to it