Yet another SMN thread: SMN is the only job that doesn't have a gauge/proc management

[Renathras]

If the whole game goes in the direction of lowering the "ceiling", it likewise alienates players that have been around for a long time and HAVE gotten better, from concerted effort or hours regardless.

Sure, but who is arguing that?

Who is suggesting that BLM or RDM's difficulty should be reduced?

No one seems to be making the argument to lower the skill ceiling of the entire game. People are just saying having one Job with a lower skill ceiling is nice, popular, enjoyed by many, is likely good for the game, and isn't having the over-hyperbolic dire consequences people wanting it to be made harder are insisting.

SMN is easy, people like that. The rotation is intuitive, people can understand it by just reading their tooltips and playing with it. This is good Job design.

It cooexists in a space with BLM, which isn't at all easy. People (generally different than the first group in SMN) like that, too. The rotation is convoluted, can be tuned to specific fights and even specific phases of specific fights, but no one's playing the Job anywhere close to optimally without spending quote a few hours on Discords and reading/watching guides online, as well as playing with it on their own, testing various things out, and memorizing fights, including watching videos and timing mechanics out, to squeeze every last ounce out of the Job.

...and BLM actually does reward those players with higher DPS, enough to make them worth taking even though SMN has superior utility.

Everyone's comparing SMN to RDM, but the opposite end of the spectrum is BLM, and SMN and BLM seem to have a healthy coexistence going.

This suggests the problem isn't SMN, the problem is RDM. Either it's doing too little damage, its utility isn't seen as worthwhile, it's too hard to optimize, or maybe some combination of the above. But the problem seems not to be that SMN is simple nor that SMN is simple and doing the damage it's doing, since it and BLM still seem to have a healthy relationship.

"But fewer people play BLM!" - True, which may not be because "SMN is easy" so much as it is "Most people don't like having to hyper-optimize and spend ours in weird third-party places outside of the game". But at the high end, people that want to play BLM aren't being denied and BLMs are assets to their teams.

The problem seems to be with RDM.

At no point has FFXIV's job design ever been so inscrutable that any player that can read (at least for the English translation) did not have every tool necessary to play the jobs in the game "correctly" as you put it if not optimally.

That's the point being made, though:

That players should be able to figure out how to play their Jobs optimally with in-game resources. And we're not even saying all Jobs; just 1. Jobs that require extensive outside research and planning are fine to exist as well - BLM does.

EDIT:

This is why I think it's important to be sympathetic to former Summoner mains who have lost a unique experience that no substitute Job provides; current Black Mage is, frankly, in no way at all similar to what optimizing (or just "playing well") ShB Summoner felt like, so telling ShB SMN mains "well just go play BLM" is honestly not a "solution", any more than telling EW Summoner mains "well just go play White Mage".

Agreed.

It's why I've held since 6.0 that the next Job they need to introduce should be Green Mage which just takes old SMN's kit (minus Egi-Assault, and the Demis) and replaces them with DoTs and the same refresh and cycle system. The only things that would be missing would be Egi-Assaults, Demi-Bahamut, and FBT. DWT isn't inherently "SMN-y", and the two big summons can be replaced with field effects that do things. The "get 8 GCDs in during Bahamut" could work like NIN's Dotan gaining the ground snake attack when you do your AOE thing while it's up. That would keep that same type of gameplay without the "Summons" and thematically fit a "plague doctor/DoT Mage" class fantasy (think Corrupted/Salted Earth). And Egi-Assaults were honestly just glorified GCD attacks that generated a stack of another ability to use for movement and "Corrupted Earth" optimizations.

This way, both playstyles can exist side-by-side.

I do think the Devs want to move away from DoTs (except on Healers for some reason...), but if they could be persuaded, GRM would be a good addition to the game to scratch that itch some people still have.

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SMN itself...I want them to give Carby a SCH-like Ruin 2. Just SOMETHING it can do other than Radiant Aegis, and an instant cast will have minimal disruption (at most while waiting for the 0.7 sec animation lock after casting Ruin 2) before Aegis, which I think is more than acceptable. Especially since Searing Light doesn't cast from Carby anymore and since every time I want to use Aegis, it seems to be while a Primal or Demi is on the field and I can't ANYway, so nothing different.