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

[Shurrikhan]

...To be very clear: I'm not trying to suggest that current SMN isn't severely-lacking "meat on its bones" compared to most other Jobs, both current and historical.

Rather, I'm saying that SMN's radical simplicity may be allowing a lot of players to realize that they maaaaaaybe... honestly... don't reeeeeally mind having other priorities in life than "mastering" an FFXIV rotation...

...and that they actually kiiiiiiiinda appreciate being able to just take a Job into even complex content, and focus nearly-entirely on the content itself, rather than constantly-fighting the encounter timeline and mechanics just to try to desperately-resist having their overly-elaborate and excessively-delicate rotation grotesquely-deranged, or otherwise have their attention constantly pulled between rotational details and encounter details.

Fair enough, but in that case SMN should only be putting out roughly what that level of effort would equate to on another job, with at most a slightly higher skew to reward-for-effort in exchange for the lower ceiling to both. No one should feel like they are obliged to switch to SMN simply because, for anyone not interested in "mastering" even a basic but not quite barebone rotation, it puts out significantly more reward for the amount of effort put in.

That's just imbalance, plain and simple, and I don't think it's worth pandering to that group of players (who want disproportionate reward for effort put in so they can perform higher than they otherwise would by abusing an imbalance) over the breadth of seemingly real choices available to the playerbase as a whole.

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Aside/In General:

To my mind, SMN should have a below average button count but above average number of actions (across even just its current 3-5 summons/trances, depending on how you define them), below average complexity in any particular rotational string and in GCD-sync but above average complexity in macrorotation and utilization of utility.

I love the aesthetic. I just don't want to be bored out of my mind actually leveraging it. I don't particularly give a damn about any checklists of button count or standard elements (gauges, DoTs, duration-ed buffs, Leaden Fist equivalents, etc.) to track, but to my mind it definitely needs to flesh itself out. Tremendously.

SMN at 90 feels like a level 60 job. And so, I want the rest of its kit. And I suspect it'd take at least some arguably 'fundamental' changes to give it space enough to do that.