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

[Eorzean_username]

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.

Breaking this into Spoiler tags to cut down on visual clutter / scroll-torment.

First of all, I want to make clear that I respect you as a cogent and intelligent theorycrafter, and that none of the following is meant as a personal attack or in a condescending tone. I'm just trying to be bluntly realistic.

That said, what's quoted here comes across as, for lack of a better word coming to my mind, a bit "pompous" and "sheltered" in perspective.

Your perception of what "the playerbase as a whole" even "is" seems heavily biased/skewed towards what you personally prefer, but that perception is not realistic based on way too many years of evidence.

The "playerbase as a whole", honestly, probably wants another two heaping scoops of EW SMN / RPR / WAR... not any of the high-concept "PhD in Game Design" stuff that grognard forum discussions tend to effusively praise and "Mhm, mhm" to each other in closed echo-chamber discussions like old men on a Southern USA porch.

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What you derisively label "pandering" is very much "in the eye of the beholder" — for example, if you were to flip the mirror, then continuing to create excessively-convoluted Jobs just to please a tiny sliver of the community would be "pandering" to players who "take the game way too seriously".

A lot of posts from "high-functioning" players on this sort of topic seem to carry an edge to them that has an undercurrent of derision towards players who approach the game differently than they do.

For example, statements like:

• "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 [...] "
• " [...] 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) [...] "

...But this is coming from a very specific perspective: basically, if you can personally "handle it", then it's "good", and anything "below" that is "obviously" poor game design that's only enjoyed by low-effort players who want "disproportionate reward" by "abusing an imbalance".

And I think that it's not a good-faith perspective to discuss things in language that makes a large portion of the playerbase sound like opportunistic petty criminals, rather than people legitimately playing a game using the legitimate tools that the developers have openly offered them.

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But I also think that a lot of "high-functioning" players simply do not realize — maybe cannot fully-internalize, due to how their minds function and see the world — that something like Summoner does require "mastery effort" for a lot of players.

What you see as a trivial hour of investigation on a Striking Dummy, followed by having no surprises left to explore, can instead require some genuine amount of consideration for people who don't dedicate themselves to FFXIV the same way, don't seek external resources, or... etc. It's an entirely different standard to be judged against.

For a lot of players, especially when playing content that's already complex and punishing like Savage and Extreme (again, try to temper your own biases when considering how this content "feels" to the broader, average player), details as simple as:

• Adjust whether or not to precast Ruin 3, Searing Light, etc, based on later mechanic alignment
• Adjust your opener based on the Jobs in your party
• Make sure to get 6 GCDs out of every Bahoenix
• Don't spend Festers inside Phoenix if you can bring them into the next Searing Light
• Don't forget to Akh Morn / Revelation inside Bahoenix
• Don't forget to Deathflare during Bahamut
• Don't waste your Ruin IV, but also feel free to put it where it fits best
• Remember to insert 1-2 Ruin 3 hardcasts between "loops", or more if your party is intentionally drifting CDs and it's deemed productive for you to do so as well, rather than intentionally-desyncing; or if you're progging and trying to hold either damage or Phoenix for a specific segment; or if things are just buns-up and you'd rather hold burst until recovering; or etc.
• Make sure to choose your Gem order so that problematic casts (Ruby Rite, Slipstream) don't collide with movement pressure; Ifrit doesn't collide with bad times to pollute the melee zone; the boss doesn't move out of Slipstream; etc.
• Exploit the ability to move Ruins around to help manage problematic Gem phases
• Balance trying to keep Titan's high potency inside raid buffs vs. using its high mobility to manage encounter phases
• Use Radiant Aegis to help your healers / help survive mechanics, and don't get locked out of it at a bad time
• Try not to waste your Rekindle during Phoenix, if it can help your healers
• Weigh the trade-offs carefully if downtime forces you to choose between finishing Gems or leaving Bahoenix sitting off-cooldown
• Consider the possibility of truncating Gems without finishing them
• (etc.)

...are already plenty enough "meat" and "details" to track and adjust around, and feel like they have a "ceiling" to work towards "mastering" on any particular encounter.

It may not be enough for you, but you need to realize that what's "enough" for you may be uncomfortably over-the-head of the wider population.

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I think that there's no need to belittle people as being "stupid", "lazy", "conniving", or any of a wide variety of synonyms (not accusing you, specifically, of doing that, but rather saying, "in general, there's no need to..." ).

Broadly, when speaking about any given Job being handled by the mythical "average player", in many cases it's hardly a lack of ability to "understand" the rotational concepts (or at least, that the "higher concepts" exist), and much more that the average person instead reaches their tolerable limit for how many different considerations, timers, and relationships that they can juggle and keep track of mentally while also performing complex spatial, sequential, or timer-tracking encounter mechanics.

This is constantly mischaracterized by high-functioning players as their "lessers" having some kind of bizarre, scheming "greed" — as if their "foes" are trying to steal a sports trophy without playing the game, via language like "wanting to perform better than you should be allowed to".

However, from the perspective of the wider playerbase, I think that it's more akin to feeling like they can finally "enjoy" the goal of performing well, rather than approaching their rotation as a stressful, exhausting, or unpleasantly-distracting experience, and/or something that they eventually just apathetically give up on due to it feeling inaccessibly complicated.

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Based on these observations, it's beginning to seem to me like the "problem" may actually exist from the other direction — that Jobs end up having overly-detailed design expectations once the average player is placed in difficult content, and that change would actually more productively be initiated from the top down, rather than from the bottom up.

I think that Summoner (and Reaper, and similar) clearly demonstrate two things:

a) A Job doesn't have to be reduced to "Glare and Dia" to be appealing and accessible to a majority population.

b) However, the threshold of "how much is too much" may also have been severely-overestimated for a long time now.

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And, to be clear, I am not trying to say that your concerns are objectively invalid; I don't think that they are.

If you take your points and place them in a game where "rotational execution" is the fundamental core gameplay sold to prospective players, or the design is inherently and intentionally more performance-competitive between players, then your reasoning would make sense.

Instead, I'm arguing that I'm beginning to think FFXIV's "fundamental core gameplay" is no longer actually centered on excessively-depthy Job rotational execution, and that the "prolonged, difficult mastery" approach has grown wizened and outdated for this environment.

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And also to be clear — my personal favorite design era was Heavensward, and is definitely... not Endwalker.

Looking back now, the game was ridiculous in many ways back then.

I think that it was much more of a "personal passion project" for Yoshida and crew, accepted as much more of a "niche" and "boutique" experience by its designers, and clearly attempting to follow the old-school WOW model of targeting the "raiding" / "hardcore" base in design, and letting everyone else just kind of figure out their own place within it as best as they could.

However, the Job designs also felt like they were at their most sincere, robust, and flavorful, and I just found most Jobs far more satisfying — and interesting — to both "be" and "play".

Yes, in practice, it was often a complete mess... but since everyone was, more-or-less, "failing roughly equally", it didn't feel particularly "bad" to play any specific Job and make a mess of it; I think that performance expectations were broadly lower, and egos seemed far more tempered.

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I am also of the — perhaps unpopular — opinion that it doesn't really work to apply such a broad design philosophy as Job rotations "unevenly", because then some Jobs feel "especially punishing" and others feel "unusually forgiving", and in turn, everyone begins to feel frustrated... because the Job that they like falls into the "wrong" category for them.

I don't think that the "buffet table" method really works, even if it's "commonly used" in "choose your class" game designs, and that the better solution — especially in a game like this, where people become heavily-invested in a specific fantasy experience — is to design everything to either one standard, or the other.

Basically: I think that someone is always going to end up unhappy in either approach. So I personally favor "broad design consistency" over "targeted niches".

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I love the aesthetic. I just don't want to be bored out of my mind actually leveraging it.

Also to be clear, I feel this myself, and personally-agree — I can't even exactly explain why, but I can't get through even one Bahamut-Phoenix loop without already feeling like the entire thing feels stale and tired.

It's odd, too, because even other "simple" Jobs like Reaper or Dancer don't at all give me that same "nibbling on a three-week-old stale cookie" feeling that EW SMN's loops do. I really struggle to identify exactly what it is about SMN's current design, in specific, that feels so "uncompelling".

So the arguments that I make in favor of EW SMN are not out of an attempt at personal benefit, but rather that I'm just not sure anymore if my "personal" concerns are actually that important to the game as a whole, nor in-line with what the broader playerbase actually prefers / enjoys.

And from that perspective, I'm not really sure anymore who should be "forced to move" in this standoff — certainly, if I was a developer trying to produce a marketed product, I'd be hard-pressed about what decisions to make when the majority of the population clearly seems to favor designs like EW SMN, and in turn, motivated to reconsider whether the entire paradigm has been misaligned to begin with.