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

[Renathras]

I can see your point, but the other side also has a point. Skill expression should have a gap, perhaps not a huge one, but it should at least be there.

And it does; there are Jobs with wide skill gaps and those with narrow.

Moreover, damage isn't the only way to reward people for mastering more difficult Jobs - and in a game like FFXIV, it can't be used, since that's the only "must have" metric. There are other "nice to have" but not "must haves" that can be used instead. You can't have a Healer without a Raise - that's a "must have" - but you can have a more difficult Healer give a movement speed buff - that's a "nice to have".

I also take issue with people demanding/deciding themselves they want to play a "harder" Job that requires "more work" and then demanding to be rewarded. It'd be like if one person digs a trench with a backhoe and another was offered the backhoe, refused and insisted on using a shovel instead, and then demanded to be paid overtime since it took them "more work" to dig the same thing. When you literally ask for more work, there's something wrong with you then demanding a leg up over other people for you doing the thing you literally asked for, and even insisted you'd be bored without.

I think there can be complex jobs, for players who like that this is important, but I don't think those jobs should get inflated damage by default.

Exactly. There are other forms of expression besides "more damage".

snip

You're going to have to tell me what "snip" means.

As for casuals - depends on the type. But generally speaking, if people are min/maxing, they aren't casuals. That's kind of the only true dividing line between "casuals" and "hardcores" (most of the rest are subjective).

Where did I say RDM should be made easier? I said that's what your argument supports.

No, they're asking to change the job to give it more pointless busy work and making it more complicated for no good reason. Summoner is being played more than ever because it has less busy work and is less complicated than other Jobs. Why should Summoners, the majority enjoying it as is, be told that the Job they like is "wrong" and should be made just as complicated and full of busy work as other Jobs? It isn't fair to them at all. If players want more busy work or more complicated jobs then they have options. Don't take this away from those that enjoy Summoner just because the more complicated/busy work jobs have issues that the Summoner doesn't have.

This.

It'd be one thing if there were many other simple and many complex Jobs. But there aren't. There are mostly very complex Jobs, moderate complexity Jobs, and then a handful of low complexity ones. SMN is one of the few, not one of the many.

you know whats also unfair? players that enjoyed pre-EW SMN being alienated by the rework and having no near-equivalent job to turn to. lmao

That's fine and dandy if you were asking for a Job to be added that has old SMN's gameplay. That's a different ask than "make SMN harder". Moreover, even if you wanted old SMN back, that's unlikely to happen (the Devs seem to hate DoTs for some reason), but even so, it doesn't require the removal of the current SMN.

You seem to be taking issue since you so strongly cling to the current summoner that you’re taking this as a personal attack. Chill out. The job is going to be changing in less than a year anyways with the coming of 7.0

To be fair, many people in this thread have said anyone who likes current SMN are lazy, babies, cockroaches, etc. Pretty sure taking those as personal attacks is the correct way to take them. And yeah, the Job will change with 7.0, but there's a difference between "Your second set of SMNs are now Ramuh, Leviathan, and Shiva but are just a different set of VFX but play the same as Garuda, Titan, and Ifrit" vs "You now have to play like BLM". There's a wide gulf between those two things.

As far as I can tell, this seems to be a pretty bluntly-true observation... albeit with a couple caveats that definitely need to be appended.

Fair points.

But note that if a person meets the metrics of that list - can't play a Caster, dislikes DPS, dislikes "wizards", etc - then why would they be asking for SMN to be the Job given the high skill ceiling, when they won't be playing it anyway?

Therefore, if a more efficient solution is made available, that has no real downsides, these players will feel pressured — either internally, externally, or both — to switch to that simpler and more efficient solution.

...which is fine, but we have a similar situation: Why argue for removing the thing, since removing it means they'd be just as prone to being a failure to their team and etc. I get that part of it is "force us to not do this", but they'd just pick the next easiest thing and then the next and so on until they got everything removed from the game but the single hardest one. Then many of them would just use cheating add-ons, defeating the whole point again.

And yes, if that's the case, it's fair to ask what they truly want and why, since if it truly was just a high skill option, then we'd, again, be drowning in BLMs. That we aren't indicates that isn't what people are really wanting. Sometimes, people say they want something they don't when they are unsure themselves, but sometimes they do it because they think they really want (e.g. suppose for the sake of argument it was to "lord over other players") would not be a popular or sympathetic position, and they recognize that and so don't want to expose their true motives.

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I think the issue is that there aren't a ton of players that choose the more difficult option when given the choice. And so SE removes or simplifies the Jobs over time. That, and people actively asking for homogenization (always insisting they are not) by asking why their Job doesn't have a certain thing or has to work harder at a thing than another Job. The end result is SE looking at the Jobs, seeing the ones least played, and attempting to make them more appealing to the masses.

Me personally, I have three general rules with game design stuff.

1) Don't take things away from people in general. If you absolutely MUST, explain why clearly, and try to give them something to compensate. Nothing makes people more upset than losing a thing they had, even if it makes no sense or doesn't fit in the game.

2) Have something for everyone as much as possible. This includes having different levels of difficult, complexity, etc. One of the most common questions asked of any given game, and definitely of MMOs, is "What is the easiest class/Job?" People ask that because there's a general desire by people to start with what's easy. Some people work up to whatever difficulty suits them personally, some never move passed that first step. But an accessible and inclusive game allows for this without issue. To me personally, this also means each Role should also be divided that way, as well.

3) When making new things, look at what's working/what people like, and try to do more of that. If people aren't jumping on complex Jobs, then the obvious conclusion is that it isn't what "the people", so to speak, want. In line with (2), you still want to have some complex Jobs, but that shouldn't be what you make every Job if people are largely actively avoiding them. I think we can all agree that if the bulk of players were rushing for the complex Jobs, SE should make more of them, but clearly that isn't what's happening, and even so, subject to (1), it would be while leaving the complexity level low for Jobs that were low complexity to begin with. A lot of people have moved to SMN because RDM has become more technical and difficult. If RDM had remained at its SB/ShB level of difficulty, more people might be playing it now instead of SMN. RDM got harder, SMN got easier, and we see more people have chosen SMN. But it's not just hardcore raider/skill focused players seeking to make runs easier for their party, but seems to be large portions of the general playerbase as well.

And it's important to keep in mind that such players really do exist, and not to dismiss them — they're "high-functioning" within the context of FFXIV, and they feel like they're being "punished" just for being more skilled and capable, by having their fun toys (challenging and depthy Jobs, with a lot of space for both failure, and optimized success) constantly taken away from them in order to appease the broader majority.

Hence my above position.

I wouldn't even mind the people asking for old SMN to come back if they were also asking for old (easier) RDM to come back as well as old (easier) versions of other Jobs like NIN or BRD...but they aren't. The arrow of "sacred" only seems to run one way, always towards more complex, with such people, since that meets their self-interest of having more Jobs available for them, but not caring about other people or actually caring about "how things used to be" as more than a convenient excuse.

However, in other cases I honestly wonder if EW SMN might secretly be taking a lot of stress and pressure off of even many "dedicated" players... but it's just "taboo" for them to publicly-admit so in the sorts of "pride in the game" circles and communities that end up becoming their social networks.

This may be true as well. It wouldn't be the first time people badmouthed something in public but it was their "secret indulgence" when behind closed doors. That's happened through Human history, and for far less benign things, to be sure.

...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.

I think one problem is people forget just how slimmed down Jobs were in ARR. Some were more complex, true, but...a lot really weren't. BLM was FAR easier in ARR, partly because it didn't have all the add-ons that have been tacked onto the Job over the years, and partly because fights weren't nearly so movement heavy in most cases, meaning BLM didn't have to have the thorough fight knowledge that is the basis of its now-famous difficulty. SMN had several DoTs and oGCDs to juggle, but a number of these were merely "use on CD/refresh on duration", which isn't terribly complicated compared to the current iteration. ARR SMN was very definitely not ShB SMN or SB SMN or even HW SMN. It didn't have the two minute cycle, the 3 Tri-Disaster DoT refreshes, the cramming 8+ GCDs into Bahamut/Phoenix windows, or managing Further Ruin stacks with Egi Assaults. Literally none of those mechanics existed in ARR SMN, which instead had 3-4 (5 only in patch 2.0-2.1, which was the only period Thunder was Cross-Class, no matter how people try to pretend it was the whole time) DoTs to manage, Shadow Flare to throw down, and AF was used on Fester (just like now, only it had a 5 sec CD, I think, so you had to alternate it), and in between, you spammed Ruin 1 and weaved oGCDs as they came off CD...just like now. There were a few things you could try to do, but many of the advancements came with HW and SB.

Many Jobs back then consisted of a relatively simple combo system, a handful of situational utility buttons, and that was mostly it. PLD had a 1-2-3 combo and spammed Flash for AOE. It had a reactive button if it blocked with the shield and it had Shield Bash and the same tow oGCDs it has to this day. The alternating Royal/Atonement/Goring combo thing was from ShB, the upkeeping Goring was from either HW or SB, during both of which Halone was used for agro (or avoided when you didn't need agro). Its AOE "rotation" in ARR was literally spamming a non-damage AOE spell until you ran out of MP, then using 1-2 Riot over and over to get more MP so you could spam more Flash, because it didn't get its agro stance until level 35 or 40, so spamming Flash was actually necessary. Sure, 6.3 PLD is simpler than 6.2 PLD, but so was 2.0 PLD.

In a way, the game started off with most Jobs being simple, and they had complexity tacked on over time, robbing the people who liked the simple of their toys. "The chicken or the egg?", which came first. The people who want complex Jobs aren't the only ones who can complain that they had something taken from them...

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...

Perhaps.

So you think it's that cognitive dissonance that makes them...upset and insulting to those who openly express like towards things like SMN?

Perhaps the timer juggling sort of skill expression isn't that individual's cup of tea either?

But it's regardless fascinating to me that the people absolutely certain that skill expression is a Very Bad Thing are always, without fail, the people who never interact with it.

And this is everything wrong with these conversations:

VERY FEW people say "skill expression is a Very Bad Thing". Look at most of the people here praising SMN. Look at few of them are saying "skill expression is a Very Bad Thing"? Most of them are saying "You have your high skill expression Jobs and we have our one low skill ceiling Job". They aren't saying "skill expression is a Very Bad Thing" at all. They're saying it's fine, as long as not everything is forced into that mold. Literally nobody is "demanding" that "nobody be allowed to get better than you"; if they were, they'd be demanding the REMOVAL of complex Jobs, not COEXISTENCE with them. The only people demanding removal rather than coexistence are the people who want all Jobs to be only the complex kinds and none favoring people who prefer straightforward designs.

This caricature is the biggest problem with these conversations.

The second worst is insisting people aren't allowed to have an opinion unless they're clearing Ultimates/Savage tiers - turns out, these SAME Jobs exist in all content, casual to hardcore; they aren't separate Jobs in hardcore content with separate kits.

And the third:

It's actually mindboggling. I don't understand how this even remotely hurts anyone, and besides, every other job is plenty populated by people who don't want to do high end content, you don't see them complaining about this.

When other people quote and support the caricature, attempting to lend it legitimacy it doesn't hold, and insisting "no one is hurt" when people are clearly hurt by their proposed changes.

"Neither we who run this factory nor those we sell to are harmed by us polluting this river."
"But what about the families that live downstream and drink it?"
"I don't understand how this even remotely hurts anyone, besides, lots of people don't even drink water, so what does it matter?"

Fair enough, but in that case SMN should only be putting out roughly what that level of effort would equate to on another job,

Again: No.

If you're choosing to play a Job that requires more work because you find more work fun, then your reward is that you have fun. In some possible scenario, the reward can be providing more utility.

Moreover, the entire point of a "low skill floor, high skill ceiling" Job is that when it's played at a low level, it underperforms more moderate skill Jobs when they are played at a low level. A badly played BLM should absolutely do less damage than a badly played RDM or SMN, since the point of the wide skill spread is to be able to excel but also to fail; high risk high reward, but high cost of failure.

The game is not a job. The realization you need to make is to stop treating it like one.

No one's asking for a 20 SMN player to do more damage than a 90 BLM player. That would be silly. But as I've said many times and you've refused to accept or summon a counterargument to - encounters would have to be designed for that lower damage. If SMN did 1/3rd the damage of BLM, all Enrages would have to be made super lenient so that SMN could still clear the content, and at that point, any part with a BLM would find Enrages trivial. The game can't work that way and we all know it, which is why no one ever tries to offer a counter-argument when I point that out.

No one is "obliged" to switch to SMN. That's the point. At the end of the day, people doing it are choosing to do it, they aren't being forced to, as RDM (as you said yourself) still can outdamage SMN and out combat-raise it, and BLM clearly can outdamage it. People are choosing SMN because on some level they want to.

Well, also, remember that this is a team game. It's not just about my fun with the job or the pride I feel doing the complex rotation - It's also that I don't want to make mistakes. I am going to make more mistakes on mechanics and cause more wipes during our prog if I play the harder job. If I play summoner, I guarantee that I can just focus on the mechanics and never have to worry about a rotation, so I will hold people back less. It's hard to justify going for the harder option unless you're really confident you won't waste people's time. If it was a single player game I might try it from the start.

Yeah, but that's the problem - then what you're arguing for, if you support making SMN more complex - is arguing to harm your own team, by your own metric.

Semi-counterpoint: if you reduce the barrier to entry via smn being exceptionally easy, good luck finding a group with 1 caster slot available and far too many smn looking for groups.

Semi-counterpoint: Then the answer is just having at least one Job in each role be exceptionally easy.

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

So much this entire post, but especially:

For example, statements like:
...
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.

And...

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.

I don't think I've ever seen truer words spoken on these forums, and it continually shocks me that there are people saying "that's not true" when it's very much and entirely true.

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EDIT2: The pushback you're getting shows you've probably hit close to the mark/touched a nerve. "Thou doest protest too much" kind of a thing.

Though I applaud your effort...I fear it's a lost cause. From talking with people on these forums, Reddit, etc, I've found it's almost impossible to convince a skill-focused player that not everyone thinks like them. They will admit on some level that's true, but then deny it in every way when you mention specifics, and they'll insist that their insults and caricatures aren't insults and caricatures - as if someone could take being called lazy and entitled in a non-insulting way... <_< ...which wouldn't even be so bad, except for how quick such people are to respond negatively to perceived insults or caricatures of themselves.

It constantly shocks me that skill focused people believe they know what non-skill focused people are thinking and want, that only they get to talk about Job design, and that there's no possible way anyone else can understand what it is they really want. Double standards to insane levels...