Anyone else think caster has suffered this expansion? (hopes for the future)

[Valence]

SMN just got the treatment MCH got an expansion earlier. I do wonder which job is gonna be next on the chopping block.

Feels like they're trying to make rotations and jobs as mindless as possible because the only thing they care about those days is hectic encounters where moving all around in pixel perfect action game scenari is somehow favored over better paced, thoughtful encounters.

[Shiroe]

SMN just got the treatment MCH got an expansion earlier. I do wonder which job is gonna be next on the chopping block.

Feels like they're trying to make rotations and jobs as mindless as possible because the only thing they care about those days is hectic encounters where moving all around in pixel perfect action game scenari is somehow favored over better paced, thoughtful encounters.

you've never played Smn in current Savages or Ultimates, saying Smn is mindless..
... you need to plan A LOT, which primal summons when, order of move sets within Ifrit, Garudas Slipstream / Swiftcast etc.., or you're ffed.., and need to be fully focused durinh Demis, or the final cast won't go off
...
but on easy / nornal content, Smn is mindless (but imo so are orher classes. , but yep Smn can be a sleeping pill during dungeons or any pre 90 content..), but its nowhere near as mindless as some are trying to make it out to be in savage / Ultimates

[Keichi]

SMN just got the treatment MCH got an expansion earlier. I do wonder which job is gonna be next on the chopping block

Theoreticly should it be the dragoon or Astrologian. ^^
Arent they becoming a rework to 7.0?

[Valence]

you've never played Smn in current Savages or Ultimates, saying Smn is mindless..
... you need to plan A LOT, which primal summons when, order of move sets within Ifrit, Garudas Slipstream / Swiftcast etc.., or you're ffed.., and need to be fully focused durinh Demis, or the final cast won't go off
...
but on easy / nornal content, Smn is mindless (but imo so are orher classes. , but yep Smn can be a sleeping pill during dungeons or any pre 90 content..), but its nowhere near as mindless as some are trying to make it out to be in savage / Ultimates

hahahahahaa

[SilversLyu]

you've never played Smn in current Savages or Ultimates, saying Smn is mindless..
... you need to plan A LOT, which primal summons when, order of move sets within Ifrit, Garudas Slipstream / Swiftcast etc.., or you're ffed.., and need to be fully focused durinh Demis, or the final cast won't go off
...
but on easy / nornal content, Smn is mindless (but imo so are orher classes. , but yep Smn can be a sleeping pill during dungeons or any pre 90 content..), but its nowhere near as mindless as some are trying to make it out to be in savage / Ultimates

I gotta say now that I think about it, you make a good point. SMN is braindead, but it has little nuances in its kit that you have to pay attention to. And that can be so mindnumbing and subtle, that you will eventually either miss some timing or fall asleep. You kinda convinced me a little bit, not bad. It's a sleepy job at the end of the day lmao.

But overall my savage experience was pretty solid and straightforward with SMN. I gotta say as simple the job may be, timing the summons is atleast some fun - even tho that is rather quickly figured out as well.

[fulminating]

you've never played Smn in current Savages or Ultimates, saying Smn is mindless..
... you need to plan A LOT, which primal summons when, order of move sets within Ifrit, Garudas Slipstream / Swiftcast etc.., or you're ffed.., and need to be fully focused durinh Demis, or the final cast won't go off
...
but on easy / nornal content, Smn is mindless (but imo so are orher classes. , but yep Smn can be a sleeping pill during dungeons or any pre 90 content..), but its nowhere near as mindless as some are trying to make it out to be in savage / Ultimates

You say that, but there's no record of you clearing current ultimates on new summoner, just uwu. Sure it's still an ultimate, but between gear sync, better consumables and the frankly comical balance at 70 it's not quite the same calibre as TOP or Dragonsong. Moreover there's no record of you doing harder content on anything but summoner which does raise the question of just how you can compare its difficulty to other jobs.

[Semirhage]

There's a long essay in my head that I won't type out now, but I think this is both true and a phenomenon not unique to FFXIV. It's something I frame as "fighters vs mages". The gaming landscape shift of "oh thank god, Action Combat is here to finally provide real, good battle content" is a product of catering to people who prefer twitch reflexes and having 2-3 buttons to mash (fighters) over strategic placement, spell fencing, chess fights (mages). Action combat isn't "better", it's a preferred playstyle hip-checking mage players to the wayside by designing combat systems to favor high mobility and button mashing, turning RPG combat largely from an INT check to all DEX checks.

Needless to say I'm not fond of the industry shift to Action Combat, but here we are. Your mages are no longer reality warping turrets with powers both mysterious and gross. They're sparkle archers. You will alternate ze attack and dodge roll button and you will like it.

Okay, I feel like an essay. Keep in mind that FF14 has many of these symptoms, but I'm also talking about modern RPGs in general. Think of your most recently played one. How many of these things apply to it?

Once upon a time, in RPGs long ago, "pure" casters and physical classes were very, very different (often with a few hybrid options, but we won't go there). The designers often favored casters as the "complex, smart person" classes that had a ton of extra mechanics to justify their higher outputs and wider capabilities. Casters could stop time, teleport, see the future, control the elements, change the weather, dominate the minds of the weak, fly, raise the dead, upend physics, create and dispel illusions. To pay for these things, they had a huge list of drawbacks. Lower health, lower defense, needing to concentrate or stand still, provoking opponents into attacking them more often, spell slots or mana, spell components, lower strength, difficulty in locating new spells, cost of ink and paper and herbs and gems and lab space making it an expensive vocation, becoming powerless in an antimagic field, needing to plan ahead and select/precast the right spells, having a slower wind-up time than melees if they were caught unaware, just to name a few. Many of these things came to video games through their tabletop origins.

Did this frequently lead to massive unbalance? Of course it did. Clever casters often found ways around their restrictions. The things they could do more than made up for them. Melees were bored that their classes didn't get nearly as much attention as the casters. They were often just "Hit the thing skill". "Other hit the thing ability". "Hit three things in front of me" classes. So the landscape began to shift. Stripping tabletop abilities off mages faster than they remove the restrictions that justified them. Giving fighters dashes and teleports without adding any restrictions to them at -all-.

What we're left with is today: casters are sparkle archers and fighters are anime superheroes. Stopping time, seeing the future? What's that? You get spells that are cosmetic coats of paint on top of a copy of anything a bow-wielder can do. Fireballs are reskinned arrows. Icebolts are reskinned bullets. Just with mana costs, because lol mages have to spend mana on things right? Oh, they're not any *stronger* than those arrows despite the fact that arrows just magically appear in archer quivers cost-free now, no management required, but keeping that cost on mages is totally fine. Damage interrupts your casts still? Of course it does! Damage has always interrupted casts! That's just part of being a caster! Nevermind the fact that those spells have been nerfed down to similar effect that uninterruptable, cost-free physical abilities have, now they just have a downside with no upside! Balance! Lower defense? Of course mages have lower defense, they've always had lower defense. Except that lower defense justifies....what exactly? Still being weaker than melees in the DPS department?

And fighters, ho boy. They've eaten real good over the last few decades. They've gone from mace go swingy to flight, chi fireballs, sword lasers, rage explosions, dashes, avatar summoning...you'd be forgiven if you mistook them for casters. Except they've lost zero of the extra defense, extra health, resource-free advantages for it. A lot of this is Old Elezen Yells At Cloud, but you've got to admit there's a grain of truth here: mages have been nerfed and nerfed and nerfed and nerfed for the last ~20 years with maybe half of their old restrictions eased, and fighters have been granted magic powers for free, and now we're at a point where, frequently, everyone just kinda swings damage at things and the main difference between fighters and casters is that fighters are tankier, frequenly do more damage anyway, and never have to spend MP to use their abilities.

[SilversLyu]

Snip

Based and your view of the situation is very intriguing. I noticed the catering to more action oriented jobs/games in general, and while it is cool to see this dynamic switch in the modern age which is so different from the oldschool games and class design back then, it certainly doesn't help in variety and complexity. I also agree that they wanted to equalise both job types, but balance can be a hard topic. Instead of keeping complexity/variety they made them the same. I also dont prefer action combat but that is besides the point. Mages are disguised archers lmao. Everything is sacrificed for dynamic movement and combat and they lack identity because of that. I personally hope they find a way to include mages better eventually and find true balance, instead of onesided care.

The point you made and homogenization as a whole are probably the main culprits of current job design/balance.

[Lyth]

...

Historically, that differentiation was based off of level progression rather than skill, which is a convention that dates back to early pen and paper games. Wizarding types started out weak and vulnerable, but grew exponentially more powerful than everyone else with reality altering spells (most famously with 'Wish'). Short of catching one unawares, your hope of winning a 1v1 confrontation with a max level spellcaster was practically non-existent. There was nothing clever about this.

By that same token, the concept of a 'tank' was a later invention as well. Melee types were historically more resilient across the board, which made them more likely to survive to later levels in games with permadeath. MUDs then introduced the concept of 'rescue' to allow melee players to save a squishy lower level caster friend to allow them to survive to maturity, and thus tanks were born. Tank damage output was then reduced to differentiate them from traditional melee, and 'aggro' systems were superimposed to make the programming around mob targeting all work out despite the lower damage output on tanks.

If you really want to get into it, traditional caster types were very much about preparation. So if you wanted to be able to cast that fireball, you would need to memorize it the correct number of times before starting your next day. Final Fantasy 1 adopted a modified version of this, wherein you have a certain number of 'spells' per level, to be replenished only at an inn. This meant that casting was a war of attrition, and you had to be very selective on what fights you were going to be using those spells, lest you run out of Cures before reaching the bottom of Gulg Volcano. It's not surprising that this was not exactly popular, and later games swapped over to a softer MP system.

You'll quickly see that modern casting is nothing like this, and there's been a push towards casters being able to cast whatever they want, whenever they want. Even within this game, a lot of the resource-management issues that constrained casters are largely gone. You could even say that MP is progressively becoming vestigial at this point.

I get that you want to look for this historical precedent in which casters are more powerful than everyone else without any effort, simply because they picked a privileged job. Truth is, those good olde days were reserved for systems in which you would have had 1d4 hit dice, AC 0, permadeath, and had to decide whether you wanted to memorize your singular daily fireball spell for use in P10S or P12S. In modern systems, none of these things are relevant, resource management is non-existent, and the people who pick casters do so because they prefer to observe the battle from the distant safety of their couch rather than dancing with death in close range. You want more damage? Work on your uptime, same as everyone else. No shortcuts to being good.

[Ggwppino]

you've never played Smn in current Savages or Ultimates, saying Smn is mindless..
... you need to plan A LOT, which primal summons when, order of move sets within Ifrit, Garudas Slipstream / Swiftcast etc.., or you're ffed.., and need to be fully focused durinh Demis, or the final cast won't go off
...
but on easy / nornal content, Smn is mindless (but imo so are orher classes. , but yep Smn can be a sleeping pill during dungeons or any pre 90 content..), but its nowhere near as mindless as some are trying to make it out to be in savage / Ultimates

The problem is, that's not the case. Technically he had been passed off as a "strategic" class that had to weigh very carefully the choice of its summons. It was basically an attractive class, but the problem is that it has 6 seconds of cast on 60 seconds of rotation. The problem is that he has nothing to worry about: he doesn't have to think about casts, he doesn't have to pre-position himself, he doesn't have to think about what will happen in the future, he doesn't have to think about dots or manage resources because it hasnt, everything is consequential. He's not a caster, he doesn't have to weigh anything except using ifrit in down time. Play the blm but trivially also the rdm, you change your mind immediately. I don't know if you've ever played the old smn, you change your mind immediately. This class is a joke. Even if I personally didn't mind the idea that smn had been passed on.