I was almost in the mood to play FF14 again

[Ggwppino]

SMN is fine as a Job, and the most I've enjoyed SMN since 2.5. Each expansion after made the Job worse and worse, and now it's back to being coherent again. I do think it should have been a separate Job and the mess that was old SMN retained in some way for people that liked it, but in vacuum, if it had just been added as a new Job so the jaded old SMN players who loved that Frankenstein's monster held together by duct tape and wishes weren't up in arms about losing the thing they loved, it'd be far less hated than it is now since it would be looked at largely as RDM/DNC 2.0. RDM was also called easy and barebones, but people liked it, and its original forms did NOT have much more depth (or any more depth) than current SMN.

Have a meager but coherent job (and not even that much since the whole aetherflow system no longer makes sense to exist and doesn't go well with the rest and the carbuncle which is arm candy), or have a "Frankenstein's monster" but that everything had to be reasoned? The second for me, thank you.
And still a job that literally makes you spam a single button for 30 seconds and having 2 out of 3 elementals doing the same stuff I really wouldn't consider it a job well done, maximum ifrit is well reasoned by designers, just as I don't consider a job well done if for 90 levels it stays the same and increases just the powers of the skills.

And yes, I agree, if they hadn't done the crap of reworking a job by not considering the old smn players looking for a certain challenges, the new smn wouldn't have been hated so deeply. At least by me.

Small parenthesis that I don't want to dwell on too much. The protagonist is the sam and how slowly they are emptying it.