I'm One Of The Filthiests Of Casuals And Even I Can See How Dumbdown FF14 Has Become!

[Renathras]

Oh, for the curious, I found Laryzur's video on it:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cNG1QNQPlNE
Summoner Changes | FFXIV Endwalker Media Tour

If you can't tell from his voice (he's a bit of a character and sometimes sounds more sarcastic when he's not being), he was legitimately excited about it. He did a video with Mr Happy around that time where they were discussing it and he was legitimately super excited about it. You can also see from the comments people were generally excited about it as well. So no matter what people say now, a lot of people then were legitimately very excited about it.

I think it's not unfair to say that many do play SMN now because they enjoy it. How many, I dunno, but it's not all about what's braindead or min-maxing with players, I don't think. I think many truly do just...enjoy it. And that's great. People are all allowed to like different things, and the best games are those that have something for everyone, I think, so we cal all share the world together.

Why is it that casters are the only role that has a sort of progression when...progressing? ...why do casters have this when no other role does? Why is there not a progression melee, or a progression healer etc?

I think there sorta is, but it's less apparent.

With Tanks, for example, WAR/PLD was good for progression because of WAR being WAR and PLD's expansive defensive suite and Cover allowing people to get LB3s and push the fight further for prog, while GNB/DRK was the go-to clear and speedrun Tank meta. It was this way for most of EW until just recently, where WAR became even more godlike and has sort of displaced DRK on the high end as well (leaving it a bit in the lurch).

With Healers, WHM/SGE is the the progression meta a lot because of how striaghtforward WHM is and how things like Cure 3 can actually be useful during prog, and that SGE has a crap ton of defensive CDs. Between Kerachole, Holos, Kerochole, SGE can keep the full party with mitigation for basically a solid minute straight, and has a lot of other mitigation tools, while WHM has Thin Air to help with Raises, as well as Lilies, Medica 2, and Cure 3 to brute force through mistakes. At least mistakes that don't outright one-shot players; it does have Benison and Aquaveil which can help for that, as can SGE GCD shields which are NEAR-instant since they only require the 1 sec Eukrasia before casting. Meanwhile, AST/SCH is generally the meta for clear and speed run parties because of all the party buffs, and AST solo healing for high end speed/farm parties due to its high healing and some mitigation potential allowing bringing another DPS.

So this does kind of exist with the other roles as well, it's just not quite as stark.

I think RDM's big problem right now isn't that SMN does comparable damage, it's that RDM actually does LESS damage in some cases. While people are willing to pick a harder Job that does more damage, few want to pick something harder that actively does less. It's the WAR/DRK problem right now where DRK is just a WAR that has less capability in a lot of ways and, after the buffs, WAR frequently does as much or more damage, so DRK has no real niche. If it had the same output, people would at least give it more a go due to maybe preferring a different playstyle. (Granted, people are still playing it, obviously, but you get my point). RDM doing more work for the same damage but better raising potential isn't a bad thing, and it has good party utility aside from that since it has a damage buff and extra party mit with Magick Barrier. Those are pluses. But if it ALSO does less damage, then people are going to shy away from it a lot more at the high end.

Though note again, when it comes to the general playerbase and more casual content and even midcore stuff like Extremes, RDM is still pretty widely played and much more than BLM is. BLM being more played than RDM is only a thing at the very high end levels of play/players.

The Devs really doubled down on SMN's reputation as the caster with Mobility since the beginning of Endwalker. Lots on instant spells with a few casts here and there. But pretty much very similar to a physical ranged for the most part.

To be fair:

This was already true.

SMN in ShB was highly mobile. DWT and FBT were all instant casts. Bahamut was 4 hardcast Ruin 3s and 4 instant cast Ruin 4s. Egi-Assault 1 and 2 were GCDs from 5.2 or 5.3 on (I forget which), and had two charges each with 30 sec CDs. So every minute you got 8 outright instant cast spells (4 total Egi-Assaults and 4 Ruin IVs), and 8-10 (depending on spell speed) instants under DWT/FBT.

...and you had Ruin 2 then (it upgraded to Ruin 4 under the Further Ruin proc) meaning even if you used up all those Ruin IVs, you still had free movement at a mild damage loss.

SMN was highly mobile in ShB already. I remembered playing it in E5N once and thinking of how darn MOBILE it was when the part with all the lightning bolts came out and I hit a DWT and was able to just dance through the whole thing without issue. SMN is another one of the cases where at least some of the stuff it's blamed for actually started in ShB, not EW. (Not all, but a lot, of "EW kinda sucks" complaints about Job designs date to ShB, and in some cases SB, not EW itself. EW's just getting all the blame.)

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EDIT:

Well, was trying to make shorter posts and just split them up...that didn't work out well. But hey, I think the above one was better off with just that little bit in it, so it's staying this way.