I'm honestly kind of happy, and extremely disappointed, seeing people agree with me whenever I speak about this. It just goes to show how serious of an issue it has become. The class I have been playing since it was released is no longer the "warlock with a grimoire and summons", and has instead become the dumpster where Square puts whatever spells they don't think fit on the other 3 healers. The worst part to me is that we are still technically the best healer in the game in most situations - we just hate playing the class we love because it's not on the same plane of existence as where it started! They're so obsessed with making flashy spells for everyone that they forget no one wants a new "finisher" skill besides RDM, whos ENTIRE KIT is based around using their full finisher combo every 15-20 seconds on repeat. We have seen the fairy gauge become useless in any non-dungeon content due to healing being entirely optional. We have seen Seraph fall off in usefulness outside of continuous raid-wide mechanics for the same reason. And for some reason Fey Blessing, the most widely usable of this trinity, now isn't even tied to the gauge so we just sit at 100% for an entire Extreme, Savage, or Ultimate fight with no reason to nerf our fairy's team-wide healing abilities by casting Aetherpact.

Why is Scholar, arguably the most unique job in the game from ARR through Stormblood, now the Job with the least unique kit in its role? Why are we getting feathers added to our class VFX while WHM now has massive (fairy) wings, and Sage is the new Warlock? Summoner needed to be touched up and brought into a modern place, but it certainly didn't need its entire kit scrapped and replaced with an entirely new gameplay loop that has now become even more repetitive with the addition of a Diet Bahamut stance rather than allowing us to summon the THREE EXISTING PRIMALS that we have been sobbing and begging for since ARR. It just feels like they actually hate that people enjoy Arcanist s0 they decided to start (literally) ripping pages out of our books and telling us to make do with half of a story.

God only knows that Square will likely ignore us again, as I doubt we will even be able to pool enough voices to demand a change like when we had to riot for them to give Energy Drain back in Shadowbringers. Yes, game design is difficult and requires countless devs to work in tandem for the product to flow naturally. But when you have a job that is this old and beloved, with a devoted pool of us that have offered everything from minor gameplay tweaks to full-on reworks, there is no excuse for so brazenly giving us a "f**k you" and teasing these changes as if they improve either Arcanist specialization in any way.