I love and respect all of you guys who liked the SMN rework-- you are my mortal enemies, but that's okay. We don't have to like the same things.

I just want to point out that I brought it up because it's possibly the prime example of a whole chunk of the playerbase essentially getting thrown in the trash in favour of getting a job a larger playerbase. I still haven't found a job that brings me the same amount of joy that SMN did in StB and ShB. I used to play all the time just for the sake of playing that job. Now I barely play at all outside of raid.

Shadowbringers SMN was an incredibly well designed job. Its phases all played into each other and it mattered for the next phase of your rotation if you did the last one correctly. All of its mechanics played together one way or another. My egi gave me Ruin IV procs to make my bahamut phase play smoother. While the DoT timers were well aligned to both be easy to manage during demi phases and engaging during egi phases. Since Bahamut/Phoenix reset my tri-disaster which refreshed them both for free, while I had to manually refresh them during my Egi phase. Phoenix felt good because its procs were independent and felt fresh and rewarding for doing my last phases well. All while my DoTs and aetherflow served as a metronomic through line. Figuring it out made me feel clever! It was a fun job! The kit let me have a magic dog! It was cool! It made me happy.

New SMN just does not compare even a little. You're barely even summoning things anymore, it's just VFX that happens to include a boss model. My carbuncle/egi is functionally the same as my minion.

But my point is that getting essentially thrown under the bus felt Bad. It has felt bad every single time they've done it. They keep doing it to BLM and any job that might seem even a little bit intimidating. And the thing that really puts salt in the wound is that unlike SMN-- it's not successful! Everyone who isn't already attached to a job is playing the jobs that are numerically superior because that's the only thing that matters to them. But the devs seem to think that the problem is that they just haven't parred the jobs down Enough. So BLM is about to be on its third strip down since Dawntrail released. For the sake of people who just don't want to play Black Mage.

I don't think job changes should be based on the opinions of people who don't play the job! All it does is strip jobs of their unique qualities. Whether those qualities be their difficulty or the fantasy of the job.

I think it's REALLY BAD actually when one portion of the playerbase gets something they like taken away in favour of giving it to a different portion of the playerbase who don't even want it. I think the only thing it's going to ever accomplish is making people deeply and severely resentful.