SMN is now the least popular caster again barely one expansion after its rework

[LoganMccree]

I think everyone should lose res because the devs make better fights without it. As seen in BA and DRS. Like, unironically, the devs only having the lever of damage down and killing players is simply bad for the game's encounter design. Not the only thing bad, but a big part of it.

They will never make such a bold move. The "improved encounter design" they promised didn't happen. Or if it did it amounts to slightly faster DDR. FF14 players got Stockholm'd into thinking that body checks in virtually every high-level encounter is the norm and default, and don't realize how damaging it is to the game.

Keep in mind they use damage down because they hate player creativity. They hated that people were soaking vuln ups on shit like O6S's flame to get some uptime. They hated that speedrunners* figured out cool tricks to get a few extra GCDs in. They hated that as players themselves they need to resort to "unnatural" techs to compete on FFLogs. This whole game is now chained to the whims of FFLogs Discord dwellers who hate anything that isn't ultra-scripted choreography. I have no doubt the job and encounter designers are part of them (in mentality at the very least). The body checks are there to force you to do the same choreography everyone must follow.

There's a reason why jobs get gutted over and over again and funneled into the same style. It's because there are only a few job designers, and the entire playerbase and game must bow down to their idiosyncratic preferences. They don't design for you. They design for themselves. That's why healers were gutted first, because the job design team are DPS mains who hated that they had to use GCD heals and not do damage. That's why certain jobs like monk get a lobotomy every expansion because the team hated how it played. They hate you as a player when you don't do what they want. That's why they keep trying to gut nonstandard Black Mage, that's why they gutted TK monk. It's why they gutted Summoner because they hated that they didn't foresee that old SMN optimization involved in large part the interplay between pet animations and pet movement (which emergently created a playstyle of stutter-stepping during Bahamut windows).

*I speak of the ancient species of speedrunners who actually enjoyed pushing for speedkills using unconventional strats which often increased the difficulty of the encounter, not of the modern variety of crit-farming brainrotten parse-andies.