Quote Originally Posted by Claviusnex View Post
- Nobody asked for more Ruin and less DoT management. That was SE's idea to simplify the job.

- I can't speak to the rationale for the hugely, big Bahamut as I've never seen those requests. I can say being around for about 2 years I don't recall seeing a request for bigger egi's but I also wasn't historically a big reader of the forums.
Actually, yeah, these are both common complaints, or at least were years ago. For a long, long time, there was just about always a thread on the front page complaining about how tiny (and dumb-looking) the Egis were. Folks wanted to have the lumbering monstrosities they were used to from FFXI. As for DoTs, there were frequent criticisms that SMN were just WoW Warlocks with the serial numbers filed off and a pet tacked on, and that the resulting abomination was hardly a TRUE(tm) Final Fantasy Summoner at all.

I, personally, didn't mind SMN's new incarnation. The DoT focus, while new to Summoners, I took as just another quirk of this incarnation, like how Rydia used black magic or Yuna white. I personally found the abstract design of the egis to be neat (it's what you get when you try to summon a Primal using a geometry textbook!) and having played FFXI myself I knew how annoying and obstructive the giant summons could be (summoning Titan to block folks' view was an actual griefing tactic during NM farming). Nevertheless, I could certainly see why folks were disappointed, even if I wasn't, myself.

The same goes for Sustain. SE said they figured Summoners could move their egi's out of harms way and nobody uses it anyway so who needs it. Let's not think about how it affects Titan or Ilfrit who by definition are meant to be in the thick of it. Regular pet movement might be workable if all of the Summoner DPS was through the egi. However 75% comes from the Summoner themselves. This means every manual movement of the egi takes away from overall DPS. Add in the other changes that gimp the Summoner and you have a broken class that didn't need be broken.
It doesn't help at all that the Place command is kinda clunky. But yeah, given that two out of three egis are intended to remain in close quarters - and Titan in particular is DESIGNED to be taking near constant damage - SE's explanation for removing Sustain is kind of ludicrous. I'll admit that I didn't use it often myself in Heavensward - but this is because I had no need for Titan at all (overworld stuff was all too weak to require a tank Egi, and instanced stuff I usually used Garuda who rarely took damage), but it was still good to have.

While it might not be a traditional FF Summoner the HW version was working pretty smoothly. If SE didn't like that they should have come out a said we are going to work on changing the Summoner toward its more traditional interpretation and fully designed the new job. If they didn't have the resources to do it properly for SB then they should not have made major architectural changes to the job and done the minimum required to build up to level 70. In the end they would have had more satisfied customers and fewer complaints.
What I object to most is the fact that SE seems to be treating these criticisms like, "Eh, there are always complainers." While this bemused headshaking is justified for some of the noise made by the fanbase (such as the never-ending back-and-forth as to how difficult the Raids should be), I'm not sure the disappointment with Summoner is so clear-cut. If there's some super-secret way to play SMN that makes it competitive with RDM, or even with BLM, I don't think players have discovered it yet.