Quote Originally Posted by Anvaire View Post
*snip*
While the class will never be a "real summoner" such as a FFX summoner, the devs are remarkably close to getting as close to a "real summoner" in FFXIV as is possibly, but it requires basically accepting that the first couple iterations of summoner were deeply flawed, and that the DWT/FBT cycle is the closest to "real summoner" that FFXIV has ever had, and emphasizing that is better.

To the people who want a poison mage, the devs should take all the ideas they've had for SMN pre-SB and find a way to work that into a class that functions well as that type of class, and split the "real summoner" off and design it based on the other half of the class, the DWT/FBT rotation, and possibly add more pseudo-summons. Consider removing the DoT nature from the class outright, definitely remove egis because the egis are stupid at this point, and find ways to allow the player to more meaningfully interact with the demi-summons beyond simple enkindles and GCD copying.

I've heard ideas for making it so "egi assault" instead temp-summons a summon, partially, to do a singular attack before fading away. The two camps are divided because some people legitimately like SMN's base gameplay in ARR and HW and, despite it breaking the game balance wise, there are legitimate reasons to like how it played, and it might work well for a different class altogether. But the people who saw ShB's changes and went "Wow, it's starting to look like a real summoner" want to push it towards the best version of summoner that FFXIV can possibly have.

What I think we can all agree on at this point is that, whether you like its business or not, the class has serious flow issues right now, and they need to be addressed.