
Originally Posted by
Taranok
And if you define ACN's core rotation and compare it to a modern day summoner, you would notice that the modern day SMN has downplayed and expunged so much of ACN's core mechanics that ACN is all but orphaned from Summoner now, in terms of expressing Summoner's core job identity, which as of SB is defined around the demi-primals and nothing else.
If you look at mechanics that exemplify the demi side of Summoner, you see it's mostly new mechanics added post-ARR and, especially, refined in SB/ShB. If you look at mechanics that never really exemplified being a Summoner, it's all ACN stuff and things built on to ACN to make ACN busier, but not really fulfilling the Summoner job identity. The egis, aetherflow blowing up DoTs and, of course, the DoTs themselves.
Hell, there isn't a single mechanic of ACN that is mandatory towards demi summons short of the mere existence of an egi being out on the field. A mechanic that can literally be described as a permanent, untargetable, unremovable (outside of SMN death or choice) DoT that the class barely interacts with anymore. It is a pale mockery of the original, horribly implemented Egis, and they could literally be removed and Summoner at a job identity level would feel better for it, not worse.
So if you look at SMN and ACN as a whole, the modern summoner is a job that is bipolar, tied to its old ACN roots of being a DoT/Egi class that explodes its DoTs but with those aspects severely diminished mechanically towards expressing SMN, and the modern day SMN that's focusing the job around the awesome Demi-primals, and the only reason the 2 are relevant to each other is because the devs haven't decided to gut the old ACN mechanics in favor of pushing the modern, more streamlined Demi mechanics primarily. The devs so far lack the will to enact the vision of summoner that they themselves have seen in SB and ShB as expressed by trances summoning demi-primals.
The original core of Summoner is dying a very slow, and very painful death as the class moves towards becoming a "true" FFXIV summoner, and just objectively observing the prominence of mechanics through various expansion cycles paints this loud and clear.