Quote Originally Posted by dezzmont View Post
Black Mage does a FANTASTIC job of evoking the 'fantasy' of a FF black mage, which is destroying things. While in most FF games black mages also handle offensive buffs and use elemental weaknesses, that 1:1 port doesn't matter as much as capturing what it would feel like to be a Black Mage. It and Red Mage are IMO the top two classes in capturing this 'job fantasy' and I would say Summoner is pretty low on that list, which is why there is a lot of bellyaching.

And existing Summoner is kinda a slap in the face to people who enjoy summons in FF games.
Is this something it's trying to do though?
Evoke the job fantasy established in other games?
I hear this every once in awhile and I'm not so sure...

When talking about Viera (prior to their release) Yoshi P emphasized that what we'll be getting are not the Viera from FF12, or Tactics, or from another title, but Viera from FF14. This is something he stressed again prior to Male Viera: that we are getting FF14's version of something. This is even something he's had to address after making bosses and locations based on something from another game (this isn't the same Crystal Tower from FF3, etc.)

With this in mind, and considering what primals are like in FF14, I don't think they're trying to shoot for "capturing the job fantasy" established in other titles, but trying to capture what being a SMN would be like on Eorzea.

Is this good?
Is this bad?
I don't know. That's not what I'm getting at.
There's nothing wrong with wanting SMN to capture the fantasy of summoners from another game, but the devs have shown no interest in doing that. And a lot of the "bellyaching" IMO seems to stem more from people not understanding the dev's aim and then being unhappy that SMN is not what they're expecting.