Quote Originally Posted by ItMe View Post
Yeah, that's kinda weird. Though the PLD job quests (for example) don't really mention their magic. So there is precedent for the job quests not trying to weave every core move we have into the job's story.
I think it also serves as precedent for 'every ability doesn't need to be justified by the lore explicitly talking about it, especially in the case of PLD where casting magic is a huge part of their FF identity, and people DID sorta ask 'where is it, besides flash?'

One of the real strengths of FFXIV in a lot of ways is evoking older game concepts. How do you handle jobs that historically have access to white magic and the ability to be quite powerful healers (PLD and RDM) despite not being healers? What about non-DoM with Black Magic, like NIN? It isn't 1:1, but they do a good job of capturing these trappings.

Quote Originally Posted by ItMe View Post
Those are not things I was commenting on as I felt it was tangential to my point.
Right but its SUPER core to mine! Yes, XIV's summoner CAN'T be a re-implementation of old summoners and it doesn't have to be slavishly loyal to old ones, but summons are suuuuuper iconic to FF overall and a huge part of every game's cosmology is addressing them. XIV did a great job in some ways (They are fantastically awesome bosses!) but in the way you access them it didn't do so great, both in general and in its own fiction, and this is almost certainly the primary 'pain point' that gets people asking for summoner reworks so often.

SMN is in a weird spot among the trifecta of 'pain classes' (BRD, MNK, and SMN, who consistently are losers in satisfaction/rework polls) because while they get updates to their basic spells and, again, TRULY well designed trances and demis, their basic egi they spend a lot of their time with and with which they are encouraged to base their job identity around has... really bad animations and despite being arguably the most visually prominent part of why you are a summoner it actually does a very bad job at it.

If you are already invested in summoner and enjoy its rotation (which, again, is a delight, its like having your own private limit break and is a 10/10 on MECHANICALLY evoking summoners in FF games), this isn't a problem because you already emotionally bought into the job. But if you haven't, or you have but still really love old FF jobs, its still an actively negative part of the job's experience that sorta... has to be addressed? No change to SMN will ever fix its core issues that keep coming up until you look at the source of the complaints, which is really not 'the egi is low potency' or 'its not fun how much getting rezzed hurts your rotation' as much as 'EGI FEEL BAD.'

That seems like a very shallow complaint, but it isn't, that is a huge part of what separates a merely good experience (Which is not worth paying a monthly fee for, as any WoW killer found out) from a great one.