Quote Originally Posted by rewd View Post
This seems like such a half-assed rework and it's sad.

First of all, the problem of SMN having more identities still persists. What are we now? Channelers? Trance mages? Geomancers? Elementalists? Pokemon trainers?
Why do we summon creatures that leave after a big attack, creatures that stay with us for a while and a creature that stays with us until we tell it to get lost? A creature that can only cast a buff and a shield and mainly looks menacingly at the enemy, while we exercise wind, fire and earth magic?

Aetherflow managed to 1) still be in the game 2) still be bloated for no reason (how did Energy Siphon and Painflare managed to survive?) 3) completely disconnected from everything. Ruin IV is even worse. What was a flexible tool and an important part of SMN's kit, is now just a GCD every minute.
Where's the problem with its identity that hasn't been shown already in lore? Carbuncle is still the initial egi. Instead, the gems are our trances where we can focus our power of the egi - pretty much like crystals summoning a primal. Unlike a real primal, we just borrow their power - sorta like using Dreadwyrm trance and using Bahamut's Aether to channel Deathflare.

The initial summon is an AoE hit basically when channeling the aether to use the gem. Then, we use the crystal as the focus of our power to use their summoned skills - like in all FF series, but different in the sense that we're only borrowing a portion of their power instead of summoning them outright.

Aetherflow lorewise is initally gathering external aether into a gem/crystal and channeling that with a small portion of your aether to activate a stronger geometric spell (fester/plainflare). If you think about it, that's basically what we're doing with the summons in the new SMN except we're gathering a primal's specific aetheric aspect instead. So we're actually going back to our ACN roots, but expanding on its initial aetherflow mechanic. However, unlike the past ACN, the split is different since they're adopting the traditional FF SMN playstyle too - where you're the one who uses the power.

Our pets are still used for utility it seems - so they're support oriented while we're offense oriented. This follows in-line with the current SCH's pet. Maybe in the future we'll get more pet skills, but we'll have to see how the pet AI handles it, since ShB pet AI is still a bit janky.

I say they handled this very well by allowing pets to co-exist, SMN to have big summons, yet still retain the lore and importance of aetherflow gameplay via mini summon phases.