Quote Originally Posted by Ursa_Vonfiebryd View Post
I understand a lot of the gripe over SMN changes but honestly for the most part, this is how SMN works in almost every other iteration of Final Fantasy, save for FFX. The summoned entity always shows up for a short burst then disappears, leaving the summoner alone on screen for 99% of the time. But FFXIV summoner was never going to be like Yuna summoning the Aeons in FFX. They gave us some pet autonomy, which was nice, and they gave us the ability to tweak our big summon size (bahamut) and egi glams to get cute carby back but it looks like they are finally ripping the bandaid off in Endwalker. Being an old school FF player, I enjoy seeing the full renders for the big attacks, like it used to be. It would have been cool to see egis of some of the other primals but with the way jobs have been handled, I feel like the 5 summons (or summon states now) that summoner has is pretty much all the job can really support, both action and lore wise. In any case, I'll reserve judgement until I get my hands on the job after the expansion goes live. I was good at smn during Stormblood but couldnt quite get the hang of it during Shadowbringers. Hopefully I can reconnect with Endwalker.
How Summoners work in FF is irrelevant because this is a MMO and you can't copy and paste big summons that cast their ultimate and go away and call it a day. Black Mages in FF don't work alternating an ice and a fire phase, yet no one is asking them to rework the job, for example.

This is not the problem, either. The problem is that the job now is completely devoided of depth and complexity. Or anything remotely engaging, really. It looks even easier and boring than 5.X MCH. Almost healers level of complexity, who at least have to worry about health bars.

The bulk of your rotation is composed of four buttons: Ruin III, Tridisaster and the two pet actions. Demi-summons are SMN's inner release with their 11111 spam, primals seems to be different combinations of 1-2. On top of that, you have no DoTs, or debuffs, or buffs to mantain. Movement is braindead because almost everything is instant. There is no resource management.

If this is really how a DPS job will play, I see a panic 6.1 rework to be inevitable. Much like NIN in 5.1 and to a lesser degree SMN itself.