Quote Originally Posted by rewd View Post
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.
It's not irrelevant though, because the devs are finally trying to peel away from the old WoW cookie cutter classes and make something more traditionally FF. This game was built on the Lore and success of its predecessors, and while some people would have picked it up simply because it was the 'new' MMO of the time, a lot of people came over because of franchise itself. I was one of them. And I pretty much HATE how Black Mage works. It's still basically WoW Arcane Mage, and when I first took up the game, I was expecting the Black Mage that I was used to from the many many other FF games I had played. Needless to say, it was not that. I eagerly await the day that Black Mage becomes more like the 'Choose Your Own Adventure Mage' it has been previously--actually, kind of like BLU is now. (Yes, it will suck to 'relearn' my main job but an old school FF player like me still remembers having to learn a completely new battle system each new game--especially if it was a new console).

With all the tearing down and reworking of other jobs, SMN was certainly due. I feel for those who put down the class due to the changes but I'm actually looking forward to it. I've liked what I've seen so far.