New Summoner looks really nice, but...

[Rika007]

Forgot Edgar used a gun.
Forgot Dark knights could summon their shadow.
Forgot Sage used flying rods to shot at the ennemies while casting greek named spells.
Forgot Bards uses poisons.
Forgot Warriors could spin like monkeys before slamming the ground.
Forgot Dancers would buff their allies (It was often the opposite, they would debuff)
Forgot BLM had a thunder dot.

And so on.
"It doesn't fit" argument ironically doesn't fit in there.

All jobs use the same base but are reimagine to fit their role, the world of XIV and the Dev team vision.
Plus it would be boring to get carbon copy of jobs from previous game.

Except here's the biggest issue every time the 'it doesn't fit' argument comes up. How much it doesn't fit is always 100% in the eye of the beholder and how loud the players get, and then it comes down to the devs to decide what the identity of the job should become. Summoner players real argument wasn't JUST dots being the issue. The general concern almost always boiled down too:

"This job has way too many identities going on, too much pet mechanics, too much DoT upkeep, too much resource management, to long trance play." Etc etc etc... The job was bloated. Wether everyone agreed on what was bloating it, is irrelevant (cause no one did). But most players (and more importantly the Devs themselves) agreed that it was bloated. The dev team specifically said the job had reached a "Breaking point" on what it had going on. Something had to be pruned, and the dev team decided that the easiest thing to take out while still keeping the jobs identity intact was the DoTs (and also the overall pet control, but keeping the flavor of it by basing the entire new theme of the rework on the gems the carbuncles were named after, which I personally find to be pretty cool thematically).

Now we can agree or disagree on if the right thing was removed or not. Personally I love DoTs, and I wanted the Pets to be COMPLETELY axed out of existence, because I ceased to believe that 14 can have a good pet system. But this is still good. It still feels very thematically much like a classic XIV summoner, while also having it's own identity in XIV based on the lore around the Carby's name. The it doesn't fit argument with Summoner was a bit more nuanced then the other jobs, because in reality, Summoner was the one job that even upper level players were asking for things to be removed from, not saved or added too.

[aveyond-dreams]

"It doesn't fit" argument ironically doesn't fit in there.

No one who has a general understanding of how summoners and summon magic work in the Final Fantasy series thinks of a dot poison focused mage when they hear the word “Summoner.” The entire power fantasy of the job revolves around big flashy attacks and powerful entities.

People weren’t asking for a carbon copy, they were asking for thematic consistency. We hear Summoner and think of Rydia, Yuna, and Garnet. Naturally, people want to play something like this:



We do not, nor have we ever, imagined *this* when we think of summoner:



Sadly, up until recently Summoner did in fact feel like a warlock or poison mage, when it should have never been at all. It was aesthetically underwhelming for those of us who know what an actual summoner is and it's gameplay was bad. Crying over old summoner is akin to crying over the loss of tank stance dancing. It's bewildering, but when we point that out we get accused of being casuals or bad at the game and told to leave when we point out the obvious flaws in their logic.

I guess they feel what a lot of us felt in 2013 when they turned one of the most iconic classes in Final Fantasy into a ghost of its former self. Now that it's closer to what it's actually supposed to be, they're all taken by surprise. Their arguments have been torn apart time and time again, and there really is absolutely nothing left to say at this point. Here's one last ancient meme I found, thank goodness come 6.0 it'll be a relic of the past:

[CKNovel]

We hear Summoner and think of Rydia, Yuna, and Garnet. [/IMG]

Rydia is a black mage with summons.
Yuna is a white mage with summons.
Garnet is a white mage with summons.

What XIV designed is a mage with summons.
And to not copy on BLM, they chose to focus on dots.

I do agree that SMN currently has mechanics that don't tie very well to each other.
But BRD has both dots and songs, it works. The point stands.
Sure they would've reworked the dots mechanics for SMN.

The rework is and was needed, as new actions happened, SMN was more and more bloated with unrelated mechanics.
Now it only has one mechanic, summoning. There is definitely rooms for anything else.

Oh and your meme is either old or forgot you actually Summon Bahamut and Phoenix. You will still get the gummy egi before you actually summon the big ones.
Finally the topic is not about SMN being a SMN and how your summons look. It's about the job mechanic.

[aveyond-dreams]

I never thought I'd see Yuna described as a "white mage with summons" instead of a summoner, but now I've seen it all. Not like how that was crucial to the entire plot of FFX. Or something. Anyway.

This just shows how disconnected these two worlds are. Yeah, the egis are sticking around for a while longer but after level 90? And the 7.0 grind up to level 100? We're not going to be seeing much of them at all compared to how they used to just be a permanent eye sore anytime Bahamut or Phoenix isn't available.

I will gladly take the new trance style system over managing dots and pets who don't do as they're told. What a mark of skill that was.

[Sequora]

Forgot Edgar used a gun.
Forgot Dark knights could summon their shadow.
Forgot Sage used flying rods to shot at the ennemies while casting greek named spells.
Forgot Bards uses poisons.
Forgot Warriors could spin like monkeys before slamming the ground.
Forgot Dancers would buff their allies (It was often the opposite, they would debuff)
Forgot BLM had a thunder dot.

And so on.
"It doesn't fit" argument ironically doesn't fit in there.

All jobs use the same base but are reimagine to fit their role, the world of XIV and the Dev team vision.
Plus it would be boring to get carbon copy of jobs from previous game.

My point was that 2.0 summoner had the bulk of the job revolve around poison damage over time with summons being a minor part of the kit. 2.0 summoner isn’t even close to the power fantasy that most of us expected.

SE themselves said that they had to put together the non quickly to get it ready for 2.0.

It was the most highly demanded job.

They copy and pasted from WoW a little too hard.

[Duskane]

I think people need to stop huffing that Miasma to think Rydia and Yuna are a good reason why poison mage should stay

[MercuryD]

I mean, we're more in line with Yuna now if you take Dissidia NT into account.

Also, people keep complaining that "the whiners are the reason SMN is changing" which is absolutely wrong and we know it. SMN was rushed and broken from the get-go and as much as the development team tried to salvage or fix it they ended making things worse in another way. Current SMN was decided in SB to not survive ShB so here we are.

[Donoman]

Dancer and current Machinist are some of the more fun classes in game. 80/20 rule. If reworking these classes to be palatable to most people means the loss of the old mains who for whatever reason were highly attached to the outdated design, so be it. For every old main lost the job gains 10 new ones, with a lot of them being players who otherwise wouldn't have touched the job before because it was in such a weird place compared to the others in game. Old machinist and summoner were at constant war with themselves in terms of gameplay mechanics and class fantasy, until they reached the absolute breaking point where the devs got together and collectively went, "Yeah, there's no way we can do this anymore."

The most logical progression for summoner in 7.0 would be to obtain new primals to summon whether they be in the form of demis, one-off attacks like Ifrit/Garuda/Titan, or one offs that eventually come to replace Fester and Painflare. I do not consider 6.0 summoner an afk job by any means but if I have to choose that between the "nuance" of dot management and pets that don't do what you tell them to do, then me and the majority of the playerbase will choose the job that is simply more fun. I have always found Black Mage far easier to play than 5.0 summoner, because the class has consistently good flow to it instead of being...a mess.

The reality is that summoner was stagnant for far longer than it should have been because they kept doubling down on the dot portion and leaving the summons for last. There is no good reason why their capstone ability in Heavensward was Dreadwyrm Trance instead of a summon. Bahamut in Stormblood took forever to build up to and the same could be said for Pheonix in Shadowbringers, with nothing but egis and dots in between. This makes machinist's old overheating mechanic look better by comparison, a truly astonishing feat.

"Carpal tunnel" and "warlock" summoner will not be missed.

This is the reality. For every old main that quits there will just be more people coming in to take their spot and enjoy what is given. I feel for the people who enjoyed old iterations of jobs, but unless there are mass complaints on certain designs there's no reason for the developers to care when so many other people are enjoying the new changes. I've learned this lesson playing other games. Most of the time being an old timer doesn't do you any justice, you just have to move on.

[dezzmont]

This is the reality. For every old main that quits there will just be more people coming in to take their spot and enjoy what is given. I feel for the people who enjoyed old iterations of jobs, but unless there are mass complaints on certain designs there's no reason for the developers to care when so many other people are enjoying the new changes. I've learned this lesson playing other games. Most of the time being an old timer doesn't do you any justice, you just have to move on.

You also have to be able to form a positive relationship with new players. One of the most damaging things that can happen to a community is people deciding new people who are excited to play and have a unique perspective on problems as new players are just complainers who need to 'get good' or 'play a different class.' You don't complain if you don't care, after all, and SMN got a LOT of complaints.

SMN was an interesting job with a cool gamefeel, it wasn't like MNK where the attachment to how it worked was purely based on an exclusionary sort of joy at other people not being able to enjoy it. But SMN is one of the jobs that really needs to instantly be a Job that evokes a 'Wowzers, I am really a final fantasy summoner' feeling, because it was a job so heavily associated with the FF brand as a whole, and old SMN didn't cut the mustard there because of just how little thematic and visual emphasis it put on actual summons.

[ItMe]

I found this new Larryzaur video (from earlier today) on the subject to be rather illuminating and valuable.

I encourage those with reservations for the rework to give it a watch. It's not even 8 minutes long.

https://youtu.be/-uk-4VaET6A