New Summoner looks really nice, but...

[Equitable_Remedy]

they will never fix as people really love

What if—and I'm just wondering here—designing jobs that people love is good, actually?

[Nyarlha]

What if—and I'm just wondering here—designing jobs that people love is good, actually?

Nah you have to design the absolute jankiest job possible, have people cry about the jank, and then have people cry for years on end afterward when you remove said jank because it required "skill".

[CKNovel]

What if—and I'm just wondering here—designing jobs that people love is good, actually?

This is good, but what about removing things that people love?
I'm going to take MCH as an example since it's where I have the most knowledge:

SB Wildfire gave me a good shot of dopamine to execute, but enabling it throught Flamethrower was crap.
Doing the combo on a 1.5s GCD was fun. Problem is that weaving between 1.5s GCD is very hard if you're Australian or Brasilian.

They changed the enabling of Overheat through a button to push, great!
They removed the combo to replace it with a IQ draining 1 GCD spam, not great. Good thing the GR/Ricochet refresh are there.
They kept the time based Overheat and the need to weave between the 1.5 GCD, not great for our Australian/Brazillian MCH friends.

Is it worth to rework a job to please the most people if during the process you ignore its core playerbase? The ones who've been dedicated to the job and actually spent time to dig and find every problems, making relevant feedback?
Even Bahamut's attacks were fixed so they listened to that feedback.

[aveyond-dreams]

Is it worth to rework a job to please the most people if during the process you ignore its core playerbase? The ones who've been dedicated to the job and actually spent time to dig and find every problems, making relevant feedback?

Yes, considering the core base of summoner were the ones who were complaining the loudest that the job was utterly failing in its class fantasy due to its mismatched focus of dots and convoluted mechanics instead of summon magic. They were not ignored, they were finally listened to. The same core playerbase was also cheering the loudest when we saw the details of the rework, only a minority of people are here moaning still that their NASA space simulator job is playable and attractive to normal people now because they’ve been stuck in a bubble for the past decade it seems. Their responses have ranged from hilarious to outlandish and hostile while everyone else has been celebrating the fact that the job is finally where it should be.

When a job that was released 8 years ago manages to upstage both Reaper and Sage in the job trailer and media tour, that’s when you know you’ve succeeded at last. Meanwhile, I guess the old affliction warlock crowd would rather players like me quit the game altogether, they've said it themselves. Hate to break it to them but my main character will go on to main SMN after I finish the msq as Paladin, and I'm boosting the job on at least two more alts. I don't whale this hard very often but after seeing how the job plays now? You better believe I'm willing to spend the money to show SE how in love I am with the 6.0 version of the job.

[Sequora]

Yes, considering the core base of summoner were the ones who were complaining the loudest that the job was utterly failing in its class fantasy due to its mismatched focus of dots and convoluted mechanics instead of summon magic. They were not ignored, they were finally listened to. The same core playerbase was also cheering the loudest when we saw the details of the rework, only a minority of people are here moaning still that their NASA space simulator job is playable and attractive to normal people now because they’ve been stuck in a bubble for the past decade it seems. Their responses have ranged from hilarious to outlandish and hostile while everyone else has been celebrating the fact that the job is finally where it should be.

When a job that was released 8 years ago manages to upstage both Reaper and Sage in the job trailer and media tour, that’s when you know you’ve succeeded at last. Meanwhile, I guess the old affliction warlock crowd would rather players like me quit the game altogether, they've said it themselves. Hate to break it to them but my main character will go on to main SMN after I finish the msq as Paladin, and I'm boosting the job on at least two more alts. I don't whale this hard very often but after seeing how the job plays now? You better believe I'm willing to spend the money to show SE how in love I am with the 6.0 version of the job.

This. I mained SMN from 2.0-4.0 (I did play RDM for most of SB) and played SMN again in 5.0. The entire time I begged for SMN to at the very least, lose the poison magic. It doesn't fit. I would have been fine if they had replaced bio and miasma, with some kind of primal-based elemental DoTs, but this is even better.

This is literally what I was hoping the job would be like since 2.0. Now if we could just get Leviathan, Shiva, and Ramuh, it would be perfect. I'm sure we won't see those until 7.0.

[CKNovel]

This. I mained SMN from 2.0-4.0 (I did play RDM for most of SB) and played SMN again in 5.0. The entire time I begged for SMN to at the very least, lose the poison magic. It doesn't fit.

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.

[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.

[Equitable_Remedy]

Is it worth to rework a job to please the most people if during the process you ignore its core playerbase?

Here's the thing: the forums, Reddit, and Twitter don't represent anything like the core playerbase of anything. A small group of people whining on the forums or on YouTube about a change really doesn't mean that the change was bad.

I'm certainly not arguing that every change is good, but the forums tend to foster a disaster mentality of every change being bad (because the game will be more accessible and fun for filthy casuals or something). The game is more successful now than it has ever been before - maybe class changes since ARR/HW/SB are more than 0% responsible for that.