Quote Originally Posted by Renathras View Post
[That said: I like Goring's animation WAY better than Royal Authority, which is probably my least favorite melee attack animation IN THE ENTIRE GAME. I'd much rather they use Goring's animation for Royal. Makes me think of the Armor Break Knight attacks from Final Fantasy Tactics.]
It's one of my biggest problems with continually trimming and trimming skills from kits but without giving us any kind of 'skill glamour' system to offset the times when the visual "upgrade" du jour looks horrendous. As memeworthy as it was to kill Selene but allow Eos to wear her skin, I think I'm glad they at least left us the option.

It's like SMN; for all the flack it gets, you can move the three Primals around and use them in whatever order you deem most beneficial. It may not seem like much, but it makes the rotation more dynamic/less static, gives the player some agency in how they want to play out their rotation, and allows an at least slightly meaningful choice on the part of the player.
I guess I just find such a definition of 'choice' to be so constrained as to not merit the word. You have the 'choice' to do damage, or to do damage, or to do damage, but you can do those damages in any order that suits you! Yippee!

As much as a certain segment of the population claims that SMN 'finally feels like a Final Fantasy summoner', I find this to be wrong, and mostly based on surface-level assessments of aesthetics and visuals. (Speaking of visuals, why do we have to wait until endgame to summon an actual summon instead of a chicken nugget? Talk about failing to give new players little reasons keep playing...)

Pre-6.0 SMN, much derided as 'discount WoWlock' with its three pets where you actually wanted a different one for different situations, actually felt like a (small, scuffed) mirror of the versatility of the classic FF mechanic -- which as you recall, saw summons like Sylph and Kirin and Starlet for healing, Golem and Phantom and Carbuncle and Zoneseek for protection, Cerberus to buff your spellcasting, Doomtrain and Stray and Siren for enemy debuffing, and on and on and on.

Old SMN was a passable inheritor of the legacy in spirit, if not visuals. New SMN feels like a non-Final Fantasy-player's idea of what a Final Fantasy summoner does.