Rotations: Making them DIFFERENT

[vetch]

Your prior post and argument was that new SMN isn't like Final Fantasy Summoners are and that the old one was more like them.

That's close to it, but no. My prior argument is that I believe people are saying new SMN feels like a FF summoner based on visuals, which feels facile and incorrect to me.

I didn't care for the DoTs, but I liked commanding my summons to hit things, which made up for it. Being filled with ruby arcanum juice so I can use [Renamed Ruin III] twice and a gapcloser (???) for some reason, doesn't. I don't want to weave in and out of melee combat when I load up SMN. I would have loaded RDM if that's what I wanted.

Old felt more summoner-y to me because it was more like 'o magical beast, hearken to my will and punch that guy while I stand over here in safety'. Remember, I consider Old a 'small, scuffed mirror' of what I feel a FF Summoner is, not a faithful representation.

I also go on to attack SMN's thematic tie-ins themselves as lacking across both iterations, but just in case, you should not take that as me rescinding my personal opinion on the underlying mechanics of old vs. new. Rather you should treat it as a secondary assertion that people are prepared to accept too little from these developers.

You can talk about Vit 0 Doomtrain - did old SMN have Vit 0 Doomtrain? No. No it did not. So it's irrelevant to the comparison/discussion between the two.

Like that. That was not a point made in support of old SMN's versatility, it was an observation about how the job's job flavor is weaker than it could be. Am I a summoner, or am I a vanilla buff-flinger?

Indeed, it was arguably less versatile before since you had to swap Egis for AOE vs single target vs loltanking (once pets couldn't be targeted anymore), where new SMN can do the AOE/single target (and loltanking) without having to swap out anything at all.

This ties into a tangent, actually, which has been on my mind off-and-on since I started playing. First, I'll reiterate the relevant point: being able to swap between the summons was more versatile than being required to cast them all.

Let me explain in more depth with an example.

Do you ever do old content, like Garuda EX, or Mog EX, or T7, or A1S, and your DNC or MCH or WHM clips one of the adds that you absolutely must not clip and wipes the raid, because an oGCD AoE is part of their normal raid rotation? The solution in those cases is learning to hold that cast until it's safe.

New SMN can't do that. It's so packed with obligate AoEs, at so many fixed intervals, at every levelcap, that it literally constrains fight design just by existing. Even in ARR you lose a bunch of DPS doing it and it feels absolutely awful. Old SMN, though? It could do it in ARR/HW levelcaps with the kind of clever shuffling you've extolled in new SMN. Spend both Ifrit-Assault 2s and Enkindle first, let them recharge while the add is active, lose 0 DPS. At higher levels, it would lose some DPS and some gameplay feel to delaying skills, but nothing on the order of what new SMN experiences.

Now, this is heavily reflective of my biases because it's formed by my experience in ARR/HW content, but that's my favorite content in the game, so tough cookies, I suppose. But if you only ever want your bosses to cast DDR patterns on the floor and for any adds to die on sight, sure, new SMN works fine.

If you ever want to design a new fight featuring anything more technical and clever to do with adds, though? Old SMN would have been pressed but could have done it, possibly with a little bit of DPS loss depending on the levelcap. New SMN lacks the versatility to handle it at every levelcap without losing massive DPS. I would not run 6.0 SMN in T7S, or any hypothetical future fight with tight add control requirements, under any circumstances short of someone offering to pay me real money.

You could say that with the amount of obligate AoEs in the game now, on multiple jobs, that it seems like they have no intention of doing anything clever with adds, ever again, but if so, why waste precious button slots splitting Shoha from Shoha 2 and Edge of Darkness from Flood of Darkness? I'm not sure that it's a foregone conclusion.

Also please note that they recently changed fights at lower levels as part of the dungeon revamps and actually removed a couple fun fights like this (old Snowcloak Yeti and Keeper of the Lake Einhander), so this isn't just a matter of cool ideas being stillborn at max level. We don't know what revamps will come to low-level content in the future, but if they're all DDR-patterning striking dummies, I will be... vexed.

And note again, before we disembark from this tangent, that this is only one facet of what I would consider 'versatility', but one which old SMN very appreciably has over new SMN: it can choose not to cast an AoE without being reduced to a one-button joke job.

[Eorzean_username]

You could say that with the amount of obligate AoEs in the game now, on multiple jobs, that it seems like they have no intention of doing anything clever with adds, ever again, but if so, why waste precious button slots splitting Shoha from Shoha 2 and Edge of Darkness from Flood of Darkness? I'm not sure that it's a foregone conclusion.

Just to quickly comment on this one thing:

Sadly, Yoshida already covered this in a Live Letter or pre-expansion interview or something. Searching for a specific Yoshida interview / stream is always an exercise in information-seeking torture, but to paraphrase from memory, it was something like:

"We noticed that a lot of times players in Dungeons weren't using their AOEs very much. So we thought, what if we give everyone more AOEs, and make it more obvious that you're supposed to use them? And so that's why we decided to expand on AOE skills so much, so players could have more fun in content like that."

That's extremely heavily-paraphrased (please don't consider it a citable source), but that was the basic vibe: the AOE bloat since ShB has been implemented specifically with "having fun" in Dungeons / trash pulls as the design intent.

[Renathras]

That's close to it, but no. My prior argument is that I believe people are saying new SMN feels like a FF summoner based on visuals, which feels facile and incorrect to me.

Ah, I see.

I think the disconnect is you're fundamentally misunderstanding the argument, then.

To me, what makes a Summoner in Final Fantasy is GENERALLY that you use these big spells to unleash a big blast of damage via a summoned creature, with some iterations (namely more recent ones) having the Summoner and Summon occasionally fighting side by side for a time. FF12 and I think FF11 did the side by side thing, FF10 did the thing like having Bahamut or Phoenix on the field (though in that case you directed their actions, but this is probably the closest FFXIV can get to that), FF16 has the "you take on the powers of the Summon" element (the Gemshine and Astral Flow abilities VERY MUCH to me seem like a proto-very caster oriented-version of FF16's gameplay), and there's also the big blasts of damage like FF15, FFTactics, FF9, FF8, FF7, and FF6 between the initial Primal hits and Deathflare/Akh Morn/Revelation from Enkindle and Bahamut's Astral Flow.

I think the problem is you assume that people talking about this are all shallow. They're probably thinking about it on a deeper level than you give them credit, and so it's causing you to misunderstand their argument and thus reach the wrong conclusion.

This is a common thing from people who don't like new SMN to assume everyone who does is shallow/lazy/doesn't care about combat/etc.

Maybe if people did that less, they'd see why there's a disconnect between them and others, as I think that's where your disconnect lies. [Semi, as you can see above, is a particularly bad offender in this category of action.]

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Couple other points:

1) Agree that fight design is an issue. I've said so many many times, so you're preaching to a choir in agreement with me here.

2) I would like to hear some of these other facets of what you would consider versatility.

3) The AOE thing I think I see what you mean, you mean the initial Summon hits. I'm trying to think of any cases where that's an issue now, since Tanks have to pull the adds apart in most fights where you're supposed to focus them, and the only fight that springs right to mind where hitting an add is bad is Pharos Sirius with the bird boss that has the eggs and enrage mechanic. But the Summon AOE's are small enough to not hit those, generally? This also seems to be more a reflection of modern fight design. You point out Shoha 2 and Edge vs Flood, but I can also point out all of RDM's formerly single-target big attacks are now AOE as well. So any fight designed with adds everywhere that you can't hit, RDM couldn't use Holy/Flare/Scorch/Resolution or Contre Sixte. PLD's burst includes mandatory AOE Swords, WAR's Primal Rend, GNB's Double Down and Bow Shock, etc etc.

Honestly, they seem to do this randomly from Job to Job, like RDM and SMN have automatic AOE, but BLM doesn't. I have no idea the logic behind those choices, but it doesn't seem isolated to SMN.

But yes, I'd like to hear the other forms of versatility. Surely it's not just the one?