I'm One Of The Filthiests Of Casuals And Even I Can See How Dumbdown FF14 Has Become!

[Renathras]

Have you looked at monk in like 2 expansions, greased lightning is gone, modern MNK is one of the best designed classes in the game

Uh......

Agree to disagree.

I know we disagree on a lot, but this is one of those most glaring cases. I feel MNK is one of the worst designed classes in the game. It's a total mess that completely upends itself. While most Jobs build on themselves, MNK completely changes how it plays. And Greased Lightning still exists; it's not an upkeep buff that falls off during downtime, but the shorter GCD is absolutely still present and clearly what Raven is talking about there.

But ew, no. MNK? No. It's the absolute least played Job in the game right now by every metric I've seen. It's definitely different - and per my norms, I appreciate and encourage that for those that like it - but very clearly it is NOT a hit with the playerbase. One would think the "best designed classes in the game" would be ones a lot of people would play - on account of them being well designed - not avoid like the plague.

I already addressed this point a couple times with my reply. To recap for your reading pleasure, the different between SMN and MCH are:

If you want an example of a complete tear down and rebuild of mechanics, I'd like to point you to MCH. What did MCH get from ShB to EW? One extra use on cooldown button and a new finisher on their robot pet. Do you see why people have no faith they'd do anything great with SMN or any other job they tore down?

To be fair, Aravell isn't wrong on this. MCH - in 5.0 - was a complete tear down and rebuild. And it was, going to your definition of what that entails, Raven, giving MCH a core concept and identity. Before 5.0, it was kind of all over, but with 5.0, they really made it about Hypercharge, Wildfire, and tools (Battery Gauge/Queen as well as Air Anchor/Drill/etc), which is its theme now. FF6 Edgar with Wildfire and a touch of FF8 Irvine's limit break (Hypercharge where you are also throwing out the oGCDs every other GCD there makes me think of Irvine's LB where you spam the triggers and he shoots his guns to that timing, especially the machine gun version).

That said, MCH is in a good state now that they returned Dismantle to it, and is largely a fun Job that is coherent but takes some effort to optimize. Low skill floor, highish skill ceiling. The only issues at this point are some hokey stuff like Wildfire kind of being pushed to the side, Flamethrower still not being that great despite looking cool, and the ping reliance for Hypercharge in a world where stuff like Clemency gets the stack treatment. Still, it has Scattergun, which is just a fun button to hit. *chuckchuck* And...while I'm actually serious about that, I am the rest as well. MCH 5.0-Present is fine and has plenty going on with the gauges and CDs you're actively juggling and rotating through.

I feel like we're getting to the point of the conversation where we're seeing some people just don't want to be pleased. It's one thing to say SMN is bare bones, but to say that everything else is is just...nonsensical.

And one thing that's funny to me in all these conversations; somehow DNC avoids being mentioned, and it's more slimmed down and boring than MCH is. "Tilania optimization" is a total canard that doesn't support that. And not for the first time, I'll say PLD isn't like GNB at all. I'm not even sure how that one persists.

Can you say for sure that they have a long term vision for SMN beyond "make more summoner and less warlock"?

To be fair, imo, that's a FANTASTIC vision to have...

The less like WoW Lock and more like an actual FF Summoner SMN is, the better.

[Aravell]

To be fair, imo, that's a FANTASTIC vision to have...

The less like WoW Lock and more like an actual FF Summoner SMN is, the better.

I'm not disagreeing with the vision. I like the new aesthetics, I'm just pointing out that their vision for SMN may very well end at "make more summoner and less warlock" without anything beyond that, which would be confirmed/debunked when the 7.0 media tour stuff comes out.