SMN is now the least popular caster again barely one expansion after its rework

[Supersnow845]

So yeahhhhhhh SMN is now a distant last in popularity amongst the casters with every other Carter having near twice the amount of clears and RDM having almost 4 times the clears (it’s even the least popular in casual dungeons and in the alliance raid)

Is this a sign that the rework was a failure? Or that reworks based on popularity aren’t always the most important thing?

How do they justify SMN’s changes as good in the longer term if all it took was one new caster and a few balance changes to send it to the bottom again

[brinn12]

The developers always protect themselves by buffing most jobs they release or rework. SMN was strong and popular in Endwalker, and that was no coincidence. BLM got unpopular changes? Just push it to the top of the charts again while PCT gets deleted. More people play the job, so they consider the changes a success. Meanwhile, the veteran player count drops.

What bothers me the most is MCH's terrible state for three consecutive expansions without any action taken from SE. Things could always get worse for SMN.

[Jeeqbit]

RDM was very popular in Stormblood. That didn't really last once the popularity wore off. Over time, I stopped seeing them much.

SMN was obviously very popular in Endwalker given the rework and its simplicity.

I think what has changed now is obviously the release of PCT, which is now popular instead as of Dawntrail. I'm also seeing A LOT of BLMs since its rework compared to immediately prior, suggesting that people like that it's simpler now and are playing it more. Every dungeon, alliance raid, are being filled with BLMs now, and I've been doing Mentor Roulette as a BLM too. I'm seeing us as double BLM in many dungeons, it's crazy!

I think what went wrong with SMN was just adding a summon that wasn't an exciting addition and just makes the rotation slightly annoying more than anything, so it's lost out on the excitement factor compared to PCT being new, BLM being reworked, and RDM even has lots of extra (fixed) procs added that make it more busy than it was. If they'd added Ramuh, Shiva and Leviathan maybe it would be a different story.

There will always be a "least popular" given jobs such as MNK and BLM have held that position. Especially within the same role. I think a good example is BRD, which hasn't fundamentally changed what actual buttons you're pressing much since Stormblood, just their underlying function, yet it became less popular after DNC relased and MCH was reworked. It wasn't that BRD was fundamentally that different in what you press, but now there were these other two enticing jobs in the same category to take a huge chunk of the popularity.

[Supersnow845]

There will always be a least popular job, that nobody can deny. My point was kinda “if we keep reworking jobs based on what’s the least popular then are we ever going to get anywhere other than just pissing off old veterans of the jobs” considering SMN is already so unpopular again and even PCT is feeling the pain of these changes crashing its play rate

Shouldn’t jobs be changed and added to based on what they need and what their players want, not this constant roulette of which job is least popular; especially since RDM is now the most popular caster in high end content and it didn’t do anything, the other three just kept shooting themselves in the foot

[Jeeqbit]

Shouldn’t jobs be changed and added to based on what they need and what their players want, not this constant roulette of which job is least popular

It would be easy to think they do reworks based on job popularity, but I don't think they do. None of their MNK changes ever seem to truly make people want to attack with fists, so they often just left it alone beside the sort of changes they did to every other job, like removing upkeep timers. And they left BLM this long despite it often being too hard for the "majority of players" to bother with.

I think that it's not to make them more popular, necessarily, but to "reduce pain points" that cause people difficulty or make them quit. An obvious example is all the upkeep timers, which some players simply would fail to keep up because they aren't really gamer types and just doing the MSQ or playing for social reasons. Or tank stances, where half of players would use tank stance 100% of the time because they believed it made sense, since they're a tank, whereas DPS-oriented tanks would use their DPS stance almost 100% of the time and put a probably-unintended burden on the healer with auto attacks. Or the reputation Monk had for positionals, which didn't help its lack of use in duties, since if we're honest, a lot of players don't actually like positionals, and some of them aren't aware positionals exist.

A lot of it comes down to SE "solving perceived problems and pain points" and to be fair, I could see all these "problems and pain points" myself prior to them being addressed, since it's obvious when average players in dungeons are struggling with these sort of things. That is true of BLM as well. As much as it was fun the way it was, there were mechanics that could make it difficult to really attack at all for ages, even after all the Triplecasts and instant casts were used, and the timer running out due to mechanics did happen more in modern content (the threat of which is what people liked about it of course), but the fact is it was a lot more likely to happen as they tried to speed up the DDR mechanics and not leave anywhere safe for an extended period of time.

The SMN rework seemed to start with the complaints of its previous iteration being "overwhelming" for SMN mains where they tried to reduce how busy it was, addressing weave issues and removing the penalty for attacking without DoTs up. So they contended with a problem that had been building for a long time, where it was fighting between its identity as a DoT/flow mage and its identity as a Summoner, and didn't have wiggle room for growing in expansions without becoming "overwhelming" again.

So in short, I don't think it's really to do with popularity. They just want to remove pain points and make it easy to understand how to actually play it.

[CidHeiral]

How do they justify SMN’s changes as good in the longer term if all it took was one new caster and a few balance changes to send it to the bottom again

This is the issue with butchering jobs to appeal to the lowest common denominator. You're alienating the people who genuinely loved the job to cater to a crowd that is transient by nature. They move to whatever job is flavor of the month while the former diehard mains of that job are driven away from the game. In the long run it's a net negative.

The funny thing is a very similar scenario to this has already played out in WoW. The devs responded to much of the same feedback you see in this community about button bloat and whatnot by pruning all the classes to almost nothing, which was a very miserable and not fun era. It took years of complaints but they eventually realized they were listening to bad feedback and reversed course. SE seems to have made a similar realization when it comes to the boss design so hopefully they're thinking the same thing about the jobs leading up to 8.0, but I can't say the job design decisions in Dawntrail have given me much hope in that regard.

[Valkyrie_]

This is the issue with butchering jobs to appeal to the lowest common denominator. You're alienating the people who genuinely loved the job to cater to a crowd that is transient by nature. They move to whatever job is flavor of the month while the former diehard mains of that job are driven away from the game..

It's wild to me that the developers seem to just not care whatsoever about their long time loyal playerbase, like I understand Square is a buisness and they need to make money by catering to the new player/casual crowd, but not to the extent you just completely disregard the feelings of the players who have been playing these classes since launch and enjoy the old unique playstyles.

The ironic thing is many of these players the devs are appealing to will either stop playing the game after a while, or if they stick around and play for long enough many will eventually start to look for something more challenging, engaging or unique, but there will be no class left for them to turn to since they've all been butchered and homogenized.

I remember when RDM first released and I was so excited to play a sword mage class with that cool asthetic, but then I quickly realised that while the class was flashy and unique, it was ultimately very simple and not very engaging, I and some others initially complained a bit, but eventually relented and accepted RDM for the simple class that it was.
Why...? because I still had SMN and BLM to turn to, they might not have been the sword mages I wanted but at least every type of player had different classes they could play depending on what level of engagement/complexity they desired.
Why can't we have that anymore? We've been giving the devs money helping the game thrive for years and years, don't we deserve to have the things we enjoy too???

[Astronema]

it just needs a new colored dragon.

[CVXIV]

it just needs a new colored dragon.

There exist enough bahamuts throughout the FF franchise that you could make summoner use exclusively the different versions of bahamut

I think we know what needs to be done here