Adding complexity to SMN

[Carighan]

Thanks for at least trying to set that right.

Yeah, sure, Summoner is a very low-complexity job. But it's not without depth, as you say. Titan-in-buffs vs Titan-for-mobility is like a damaging-gapcloser decision on tanks, only with a pre-selection-timer, which is kinda neat. Weighty mid-fight player choice to make. Not super brainy of course, but still needs more braincells to perform than people give it credit for, maybe because making the wrong choice has a rather low penalty attached and we're used to seeing Summoners near the bottom and hence don't truly notice the difference in someone optimizing that vs not doing it.

More noticable now with M5S of course. The near-constant mobility in that fight makes correctly sequencing your minors a bigger deal than in many other fights. Low as the outcome effect of that correct choice will still be.

But yeah people keep exaggerating Summoner in simplicity. More so because people also never differentiate complexity and depth, thinking of the two as the same when in particular FFXIV struggles hard with a ton of complexity (mostly via button bloat, extremely so comparing other similar games) versus very little depth (all static rotations with pseudo-static solutions). So the teensy tiny bit of depth the correct sequencing of minor summons adds on Summoner while having such low complexity is actually really cool to see. High depth + low complexity is the top design result after all.

[Dahlinea]

But yeah people keep exaggerating Summoner in simplicity. More so because people also never differentiate complexity and depth, thinking of the two as the same when in particular FFXIV struggles hard with a ton of complexity (mostly via button bloat, extremely so comparing other similar games) versus very little depth (all static rotations with pseudo-static solutions...

I think most of the criticism on SMN's simplicity don't come from mixing complexity and depth. Some players complain because they compare it to what it was before the rework, where the devs stripped it of almost everything (mechanically wise) and gave basically nothing in return, me included in this group. Some other players complain because they were expecting the so called "base to expand upon" to realize in this expansion but that never came and SMN stayed basically the same as it was in Endwalker.