FFXI Summoner VS FFXIV Summoner

[MicahZerrshia]

They cannot for the life of them get pet classes right in this game, which is why my hopes for bst in 7.5x (which I would put money on just going to be blue mage with regulators) and possibly pup later are so low they had to be buried.

XI did so many things so much better, smn being just one of those. That game was handled with so much care that it's staggering when you switch between the two games and go from a beautiful world with well crafted jobs, battles and lore to a world that feels like it was made by taking clippings out of various manga and cramming them together before santizing it so no one feels even slightly uncomfortable. I mean just look at how XI handled Blue Mage to the point it was nearly the perfect iteration of the class from the entire series and seeing how they destroyed it by making it a cute circus side show in XIV that you cannot even use in regular battle.

SMN never stood a chance with the XIV team.

[Carighan]

Having variety would be the more preferrable option for an mmorpg in my opinion. Cater to different kinds of players, and just accepting that not everyone will play a certain things. And to provide that sort of options, it requires maintenance and fixing stuff. This is also why I am not exactly as enthusiastic about beastmaster coming later this expansion, as its limited and that means I can't just queue in roulette as beastmaster and play with all the other jobs.

This is how the general design guideline used to be in old MMORPGs. Yes.

But then in particular after WoW released, a shift happened. Players now expected two things to be roughly universally true:

• All classes can solo enemies in the open world, allowing them to level/grind on their own. Previously, this was a specific upside to some classes (e.g. EQ1 Druid and Necromancer, and later also Bard and Enchanter once players figured it out), usually in turn these were designed to be inherently undesirable or sub-par in groups (compare how the Necro rezz or play dead works in EQ1 compared to Cleric rezz or Monk play dead). So you had to pick a class for playing solo, and that was it. You picked that class. You're not stuck with your solo mode.
• All classes roughly balance in group content. You can play whichever one you desire and by and large, groups are fine with that. This was intentionally not designed that way before. We nowadays complain loudly about a job being 6% ahead in damage, or the gap between the top and worst damage dealer being 12% or so. But keep in mind that back in Ye Olden Games, 50%+ (!) of damage difference was entirely normal, and in fact designed that way. Abilities with 12-70 hour cooldowns existed, flat-out one-shotting what passed for boss enemies back in the days. That was designed that way.

The change in these forces a certain homogenization of design as games age. The older the game gets, the more the designers need to dig deeper into the crate of fight mechanics to find new mechanics and new combinations of mechanics to engage players with, and they also need to crank up the "tightness" further, both in timing and in damage. But this naturally also further and further pushes class design together.

Pet classes in particular fall victim first to this, as the entire idea is that a computer-controlled entitity is doing the "raw output", and you have to guide it around all the bad stuff and heal it when it gets hit. But this is ideally difficult for the players themselves already, nevermind when also having to steer a pet via a click-on-ground cursor. Now of course, pet classes could simply be intentionally excluded from group gameplay, right? But as above, players no longer really accept this design. They want to play Summoner in a raid for example, no matter how intentionally the devs want to design the class to only be for open world solo grinding (to compare the EQ1 Necromancer).

[Manamaru]

Summoner is absolutely up there as one of the most frequently disrespected jobs in the entire game.

Even when the job first came out and they pulled the ‘oh sorry you literally cannot ever have any other summons besides the main 3 sorry not sorry’ bullshit to cover their asses for never adding more (But it’s ok because Summoner is poison mage now!)

They really came straight out the gate with the disrespect to the job; Lunar Bahamut was just the latests in a long line of metaphorical ‘slaps-in-the-face’ to people who actually like Final Fantasy summoners. Where are the countless iconic final fantasy summons the game has to draw from? Like none of them are even remotely referenced by Summoner lol. You can’t even summon a Chocobo to kick the enemy, how is this an FF Summoner?!

It genuinely feels embarrassing to even play it anymore. Like you’re running around with a ‘I’m a clown’ sign stuck to your back. And from what I understand, despite being so brutally ‘sandpapered’, the job still doesn’t perform well. So they sacrificed the job being enjoyable…and gave effectively nothing in return. A hilariously pointless AoE heal tied to Bahamut for absolutely no reason lol

Wait until you find out that the summon, attack, and disappearing animations in level 90+ primal summons are recycled animations from Stormblood's Heaven on High deep dungeon via its magicite system. Since in HoH there's also an Odin magicite with animations, Summoner could've gotten a fresh Odin summon by now. But we didn't.