A Review of the Dawntrail Job Changes 

personally I think black mages are made because pictomancer is so fun and colorful; it's reminding them of their youths.

I am a Monk main who is upset because it is tradition to be mad every expac

My SMN beef is either go technical or go pretty. If it's the simplest job, then give it the aesthetic people want. Make it pretty and vapid.

The point that I’ll disagree with you on as a long time SMN main is not that people necessarily thought that the job would all of a sudden become more complicated but instead that they would build more upon the new foundation they laid in Endwalker. Really, the main thing I wanted to see where three new regular summons for half the rotation. They could even mostly play the same with one focusing on big casts while the other two were more or less insta-cast spammers. They could’ve given these flashy new animations which gave the ILLUSION that the job actually played differently when it was more or less the same and the vast majority of current SMN players would have been satisfied.

SMN being simple doesn't mean it has to be without flavor. It's atrociously bland compared to what it could have been. Three more summons to complete the set of primals and a new summon like Alexander or Odin.

The lower level consequences of the umbral ice mp changes hadn't even occurred to me. The best fix for that problem would probably be to massively lower the level of umbral soul.

I've been playing for over 10 years, things change, I just roll with it. I play what feels good and I never one-trick "main" anything. Sometimes I shelf a job I love for most of an expansion, sometimes a job that feels bad early in an expansion gets fixed midway through. Just relax and push the buttons, no need to have a dedicated monogamous relationship with jobs.

I don't want to come across as aggressive, but saying the AST cards have an identity now is misunderstanding what the job currently is and has been. Don't want to do a whole rant but having a card that shields and another that heals is the worst thing they could've done, it's just another charge of ED and CI lol. Cards are now a worse Aetherflow with a card skin.

I'm a monk main who actually heavily welcomes the changes being made, and I couldn't care less about the nonstandard rotations because there's still several nonstandard rotations that can be had. The changes to brotherhood and overcapping chakra will help prevent creating bad habits of gcd clipping, and more than that; because of the overcapping, you won't have to be as aggressive with it either; so this would actually provide more comfortable leeway into heavily increasing the overall gcd speed; the only caveat being that there's no dot to benefit from a high skillspeed stat. I couldn't care less if we kept the twin snakes and demolish timers or not. Those don't matter to me because I already mastered my rotation to keep those up without ever having to >look< at them anymore. More than that however, I'm actually heavily disappointed in the other monk mains I've seen about this dilemma because most of them are angry about the skill floor being lowered. and every time I think about it, I take a look at myself, and then back to them and I say "The skill floor literally doesn't exist for us. Why should we care?" Because the notion is just a huge blanket in denial for being extremely weirdly gate-keepy. And I've been called actual slurs for this. Very disappointed in them for this. I welcome the changes. Only argument I have with the changes is that the trait for the new skills replaces the actual bootshine/truestrike/snappunch instead of using the acquired beast sigils to augment them INTO those skills. But considering we won't find ourselves actually using those without the buffs, it's in reality a non-issue. And I cannot begin to stress how much all these changes, potencies, could be changed in the final build. Those new riddle abilities we're getting will fit in fine and will make monk actually way stronger.

I’m going to disagree with your points on summoner. I have been maining it since 2.0, and it wasn’t until 6.0 that it was the “easy caster”. It feels bad that a job that used to be considered one of the more technical was simplified to this level. Red mage is also on the simple side and used to fit into the “easy job slot”.

I confess I have a bias due to having enjoyed summoner pre rework for several expansions and being a fan of the job in older FF titles. But what was a complex job prior to EW has been reduced to babies first spell caster. What should be represented as technically difficult (rotating through numerous summons and using their abilities) is now mundane and unexciting. And I do kinda agree with the 'it's another bahamut and should've another demi or more summons' argument. The EW rework ideally was the blueprint but I guess it didn't pan out. There are other simple starter jobs, why'd they murder my boi :(

As someone who learned and loves Freestyle (non-standard) Monk, the issue isn't the guiders on the GCDs, those are actually really nice and make the job a lot less daunting, it's the loss of the double DoTs. Monk has basicslly three (four, but one is very situational) rotations: Normal but you drift a ton, a looping rotation with some small forced losses to loop, and the freestyle rotation you have full control over. Playing freestyle means managing your DoT timers effectively to line them up with Riddle of Fire, and it leads to very interesting situations like how you actually WANT to double refresh Twin Snakes before the last Demolish going into RoF, so that you can do your full PB combo and resume from Oppo (highest damage) without dropping the damage buff. There's also situations where you actually want to Demolish instead of AoE and mix up both single-target and AoE rotarions. The monk changes basically eliminate all of this. It'll play about the same as freestyle, but you no longer have to worry about any of those little complexities because they're just gone. There's one rotation, there's no more timers to take care of, no more interesting tech, no more insane skill expression and high skill ceiling. Is the job dead? Absolutely not. Is it going to be less fun? Probably not that much, honestly. But it's a completely incomprehensible step backwards from a job that was imo already perfect, and it's definitely overcompensating for Monk's image as the hardest melee/job.

Monk mains are mad just to upkeep the tradition of them being mad every expac launch. I personally love the changes.

I'm honestly gonna miss the Paradox Rotation on Black Mage, just for the fact that it allowed for easy uptime in cases where heavy movement was needed....sure you need both of your Triplecast stacks and your Swiftcast to do it, but it was so satisfying to pull of 10 spells while on the run. I just hope that with the changes, there are still ways to keep at least reliable uptime during movement mechanics, though with Triplecast, Paradox and maybe High Thunder being instant cast, and with Swiftcast being a 40s cooldown instead of 60s makes it seem like it's still possible.

RE Summoner, I think the real issue with me is that the new summon just doesn't really fit. Instead of replacing normal Bahamut, it instead crams normal Bahamut and Phoenix into the one-minute windows, and takes over the opener and 2-minute entirely. It also looks, imo, quite goofy, and at least thus far, as functionally zilch for lore basis. It would have been _so easy_ for them to make the gems that you get after Phoenix swap into Ramuh, Leviathan, and Shiva. They could even make them essentially mechanical clones of the existing Titan, Ifrit, and Garuda, with one having a pair of long casts with a two-GCD combo Favor, one having for short-GCD instants with a long-cast Favor, and one having four normal instant GCDs with weaved Favors. They could give those subtle flavor differences, or they could literally just be SFX reskins with the same mechanical effect, and honestly _it would have felt better_ to me. That would at least lean into the "Summoner" archetype, and the existing gameplay build-up over the levels. This weird sword-winged second Bahamut that they just sorta sledge-hammered into the job feels not even half-assed, but something some intern cooked up on a lunch break when they realized they'd forgotten to write down anything for Summoner at all.

Saying summoner has been made purposly simple for casual players feels a little dismissive. Im sure even casual players want some sort of challenge 😂

I'm honestly fine with summoner's simplicity, but still, no new summons minus Blue Eyes White Bahamut, is very disappointing. We wanted more gem phases, not another Demi-phase.

SMN main here. I played back when "SMN is for casuals" was not true and still lament the days of complex dot weaving nad multi-target optimization, but I've resolved to let it go. The biggest complaint I have is that there are many, many janky elements of Summoner that are leftover from the job's inception back in 2.0 that still haven't been addressed, especially when playing SMN below level 60. It honestly feels like they couldn't find a good way to parcel out the abilities to make the job feel like it has a functional rotation before getting Dreadwyrm Trance. If the job really is meant for casuals and new players, I think it's *especially* important that the level-up process is clean and easy, and not just that it has a pretty butt-simple max level rotation. And to my knowledge, they still haven't fixed Physic.

I started playing in ShB and became a SMN main because I fell in love with it. The changes in EW caught me off guard, but I kept playing because I liked the job aesthetic. Also, yes, it was nice to have a casting job that I didn't have to spend much time thinking to play, but I would give that up in a heartbeat to get old SMN back. Realistically, the one change I really hope they give the job is a useful healing spell to replace Physick. They could even put a long cooldown or a high MP cost, so we can't replace a healer, but I would really like to have that utility, which right now only RDM has.

I understand the business case for standardising jobs and their rotations - to make the game as accessible as possible to the largest number of players (particularly new and returning players) and to reduce potential toxicity as a result of either (a) not including a class in your party because it doesn't have a particular ability or (b) shaming players for not min-maxing their rotations or discovering those hidden synergies. The above said, I don't agree with the approach. It essentially turns us into a bunch of interchangeable robots who push buttons in a specific order. We are differentiated in our ability to deal with complex mechanics in Savage fights and such, but for me multitasking is not a function of intelligence. I enjoy when a game allows questions like "how should I adapt my rotation for this particular fight?" rather than accepting that a rotation is just something to distract you in the background while all the real mechanics are happening in the fight and it will always be exactly the same. You know, back in my day (1.0), I had to actually think about how to use a job (like Summoner). *cough* cough

Thank you for making this video for those of us whose eyes glaze over when reading tool tips

I love how with Summoner it was that this job just isn't for you anymore but Black Mage is an issue.

On the topic of dancer, Standard Finish does combo into Last Dance, making doing Standard Step on cooldown still a dps gain over doing filler gcds. But, of course, potencies subject to change for launch.

I started playing 14 in ShB because of SAM, loved it then but was put off by it in EW (before Kaiten was removed) and never really had a reason to play it. But these DT changes have me scratching my head? They get rid of unique gauge spenders going into EW with only 10/20/25spenders (later reduced to 10/25), just for them to REINTRODUCE a 50 kenki spender but make the original 50 kenki spenders (that were made 25 kenki in EW) 60 seconds? It just feels super redundant to me, like where is the job actually going?

Black Mage being made slightly easier is nice for me as it was slightly harder than I'm comfortable with during Endwalker.

The issue why monks main are mad is because optimal drift is dead and now the job have an easy to understand rotation

About smn: Rdm was already there as the "easy caster", that's part of what pissed people off. There was no need for a job change like this, making a new job the "easy" job would have been less painful

As a fan of new SMN, I disagree with the SMN portion of this video. I think new SMN fans just wanted to see *a* gameplay change this expansion instead of just visual changes to existing moves. We're summoners, we wanted new skins on the *summons* (complete with new quirks for Astral Flow and Gemshine), not a new skin on Dreadwyrm Trance. A new Bahamut is the least interesting change they could have made and, personally, I don't like the Allagan design so an Allagan Bahamut is 🤷🏽‍♂

11:58 YES. I COMPLETELY AGREE. Thanks for this video, have been so tunnel visioned forgot to look at everything else coming for DT. One thing I was thinking about looking at all the new toys Healers and Tanks got was that I think Yoshi-P has had enough of us and is going to kill us. I hope the new fights make good use of all the new mit/healing abilities.

What we smns wanted was levi,ramuh Shiva after bahamut set of 3 lol we weren't asking fir complexity we were wanting the next set we been waiting 10 years 4 lol

SMN has literally zero room for skill expression, which in my opinion is something that every other job has

Can spell speed offset the requirement of 3 fire 4s on each side of paradox or am I missing something.

Regarding Monk, what I'm worried about is that the burst windows is now much less interesting. Before, you had to worry about how your timers were aligned before entering burst. Because you wanted to do Lunar/Phantom Rush right after refreshing the buff/dot, and Solar when they both needed to be refreshed, your decision of whether to go for Solar or Lunar first when you had to do both was a significant one, and you'd sometimes have to refresh Twin Snakes early or enter Perfect Balance at unusual times to make things work just right. I think now that's not really going to be the case any more, because you just use the builder if you need balls, and the spender if you have balls. I love all the other job changes, the Monk job gauge actually showing helpful information, Six Sided Star consuming excess chakra, increased chakra cap during Brotherhood, all great stuff. Trying to stay positive, since I won't know for sure how I feel about it until I actually try it, but those are my concerns.

The algorithm needs to be pleased, comment necessary

Unpopular opinions, high dps classes should be more challenging to play.

There seems to be some sort of miscommunication where people think only the old SMN mains dislike these changes. The thing you have to understand is that even us who like simple EW SMN are disappointed in what we got for DT. No one wanted another Bahamut, we wanted Ramuh/Leviathan/Shiva. Or heck, even Demi-Hydaelyn, even that would have sufficed. At least that would make more sense than this random non-existent Allagan Bahamut knowing how to use Exodus. We also gained a visual upgrade for Fester but not one for Pain Flare??? So in AoE I don't even get to look at a new animation for my Aetherflow? Not to mention, the loss of the extra 10 seconds on searing light making it so the first primal we choose after Bahamut doesn't matter anymore because it's no longer in the buff window, or the fact that saving searing light when 2 SMNs are in the party is now the equivalent of asking "Hey other SMN, can you drift your 600 pot follow up attack for a minute? Thanks." Please do not be under the impression that all of us who enjoy new SMN are singing Sol Bahamut's praises, because most of us aren't. Otherwise, good video.

"SMN isn't for the hardcore player who wants to optimize" *laughs in 2.0 SMN Main* Summoner being simple AF is a relatively new thing, so I'm gonna just say it; I think you're the one who's missing the point, @Siffus

Okay, so I'm a midcore MNK main who's mostly mixed on the changes but I do understand why they aren't well received by some Monks. Basically, the new Ball system is not equivalent to the old Buff/DoT system. With the Buff/DoT system, you had to keep up those timers even when in Perfect Balance spamming DK/Bootshine because if either dropped you would lose DPS. That meant that, especially in progging fights, there was a lot of improvisation in order to keep all the buttons you needed in the Riddle of Fire window without any buffs dropping. With the Ball system, buffs granted by Ball gainers (DK, Twin Fang, Demolish) are local to those combo steps. If you are doing a Lunar PB window alternating Oppo-Oppo skills, you don't have to worry about anything else as the Balls you have already gained don't have a time limit. This not only limits the funky MNK optimal brainrot rotations, like optimal drift, it also makes your burst windows a lot more linear. Personally, I wish they'd have just turned those buff timers into the new job guage and left it at that. I understand why they did things the way they did, and I do like the Reply skills quite a bit, but the main combo changes kind of misunderstand the fun of the job imo.

The monk changes do dumb down monk a bit, and it's not really in how you see information. The rotation for monk has now been streamlined making it so drift and looping are no longer a consideration. For example, you don't need to consider how long you have until your Disciplined Fist falls off, because the buff is no longer there, so there is no risk of messing up the order of a perfect balance and having your finisher fall outside of Disciplined Fist. The same goes for the dot, which you don't consider anymore when using riddle of fire, and you also do not consider in multi target scenarios. The current media tour monk has removed fail states from current monk, while also streamlining the rotation, removing the more complex ones that people could learn to optimize monke play. It is similar to how the black mage changes have removed a lot of the thinking involved in executing their rotation, while also removing the non standard play

These are the skill that will be deleted or change in Dawntail 7.0 Dark Knight [Blood Weapon(delete), Delirium(delete), Plunge(delete)] Gunbreaker [Rough Divide(delete)] Dragoon [Dragon Sight(delete), Spineshatter Dive(delete)] Ninja [Huton(effects will change), Huraijin(delete)] Samurai [Kaeshi: Higanbana(delete), Shoha(effects will change), Shoha 2(delete)] Bard [Wanderer's Minuet(effects will change), Mage's Ballad(delete), Army's Paeon(effects will change) Black Mage [Sharpcast(delete)] Astrologian [Minor Arcana and Draw(effects will change), Redraw(delete), Astrodyne(delete)]

It's not just about standard vs. nonstandard rotation. It's about FREEDOM. Black mage had the freedom to mold their rotation around the fight, or around a death, etc. That freedom, like every other player optimization since Shadowbringers, is deemed unworthy to exist. They've lost their way with job design; let's hope they can turn it around with the 7.2/8.0 job update

As someone who played and enjoyed SMN until Endwalker I will say this: S-E took away the identity of the summoner job, which was to apply and spread DoTs and to synergize with various pets. That identity is completely dead. They replaced that very unique identity with a job that's VERY simple, kind of "baby's first DPS job," and now the appeal of the job is that you get bigger, flashier summons that look like mini primals instead of floating lumps. So now it's a flashy, dumb job, and they had an opportunity to make it more interesting, or more flashy, and they did neither one. In reality, they *could* have kept the job identity in EW AND made it flashy, and most summoners would have *loved* that. They didn't do that, okay, much sad, but people who want that already stopped playing it so no big deal. They should have made it sexier though! Now, it's still the most-played job and will probably remain the most-played, because *easy* is *good* when you're trying to learn hard / new content, but that doesn't mean it's a well-designed job. It just means that the job is a good crutch.

So is transposing rotation impossible in new exp (or losing so much damage it's never worth it), or that it still offers competitive or slightly less damage? I think one thing in favor of keeping the transposing rotation is that during this time BLM have decent mobility due to how many insta-casts are there in that phase. Removing it might make the job harder, not easier.

RE: Red Mage, the reduction in cooldown on Swiftcast, afaik, essentially completely negates the issue with GCD shifting. RDMs need one GCD shift per melee combo, since the melee combo itself causes a GCD shift by being ~5 GCDs long. RDMs do a melee combo roughly every 35-40s, since we generate an average of 5.25 mana per GCD during dual-cast, and a melee combo costs a net of 73 mana (the spells in the combo regenerate 27 of the 100 mana it consumed). However, every 2 minutes, we get a bonus free melee combo that provides a free GCD shift on its own, so realistically we only really need 2 GCDs shifts per two minutes. Since we have ~30-40s flexibility on when to actually use the melee combo, due to pooling, Swiftcast at 40s is _more than_ sufficient to provide the odd instacast we need to fix GCD alignment between combos. That said, I do kinda wish they'd just give Fleche and Contra charges already. While managing GCD alignment to maximum CD uptime on them is certainly a form of skill expression, it feels more to me like playing around jank in the system, rather than actual proper job complexity. That's especially the case if they're going to have us depending on a role action for that alignment, a role action that is also often burned on things like rezes.

Its cause they really went ah lets simplify boack mage by no more paradox in ice form, and thiught that they could just give us moving leylines and wed just behappy with that.

I'm not a machinist main hut I heard with the changes to machinist you wouldn't have to worry about hyper charge during wildfire but there still might be room for it i there.

The weaving of random cards in AST is what made it fun. Healers already have so little to do in dungeons that drawing cards always felt exciting. Now we have 3 buttons to press every minute… yay I’d rather they added those cool new cards to the random drawing mechanic. Not this dumbed down version

Yet. The new GNB combo has no continuation yet.

SCH's level capstone ability means it can basically solo heal and that is a massive gain imo

I would 100% trade the places between Sam and Whm on your list.

I think the biggest issue with summoner is the thematic choices.

So I'm curious about the black mage changes. No free regen in frost is really going to hamper solo and non party content in my opinion as you can't reliably start fights with full mp if your target dies on fire phase. But on the other hand, it could mean more interesting choices outside of combat. I'm curious what it means for lower level play as well, nothing like getting a lvl 36 dungeon and having to use 4 alternate slots because your stuff is locked

Btw for RDM grand impact you can make it only replace impact while still can cast and use jolt 3 .. that from new setting they did add so i guess RDM still fine if not better.

while i do agree that there should be a casual friendly job, lets not glaze the company and say its a great idea to turn SMN into that job. it was a terrible decision. people who mained smn years before they neutered it have every single right to be pissed off for the rest of their time playing this game, when square could have EASILY turned any NEW job into what your posturing for. its not like the other jobs are genuinely that difficult anyways, it did not take the brain power to play smn before neutering to play drg or whm or half the tanks. none of these are really THAT difficult in comparison to so many other games where they just HAVE to gut anything interesting in FFXIV to get people to play anything. another huge note is the casuals will play literally any job it doesn't matter about usage rates. theyre still likely playing the game sub optimally regardless of whether or not the job is brain dead or astrophysics level, i mean so many casuals fuck up blm rotation on a daily basis but still play the job because they find it fun LOL. it was still a shit decision to turn a more complex job into a simple job instead of just making a new simple job, i dont understand why thats so difficult to grasp. if a job is too difficult for you, go play a different one. dont take years of someone else's dedication to learning it and shove it down the drain because its about what you want. also ast having varying levels of more healing in the cards isn't really a "strong identity", the cards just heal now yippie. on top of the already strong heals it has, that just makes it redundant.

Monk literally got even more dumb lol. Why would our ability to buff and debuff be removed. That's of my favorite parts

12:09 As a Monk main I love the changes. While I would've been fine if they increased the buff timers in order to weave in the beast chakra system within the rotation, i'm fine with them getting rid of it entirely. I just wanna punch stuff

I agree on summoner, I play it when I want to turn off my brain

I was hoping for SMN to at least get some salt and pepper so that I could pick it back up. But it's still baked unseasoned chicken breast. I was a SMN main since ARR 2.0 early access. You could say I was really tied to the job and dealt with many of the problems throughout the years. Always loved it, regardless of the issues, and I basically had to quit it in 6.0. The only time I stopped playing SMN was during 4.0 when all Ruins behaved like Fester at the time and once that got fixed, I returned immediately. To this day I'm still bummed about EW SMN, the job I used throughout MSQ, raids, did relics on suddenly became a job that I'll never look at again. All the glamour gear I had became worthless too given that I never liked BLM or RDM.

I don't understand the upset over Bard songs requiring a target. One was originally doing DoT to the target and the others were applying (admittedly small) non-aspected damage to a target in addition to their party buff abilities. Personally I'd love to see Bard's buff abilities expanded upon and a return of real, actual *support* jobs. Which I know will never happen...

No one is talking about this yet, but I have a feeling we're going down to just one endgame set of gear too, no more crit build, just spell speed. I feel...

I'm going to reserve judgement about Black Mage until I try them myself but even so, I'm currently suffering a serious case of pre-order regret Being a casual which does roulette everyday, having to change rotation for low level dungeons is hard enough already, with the changes to mana regeneration I may need to stop queueing for anything under level 90 (I should finish my ARR relic weapon ASAP) All of this of course, assuming that the rotation for Dawntrail is easy, and fun enough to overcome the changes I may need to do in my current rotation People trying Black Mage for the first time because of these changes is good but would they stick around or is Black Mage going to be less played after the initial hype subdues? I personally like to run one roulette a day as Scholar or White Mage but my favorite job is Black Mage, and if it's future incarnation is not fun for me, playing healer for a couple of hours doesn't justify a monthly sub

Gunbreaker still plays the same. It's still the same busy tank even though it got rid of rough divide. And we all know double down and lion heart combo is gonna get a continuation combo come 8.0 or 9.0.

Personally, I'm looking forward to playing the new Ast.

We keep streamlining all the classes and turning them into a faceroll I wonder what older summoners, monks or BLMs, who have long left the game, would say if they could see the classes now 😂

You can still very easily fit 4 Fire IV at the back half of paradox by using your Fire III proc anywhere in there. You barely lose any damage compared to the main use of transposing out of ice to use the Fire III proc. The changes make fire phase WAY more forgiving and ice phase loses a bit of its forgiveness. Would be nice if we kept ice paradox in some way, even if it just refreshed ice timer as an instacast with no MP regen. Other than that we are in fire phase longer with easier Enochian management and more movement, sounds good and can't wait to try it out.

My biggest problem is SMN. I used to main SMN in HW. Kinda got turned off from it in SB. Was quite excited for the changes in EW but it ended up being very flat. It's just flashy, nothing else. I was hoping for a bit of complexity being brought back into the job in DT. Just a little so it's still one of the easiest jobs but still gives you something to think about. I probably also wouldn't mind if not every single other job got made easier too to some extent? At least as far as i've seen. I get that they want an easy job that anyone can play but it's a bit TOO simple. RDM already kinda filled that role for me at least. The only reason i occasionally play SMN nowadays is because their animations look flashy and cool af.

I'm mad about the lazy SMN changes.

Summoner could have gotten a different summon and I would have been happy….but here is rehash bahamut. Luckily I will be reaper, sage, viper, and picto. That’s the beauty of Final Fantasy C. So many jobs there is something for everyone. Sucks some changes are just not good.

The TLDR: more simplification and less rotation crafting. I can understand you want to have one or 2 jobs and low level being able to be simple for new players. But high level play is being dumb down hard

22:28 Whenever I play black mage, I only do the standard rotation. But these changes make the job feel more rigid and makes it feel like I'll be punished harder for making a mistake. So I disagree they're "pretty nice".

Well, goodbye to playing healer. AST was the one green DPS that didn't have a 1 button rotation and now they butchered even that. What do I need another heal/shield for when I'm pressing 1 for > 95% of a fight.

BLM changes - absolutely hate that the thunder proc. has gone. Half the fun and skill with BLM is adapting to the procs and keeping bits on hand for when you need to move for mechanics. Basically the changes just railroad you into doing a 100% repeatable rotation - not talking about the weird and wonderful alt rotations, just some adaptive variation to the intended one. I don’t see how removing all random procs has any benefit. Also agree with the comments that harder jobs should do more damage - not silly amounts more, just enough to stroke your ego by being top after tanks on the aggro list

I just wish Summoner's new summon was more interesting. I've been wanting Shiva forever, but I would've been happy with anything else.

I am main Sam widow of kaiten, pepehands, perhaps I move on to another game because the game is not for me anymore, have fun guys

Not gonna lie. I play ultimates as the most frequent thing to do in this game, I pretend energy drain doesn't exist until I have nothing else healingwise to use stacks on except from the opener. You can play scholar like that and still do very respectable damage. And people love being comfortable in health. Win Win. Play it, I highly recommend it under this mentality it's really fun. If you play it to be an energy drain bot no group will ever want you.

i wish i could just change the spells look but it does the same thing like i want to use ice magic and lighting

You're wrong about BLM. The umbral soul ability gives mana with each use. Say you are killing a boss in fire phase and it dies, you transpose to ice and if you use umbral soul 3 times you get full MP. It even says it on the skill for umbral soul. You also still have triplecast so you're able to stack 4 fire 4s on the first 1/2 or back 1/2 of fire phase easily. Especially with leylines I can get in 5 fire 4s in the first 1/2 of fire phase. I don't but you can but I do hit 4 fire 4s in the first 1/2 easily with and without leylines and or triplecast. I will miss ice paradox because it gave me utility options in ice phase, like if I stacked up some paradox charges. I agree with Sharpcast, it was a clunky spell.

Almost every black mage is just going to roll pictomancer when the expansion drops so it doesn’t even matter.

i dont get monk complaints, i dont see how refreshing demolish and twin snakes is any more difficult than managing the fury gauge, they also fixed serious issues like chakra overcapping and a very stagnant rotation weve been stuck with for 10 years

tldr, you're in favor of ease of use > skill expression. You want to know the best way to learn monk? Actually playing the job. Monk is (was?) the best example of job progression as each thing you learned felt like an addition to your previously obtained knowledge rather than a thing that requires you to change your playstyle (looking at you, Samurai every capstone). Now my time is not rewarded, nor respected. It is now no different than any other melee dps except Ninja. Black Mage has me concerned but makes me wonder if triple or quad flares will be optimal again.

"I'm glad Sharpcast is dead, that thing was annoying as hell" preach brother preach 🙏

I play monk and black mage and im very excited for the changes, especially monk. Finally 3 of our 'core 6' skills got new fucking animations! It only took 11 years of the same shit old animations.... And current black mage is a bit of a cluster fuck and sharpcast sucks so curious to try out the new changes. Probably been changed since media tour build though, hopefully for the better.

Summoner needs it own tier… SMN got the shaft.

Is losing Ice Paradox really that big of a deal? sure its a nice moment tool but we're just going back to when UI phase didn't have it. I see no real reason to be upset. The only thing I would change is gettingUmbral soul at lower levels

genuinely a huge wave of relief every time media tour comes around and I hear "warrior is still basically the same". don't ever touch my baby, se

SMN is popular cause it's two jobs from one class so leveling is breeze.

I love that summoner is an easy for players that need it but a job can be easy but also be fun which new summoner doesnt really succeed at imo it gets stale way to fast .We now have 3 identical demi sumon phases which is a huge waste. Were not asking for a bunch of bullshit to Manage and keep track of we just dont wanna spam astral flare and its equivalents for 15 seconds, phoinex in shadowbringer had a 2 action combo but it got removed for some reason in favor of 1 button spam. Square couldve done literally anything else to make basically the only new dawntrail addition unique but they just...didnt 😅 new aoe heal ig so now healers can heal even less now lol

i gotta disagree with your points about summoner. First off its not fair for summoners to have their job gutted because the devs wanted a easy casual job. If the devs wanted one they should have made a new job thats easier and more casual instead of redoing an older one. Secondly people are pissed about the fact that we have not gotten a new summon but instead a reskinned bahumat. We've been begging SE for new summons like odin alexander shiva or leviathan but nope enjoy bahumat but shinier.

This is why so many of us were telling MNK mains to wait until we had the full kits. BLM mains like myself, were hype based on the first part without knowing the full picture when we were actually the ones with the most to be mad about and MNK isn't really harmed much at all IMO. The changes are polarizing for sure. I'm genuinely just hoping Picto can offer a less restrictive alternative since I don't see myself playing BLM through the expansion anymore. I get that they said they are changing battle systems first before addressing the job problems so I'm giving them the benefit of the doubt to actually play the new battle mechanics to see if I buy into the idea of them fixing the oversimplification and homogenization issues with jobs in the next expansion.

Hard disagree on Summoner. I do agree the game should have a simple and accessible job for the very casual. But it shouldn't be a job that was there since launch and some of us mained for years. Then suddenly the main we enjoyed got gutted and lost all identity.

Seraphism don’t makes sense visually on scholar.

My disappointment with summoner doesn't have anything to do with job complexity. I just didn't want yet another bahamut and no other real new summon. I woulda settled for just one more new summon, whether it was a minor summon or a new demi summon. We're 5 expansions in and there's not even a ramuh, shiva or leviathan summon. All the assets already exist. Even Fenrir, Alexander, and Odin are low hanging fruit at this point. Summoning a version of bahamut twice feels super awkward and I can't believe they green lit this garbage. It's likely I'll just stick with black mage and picto for magic DPS this expansion.

the consequence of killing nonstandard is that black mage players will actually do caster damage instead of doing more damage than melees. good.

Significant changes to whm, are you joking?

So what I've gathered is that they made every job easier and everybody is mad about it

Am a new player, started this year. But after some dungeons and finishing ARR MSQ, using all tree classes I can say that, DPS is the most complex of all and healers are dumb down completely. To be honest its ok to be simple up until level 30, then you need to have more stuff and be complex. Making the game simplified for higher levels dont help the newer players, it makes everything boring.

So warriors will continnue to unga bunga? i am fine with that :D

I dont like being manipulated with a thumbnail and watching a bunch of stuff i dont want to see just to get to that info, but thanks for the time stamps.. As for the black mage, why even give abilitys if you dont really have choice in when or how to use them, just give us one button that does the ability allowed at the time.

Are you David?

Fair warning, this got long. It's not meant as a rant, or a vent, but more like my own thoughts on smn and how it could have been handled better. It's a rdm, but as a pet job and no sword. And it sucks that how it's just a pet job. I like smn anyway, but I know it has issues. Thank you so much for the video highlighting the changes. My thoughts on summoner. As someone who still plays summoner in ff11, I came in to ARR and felt a little disappointed, but accepted how summoner played. And then the years went by, and I just had to grit my teeth and remember if I missed anything in the ff14 summoner, I'd just go to ff11. I had a friend who played WoW, and loved the DoT mage that summoner was in the older expansions. And then when it went full pet job, they were very discouraged, which sucked. For them. I loved that we finally had full sized summons. In ff11 you get a key item, brave the dangerous route in the wild, to go out and fight the avatars of the summons, in order to gain a pact with them (or kill them for other drops/gil on the daily). It got you the full sized avatar of that summon. So I am still a bit bummed that we have such a short supply of summons. I know it has to do with lore, but like, Ramuh was chill with us! It makes sense that we'd get a trail fight with him, and then he joins us. And it would be awesome if the summons made sense again! Sure Garuda and Ifrit are dps summons, but make Titan more tanky! Ramuh could either focus on DoTs or crowd control. Shiva could be a buffer (adding en-blizzard dmg to players smg). But the devs did away with elemental dmg it seems, I mean they got rid of weapon type dmg. I once ran a temple of Qarn duty where the tank disconnected and never returned. And I changed to topaz carbuncle, and it tanked the bees and that minotaur boss easily! I just had to remind the healer to pay attention to Carby's hp, not mine. XD We got a new tank right after, so I didn't get to test topaz against the final boss. But it was fun! It felt like a really versatile job! Like when as a blm, I miraculously saved the party by spamming heals when the healer accidentally died towards the end of the Dzmael Darkhold final boss. Because I had that arcanist heal spell that I can't remember the name of right now. Okay, so. In ff11, the base carbuncle has dots, heals, a shield, and can cast meteorite. I get that ff14 jobs has to be "you do this role, you never step outside this box!" mentality, but I miss the older version of ff14 where the jobs felt more different. And I miss cleric stance tho just basing healer dmg on mnd makes more sense. XD I still have that item that would let me rearrange my stats when I changed between sch and smn. ^^