State of the Realm  

Thanks for having me Happy & Sly! Was a fun time :)

The thing with Summoner is that there's plenty they CAN do with what they now have if they stick to the "Big Summon, then Pick 3". Each expansion, they could just add one extra intermediate summon with a gimmick and rebalance the kit to say "all the non-mobile casts are higher potency" and make you piece together your rotation on a per-fight basis based on how much mobility you need. I don't think Summoner will ever return to the "maintain your DoTs" caster, but it can easily be the "pick your poison" caster. Ramuh with normal casts, Leviathan with a channelled cast, Shiva with melee-range instant cast spells, etc. If they want to keep adding Demi summons, they can also let you pick which Demi you choose next, and force a refresh of all the ones you can choose every 2/3 loops you do, if they want. It's a pretty good system; they just need to build it up from here, and we'll see what they decide to do.

Man, Haps looks like a totally different person from like 12 months ago. He's on his Chad arc. Good shit Haps, good shit.

A RDM main's Wishlist: - Trait that makes 3rd Moulinet cast in a row coat half mana (makes AOE combo cost the same as ST) - Fix the res tax (there are several fine ways to do this) - Fix Reprise mana cost being stuck at ShB levels - Idc what the level 100 button is, but don't make it another melee combo button

I love RED MAGE, it's my MAIN & I love its identity. SMN is my second. Black Mage is my least favorite caster. We will see about Pictomancer. But I do agree we don't need a new melee button or skill. I would love it if they could add something like ver-water, ver-blizzard, ver-quake, or something. Change Impulse AOE rotation like the JOLT single rotation. SMN: I would like them to add RAMUH, LEVIATHAN, & SHIVA in the mix. What bothers me sometimes is when people talking about SMN or RDM aren't complex, their rotations are simple & straightforward. NOT every JOB needs to have a complex rotation. Both jobs are easy to pick up & play. I played SMN since ARR 2.0, when it was basically a dot-mage, & at times I do miss the dots. And then when RDM was available, that has been my main ever since. Nice, simple & to the point.

I've been a SMN main since day 1 of 2.0 when you would crossclass Thunder, through all it's ups and downs(except Shadowbringers, that jank mess was completely unpalatable to me) and I think there is a lot they can do with it from now using the base they built in Endwalker however the one thing I want gone or completely revamped is Aetherflow. It's so weird to me using "Fester" when there are no Dot's and it honestly just feels like a relic of the old job design that isn't necessary. If they scrapped it they could replace it with something more interesting that gives it more complexity. Also please, just turn Physick into like a 60 second cooldown Summon Moogle AOE cure or something.

This would probably be too much, but this is what I'd want for summoner: Add Odin as a demi (or Alexander) and put the demi's on a 40 second cooldown. Make the demi skill spam about 4-5 seconds shorter, and once your first demi is over all 6 crystals light up for Ifrit, Titan, Garuda, Shiva, Ramuh, Leviathan. Add an additional extra button, meaning you have one additional themed spell for each summon. You'd then have time to work through the rotations for 2 summons of your choice. Then cast the next demi, spam, and then have the remaining crystals left, and work through the next two. Demi, and then the final 2. Then it goes back to the top. Make it so that once you cast a demi, it's on cooldown for a minute, even thoughnthe other 2 are just 40 seconds. This means you can't cast the same one twice in a row, but you could alternate between 2 if you wanted. This would be specifically to hold Phoenix for the reason I'll state below about removing the current rez. Other odds and ends: 1) Remove fester. Just have ruin 4 as a one-off that resets each time you demi, giving you a movement spell to flex in. 2) Make sure each summon has at least 1 hard cast spell. 3) Remove physic, and add a summon on an unrelated cooldown (could be chocobo or moogle) that just does a heal, or maybe a few healing pulses, and then is on cooldown for a minute or two. 4) Remove the res, and add it to Phoenix. As it's summoned, it instantly raises someone. And you can enkindle a dead player for a 2nd raise. But after that the summoner can't resurrect until Phoenix is back again. This makes it less annoying on the summoner to cast, while also making it less reliable, and removing the need for it to contribute to the res tax because it's less flexible/spamable now. That's it off the top of my head. Feels like it would add skill expression and decision-making, without adding too much extra difficulty. Would also involve more themed summon abilities, assisting in class fantasy.

Incentivize alternating between verflare and verholy. Give red mages more reasons to use their sword other than for the "melee combo" - which is now only half melee. We don't need to extend the melee combo more, if anything enhance spells between melee combos based on which type of magic was used during the last melee combo or something.

EksuPlosion! He's the reason i main black mage.

Another RDM main here with my wants: - New Melee combo animations (finally) - Not another Big Combo Ender - More OGCDs for weaving - Displacement made into a pure movement tool (give it it's own charges, remove potency, remove needing a target, lower the distance it moves you backwards). Even almost every single dungeon boss these days actively punishes using it as it was intended, and RDM already is the least mobile caster anyway, so just give us the ability to use our cool backflip again and solve some of our movement issues in one change - Put a restriction on Raise so that we don't lose it entirely but also don't need to be so harshly punished just for it existing whether we use it or not In essence, the job is perfectly fine as is but could just use some tweaking and enhancements

I hated SMN at the start of EW cuz I loved SMN at the end of ShB. Now I've grown to the point where I can appreciate it as a simple, decently fun job I can play when I don't feel like thinking too hard. But I can still never forgive them for completely removing something I loved.

I think a possible solution would be for both SMN and RDM rez to be on a super long CD kind of like BLU. So make them keep it, but it will only be available every few minutes or so. I am also in favor of removing the rezzes from both as well and only healers being able to rez.

I like that pretty much everyone points at PvP for things they want for their jobs. PvP finally coming out above PvE.

What if after Phoenix cast egi's change to 3 other egi's other then the normal 3?

As someone who got into summoner in Endwalker, I don't get the animosity. Would primal themed ogcds be a neat addition in Dawntrail? I mean, I guess? Not the biggest fan of dots to begin with but they have their use. Like on healers. Iunno, maybe have the dots be the Egi enkindles, iunno.

Ok question with the black mage thing, do you despair transpose paradox fire 3 into 2 fire 4s into despair? or transpose paradox fire 3 into 3 fire 4s into despair? Edit: nvm you don’t get enough mana, but another question should I ignore thundercloud procs unless I need to refresh my dot? Because my fire 4 vastly outdamages my thunder 3s

As a rdm liker, all I really care about is increases on the mana gained from skills. Like Jolt/Jolt II from 2 to 4 or 5, Verthunder I and III and veraero I and III from 6 to 8, verfire and verstone from 5 to 7 or 8, scatter/impact from 3 to 5 or 6. and Verthunder II and Veraero II from 7 to 9. Like I know Manafication exists but I wanna get to 100 on the gauges much faster. Also even though I say I am a rdm main, I rarely use moulinet and reprise so as much as I want to remove them for button bloat I can’t say those should be removed.

I feel like the white/black shift in PvP has potential to be used for RDM's. It'd be cool if instead of having to avoid overcapping on white or black mana you instead had to build up one or the other, and then use Verflare/Verholy to shift the balance to the opposite mana, and that would trigger your melee skills to balance the two mana bars out for Scorch and Resolution? I dunno, just an idea.

Ifrit dash is the only skillful part of the job. Making sure to plan your ifrit order so you can cast the hard casts and dash is a good part of the job.

Someone mentioned giving the redmage some more range for their melee combo, and the whip could be a great way to do it. Becomes a whip combo with 3 (or whatever number) more yalms reach.

If you look even closer at the benchmark just before redmage does the rose whip, they do the animation for Manafication. I think it's a resource spender or some sort.

eksuuuuuuuuuuu

Im sure happy has said it before but why did he drop monk to main phys range ? Was it just what the static needed?

summoner can use swiftcast for a rezz and build up another in 8s. that's 2 resurrects in 10s. redmage can dps, rezz, dps, rezz, also 2 resurrects in 10s with 2 dmg casts. when using swiftcast even 3 resurrects in 10s. limiting redmage resurrect to a cooldown of 5s or even 10s would be a fair trade if that means he's less of a support role and gains 1-2% dps overall.

SMN, speaking of Megaten. I want SMN attacks themselves to summon a egi or demi just for the attack animation. Be able to freely use ifrit dash, or garuda ground aoe both as oGCDs instead. Same for phoenix regens. But all these oGCDs will cost job gauge building it up with your GCD spells. Your battle pet will keep turning into the last egi/demi attack you used. Regularly they'll do an auto-attack on what your targetting with aoe dmg when you're using youe aoe gcd spells.

For BLM, I think it's best to tie MP regeneration directly to ice aspected spells rather than relying on server ticks, and they've already implemented this when you role-play other NPCs that use a simplified BLM toolkit. They should also reword the traits to exactly convey the damage multiplier of each stack of Astral Fire (1.4x, 1.6x, and 1.8x for one, two, and three stacks respectively). This should help convey to players that Astral Fire phase is for big damage, Umbral Ice is phase is for recovering MP, and MP itself is not a traditional finite resource like we usually see it as in other jobs and other FFs.

I also do hope that if we get a shiva summon it isnt just a shiva summon and its like an update of dreadwyrm trance to invoke shiva and we become her. it would just break the entire story of shiva unless we decide hey ysayle you are coming out of the stream to do battle for us or hey ryne get wrenched from the first to whereever we are in the world and become shiva again do it you won't. the only way shiva can be summoned is if a person offers to become her thats why we dont see her outside of using ysayle and ryne at least in ff14. thats why i think it should be an upgrade to dreadwrym trance or something

Damn this podcast autoplayed and I was really into the intro music. As it faded away I shouted "Wait, no, COME BACK!"

I think red mage should be able to perform a combo range sword skill after each successful dual cast

I think making the Rez cost some White and Black Mana on RDM while bringing its melee combo potency up would be a nice change for RDM. You get to keep chain rezes, but they only cost you damage potential. Or make the job more MP management based so rezing eats into your MP pool more, basically only affecting damage potential as well. You stay rewarded for not needing to rez in an encounter, while not having to pay the rez tax all the time.

Pretty sure they said about black mage your fire and ice spell will share the same bouton.

For BLM square has been pushing towards standard rotation for a while now. So I could imagine them buffing B4 in some way, as they did F1/B1 with Paradox, which would make non-standard lines less useful outside of fight timing situations. Don't think that that would be inherently bad, but it would make the job somewhat less interesting. What I would really love to see is them reworking some BLM skills for leveling since the job feels pretty bad to level up + the damage is kinda low compared to other jobs until you get into the 60s/70s. Earlier Triplecast, Sharpcast and Despair and maybe a stacking of a second Firestarter proc (so there's more leeway than .3s to react after you get the proc, especially on sub 60 when you spam F1 and potentially overwrite it) would be nice additions to see.

I ran baldesian as rdm and not being able to use rez was so strange

What if they gave caster combat res a CD and charges. That way it can be helpful but not a crutch.

For summoner i have a killer idea of adding more summons but you still one get 3 gems per gemshine and they are all random so you always have slight variation but still keep the same rotation mostly every 2 mins instead of the straight forward stale as hell titan>garuda>ilfrit currently

Hey, Mr Happy, have you ever considered getting a pair of those glasses for correcting color blindness? Just curious. Also my favorite color crayon is the yellow one cause I get to clap them as an OGCD.

as healer main, I would be 100% ok with them removing caster resurrection or at least limit it to a 120 sec cooldown or maybe even have the healer ressurection upgraded with a trait, so that it restores more HP, has no weakness etc.

In regards to the blackmage spell speed discussion I have a suggestion that would solve both sides wants for. Make materia more impactful. Simple as if someone wants to be a fast casting blackmage then just add spellspeed materia that actually makes you cast faster. As materia is now alot of it feels like your getting like almost no change for the amount of materia you equip. So simple just make materia better overall that way neither side has to compromise on how they want to play blackmage.

RDM having stances is a neat idea, but being locked in completely during combat would not be good. It would result in 3 possible scenarios: 1. You chose support stance, and you were able to raise a few times during the fight. Perfect! 2. You chose support stance and no one died, so you just threw away a bunch of damage for no reason. 3. You chose DPS stance and several people die, but you're unable to provide any support because you picked the DPS stance. I think it's unlikely that they introduce stances, but if they do, they would need to do something to address this issue. Whatever they would do, introducing these stances would result in the DPS stance being the default to most players because otherwise you're just leaving a bunch of potency on the table. If Verraise is truly a big concern balance-wise, perhaps they could do something like tie it to a resource you generate and then you can spend it on either damage or support, similar to how Scholar has Aetherflow.

Enkindle with Eigis? Non Egi burst ogcd attacks? Like Blu mage. Auto attacks for Carby. Black mage: turn Scathe into an auto attack 'stance'. That's it, that's all I really want, every thing else is frosting. Rdm: I don't know really.

Give RDM and SMN a 2 min cooldown dmg buff that disables their raise. You either commit to doing dmg or you get to raise

34:40 color rant 🤘

A solution to the rez tax would be to create content where deaths are expected and can be recovered from (24-man savage for example) and to make that the concession between the rez and non-rez casters or give casters a special 8 minute rez that does not apply rez sickness, essentially a free death you can use to cheese a mechanic that you couldn't do with Black Mage or Picto (you can give it a long cast time so there's still some point to save Swiftcast/Dual Cast proc for it)

They need to do PLD Raise and let Devs go crazy with DPS checks.

Really hope PF doesn’t mind double caster in DT

For RDM, if I had my wish: Put the 1,2,3 melee combo on a single button. In literally thousands of hours on the job I have never pressed them out of order, there's no reason to have 3 buttons. Use one of the now free slots to give a 3 hit AOE melee combo. Put Moulinet in it. That way when we have a group of enemies and I am hitting them with AoE, I don't have to have my final step be to stop AOE and three hit a single target to get to my AOE combo again. So instead of ever using Reposte, Zwerchau, and Redoublement in an AOE situation, I can AOE with Moulinet, Thorn whip thing (from the benchmark) and something else and then roll into flare, scorch, resolution. As it is now, I have never used moulinet. Why would I backslide and push my big hits out farther on a group with enchanted moulinet rather than just use aero2 or thunder 2 which GIVE me mana and do 10 more potency than moulinet? For BLM, you have Between the Lines, give them a new one "The Lines Between" that brings your ley lines to you rather than vice versa with both on the same cooldown.

Crazy RDM idea: Give a melee based jolt alternative that procs dual cast. Highest damage when in melee and alternating between spells and melee, jolt being only used when you can't keep melee uptime, or have reprise proc dual cast. Remove engagement to incentivize use of displacement during caster section of combo. This would be a summoner level rework, though, and basically we'd have a caster that was a melee and a caster that played like a ranged phys in smn.

If anything I think pictomancer was a pefect oportunity to distance caster dps from elemetal damage that all other casters already can do, if they wanted to really lean into the pictomancer drawing inspiration from Relm they should then go the creative route of painting monsters and such for the spells, like why even have pictomancer if you are just going to draw a low res rock and drop it on people when you can get creative and have a statue of let say a chibi thaliak crash on foes,just go nut, draw fat chocobo for huge AoE damage, paint King Behemoth and unleash cartoony meteors, paint ultros and unlesh tentacle hell,etc. the plain old rock, fire, thunderbolt seems very low effort.

Just take rez of summoner and allow red mage to “build up a rez instead” so they can’t even build more than two “ enough to undelete healers” And give us back class identity

At level 100 summoners should replace bahamut and Phoenix with summon hydaelen and summon zodiark

yes, more tight white shirts please. Thanks.

Red Mage is just fun to play point blank period.

Going to totally disagree on that red mage stance idea and it being combat locked. Would create a huge issue of never being able to win as Rdm. When stuff goes wrong and you are in damage stance, whelp your random pug group is going to be toxic. And if you clear the fight with no issues, "why were you in support stance?" This is one of those idea's that sounds good when you play with a set group and never pug. But as soon as you shine the light of random group play, it becomes very unfair to the Rdm. If you wanted a cooldown between switching that would be more reasonable. But locking it too once combat starts is just asking for headache. And I know there was an MMO I played where they had that kind of combat locking, I just can't remember which one it was (20 years of playing basically them all lol) And I know there was flaming in those scenario's

I don't main a caster, but I like the idea of stances for rdm. I'd combine that with rez limited charges.

Enkindle Carby, turn him into primal carby from pandemonium. finally have carby do something

I think that SMN is in a better place then before, it feels like an actual summoner now instead of dot mage. Other possible changes we might see for Summoner are that Ifrit, TItan and Garuda will stay longer on the field like demi summons and do more basic attacks. There is also the possibility that we won't get more summons but upgrades to existing skills will incorporate other summons like fester will have an image of Ramuh when you use the skill.

Summoner has been my main since I started in 2016 and I love the rework. I don't care that it's braindead, I don't even miss the dots anymore. It's not janky anymore, and it's super flashy. I will keep my summon sizes on large and you can't stop me. I hope they add ramuh, shiva, and leviathan and some more cast times with them.

The worst thing about jobs staying mostly the same from EW > DT is that they already stayed mostly the same from ShB > EW. 2 expansions later and the jobs and combat being mostly the same just feels terrible.

Don't forget to eat your fruits and vegetables everyone.

Why do you have to hurt me by despising the job? I love most and only talking about the castor I like the least😢

damn, Happy getting ripped and chiselt. U can see that sport in the face. Much more defined. Seems he also got a graphical update! ^^ Sry... off topic :P

Support could be a class type in this game. It just is not balanced for it at all. Red Mage, Dancer, Bard, (picto) as support classes. I am really in favor of Picto having rotations that end up giving buffs to the party but that won't happen.

I think SMN is actually mostly fine as it is. The biggest issue are that, as a level 90 job, it feels like a level 70 job. It's all there and functional enough but lacks the details that really make a job fun (it feels a lot like taking RDM back into Eureka where the tools are sort of still there but just not completed or fleshed out). The other big SMN issue is that the job barely changes or improves at all throughout the levelling experience. Level 90 SMN basically plays almost exactly the same as level 50 SMN and that just boring. There's no sense of growth or progression outside of the job story. Just as with Eksu, I actually don't have any issues at all with there being a lower barrier to entry job in every role and SMN can be that for Caster as it now, finally, actually does capture the job fantasy of being a Summoner. Not every job needs to be a hardcore players wet dream.

sly with the bad takes as usual

Really hoping the devs realized double down is a terrible button that no one likes and won't make the same mistake with black mage. If it got a two polyglot spender, it'd have to be 1800 potency at minimum, which is ludicrous. I play black mage in part because it dodges the issue of so much of its damage output being decided on one button it presses once a minute. I stopped playing gunbreaker entirely due to that. I'd legitimately just rather have nothing new at all, or maybe just some token visual upgrades. Despair looks kinda underwhelming, give that a fresh coat of paint and call it a day.

Fast BLM for life.

I hope SCH gets the flashiest most useless spell in the game, to counterbalance EW

42min-43min... Sly: "SMN can't evolve" 🤡

Honestly i think for both smn and rdm to keep there rez's they should just do the stances rdm has white and black and smn has phoenix and bahamut stance one is for the supportive side and the rez in white and phoenix stance whereas the damage stance negates the rez in black and bahamut stance. i also feel like a lot of people are saying hey this is rdm's 7th combo finisher but unless you can now just skip to the 7th one it physically cannot be a 7th combo because we dont see the fire/holy finisher, we dont hear/see scorch and we definitely do not see resolution. like i said there could be a seperate button this could be an ogcd that you gain access to when do the combo's or something but it physically not be a 7th finisher

Just because one team did one thing once, doesn't mean UCoB or any ultimate for that matter needs changing/updating. TOP was cleared without any healer roles, you don't hear people saying that ultimate is a joke because one group did one thing once, so stop doing it with UCoB.

Increase mp cost on caster rez

The only way to make summoner get interesting gameplay is to allow players to choose between Bahamut/Phoenix/X - if players were allowed to choose between them then each could have noticeable variations with gameplay and potentially different summons tied to each as long as its a static order itll be hard to allow engaging gameplay

Put rez on a 7min cooldown like holmgang. Have veraero and verthunder become fire and stone when procked. Put the melee combo on one button.

main blm here lol

Man these prediction episodes have been miserable. It feels like everyone but Happy is just so down on everything. No one seems to have any sort of positive expectations or even a "yeah I think this looks sick". Instead its just been about how the mechanics are going to be bad and how they don't pay attention to visuals. I have my own concerns about Dawntrail but God damn, im still excited as hell to try the new jobs and see the changes they make.

The datamine from the benchmark. Shows that Summoner is getting a 3rd demi. I hope we get another primal at least.

How come they haven't released an Action/Abilities trailer for Dawntrail? They released the Endwalker ability trailer like 2 months in advance. It gets be worried about the abilities. The Viper trailer was so mediocre, the abilities trailer is what I usually look forward too.

Getting more Spell Speed actually hinders your mobility, bit of a Paradox. Any of these changes actually have a huge Impact. I hope we can finally get some Resolution on these issues. The streamlining was a bit too extreme and it has hurt the general Engagement with the job.

I feel like there's a disconnect with people's opinion on picto art style. I don't think anyone is bothered that it looks "different" the issue is some people think it looks ugly af. Yeah we don't have to play it, yeah we could turn off the effects, but what's wrong with just admitting we don't like it either. It should be fine regardless if you like it or not.

Current blm is a far cry from the traditional blm those of us that are long time Final Fantasy fans know and love. It needs to return to that for me to ever play it outside of leveling it.

Man cant wait to get palette swapped Ifirt Titan and Garuda and for thr rotation to literally not change. If they plan on making summoner "easy" casters might be time to join the flock and take up blm cause its just more fun. Sad to be retiring the book after 6 years

I love SMN, like RDM, and hate BLM. There's this weird dichotomy between "high end" players and "everyone else" where the former love BLM and dislike the others and the latter hate BLM but like the others. Maybe it's that I like healing, but I don't like being unable to heal/res. That's relevant to me. And I HATE the pretension of BLM players "Well.._I_ play a REAL caster!", no, you play a Job that you can preen about being "elite" because it's kind of clunky, not because it's good. I do think it's nice that BLM can change the arrangement of its rotation, but so can SMN (in more minor ways, and I don't just mean Primal order; Ruin 4 and one Ruin 3 cast per minute can also be moved around based on movement needs and so on). RDM is fun, the thing I don't like about it is that Verfire/Verstone are easy to not see if you don't have your eyes glued to your bars. Honestly, they could make the right/left sides of the Job gauge light up with a gray stone with glowing fissures effect when Verstone Ready procs and the black mana side go orange/red with flames when Verfire ready procs. Those would be neat. I also like that RDM is one of the few Jobs that skirts the otherwise rigid Trinity that FFXIV. This goes all the way back to the days of EQ and Vanilla WoW of "the hybrid tax", but lots of us players like being able to have toes in other roles and think it makes for more interesting games and classes. The PvP White/Black Mana Shift is a neat thing. Kind of like the old Tank Stances in a way, but it is neat being able to work that way. SMN is also a "magical ranged dps" (the role is not "caster", we just use that shorthand), no matter how much people want to disparage Jobs over it. Regardless, SMN is a fun Job. There's some nuance and options on how you want to arrange your rotation, some nice utility, and it's just FUN summoning Primals in the old FF style to hit enemies with a big attack like FFTactics or something. As to Raises: If they were removing them, they'd have told us already. The thing is, the utility they offer is lessened with body checks everywhere. If they are going to balance raises being prominent and reducing their damage, then they need to make that valid. I think going forward they'll have SMN/RDM having combat raises and BLM/PIC and probably new options not having it. The biggest problem with removing it is for RDM, since it's pretty core to the Job's identity at this point. They COULD make it where Dualcast doesn't work on Verraise, but anything more than that would basically majorly harm the Job. I think part of the problem comes with the dichotomy between "I DPS to DPS" players and "I like having versatility" players. The former want damage >>> all and don't want anything that doesn't do that. They don't want to be "healbots" or "resbots". And BLM/PIC exist for these people. But then there are people that like breaking out of the rigid Trinity, and they like RDM and, to a lesser extent, SMN. On RDM... I think the RDM vine whip is probably an upgrade to Contre Sixte, but it's hard to say. RDM being the least mobile is kind of strange. BLM is arguably WAY too mobile now. A 1.5 sec on Jolt would be an interesting change to RDM. NOT Fire/Stone, JUST Jolt. It would give Jolt some interesting utility for movement, imo. Remove Jolt: What I think they could do is remove Jolt (and Impact?) and make it where Verfire/Verstone Ready, isntead of making them USABLE, would increase their potency and/or mana regeneration. This would mean when you get a proc, you want to cast THAT ability, and keep procs meaningful while also removing the "boobie prize" Jolt when you just "have nothing better" as sort of your "backup plan" date, so to speak. I also HATE the AOE rotation being "backwards". It still bothers me that you use Thunder/Aero into Impact, which is the opposite of the single target rotation and annoys the hell out of me. On SMN... In ARR, the only Jobs I got to max level before HW were WHM (my starting Job) and SCH/SMN. Then I added PLD in HW. Then RDM in SB. (In ShB, I got a lot of others, but I don't really main them). I have always hated DoTs. In MMOs, I rarely like DoTs, and to do so, they need to be somehow connected with the Job overall. Proc things, generate gauges, etc. The game also needs to allow add-ons that can be set up robustly to give DoT information. I remember WoW having some frame tool or something that would ping your screen when a DoT was going to wear off. I HATE that all Healers have DoTs so there's no escaping the things, and they're the WORST possible kind of DoTs; the kind that do nothing with the rest of the kit. I was NOT sad to see them go, honestly. I liked old SMN being mobile, and people forget HOW mobile it was as well as being the progenitor of the 2 min meta. I would like the other three Primals as reskins post Phoenix. Nothing complicated. I also like that it "doesn't feel like you're casting a lot". Again, people forget just how mobile old SMN was. It wasn't AS mobile, but you had a ton of mobility between DWT, FBT, 8 Ruin 4s per 2 mins, 8 Egi-Assaults per 2 mins, etc. People act like old SMN was old BLM, and that's never been true and wasn't true in ShB. I REALLY don't understand how EVERYONE seems to have forgotten this UTTERLY. I really like new SMN. It's one of the few Jobs I can think about my rotation and then just...play it. I don't have to glue my eyes to my bars to see what's up when, watch for procs that are tiny little buffs in a screen of magical explosions, or juggle an upkeep buff or DoT that are equally impossible to see. SMN has a closed loop rotation. It's nice. I liked SMN before, I like SMN better now. There was no "slap in the face". That kind of talk just annoys me. It feels really slick to play and is just...FUN. In an odd sort of way, it's more like playing an ARPG, but that's not a bad thing since it does it so well. I suspect the inability to look at it this way is why people don't get it. "It's not a Caster!" the role isn't "caster". It plays a lot like a game like Legend of Zelda or something where you have buttons to push but not a complex/convoluted rotation. You push your buttons in an order you can understand by feel without having to look at your bars to watch timers and procs nor to try to look at the little debuff icons on the enemy to see what upkeep needs to be maintained like some sort of janitorial busywork. Not to mention there's plenty of ways of growing - as you say with the Ramuh lightning rod (which you could do by giving Ramuh Garuda's moveset with the Lighting Rod being his version of Slipstream). Anyway, SMN is a great Job and I really like what they've done with it. It's just...FUN.

Dunno I feel like Picto spell animations doesn't believe in a FFXIV world, there's other ways to make a painter look good. imo artist visuals in Lost Ark looks insanely good even if its on an Old engin.

What's speculation is there The caster is pictoomancer