Summoner Over-Nered (and A few other Problems)

[Dualgunner]

Your painfully wrong about a large number of things. Nobody here believes that summoner's dps is ok. Let alone top. Here's where Summoner stands in dps. They average around 2-3rd lowest dps and lower then both other casters. You can go through the different options and look for yourself.

https://www.fflogs.com/statistics/15#boss=1037

I'll admit when I'm wrong. I will note however the large variances in total parses between the different jobs as a possibility for variance.

As A summoner "Oh no. Both healers are dead. It's a wipe."
If a summoner wants two raise both healers. Guess what. It's still 50% of the Summoner's Mana. As you so eloquently put, The minimum amount of time A red Mage can rez both healers could be right around 4 seconds. The Minimum amount of time a summoner could do it is around 9 seconds. Swiftcast > raise >wait for Gcd hard cast raise. By the time the Summoner gets both healers up, the tanks are most likely dead and nothing can save the run. Never mind that Summoner spent half their mana and 9 seconds doing nothing. During that 9 seconds, the Summoner is lucky if they do 180 potency per tick if they have their dots up. The Red Mage just goes back to attacking. A red mage can go any stone sky sea dummy and beat the dummy without using a single mana cooldown. Summoner's are encouraged to use as much as their mana as possible to increase dps. The dps loss hurts summoner more as it means they can no longer use their strongest spell.

It's almost as if this is what I said RDM's chief advantage over Summoner was. What a surprise, thank you for enlightening me.

Do you use ruin for 120 potency and 240 Mana, or ruin 3 for 170 potency and 1440 mana? (Under tri disaster buff) You use way more mana, But it's a dps gain. Alternatively, Summoner can play more passively, using ruin 1 and ruin 2 to save on mana, but lose a large amount of damage. (Oh only about a third of their spell damage)

IDK, seems stupid to me to waste 7x mana cost for a 50 potency increase. Like I said in my earlier post, the nerf to ruin 3 was dumb, and disingenuous when they put its former potency on ruin 4--a false upgrade that is annoying among other things. Though again, a loss of 50 potency between the spells you mentioned equates to a third of spell damage? I'm sorry if that's the case.

Some other Red Mage tips? Sure. You can use all your Ogcds after you dualcast Veraero. You can fit in Ogcd's cleanly as there is a delay when Jolt 2 and Veraero cast before the Global cooldown resets. This is an improved Version of Summoner casting ruin 2 instead of ruin 3 so they can fit in a Ogcd without setting their rotation back.

Thanks. I'll keep that in mind next time I do Susano EX again. Should put me even farther above your total damage in the fight. So you're saying I *should* Fleche and Contra Sixte on cooldown? You sure I shouldn't needlessly hold them?

Something quite interesting I noticed playing both Red Mage and Summoner. Ahk morn has 680 potency. Verflare/Holy is 550. Unbuffed (No embolden) on a training dummy at the same Ilvl Verholy does 11,830 damage. Ahk Morn did 10,992 damage. I find it odd that a 680 potency Ahk morn is out damaged by an unbuffed 550 potency.

Dunno what to say without context here. Gonna assume you mean they both were nondirect noncrit attacks? Sounds like something Square should look into either way.

[Ariomi]

It's almost as if this is what I said RDM's chief advantage over Summoner was. What a surprise, thank you for enlightening me.

IDK, seems stupid to me to waste 7x mana cost for a 50 potency increase. Like I said in my earlier post, the nerf to ruin 3 was dumb, and disingenuous when they put its former potency on ruin 4--a false upgrade that is annoying among other things. Though again, a loss of 50 potency between the spells you mentioned equates to a third of spell damage? I'm sorry if that's the case.

Dunno what to say without context here. Gonna assume you mean they both were nondirect noncrit attacks? Sounds like something Square should look into either way.

Everything about Red Mage is a chief advantage over summoner. The Damage, The Utility, The Mobility. Oh and less frustration.

Look at your parses. Your only 60th percentile, yet you outdps me and I'm a 78th percentile (Not by much thou). If the average Red Mage can do around the top 22% of Summoners can do then Summoner needs to bring something more to the table otherwise it's obsolete. (Which it is)

When Ruin 3 was 200 potency and 120 potency stronger then the previous ruins, It was worth the extra mana and good summoners could balance the mana.

It made a big difference. https://www.fflogs.com/reports/Db1hw...pe=damage-done Before the nerf anyway.

And no. Both hits were normal unbuffed hits. Same gear, Both Susano 320 weapons. Wouldn't be the first time Summoner's pets potency would be different/lower then themselves.

[Yukiko]

When you read what yoshi-p said about job-balancing, it feels like he was saying that we dont know how to play SMN...

We Can Support the group: When you try to heal its most likely a wipe - no way to replace a healer or even to help healing because its just way too weak! Healing of 500 when getting damage of 3000 is a joke. In add: supporting costs DPS, so why supporters who need to spend skills to support the group are rewarded with weak damage skills? Actually it is only thanks to skilled players that SMN is not last in list of DPS...

We can Buff the group / debuff enemy: How many mages are within the group or when does anyone stand near the egi while evading enemy attacks? Thats the next joke... In FC i said once for fun: "i will now only summon ifrit because as meele he is near other meeles and can buff them." Futhermore the timers are a joke too: If you focus on buffing your members in time (so they can reduce incoming damage before buff runs out) you either eat one hit yourself or you just cant complete your rota because evading (at best you lose some DPS because waiting for perfect timing)...

[aesteval]

SCH has Aetherflow and access to lucid dreaming..... the job is in no way worse off for MP than the other healers.

May not be worse off for general MP usage, but it's really annoying to switch off of craft / gather class to SMN, hit Aetherflow, hit Swiftcast, and then have to wait for MP ticks before being able to summon. Just, WHY.

[remiff]

summoner just need a buff ^^
buff dot pot 40-->50 for miasma III and bio III
buff ruin 3 --> 200 pot, ruin 4--> 240 pot and smn dps is fine !
Buff devotion 5% --> all playeur .

[Ametrine]

SCH has Aetherflow and access to lucid dreaming..... the job is in no way worse off for MP than the other healers.

Energy Drain does not in any form make up for Ewers, Thin Air, or Assize.

Between SCH'd higher mana costs for lower potency heals and the cost of an Aetherflow stack, it's not nearly as easy to hold onto Mana.


Nevermind the fact we have to drop Eye for and Eye to instead take Lucid despite having a skill specifically meant to buff it.

[Alleo]

Summoners needs a correct path they will go down and not a "take a bit from this and take a bit from that". If you want to make it more like the other FF summoners then its fine to take away Dots and stuff but it does not make sense to take away egi skills. It just feels like SE does not truly know where to go with it.

I do like Bahamut as a idea but I do not like how he was implemented. Not only did they take the wish of the summoners for bigger egis and made it into something that can hinder the summoner and the other players..no Bahamut itself is really unresponsive. We cant move him, so he always sticks with us, yet every single movement from us players will have him stop attacking to rearrange himself..I already lost some of his super attacks thanks to that. (I mean the timer itself is already quite short) And on top of that it hinders the view of ourself and the others..the biggest problems are his wings that are just spread out and too big. So if he would be flying around the field this would solve the problem.

But at the same time the egis are gone at that time, thus any sort of tanking with Titan will be useless. This makes Bahamut an disadvantages in some situations.

It just feels like they never truly tested him in group content otherwise they should have noticed the problems. Really I love for more big summons and I am happy to have him in theory but he is just clunky in practice. But he is not the only clunky thing. All my new skills and the egi feels clunky. How often did I have to click again and again till devotion finally got used..(and why cant we target the one that we want it to have?) Garuda is still bad with the new contagion and the reaction time of the egis are also still bad.

So they took away our Dots and gave us something that is not so well thought out..Thus we are truly punished with our DPS if we make some mistakes or if the Egi/Bahamut still does not listen to us..you made the job really frustrating..

[Angry_Evil]

When you read what yoshi-p said about job-balancing, it feels like he was saying that we dont know how to play SMN...

Heh. More like SE don't know what to do with smn. Half assing it like they did so far resulted in summoners being dissatisfied with poorly design and unfun job. But reworking it will probably need a lot of resources so it's not happening any time soon(or at all).

[CecMiller]

This was over the last 2 weeks (approx 3 days ago I gathered this data). It shows the state summoners are in and the RDM dominance over the other 2 casters.

The part that concerns me is that I have seen a lot of posts concerning buffing SCH DRG WAR and MCH but not as many voices for SMN. If those classes do get buffed and SMN has no changes made to it, from the current trend of things, SMN will be the class thats getting the shaft even though its harder to player than most dps if not the hardest to play (at a high level). The DPS section is mostly talking about BLM's vs. RDM's with not many knowing SMN. Similarly, reddit is mostly concerned with SCH DRG WAR and MCH. I'm just concerned we'll get overlooked so I'm reposting the data I gathered from a few days back


When you look at the data sets from 10th percentile to 99th percentile, what you find is RDM is doing fantastic in comparison to BLM and SMN. Now as for RDM with regard to buffs and nerfs, hear me out. I don't really want them to get nerfed - I'd much prefer if the other casters got buffed to do more damage than RDM as this balances out class difficulty to dps output (personal opinion). It's clear in their initial testing they were content with the dps output from RDM and as such, I don't see how both BLM and SMN doing more dps than them should break fight difficulty if they were buffed to more dps. This is just my personal opinion, but I do enjoy the fact that RDM is very easy and as such, even the average to bad player can perform decent dps on that class.

If we analyze the dps data on both fights, we can identify which classes are performing well at each level of play and which might not be up to standard. You can make your own conclusions about the data: whether its down to class difficulty, skill level of class players, fight design, how "strong" you think the class should be relative to the skill level needed to play optimally, how effective the class is with party buffs, stat distribution on their gear etc

All the data is retrieved from here using standard comps: https://www.fflogs.com/statistics/15...unt&dataset=90

Lets do a statistical breakdown for both bosses (you can check the data yourselves for the individual bosses to the see the differences). I skip the 25th, 75th and 95th break points just to make the division more nicer looking. However, they are good break points to look at regardless.

We have the following (assigning 9 for the worst dps and 1 for the best dps):



Averaging the results, we get the following scores/rankings in terms of DPS for both fights:



Keep in mind this is data from only 2 EX fights and so fight design plays a key part, but even still, the data is useful. There are some "obvious" observations from this however. It is clear, across all levels of play, SMN, MCH and DRG are the 3 worst performing dps in the two fights and SAM, RDM and NIN are the best 3 performing dps. There are a lot of factors to consider as I pointed out earlier. For the lower percentiles, it could come down to class difficulty/design or how badly deaths affect a class etc. For the higher percentiles, it's more about the dps ceiling of the classes coupled with mechanics in the 2 EX fights. If you look at the full breakdown of the dps at each percentile, its interesting to see the dps difference between them (the bottom 3 have very minute differences generally speaking).

For example at the 75th percentile the bottom 3 are: MCH (3067), DRG(3087), SMN(3090) a difference of 23 between 10th and 7th place]. However the difference is more stark as you go up: comparing SMN (3090) (Ranked 7th) to BLM(3190) (Ranked 5th) or even NIN(3275) (Ranked 4th) demonstrates this.

To end, my personal opinion is that I really like how easy RDM plays and I'd much prefer the other 2 casters receive buffs if they were found to be weaker (I'm a caster/SMN main so I'm biased - go figure). It's clear for me that both SMN and BLM are more complex from personal experience on said classes. I've already voiced my concerns over how bad SMN's dps is considering their difficulty. We'll have to wait and see what 4.0.5 has in store. For now, we can just try our classes out in omega and add more data to the pool and keep giving feedback to SE.

EDIT: Currently on 75th percentile, SMN is only above MCH in dps dealt to both bosses by 25 dps. If MCH was to recieve buffs, SMN would surely be at the absolute bottom at most percentile ranges. I've already gone over summoner problems (death being far too punishing, Aetherflow problems, riggid rotation/mana reliance, pet responsiveness), but having it be at the bottom of the standings when its played even by good players would be a complete injustice compared to the amount of practice the class takes to pull off a good parse. Currently at the 90th percentile, it beats bard in dps by 14 and DRG by 27. Further, for 70th percentile and below, currently SMN is dead last in dps dealt to bosses. Take that for what you will.

[NaesakiAshwell]

It only saddens me in regards to MCH, DRG and SMN because you'll get the popular raiders who hold sway not taking them in groups and advising other players not to, people will listen. Then the more popular youtubers (looks at mrhappy and his past controversy with warrior versus paladin...least it was something to that effect >.> <.<) will also probably echo similar sentiments and convince people not to take them and the viscous cycle will continue where you are forced to play something else if you hope to do any savage or ex content if you don't happen to have a large enough fc or friend circle, or you get lucky with the party finder people to do the content with :/