If i had the Wheel Part 3

The next collection of 5 jobs i want to discuss:

Summoner:
Summoner i feel needs a total rework, but it could be VERY healthy with a quite a few small changes.
Align summoner buffs with Bard mechanics, provide 3 default slots they can occupy, change all the summoning ward buffs to take up only one slot. Moving into the healer/support stance provides an extra buff slot and maybe a tier of endgame staffs provides a 5th slot during SP. therefore easier to balance thier bufflines buffs can be more impactful than they currrently are due to healthier limit of amount they can apply.

Change summoner SP's:

Astral Flow: Duration Avatars gain thier ultimate blood pact rage or Ward depending on current stance(not both)

Astral Conduit: (Same as Tabula Rasa)DD stance: , gains High triple attack and Magic burst bonus, temporarily removes the ward cooldown penalty.
Support stance: Avatar gains immunity to its element and the element it is ascendant to and thier debuffs, provides party with a smaller buff to those resistances. Buffs last twice as long and gain x% benefit to thier potency(SMN NiTro) can support one more buff slot(works like soul voice) and temporarily removes the blood pact rage penalty.

Avatar's Fury(lvl49): Create a stance for the SMN to DD with the avatar that rewards a free cooldown refresh of Blood pact RAGE when they open or close a skill chain, or magic burst with thier avatar as well as a general cooldown reduction to blood pact rage. In trade make the cooldown for support blood pacts from blood pact ward have a longer cooldown.

Avatar's Grace(Lvl49): Create a stance that refreshes ward cooldowns whenever a blood pact the summoner uses removes a debuff from an ally (help cover Yagrush's job for SMN) and a general reduction of blood pact ward cooldowns as well as a penalty to rage cooldown.

Specific summon pet changes:

ElementalAvatars(Carbuncle(light),Ifrit(fire),Shiva(ice),Garuda(wind),Titan(earth),Ramuh(Lightning),Leviathan(water),Diabolos(dark)):
should change thier default attack behavior to standing stationary and using a ranged attack of thier elemental damage type, allow this to trigger pet double attack type traits. if a skillchain is created they will magic burst with the appropriate strongest elemental nuke they have off cooldown at the absolute end of the window(like shantoto II trust) Avatars should be at least as smart as Trusts, more likely better coded since the summoner basically has to live vicariously through thier summoned pet. all base elemental avatar's avatars favor grant resistance to the element they represent, the element they are ascendant to and resistance to any debuffs associated with those elements while in support stance, and instead provide increased magic attack and physical attack when in the damage dealer stance.

Carbuncle blood pacts:
Shining Ruby: literally Casts at level protect and shell equivalent to WHM same level and uses those buff slots not SMN buff slots Greatly increase the duration to be commensurate with protect and shell.

Mending Ruby(NEW): Gives AOE regeneration to the party commensurate with one level lower regen than same level Scholar. uses the regenerate buffslot and can overwrite or be overwritten based on potency

Glittering Ruby: Enhances MND and cure potency not random

Avatar's Favor: grants Cure potency received to party and cure cast speed to the SMN

Holy Mist: AOE

Shining light(NEW): Grants party enlight effect

Ifrit:
Crimson Howl: casts boost STR on party instead.

Meteor strike: Area of effect fire damage high damage for AOE to the target(reduced AOE penalty), but usual penalty to others in range for aoe magic damage.

Avatars' Favor(NEW): Grants resist to fire and ice and thier debuffs.

Shiva:

Diamond storm: scales with SMN skill to be commensurate with one tier lower than rdm distract at same level

Sleepga: replace with targetted sleep and sleep2 at appropriate levels.

Heavenly Strike: AOE

Provide Enblizzard blood pact ward(available through sub).

Provide ward that casts Boost-INT

Garuda:

Arial armor: shadows count scale by SMN skill. either convert to guarunteed shadows or more shadows since blink is a weaker effect than utsusemi style shadows.

Provide enaero blood pact

Wind Blade: AOE

Create ward giving Boost AGI

Titan:
Move Diabolos's Phalanx here as a ward

provide enstone party buff

Provide ward that casts Boost-VIT

Earthen armor takes a buffslot works like Migawari prevents 1 death, even from instant death effects. Maybe longer duration.

Stand Tall!(NEW): prevents all knockback a certain number of times, scales similar to aquaveil(uses a buffslot)

Geocrush: AOE

Ramuh:
Change thunderspark to be the merited one and increase its damage and paralyze potency based on Summoning skill.

Volstrike be the single target version that paralyzes available at 19

Provide a ward causing any party member who becomes stunned, or terrored to heal a small amount (takes a buff slot)

Leviathan:

Soothing Current: convert to a smaller amount of Cure potency 2 and it takes a buff slot.

Tidal Roar: increases defense of allies but competes with cocoon, defender, other type buffs. takes a buff slot.

Spring water: Give a amall buff to the total damage healed and then divide that damage by 3, and have it delive the healing in 3 pulses each pulse removes a physical debuff (ignoring non-removable auras)(paralyze, poison, amnesia, str/dex/vit down, disease, Petrification, slow, blind)

Grand Fall: AOE

Diabolos:
Nightmare: sleepga upgrading to sleepga 2 @ 99

Night Terror: puts a debuff on all sleeping monsters in the area to have all stats reduced when woken up for a short duration.

Nether blast: can Magic burst

Solomnescence: upgrades to gravity 2 at 99

Noctoshield: Change to resistance to mental debuffs (Addle,bind,charm,curse,Doom, muddle, Silence, sleep, Weight)


outlyer avatars:
Fenrir: Let Fenrir be the Avatar with the highest Physical attack stats(Higher str,dex,vit) focused on Physical damage.

Crescent Fang: AOE

Lunar Bay(RAGE): Grants Fenrir the Berserk Status like warrior

Lunar Cry: STOLEN warcry effect from ifrit(occupies a buff slot)

Ecliptic Growl: Occupies a SMN buff slot but buffs all stats, capping at a lower value than boost or gain probably presently 15 ish since it buffs all stats. if you want to keep the moon phase in there have the base be 10 and physical and mental vary by +1 to +5 so the buff is always good and relevant even if there is a moon phase you don't want.

Ecliptic howl: Enaspir no moon phase variance (occupies a buff slot and same buffslot as Heavenward howl)

Heavenward howl: Endrain no moon phase variance.(Occupies a buff slot and the same buffslot as Ecliptic howl)

Steal Ifrit's avatars favor of double attack here, and possibly have Fenrir specifically gain triple attack from it while party members get double attack.

Cait Sith

Change my cats damage type to slashing they got claws

Altana's grief(NEW): provides the party with Subtle blow commensurate of thier level scales with Summoner skill (occupies a buff slot)

Raise II -> raise 3 @ 99 ... aint nobody want a raise 2 anymore with exemplar xp.

reraise II -> reraise 3 @ 99 Ditto above

Siren

Let Garuda handle the enaero effect
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Sorry SMN is one of the jobs i feel needs the most work, i don't even think this would necessarily fix them but it would help them slot into parties in the same type of position a BLM or scholar might but also a WHM or SCH healer in the other stance.

Samurai:
I think by and large Samurai is in a pretty healthy place the only thing i would advocate for here is maybe making thier stances more commital and making Hasso the damage dealer stance and Seigan the tanking stance.

Dual wield 1 at lvl 1 (option to use Katana and wakizashi)

Let samurai use "katana" as well as Great Katana but give them thier own sets(katana and wakizashi, or greatkatana) based on parrying and Seigan mechanics and maybe some dt- or dt II - on the "Tanking weapons"

Hasso: provides job haste when both hands have a weapon in them(two handed weapons and dual wielding weapons, hand to hand weapons).

Seigan: Increases parry chance and number of Shadows granted by third eye as well as enmity generation while both hands hold a weapon.

I think Samurai needs very little work to qualify as a tank, and its a great and flexible DD presently.

Hasso, Seigan and third eye and meditate feel like they bring what is "Iconic" to Samurai to other jobs when subbed.
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Ninja
create ninja tool items that are not used up on cast possibly key items.

The main thing i would change about ninja is to separate it into three pieces by stance and generate a new mechanic around thrown weapons that synergizes with thief:

Change yonin to a stance so it can't be dispelled, remove the accuracy penalty and decay rate and instead impose either an attack penalty or melee haste penalty this will become the ninja's "tanking stance" it would be nice to see some Ninja gear with dt- and possibly one of the dream end game weapons providing dt II - maybe the evasion bonus needs to scale with level, i would love to see some synergy with monk dodge JA
@99 if you lose more than 2 shadows from a single enemy attack you immediately regain a shadow(perhaps by gear be able to improve this to 2)

Innin is already quite well designed to take over as the ninja's "melee dps" stance.

Change Futae into the "Magic DPS" stance: provides Faster casting of Ninjitsu, and higher debuff potency for debuffing ninjitsu

Dragoon:
Give pet DT- all the way up to 80+ percent on gear DRG will be gathering TP in.
Dragoon feels typecast to me, they are the best savage blade monkeys in the game, they also have some interesting potential despite being pinned to a "dd only" playstyle presently. I mentioned back in BST that i feel BST and DRG feel like the pet is thier "Partner" i like the idea of Dragoon being a pet job that is a little more approachable and requires less meta knowledge of the game for newer players.

Change spirit bond to be a stance rather than an activated ability that whenever the DRG recieves healing or a buff the Wyvern receives it too, the DRG will offensively breathe elemental breath matching your skillchain and magic burst any skillchain you close choosing the best element to burst with.

Guardian stance: The DRG protects its Wyvern granting DT II - to the wyvern, the wyvern will instead use healing breath whenever the DRG weapon skills targeting the lowest health party member. if the DRG completes a skillchain this healing is empowered and removes one magical debuff.
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Blue Mage:
Mainly with blue mage they need to reorganize what level they get some of thier spells and thier interaction with other classes. they dont mesh well with a lot of subjob traits and they dont provide a lot of interesting subjob mechanics outside of enmity generation for tanks.

I would move one of the dual wield spells or give a low level spell the equip benefit of dual wield so they can be the "magic based" dual wielder.

Changes to Hasso will help them as main job, there is a lot of neat stuff here that many jobs would use, but the nerfed subjob macc from blue spells makes them unviable. This job may benefit from a scholar like passive buff to blue magic allowing jobs subbing it to have one letter lower cap than a like level blue mage.

i think that change alone would make them a more viable and accessible main and subjob

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One of the main problems SE has had balancing SMN if AFAC, i think removing the the current SP's or tweaking them away from that will make summoner much easier to balance, rather than having full access to all the top tier support and damage at the same time limit whether you get Astral flow buffs, or Astral flow rages not both, based on what stance you are in when you activate it.

The game could very well benefit from an ammo slot item that has vatar perpetiuation = to the cost of a lvl 49 avatar perpetuation(15/tic) and picked a higher level that is fair for the summoned creature when you sub it. a SMN subjob specific item if oyu will to make the class as a subjob more manageable and approachable.

Astral Conduit would be really, really, really easy to balance, actually:

Make blood pact rage/ward timers refresh whenever an avatar is summoned for the duration of the ability, and extend the duration of the SP by 15 to 30 seconds to accommodate casting times. Bam, no more spamming Volt Strike as fast as possible.

If you wanted to get really ambitious, make blood pact: rage a split timer like waltzes have, where there's a global recast on them and then a longer individual recast on each one, and make Astral Conduit negate the global recast time without affecting the individual recast time. Summoners now have the means and incentive to break out as much of their toolkit as possible, and the game-breaking "spike damage once every second" problem wouldn't happen, since each avatar has at best one really hard-hitting move.

While we're making changes to make summoner viable without being game-breaking, replace the general-purpose no-summoners-allowed wall on damage from any and all blood pacts with a system like weaponskill damage wall where repeated use of any one blood pact reduces the damage of each successive use within a short time frame (and maybe instead of going from 100% damage to 10% damage, it should be more like 100%, 90%, 50%, 25%, 10%? Apogee seems like it should be a generally viable job ability, since it does come with added MP usage). Same circuit breaker effect for Astral Conduit, but it doesn't render summoners completely impotent.

Strongly disagree with making summoner compete with bards for buff slots. Maybe if you literally gave summoner abilities directly equivalent to what bard songs and corsair rolls can do, but nothing in the toolkit is nearly potent enough to say "it's too much to allow all of this at once." Heck, that's most of the reason people want summoners applying buffs: you can get like 12 extra effects or so, about two of which actually matter and the rest just mean another 1% to Savage Blade damage for Naegling users.

I would love to see a stance system where you can focus on damage dealing and use weaponskills or sacrifice TP to recover blood pact: rage timers faster, or on support abilities and have a reduced recast on blood pact: ward, but it wouldn't take a total teardown and rebuild to make the job work with that.

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Make blood pact rage/ward timers refresh whenever an avatar is summoned for the duration of the ability, and extend the duration of the SP by 15 to 30 seconds to accommodate casting times. Bam, no more spamming Volt Strike as fast as possible.

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Conduit already reduces those timers to zero. I don't understand. Extending the duration also doesn't make make switching avatars to use more different abiltiies any more enticing.

The issue with AC has always been that it is artificially nerfed in specific contents/areas because it's stronger than SE would like it to be (even though it's not even THAT crazy unless your loadout is perfect). I don't think the nerf was really even justified amidst all the melees that can pump out WSes with tends of thousands of damage in the span of a few blood pacts with (at least from my perspective) comparatively little effort. I don't really think AC is that amazing unless you marshall an army of SMNs just to use their ultimates, but the thing is, you can gather multiples of many jobs that can still pump the damage in a short timespan.

SMN is sometimes used for buffs; but we all know that's not what what SMNs really want to be sought for.

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Originally Posted by Alhanelem

Conduit already reduces those timers to zero. I don't understand. Extending the duration also doesn't make make switching avatars to use more different abiltiies any more enticing.

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The idea was to have the refresh on resummon in place of the zero cooldown, rather than alongside it. So you could use a blood pact: rage, and it would be on the normal 21 second recast, but if you dismissed and summoned an avatar whatever recast time remained would be cleared. Rather than instant re-use, it would just be significantly quicker (I think it's about three seconds to dismiss and recast an avatar, normally?)

But then you'd want the duration extended because, again, about three seconds to cycle avatars, that's a pretty significant chunk of your 30 seconds. Putting quick magic on summoning spells for the duration might help, the pet command lead time and mandatory casting animation delay would still keep things at least a little reasonable.

And no, the issue with Astral Conduit was that it could push out something like 600,000 damage in 30 seconds, assuming one 40k damage pact every two seconds, and if I'm not sure that it's not possible to do every second for twice that (or more with better base output.) Nothing else can dish that kind of damage that quickly. It was absurdly powerful, so then it got artificially nerfed to take summoner from top-ranked best damage output job to literally less damage output than bard.

Of course, without access to all the options players have for increasing attack and accuracy, avatars have fallen behind the defense and evasion curve on newer content, so even without damage adjustments Astral Conduit probably wouldn't be that impressive next to a well-buffed melee job any more.

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The idea was to have the refresh on resummon in place of the zero cooldown, rather than alongside it. So you could use a blood pact: rage, and it would be on the normal 21 second recast, but if you dismissed and summoned an avatar whatever recast time remained would be cleared. Rather than instant re-use, it would just be significantly quicker (I think it's about three seconds to dismiss and recast an avatar, normally?)

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Even with maximum fast cast resummoning an avatar takes way too long before you can make it do something for this to be wortthwhile. Even with a duration extension you'd need to significantly increase the power of BPs to make up for this, just due to the way casting works and the significant delay between casting and when you're actually able to execute commands. With BPs already being relatively short now, the advantage afforded from doing this is really small and it doesn't seem like you'd get much more benefit out of the ability than you do now.

I get what your vision is but with XI the way it is it just wouldnt work. Swapping summons would basically have to be instant the way it is with SMN in FFXIV, and I don't think the game's engine is capable of that.

I think they should detach playing summoner as a DD and playing summoner as a support/healer from each other so they are easier to balance.... almost every nerf levied on summoner to stop AFAC from breaking the game hurts them as a support and healer, and i healed as a summoner only 2 nights ago in Dynamis Divergence, and its one of my most played jobs since it came out.

I don't want to see summoner continue to get shadow nerfed out of content by blood pack walls and burst walls specifically targetted to them.
Also i think summoner can easily fit into a skill chain maker or skill chain closer role in addition to a magical DD which would allow them to access content via healing/support, Magical burst DD'ing, and as a Skillchainer. Problem is they are much harder to balance if they can do all 3 at the same time. I think it would be best if they picked one of these roles set a stance to commit to that mechanic of thier class and then they can more easily be balanced in general not just specifically that one ability.

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I think they should detach playing summoner as a DD and playing summoner as a support/healer from each other so they are easier to balance....

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You can't detach them. They're both part of the job. It's meant to be a versatile job like say red mage is, in terms of being able to do a variety of things but not necessarily the best at any one thing.

And the thing is, it's not even really relevant here in a balance context. Astral Conduit doesn't really enhance SMN being used for support very much, unless maybe you want to spam a heal like Whispering Wind or something (which is probably the most useful thing you could do with spammable Wards). We all primarily use this ability to do damage. Most of us treat it like "chainspell for blood pacts." The only reason balance is really an issue is because SMN is in a safer position when using it compared to a BLM using manafont or an RDM using chainspell, because a pet is getting all the hate rather than the player. I don't think SE would have made content-specific nerfs for this ability otherwise.

Its not the most useful thing you can do with the wards, spamming all the buffs makes them operate like a pseudobard it extends duration and allows stacking a huge amount of buffs for savage blade, what im saying is they are using too many mechanics from all over the place, its fine for them to be versatile but you don't want ANY job in the game efficiently tanking, healing, supporting, and damage dealing at the same time. If that job existed no one woul duse any other job, and you wouldnt be able to get a party for other jobs, hell its rough balancing many of the jobs that can do just 2 of them at the same time. Yeah RDM can heal, rdm can purge debuffs, it can debuff, it can nuke and it can melee, but it doesn't do most of those as well as the main job that can do them, most red mages are recruited either for haste 2 and refresh or thier unique and highest tier debuffs in th egame. despite them being a "jack of all trades" they actually aren't its just almost all content requires the best debuffer in the game and haste 2 ... if you compare SMN to red mage thats one of the main problems and why they get picked instead. SMN can also apply haste 2 but only to thier own party, and they also dont provide any excellent top tier powe rin any other category to compete with red mage. You look at bard and you see the same problem, although summoner can provide VERY similar though slightly weaker buffs than Bard they dont spam Giga savage blade so bard will get picked every time.

The reason you need to separate SMN healing and SMN damage dealing is you don't want them to be able to do both at the same time and push other jobs out in the cold, they provide what a bard provides but worse, so balance them with bard as a support OR you could use the summoner and the summoned pet like luopans and base them more like GEO's so they interact with mechanics already in the game but put thier own spin on them. the reason you need to separate healing and damage dealing is that they are already a smidge below both corsair and bard as a support, if you gave them BOTH healing and damage SIMULTANIOUSLY, they would be back to being too powerful and they would get picked every time. I think its fine if they support and DD or support and heal but not all three at the same time thats just asking for a bruisin. it also helps summoners actively participate more instead of being a buffbot if the buffs are individually more inline with what bard or geo can do its ok to have them last longer and not have to cast so many. they can spend far more time actively engaging in healing or setting up or capitolizing on skillchains.

The problem is without separating things summoners fall into a few categories in the game:

Good for things that can be AFAC'ed to death at no risk

Buff bot

Character that becomes useless if a monster keeps one shotting thier avatar

None of these are fun and engaging ways to play the game, They also have to keep putting in shadow nerfs by preventing blood pacts from dealing damage even though melees are spamming bigger damage every other second than most summoners ever see, simply because summoner does its damage with very low risk, A Samurai using Meikyo Shisui still has to live to deal the damage they are in risk by being in melee most of the time. Summoner does its damage vicariously through its avatar so the same ability type (Astral flow) is in a way safer as long as the mob cant kill the summon in the timeframe, but even if they can SMN can resummon a new one. Samurai has to tank the damage and/or possibly be forced to activate defensive cooldowns. Despite that in thier current state i would still lean towards Samurai being the stronger, more requested, and more meta stable class. even samurai the "flexible melee" cant tank very well in Hasso, and cant damage very well in Seigan they have to pick and choose which is more important at any given moment and commit to it, even if thier current ability to switch is quite short.

FFXI is at its core a teamwork centric game all classes should be trying to contribute to skill chains and magic bursts where they can, or on the enemies that prevent you from doing that they should be either weaponskilling together nearly simultaniously or using the differing mechanics tacked to that encounter.

Presently Summoner in its design is designed as a class that ignores the game almost entirely, If it can be AFAK'ed they don't engage with the boss mechanics at all they just hit thier face on the keyboard with strongest blood pact rage and go brrr. If they are trying to do current content containing shadow nerfs they are basically just a buffbot that cant melee like bard and cant nuke like GEO so in other words they arent going to get to go.

or the enemy has aoes that put them in too much danger to be within commanding distance and thier SMN is dead all the time.

I think SMN should be rewarded for keeping thier avatar alive instead of treating them like expendable zombies or skeletons. It takes a lot of work in game to even be able to summon every summon in the game, and having so many of them be very lackluster and instantly wiped off the field feels pretty bad tbh.

Summoner being the second most complex pet class also helps there be a nice gradient with pets and player commitment and required attention.

DRG requires very little player bandwidth and makes an excellent beginnier pet class
BST is a nice balance equal attention to both master and pet.
SMN Mostly paying attention to the pet and your own positioning and casting many spells to support
PUP being for full on pokemon trainers that want to control every tiny aspect of thier pet and crave a jobs complexity.

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Its not the most useful thing you can do with the wards, spamming all the buffs makes them operate like a pseudobard

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I mean it's quite busy, but with a decent enough master level you can already rotate all the major buffs you might want to use. We don't really need Conduit for buffing in the first place.

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SMN Mostly paying attention to the pet and your own positioning and casting many spells to support

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Honestly in a lot of content with the right gear and positioning you can use your staff to set up SC/MB, people vastly underestimate the value of this. Even SMN can obtain enough -DT to not get instantly deleted by stuff. You can't get away with this everywhere, no, but even in "real" content SMN can do more than be a gimp WHM with a few neat tricks. The only real problem is just SMN is a "not savage blade" job, so there's no way to do stupid damage with minimal effort. It's kind of funny because in the old days, SMN was usable with basically no gear, and today it needs a ton of stuff.

Part of the problem isnt just what summoner can and cant currently do, it is also the perception of summoner and what it can and cannot do. I think you are being abit dishonest to yourself when considering how much gear you need to be where you are talking about like every newbie just hitting 99 on summoner can just immediately do all that stuff and participate in end game content. The worst part is what you need to to do that in engame is in fact also gated by endgame gear and large amounts of gil.

Summoner's gear, strategies, and gameplay need to be much more clearly communicated to players. no you cannot just spam all the releveant buffs with normal or low gear for lvl 119. you need almost completely upgraded JSE gear and +1 apogee gear, something no brand new summoner at 99 is going to have an easy time aquiring. Chances are the community will instead force them to not play summoner to get the gear to allow them to play summoner.

I think if you don't believe that than we arent going to find any agreement here, i think you are too far detached from what a summoner fresh to 99 feels like in current day. Especially a new player alone. Understanding how to gear summoned pets is not clear or understandabale to a layman attempting to play the game. long winded research in pet Macc Matt and blood pact damage and how much they are constantly toggling tons of gear and needing so much more lateral improvement than many other jobs (save maybe RDM and PUP) and i myself play RDM in endgame quite frequently as well as Summoner. I still as a NIrvana and near BIS summoner have quite a hard time getting anyone to let me play it in a party ever.

I think making them touch on and work like either a bard (via buff slots and stronger buffs so they line up with bard and cor and dont need to be able to keep up so many) bard and cor just spam thier buffs and then they get to be dd's or in bards situation possibly backup healer. SMN spends a much more drastic amount of thier time spamming those buffs, its not particularly comfortable or fun way to try to heal, nor will you have anywhere near the amount of time to dd as a cor/brd/geo will get sof the same benefit. It reminds me greatly of the era of FFXI when redmage just spammed refresh and haste on everyone and that was thier entire gameplay.

They could also honestly function much like a geo (Shiva/ifrit/ramuh already operate much like a luopan) simply provide an aura around the summoner as well base don which avatar they have out or which they activated a ward on to create the aura, and give each avatar an entrust typse blood pact ? Thats not to say i want the classes to be identical but if they are similar at least they will be easier to understand for a new player glancing at the class. The difficulty of equipping a summoner is kinda crazy in comparison to even most other pet jobs (except maybe pup which is even more complex). you should on summoner have an Idle set (Omen), A healer/support set(Dynamis Divergence), Pet stats to dd/debuff should be handled by communal gear from ambuscade to save everyone (DRG, BST, PUP, SMN) space in moghouse they all want high accuracy/macc/att/matt for thier pets to macro in when using an ability.

They are on so many peices of gear that are useless and for PUP and BST and they arent on plenty of gear from them that they really need(like DT-) how they deal damage is such a huge math dive to determine if BP+ damage or macc or att or double attack ect. is more useful. it isnt apparent like it is on melees which ataacks will necessarily scale well or even which are hybrid without deep dives into mechanics hidden fromt he player on the surface and only explained in dusty old forum posts and BG articles.

By all means restart your AF quest and get it to 119 and use ambuscade gear and tell me how fun trying to buff and heal a party feels today in 2025. I'm pretty sure you're going to have abad time. Hell try to magic burst for a party, chances are they wont even bother because a fresh warrior can just spam non skillchain ws's for more damage than building a skillcain for you and allowing you to burst would provide. its the modern era so twitch it, se ehow people react to the mere suggestion of what you claim is possible that you don't already know personally from playing the game presumadly for years.

I can tell you i got summoner to I119 a few years ago and ive probbaly only had the opportunity to use it like 20 times in 3+ years when not soloing even if summoner could very well have filled its role i was trying to get someone to allow me to play it for. Its clunky, and it shows the difficulty of understanding the class doesnt just affect the person playing it, the people not playing because they also don't understand what summoner is supposed to and can do will just assume it can't or its not worth the stress to be able to and pick simpler communicated jobs, that honestly at present do actually meaningfully outperform summoner in all its roles save for AFAK fights.

I also play on Asura where the majority of remaining players reside so if there was going to be pockets of people willing to accept summoner it would be there on the most populated and diverse server.

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Part of the problem isnt just what summoner can and cant currently do, it is also the perception of summoner and what it can and cannot do. I think you are being abit dishonest to yourself when considering how much gear you need to be where you are talking about like every newbie just hitting 99 on summoner can just immediately do all that stuff and participate in end game content. The worst part is what you need to to do that in engame is in fact also gated by endgame gear and large amounts of gil.

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Well, it was much more true that you didn't really need gear pre-level99 and all the new progression stuff. But I think you misread the post. I said IN THE OLD DAYS, SMN was usable without any gear, and this was true. There was very, very little gear beyond the AF/relic that made avatars stronger. Nowadays there's tons of gear for SMN. But back then, gear was almost useless outside of playing your subjob like it was your main job. And unfortunately, that was a common thing.

Yeah i can agree to that i remember playing summoner as a /WHM healer from the dunes until level cap. I do't really want a return to that either. I think if summoner heals/supports/or DD's it should be through thier summoned pet. They are the most reliant on the pet jobs of thier pets being alive and they have the least ability to do so at present.

In fact one of my pet peeves it that they don't ever seem to even try to make summoner a viable or useful subjob as well. i could see a whm/sch/rdm enjoying carby or leviathan there to help with debuff removal or healing throughput. but alas they have almost never made any relevant gear for SMN to be supported as a subjob.

I'm going to be honest, i think it would also help summoner to remove the perpetuation cost for avatars since it is so trivial to get to 0 and then that frees up a line on thier late game gear for more important stats on idle sets they are currently missing (Pet DT-, pet TP gain type stats, Pet regen, Avatar's favor (GEO idea), Ward Potency(BRD idea), just replace with refresh instead of Perp -)

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Originally Posted by Delgear

I'm going to be honest, i think it would also help summoner to remove the perpetuation cost for avatars since it is so trivial to get to 0 and then that frees up a line on thier late game gear for more important stats on idle sets they are currently missing (Pet DT-, pet TP gain type stats, Pet regen, Avatar's favor (GEO idea), Ward Potency(BRD idea), just replace with refresh instead of Perp -)

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While its easy to negate in the late game, it's still a key part of early game balance for the job, so I don't see it being removed. They'd also have to update all such gear to replace it with something else.