If i had the Wheel Part 3

[Delgear]

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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[Delgear]

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.

[Zenion]

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.

[Alhanelem]

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.

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.

[Zenion]

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 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.

[Alhanelem]

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?)

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.

[Delgear]

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.