SMN Feels Underwhelming?

-It would be nice though if the egis then had some damaging abilities of their own that you could use off cooldown that were aspected to their respective egis element but were otherwise sort of identical (although they could be flavored differently, if you will).

-It would be nice if each egi could give the group an elemental specific buff (think like the mass blink in FFXI) that could provide some sort of utility to the raid. But, this would admittedly have the potential of being really difficult to balance. In theory, if the damage mulitplier for elemental weaknesses wasn't too large you would have the interesting choice of do you use the egi the monster is weak to or the one that has a more useful utility ability, but that might be going a little too deep.

-Otherwise the spells SMN uses are exactly the same, they just have a different elemental aspect depending on which egi you have out.

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-Maybe have a relatively even distribution of elemental weaknesses instead of like having only 5 monsters weak to earth and everything under the sun be weak to lightning like in FFXI. :rolleyes:

-Elemental resistance gear is something that never happens.

What is nice about this solution, I think, is that it allows for a way to make each egi useful in different fights and bring in a bit of diversity without actually changing the job too fundamentally. Of course, this would require some modifications to BLM as well. But they could do something similar with having BLM switch "Elemental Stances" (you know...like GW2 elementalists) so if the monster is weak to water you have like an "Astral Water" and "Umbral Fire" sort of thing going on, circling the elemental wheel as necessary. And same with Thunder I guess? But basically it's the same thing, you're using elemental weaknesses to add a bit of simple diversity without actually changing the mechanics of each job really.
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Just an FYI, you can edit your first post and bypass the 1000 character limit.

As for weakness, that was scrapped at the begin of ARR because the devs didn't job X to be left out because Boss Y was weak to job Z attacks.

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Originally Posted by Dyvid

Just an FYI, you can edit your first post and bypass the 1000 character limit.

As for weakness, that was scrapped at the begin of ARR because the devs didn't job X to be left out because Boss Y was weak to job Z attacks.

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Yep, classic wow suffered from that. Most of the first raids were immune to fire, so fire mages were automaticly kicked out.

Yeah, I'm not feeling summoner DPS at all. Too many buttons that don't really add anything (why is Spur/Rouse a thing / why do I have to push 4 buttons if I just want my pet to do burst AOE to a group?), and very dependent on meta/fight knowledge to dps effectively, more so than some other classes.

I like the idea of a dot/debuff/control class with lotsa buttons (<3 oldschool LOTRO Loremaster / EQ2 Illusionist / etc), but unfortunately summoner just seems to be straight-up dot dps with the burst hiding behind a ton of necessary micromanagement and a fairly rigid priority system... may just be me, though.

I would of rather seen the Necromancer job in the game before Summoner but sadly they rushed Summoner and now its in its current state which makes it very difficult for them to add anything more to it. I also don't like that the job went dot based which makes it very weird and out of place for the Summoner job itself which is usually based around summons.

I will also never shake the feeling that it plays like a Warlock from WoW. The resource system is so close to being the same as this video gives a great example. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ro0a_yws5z0

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Originally Posted by Zetor

Yeah, I'm not feeling summoner DPS at all. Too many buttons that don't really add anything (why is Spur/Rouse a thing / why do I have to push 4 buttons if I just want my pet to do burst AOE to a group?), and very dependent on meta/fight knowledge to dps effectively, more so than some other classes.

I like the idea of a dot/debuff/control class with lotsa buttons (<3 oldschool LOTRO Loremaster / EQ2 Illusionist / etc), but unfortunately summoner just seems to be straight-up dot dps with the burst hiding behind a ton of necessary micromanagement and a fairly rigid priority system... may just be me, though.

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SMN easily has the lowest knowledge level requirement of the two mage jobs, and also is punished the least in most fights regardless of knowledge. I mean you fester burst is behind 1 button after level 56 your death flare behind 3 if you really really want it to be or more than likely 4.

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Originally Posted by shadowwind

SMN easily has the lowest knowledge level requirement of the two mage jobs, and also is punished the least in most fights regardless of knowledge. I mean you fester burst is behind 1 button after level 56 your death flare behind 3 if you really really want it to be or more than likely 4.

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Add phases and 'boss goes invulnerable' phases are fairly common. If an add spawns far away from the boss and needs to be bursted down within, say, 5 seconds, you need aetherflow for painflare/drain (or maybe dotx2 + fester, though that is way too slow). If you don't have aetherflow stacks at that point and AF is on cooldown, you're left spamming ruin 1/2/3 along with pet aoe abilities and hoping the other DPS picks up the slack. Or if you enter DWT two seconds before the boss goes invisible/invulnerable, you just wasted a ton of your damage.

On the other hand if you deliberately save your AF/trail stacks for 'the right moment' to prevent situations like this, you risk lowering your dps... or maybe even risk aethertrail dropping entirely if the boss decides to become untargetable with 5-10sec left on the buff timer. Shadowflare is another example. It's OK against bosses that don't move, but there are lots of bosses that zip all around the arena during the fight (e.g. second boss in fractal, first and last bosses in neverreap). How do you know where / when to place it without strong knowledge of the encounter?

Maybe black mages have it even worse (in fact, they probably do due to turret gameplay), but that's more of an indictment on black mage design than praise for summoner design. At least black mages don't have button bloat... I guess :p

(aside: all the 'burst window' abilities added in 3.0 like wildfire, enochian, DWT, etc imply a requirement of strong fight metaknowledge while also amplifying the effects of latency... not a fan of that, personally)

The issue with Summoner in this game is everyone can summon since its the pure form of magic and its innate magic. Resource wise Summoner is errily similar to the Warlock which makes no sense since lore wise the Summoner resoucre wise is a Sorceror.

Lorewise Summoner pcs primised not to summon primals so it limits summon abiilities and design. The only summon that the Summoner can get unique to them is Hydaelyn becuase she actually exist as a seperate goddess in the aether stream.

I don't mind SMN being a DoT class, I just wish our job crystal would change our 3 DoTs to line up with our 3 Egi's (burn, some kinda wind dot, etc.) It wouldn't really do anything to gameplay but it'd add some flavor. Gameplay wise I like the evoker direction we're going in, it'd be cool if we could invoke the Warring Triad at later levels. Or just keep adding more Bahamut abilities

The Summoner is going in the direction of the Final Fantasy III iteration of the Summoner but the DoTs are holding the job back. I'm pretty sure at higher levels they will go with the Caller direction.