If talking about how the new SMN works and is structured ruins your fun, excitement and arguments, it's not my problem. I'd say that's actually the point.
Thank you for admitting that your express purpose is to try and bring everyone's mood down. Misery loves company it seems. In any case you've largely been unsuccessful in convincing most people that the new summoner is bad, so why not do something more productive with your time than trying to turn back time to go back to the affliction warlock days now that the devs have said that "Yeah, we're absolutely done with this design?"
For me it’s not even necessarily that we had DoTs as a main source of damage. It’s just that all of our main DoTs were poison spells.
Bio, bio II and miasma in 2.0 we’re probably the most unimpressive looking and feeling spells in the game’s history. Barely noticeable, barely even a sound effect.
If they were elemental in nature to match the primals, I think it wouldn’t have been so bad. Maybe an earth, fire, and wind DoT. Then fester into aether overload or something.
That being said I am very happy with what I’ve seen for 6.0 summoner.
God, if only people had hated the old Summoner for sensible reasons. You don't like dots or pets? Fine, whatever. But this posing around "Oooh, this is not a REAL Final Fantasy summoner" is so pathetic.
I present to you this ancient meme that was relevant up till recently. These egis were an eyesore and the fact that most of summoner's damage came from poison spells instead of -summons- who looked terrible were some of the top complaints the devs addressed in this rework.
Bahamut and Phoenix took forever to build up to and the rest of the time we had to look at a flying chicken nugget. That wasn't cool, that was pathetic. Now that we are summoning one being after another with trance spells in between, we finally have the class fantasy that we always wanted. So yeah, in the context of the entire FF series, affliction warlock was by far the worst iteration of summoner.
https://i.imgur.com/uYXuizD.jpeg
Does it count as ruining excitement if we point out that meme is accurate for 89 levels on new SMN?
Yea, I remember managing Bio, Bio II, Miasma, Shadow Flare, Contagion, weaving oGCDs between. That is why I played the job, because I found it fun managing all those systems. Not for the 0MG I'M A 5UMM0N3R! If you want to play a WoW Demonic Warlock you should go play WoW. You can summon to your hearts content.
Yep and when Demi Bahamut came out people instantly asked for it to be resized because they couldn't see the mechanics in a boss fight showing the community why Egi had to be small.
Also this is what people really wanted:
https://img2.finalfantasyxiv.com/acc...cc_400_400.jpg
But doesn't matter now. You got what you wanted. Instead of a persist Ifrit Egi, you get a 5 second animation. Not sure why you need to booster SMN on you Alts however if they jobs is going to be so fun to play now but hey, you do you.
Except it isn't, since initially the class gets to use elemental carbuncles for its early levels to do the same one-off attacks that the egis will proceed to do. They go in, and then get off my screen. We do not have to look at the ugly egi models for more than 2 seconds, and then we get to use cool looking elemental magic. Then once we have Bahamut he sticks around along with Phoenix during their respective trances. Now at 90 and beyond we will no longer have to look at the egis at all, and certainly not at all during the eventual 90-100 levelling during 7.0, and so on for future expansions.
The foundation they've given us is meant to last far longer than just the expansions of the Hydaelyn and Zodiark era. We will continue growing in strength and gaining new abilities but for now we have the base of some really great things coming in the future during the next 10 years. I would hardly consider that a tiny portion of the game. At the moment we do not have specific details as to whether we can glam the egis into carbuncles but it wouldn't surprise me that they retained this option in game and that it wasn't available in the media tour because they didn't flag the characters as having completed the egi glamour quest (or the quest to even be able to dye gear for that matter).
Again, I implore you to do something more productive with your time than trying to convince those of us who are excited for this rework that we should be sad over the loss of a mechanically and visually unimpressive job in favor of everything some of us have been asking for the past 8 years.
Then what you were looking for was Time Mage or Necromancer, not Summoner. If dark poison magic was your thing then Summoner was not the class to co-opt to fulfill these desires. The point of Summoner is to summon beings for cool looking powerful attacks. Not to be a cheaper version of Affliction Warlock.
We will not miss visually unattractive pets who did not even do what you told them to do whose best attacks hit like wet noodles. It absolutely mattered because the beings we were summoning most of the time were useless.
Considering that the summoning causes a single instance of damage that is just a small portion of the future total rotation, the damage is now caused by summoning rocks and wind rather than your "garuda emerald" doing more than one whirlwind.
Ok, you were obsessed over this symbolic "wow big attack summons!" thing and you got it, fine. But the message of this thread seemed to be somekind of a high ground "And I WAS RIGHT!". No, people who think old Summoner was bad because of Egis were not right. They were just obsessed over something that did not matter.
So your argument is "Old SMN is a fake summoner because we summon an Egi, Bahamut and Phoenix. New SMN is a real summoner because we rotate our three Egis and summon Bahamut and Phoenix. Then for a tiny portion of the game's content we are even better summoners!"
How did you do it? How did you manage to make "YouTube likes" your most compelling argument?
there was alot more simularies.
garuda - imp
titan - voidwalker
ifirit - felhunter/succibus
virus- curses
ruin - shadowbolt
ruin II - shadowburn
Energy Drain -> Life drain
Bio -> corruption
Maisma -> curse of agony
Bane -> Seed of Corruption
garuda had abilitiy to spike dot timers or refresh it. so she basically was go to bed.
summoner had alot of bad abilities at that time virus. tribind. we had ress we had psyheal.
anytime you used titan you solo content sound familar.
be honest it was a completely copy and past job on wows warlock just different names to abilities. and it pissed off alot hard core final fantasie fans cause ppl wanted to play summoner not warlock clone there alot of copy writing strikes going on here
I feel like this thread is beginning to go in circles. Best to let it go. :)
aveyond-dreams, this is important. Given that the primary argument against Summoner right now is that it is mechanically dead and that anyone who likes it is too distracted by the pretty colours, dragging the conversation down into whether the new summons are prettier does not help your argument the way you think it does. They know it has a better aesthetic. They've agreed with you on that point.
This has been acknowledged several times in this thread, they simply do not accept that they wasted ten years misinterpreting that the theme they’ve been asking for only needed to be represented graphically. Mechanically it still could have been done better and in a way that didn’t alienate actual lovers of the job, as I’ve explained earlier.
Understood. I figured someone ostensibly on the same side as them saying it might serve the purpose better.
Like, I'm excited to test out these new phases. A gap closer on a mage, hilarious (though I remember back in 2.X discussions on whether it was Meta for summoner to stay in melee to squeeze out that extra bit of DPS from the book slaps) knowing when the enemy was going to stay still and when you need to not stay still. Cool. I'm a bit of a reactional player, so having things set up so I need to know when to do what, I prefer that over a defined rotation. It's not much variation (the flow still goes Bahamut, ARR Trio, Phoenix, ARR Trio, repeat) but it is something and I can work with that.
These are the reasons I like the new summoner. The big boy summons are just gravy. People focussing on how the graphical changes make the class better just hurt my position.
So you admit 2.0 Summoner was summoner in name only and was only fun because of the jobs random poison/viral magic and not the actual summons? And you used to call yourself a Summoner main yet played Summon-er for the poison magic? And you're telling someone to go play a job in another game that has actual proper summons instead of making Summoner a summon-er? Yeeaaah, not much I can say about that without going on a tangent and you're clearly not worth the time or effort.
For all you 5UMM0N3R mains, not lumping the real Summoner mains in with you, out there you all sure love your poison/viral magic which sounds an awful lot like Necromancy and not Summoning. If anything Summoner should have just been Necromancer with all the poison flinging nonsense it had and how the egis basically look like corpses.
I'll be over here lounging on my beach chair sipping my cocktail and waiting for November 19th to roll on by to take your Summoner main place because it's finally a Summon-er and not a poison toting job with lousy janky glorified DoT pets.
I’ve mained SMN since 2.2, while it’ll take a bit to get used to I’m rather excited for the changes.
The main issue I think SMN had was in identity. It never seemed sure of what its aim was. You had dots to keep up, except it was only for damage, your Aetherflow mechanic only half matched that, and half tied into burst phases with trances and demi summons, your pets outside of assults were fancy looking dots that before ShB could die, and it just felt, not complex but convoluted and at times unintuitive.
A bit of me is sad about pets going but another part of me says that they’ve had 8 years to wrestle with pet AI, there comes a point where the solution is to remove the problem all together.
I thought this thread already reached peak clownery, but now that aveyond-dreams's replacement has arrived, we were gifted the new knowledge that poison= necromancy. Everyone's looking at Reaper, but it turns out SCH is actually the wannabe necromancer job. Fairies are just family friendly voidsents.
I'm still of the opinion that current Summoner is more summoner-y then the new version, purely because you can actually control your summons. With the new version they just come down give you a buff and then leave. If you remove the model from the spell or replace it with something that isn't a primal, is it still a summoner? Hmm...
Back to chime in again. Biolysis, which does deal with death through the decomposition of matter through bacteria and does fit into the necromancy theme, doesn't look like poison or viral magic. It looks like mathematic symbols which fits Scholar's entire "militaristic and scholarly" theme. Easy fix for the poison/viral DoTs feeling out of place on Arcanist/Summoner would be to change the names and VFX to be more in line with how Ruin and Painflare look; runic symbols. Or have SMN summon something to put poison on enemies, which there are only 2 poison related summons in the entirety of final fantasy, one of which that can never be used because of this game's lore. Eukrasian Dosis looks a better visual for Arcanist/SMN DoTs than Bio or Miasma ever did.
Wouldn't surprise me if Scholar is the next job that gets a complete from-the-ground-up rework in 7.0 and loses Ruin, Ruin 2, Bio and Bio 2 in place of things that will fit Scholar thematically as Scholar has already been effectively split from Arcanist.
See ya in November.
It’s made worse by the fact the new spells aren’t even tied to each pet directly. In the sense that they’re cast by them. Egi Assaults and Enkindle actually are and have a clear purpose within the current rotation. They’re just not pretty. If they were at least honest that they also hated the pet AI then that would at least be accurate. Hell my problems with Devotion and Carby’s new Shield are the same as the current version. Can’t use either while a Demi-Summon or avatar is out.
After FFXI, the Necromancer job - err, Scholar - was changed to be a tactician able to use white and black magic. Poison and related spells, as black magic, are part of a scholar's arsenal, as you can see in the FF3 remake or in FF11 (which is often used as a paradigm for job design, but only when it is convenient). They were also more prominent in FF14, before Square Enix decided that only idiots play healers.
If the topic is "what fits Scholar", I guess I'll go with what people that literally created Scholar think, and not what a random user on a forum thinks. You are out of luck here, friend.
EDIT: as a heads-up:
Lysis doesn't mean death through bacteria. A lysis can occur through detergents, enzymes, pressure, sound, temperature (and so on), viruses and bacteria.Quote:
Biolysis, which does deal with death through the decomposition of matter through bacteria and does fit into the necromancy theme
Man, did someone cast resurrection on Akiza because that's the level where these post have gone.
So when are you guys going to lead the charge to get Black Mage and Red Mage changed so it feels more true to Final Fantasy? Last I check BLM doesn't just cast Fire, Ice, and a little thunder. Red Mage could be used as the group healer and deal DPS/Enfeebling magic when not healing. And let's not even start with Bard or Dancer.
Honestly it looks like they just deleted pets then moved Egi Assualt and Enkindle to the caster with flashier animation. Real game changer lol.
All this does is to reinforce the point. Black mage specifically is a perfectly designed job. Yes they cast more than fire, ice and thunder magic, but those are definitely the spells they’ve historically used the most. They’ve taken that history and made a very good job that people really like.
Red mage is a little trickier, but they’ve also done a good job with them too. Red mage is obviously typically closer to a hybrid, but in ffxiv it needs to fit into one box. They do have a couple of “white magic” spells including a potent cure and raise, as well as a party buff. It’s also the reason I think they’re getting magick barrier.
Wind, water, and earth magic are also more aligned with light than dark in this game.
2.0 summoner was very far removed from what they were. To build a job off of poison spells just doesn’t fit. Regardless if 1 of the characters has it.
SE has admitted in interviews that 2.0 SMN was rushed. They were rebuilding an entire game. The other jobs already existed with some kind of identity. My guess was that it was a little “homework copying”. They had to put together a job that summons things, and they saw how Blizzard made a class around it, and adapted it for this game. Thaumaturge had both poison and bio in 1.0. What perfect way to add them back into the game, than to put them on their DoT caster.
It does if you realize the reason you're corrupting their Aether is because you're attempting to use the very tactics of primals against them. There's been plenty of terms for those afflicted by primal influence. An explicitly magical Poison/Curse isn't all that different from it. The Egi needed to take advantage of the damage being caused by those poisons to extract aether from your enemies, enabling you to call upon the Avatar spells. That's the mechanical flavor that was missing that connects Arcanist and Summoner together, reflecting what the actual lore states about their field of Arcanima.
That's the thing you're missing. Summoner and Arcanist ARE why we play this job. You know, the poison carby programmer/scientist mage subtheme that's carried the job since its inception. And unlike most subthemes within XIV classes the magic we use from it is directly responsible in the job quests for enabling us to defeat and summon primals at all. The people who fell in love with the job wanted to see the marriage of those individual aspects, to see SE intentionally combine both identities in the mechanics since its inception. Because mechanically it had the pieces for Arcanist, but not Summoner in ARR, and now in Endwalker it's the exact opposite. You know how Astrologians got mad when Time Dilation and Celestial Opposition had their extension effects removed because it 'killed Time Mage' for them? The removal of DoTs is in that exact same vein. Lore wise I wanted Poisons to empower our Egi. And I sure as hell wanted Carby to be an active, persistent participant in the rotation way more than these one and done Avatars and fake spells. Sure, the 'big flashy primal' aesthetic of the Summoner job wasn't there until Stormblood, but I wanted that contained to the Demi-Summons. I think Bahamut was merely awful from a mechanical standpoint back then (still is now, but for reasons that aren't getting fixed in Endwalker), but aesthetically? Ya'll kept being hyperfixated on the Egi instead of asking "Where in Bahamut's name is my 7-pulses of Akh Morn spam!?". Even so, SE retained the Arcanist side through it and Shadowbringers, and ya'll couldn't see past "Egi aren't pretty enough" when we literally summoned grandad birb and got exactly what 7.0 summoner is but better. Tying Phoenix to a single moment actually made it cool and distinct, while still respecting the Egi part of the rotation. Now we'se seeing that aspect and much more being stripped away. SE is killing that moment and the important part of the Arcanist job entirely. I took the 5.0 iteration's quality in and ran with it because all the little details that needed to be ironed out with Egi were almost entirely fixed, and instead of taking the last step of adding charge action autos and making Egi all ranged to help fix player input priorities SE gave up and catered to players who didn't even play the goddamned job despite getting exactly what they wanted four years ago. If you think 7.0 Summoner is the bomb, current Summoner did that and could have done so much more! It was a complete job. As of Endwalker it's half of one again.
Other jobs resizing bahamut is handy for them, I like him at full size tho thank you, I would have loved the egi to be larger too and less hideous. Hyped for the new summons actually looking like the primals. SE better gimme something even BIGGER in future.. or idk gimme /bahamutextralarge so he can look like he does in coils xD fun fun fun
Carried it all the way through a rework every single expansion until they finally got rid of the problem that was created by turning Summoner into a warlock because most people ran in the opposite direction whenever the job was mentioned. They didn't call it the calculator job or the carpal tunnel job for no reason. People overwhelmingly disliked the fact that class was a clunky mess whose summon magic was an afterthought.
Making Summoner into a pure Summoner only angered people who were more married to the warlock aspects of the class than being an actual Summoner while the other 99% of the internet is celebrating. The arguments they've given in this and other threads make me chuckle, because the more they double down on dots and poison magic the more it is strikingly apparent they don't understand what the job is really about. Me and many others tried this affliction warlock and abandoned it for reasons that are obvious to most.
And we will gladly come in droves to replace any lost warlocks come 6.0.
It also helps our case when you consider Summoner’s thematically are Warlocks. The D&D version of the class. Borrowing the power of a Demigod through a pact is literally what the job is about. And in XIV Arcanist honed in on that better than every prior iteration by tying the magic we used to contain our vessel of that power into the same magic that allows us to wear down our enemies, making us a direct reflection of the primals as a whole.
It’s not my fault you have no imagination. In all of those nonsense posts you still haven’t even broken down any mechanical issues with the current job or looked at how the new iteration makes it worse. All you have is “It’s pretty now shut up shut up shut up”. Maybe, just maybe, you should have read the job quest dialogue and immersed yourself in the lore specific to XIV before casting judgement on graphics.
Thank you for demonstrating that you have no context of the job's theme in the entire rest of the series, where they are absolutely nothing that I would call a "warlock." The objective reality is that the devs agreed with players that the job had reached total stagnation and that it was too far removed from what a Final Fantasy summoner is, with mechanics that made people's experience with the class miserable.
It has already been explained numerous times why the poison magic and broken pet AI had to go, no matter how much of a "sign of skill!" it was to battle against such mechanics while every other job in game had great flow to it. Once again, if what brought you to summoner was poison magic then this was not the class to co opt to turn into poison mage. You had 8 years to experience FFXIV's affliction warlock-now that it is finally a true summoner, I suggest you wait patiently for Necromancer to be released just how I and many others had to wait for an actual summoner to be added to this game.
In any case, I do not believe this thread should be bumped further so any more of these recycled "SMN is a poison mage! You just need to learn to play the game! You didn't even try the class! It's supposed to be unique!!! You're obsessed with graphics!" posts will just be responded to in the front page where I've collected the more *interesting* takes some of these affliction warlocks have had and to save people from having to read the same disproven arguments over and over again.
6.0 can't come soon enough.
I'd like to reiterate a point I've made a few times before. That being, I don't see how a primal coming down, giving you a buff, and leaving, makes you a summoner. Give the current summoner primal models instead of egis and you have 100000x more class fantasy.
My favourite Final Fantasy game is IV, and Rydia is one of my favourite characters. She is cool and being able to summon beasts that help you by using big attacks is amazing. You said that XIV's version of a summoner is a real summoner now, so I'm pretty excited to play it. Out of excitement, I'm checking its kit right now. I'm slightly confused though, so I hope you can help me here.
As I'm seeing, you get... A weird, shiny rat? Must be a summon I don't know, I don't remember it in IV. Doesn't seem very threatening, but it doesn't matter. But... Why does it stay there? Like, all the time? Not really doing anything...? Oh, he is casting a buff, I guess? But isn't he supposed to be going away? Oh right, he is going away now. Is this a chicken nugget? Oh, it's a summon? Uhm, ok... I don't really remember summons being like this in Final Fantasy IV, though... And now the rat is back again? Oh, he is gone again. This really looks like a chili pepper. So this is the level 50 kit, huh? Well, not really what I was expecting, but let's move on!
Wow, you get Bahamut! Look, he did his flashy attack, cool! Uhm, why is he staying? Isn't he supposed to go away after his attack? This is getting kind of weird, I'll be honest. I don't remember Rydia getting a dog (or is it really a rat?) and some.. shiny floating things. She does get Bahamut, so this is nice, but why is he big? And the rest so small? Why isn't he leaving? Oh, ok, he is leaving.
Wow, Phoenix now! Oh, we are talking now. That's the flashy attack, I suppose and... It's not going away, I guess. Oh, it just did. Kinda sucks that the flashy attack is just what Bahamut did, but with a different color.
Oh, now you get rid of the floating things and get Garuda, Titan and Ifrit! Like, the big versions! That's cool! Wait, why are they going away? Why is Bahamut staying? What's the difference? Oh wow, the dog is still there too... I don't really remember Rydia working this way.
Don't get me wrong, it does look cool! But... I feel kinda tricked now. Not really the "Final Fantasy summoner" I was expecting :/ I don't remember Rydia being like this...
I lost interest in SMN when my pets weren't actual pets anymore in ShB. Before, I'd use Titan to tank for me when solo. There were problems with how pets worked, but those could have been fixed. SE decided to distance themselves more and more from the old SMN, and now rebuilt it from scratch.
I don't see the old summoner return. But I do hope that we'll get an actual pet class (hunter pets in WOW do just fine in raids btw), preferably with debuffs, buffs, pet management, and maybe dots.
Basically, there's 2 ways you can be a summoner. One, you can summon a pet and act through the pet. Think DAoC necromancer or what they tried to do with demi phoenix/bahamut where it mimics your GCDs. They could make that the primary core of the class. 2, you can channel abilities of a primal, such as directly casting ifrit erruptions or ramuh lightning strikes.
EW Summoner went with a hybrid of both. You directly summon major summons (pets) but they act on their own while you channel individual abilities yourself, and then you do partial summons to channel the abilities which are used as a reason to basically shake up the rotation depending on which summon is out.
Both are good implementations and both capture the feel of a summoner, but one is very much a final fantasy summoner without replacing the party, and the other is FFXIV's way of expressing this without basically turning the summoner into a permanent Anima or Yojimbo as has been done in past FF games.
It's an unfortunate limitation of how FFXIV is coded in some capacity, but the pets aren't responsive enough to be allowed to do things on their own, and short of having a rotation where you command a pet to do things but it's really just echoing your GCDs, this is a good compromise.
Let me try to bridge the gap and explain the worry of summoner mains about the state of the job fantasy.
Pictures of the feel of the old fantasy vs new "fantasy"
https://i.imgur.com/FGfBdm7.png
People are mourning the loss of the fantasy of collaborating and coordinating with a summoned entity and exchanging it for something with an over reliance of a sequence of pretty pictures with no mechanical depth deeper than "cooldown is up, you're allowed to see pretty sparkle!" Having the pretty particle effects is great, and no one is complaining about that. Hell, summoner mains have wanted that for years (thanks ps3...), but for those who liked interacting with the summons, and the lore of primals, this new fantasy is comparable to playing redmage, while looking at a google image search of ifrit on your second monitor.
My personal feelings on the fantasy, and various concerns with how the job fantasy is expressed:
TL;DR:
Carbuncle is cool, I want more carbuncle interaction.
Build up to cool super move is more fun than waiting for permission for cool super move.
Leveling was fixed... kind of.
SUMMON I CHOOSE YO- wait no, wrong IP! Having a selection of summons to customize depending on situational needs is more engaging than picking an order to summon the same primals every time. And the future of summoner kind of needs the option if we want to have its identity depend on mascots long term.
Dots and egis were not against the job fantasy of summoner, their graphics were.
Delete physick.
1. I love that the carbuncle is taking a more canonical role in summoner as a permanent familiar and I don't mind that the primals themselves are just particle effects, but I do wish that carbuncle interaction was more than One mandatory burst phase buff, and two shields. (if it must be JUST a support bot, an easy fix would be to have the role action animations be displayed as coming from carbuncle now that there shouldn't be a queuing problem. Think of mch lunchbox slap vs brd flute, vs dnc... dance. That would be a big help with flavor, at least for me. Oh, also bring radiant shield back from old ifrit :3c carbuncle casts reflect doesn't he?)
2. The mechanic hierarchy is all kinds of messed up. Our BIG POWERFUL ELDER PRIMAL summons are fulled by... wait no, nothing, they're just cooldowns. You literally start with the most powerful primal in canon (outside of [REDACTED] and [REDACTED]) and it's all deescalation from there. THE MIGHTY AND POWERFUL DREAD WYRM BAHAMUT gives us permission to do our filler phase which consists of ammo whack-a-mole, until the timer tells us we're ready to summon phoenix, and then it repeats until bahamut decides he's ready to play again. So to repeat: Biggest baddest dude on the block is ready to go immediately, unlocks the ability to use the weak ones, slightly less baddest dude on the block decides that the biggest baddest dude has been gone long enough and allows himself to be summoned, and then once again grants us permission to summon the little guys. cycle repeats. The rotation is a constant downhill hype ride. Also aetherflow is there. (why is aetherflow there? It is literally just ocd fluff with no mechanical or thematic tie in to the job at all now.) Also it rubs me the wrong way that the small weak primals have more influence over your approach to casting and optimization than the two demi primals, despite them being out for longer (individually) and them being our big climactic abilities. It's the same problem I have with how ruin IV is where the skill lies in current summoner, instead of making sure bahamut is summoned. It's more of a mechanically artistic complaint than a numerical/rigor mechanic complaint.
3. I am super SUPER thankful of our leveling process being fixed and having such a complete kit at such a low level, as current summoner teaches you WRONG right now as its leveling progression. But, there is a huge problem with the acquisition of phoenix right now, as since level 79 is a deluge of BAHAMUT, GEMS, BAHAMUT, GEMS etc, once you get phoenix, your damage drops since you will be missing a deathflare every other minute now. Leveling up shouldn't feel sucky, especially not at a capstone level. And yeah, a utility summon is nice and all, but one that lasts for 15 seconds out of every 2 minutes isn't very useful since you shouldn't just hold your demi just in case. And I really don't think that fights should be designed to need more healing every 2 minutes just for a smn to feel (artificially) useful. (more on this later)
4. After we get our last 3 gem summons (leviathan, ramuh, shiva) what is next? Add another demi + the warring triad? Are we gonna have a 3 minute rotation? Are our different primal/demi phases going to be overwritten? I don't think this design is as future proof as we're hoping. And I'm worried that someone might get attached to a certain phase or mechanic that exists now, but will be overwritten later to save room. (more on THIS later)
(now is later) Personally, a key part of the fantasy of a monster summoner is that your pool of summons is a toolbelt, not a check-list. Phoenix, as he works now, would be much cooler if I could keep him in my pocket until things start to look dicey, and instead of summoning my big bursty bahamut demi, sacrificing that summon to instead summon pheonix to provide support in a pinch, while still doing a bit of damage. Hell, I know there's talks of removing raise, and I'm all for it, but I wouldn't mind if raise was ONLY accessible in pheonix trance, and say your attack gcds, if targeting a downed player, would raise them instead, maybe even have each raise give a little (VERY LITTLE) buff to phoenix itself, so that its revelation could do more damage the more people you raise (not enough to be more than bahamut, or even comparable, but enough to reward you for doing a cool save and not feeling like you wasted that trance) that would be a much cooler fantasy imo.
-
And I think the end game for summoner, to prevent any more button/rotation bloat, and avoid removing more things as summons will eventually have to be overwritten or diminished, is for us to either have branching paths on our rotations, or to keep things a bit more mechanically simple/restricted, to "slot" summons (say, 2 demi attunements,and 3-6, gems) and have that dictate your available summons/rotation.
Examples for "summoning slots":
EW lv90 slots: bahamut/phoenix attunements, ifritx2/garudax2/titanx2 gems.
EW lv78 slots: Bahamutx2, ifritx2/garudax2/titanx2. (for more raw damage, less support)
Expected Lv 100 slots: Baha/Phoenix, ifrit/garuda/titan/leviathan/ramuh/shiva.
LvXXX slots: Alexander/phoenix, sephirot/bizmarck/Sophia/.../.../... (potential full support)
So you would slot more supporty/safe summons in a prog scenario, and then go full force with more aggressive summons in a farm/speed clear scenario. For more casual stuff, you would go with a jack of all trades / default loadout
It could even be tied to our gauge in some way (if the ui could handle that)
https://i.imgur.com/WNJiYrM.png
Also I liked dots. I love death by a thousand cuts styles of combat. The only complaint I had about them was they didn't get the glare/dia treatment to make them more thematic with the job. (as people didn't understand that we were corrupting the enemy's aether like primals do)
And delete physick, like wtf?
This isn't a full request for a redesign. (if the incoherent rambling didn't tip you off! :P) But this is just more of a list of concerns I have for the state of SMN's identity and how it expresses its power fantasy. I truly think there is an achievable middle-ground that can be satisfying for both old smn mains, and non-xiv smn fans.
I think Roda hit the nail on the head. There's died need to be more Carby interaction...the rest of the stuff they said was spot on too.