What’s the point of Physick for Summoner?

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Originally Posted by Shuuli

The difference is that res is a useful skill from the point you get it until max level. You use it in level 90 dungeons and extremes and even in raids as a last resort. Res is often mentioned as summoners "tool" that makes it the lowest magic dps now, next to its extreme low complexity of spell rotation.

In addition red mage also has a healing spell and is never turned to healer... and even though it has a longer cd and lower potency time, the RDM spell is 100% more useful for the single reason that summoner Physick scales with Mind, while summoners main stat is Intelligence so this spell never scales... for red mage this is not the situation, the heal is actually potent and is used by people.

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Plus, adding to that, Vercure will always be more useful than a Physick scaled with INT simply because of the fact that RDM got dualcast.
The niches that you would use both spells are emergency situations, and you'd probably have to cast a few back to back in that case.

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Originally Posted by DPZ2

Why should a DPS who doesn't utilize white magicks (aka Red Mage) heal or resurrect? Not sure if every summoner out there would object, but I could see a number of the complaining about the reduction in yet another of their skillsets.

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I'm trying to think of it logically. Red mages use a balancing act of using both white and black magic to create "Red Magic," which lorewise, means accelerating the black and white mana generated with movement of the body as the medium to create powerful spells.

As a DPS, we're just more inclined to use 'offensively-oriented white magic. Red Mages still have access to white healing magic too (Vercure, magick barrier, verraise), but not so much that it will step on an actual healer's toes and become a healer over a DPS. Lorewise, we also don't have an abundance of aether to draw healing magic from, as we are limited by our own aether reserves instead of using aether from nature like White Mages. Even conjury borrowed aether of the surroundings, albeit at a small amount. I guess in that respect, using your own aether to fuel your spells like in Thaumaturgy can justify using INT over MND since you're manipulating your base aether and not an external source of aether. After all, WHM, AST, SCH, and SGE all use external aether in some way to heal - WHM drawing power of nature/earth to fuel their spells. AST drawing power of celestial/astral aether to fuel their spells. SCH and SGE uses a focus/foci (their book /nouliths) to soak up the surrounding aether and create a healing formation. For other casters, they strengthen their ability by manipulating aether in specific ways. Black Mage uses their aether to manipulate external aether to strengthen their spells (hence untrained Black Mages can potentially self immolate without proper control). Summoners utilize primal aether by attuning to it and storing the power in gems. I figure lore-wise, this is specifically why we can heal as a SMN only during Phoenix phase - because Phoenix is the only primal that has healing powers due to its ability of rebirth.


For a more reasonable explanation on why SMN's Physick still scaled on MND, it's probably a combination of old coding factors & class decisions. ACN is originally a job where players can choose to either be a SMN or a SCH. As ACN, your stats went up equally in both INT and MND, so Physick still scaled quite well at the time. This is still applicable to ACN. Back then, egis & carbuncle also had a health bar. If you were to use titan egi, you could actively heal it while it tanked the enemy. Thus, there was a reason why ACN, and by extension SMN, had Physick. You could also manually assign and distribute points too. That's no longer applicable.

After job changing, your stats would go up in INT as a SMN or in MND as a healer. In the olden days, there was a thing called Cleric Stance. It swapped a healer's MND to INT. When you wanted to heal as a SCH, you'd turn off cleric stance. Then when you wanted to do damage, because the skills scaled with INT, you'd turn Cleric stance on. That is also no longer applicable.

Then, SE wanted to split up SCH and SMN (hence the jobs having less and less shared skills in common. By ShB, SCH lost Bane from ACN and energy drain worked differently (Aetherflow was basically ACN Energy Drain while SCH Energy Drain spent aetherflow). By Endwalker, SMN and SCH no longer have any shared skills outside of Resurrection. Even Physick is technically stored differently even though both skills scales on MND.) This is also the only reason these 2 jobs have the same base class, and no other jobs share a base class with another job - they didn't want to design 2 jobs that shared base skills but branched off in their own way.

Even in Endwalker expansion, the devs mentioned how they thought of getting rid of Ressurrection from SMN, but decided not to. From this viewpoint, it can be seen that they really want to see SMN and SCH as two separate jobs, but the ACN base class tying them together prevents that, so they're trying to make SMN more of their standalone job and leaving SCH with Physick instead if the player decides to change from ACN to a healer job.

Simply put, SMN was never meant to have Physick at this point in time, but because it shared a base class with SCH in ACN as a healer, it still kept Physick and Resurrection by that token for lore.

iam confused why smn even has res spell to begin with. yes i know they come from arcanist which can become scholar but personally, i think when they reach smn, res shouldnt be there, or at least should have long cooldown.

i can understand RDM being all rounder magic caster, but smn which supposedly a pure magic dps?

Simple. When the jobs were designed, they hadn't yet made all these changes to be able to fully separate the job skills. SCH unlocks at 30, but needed the standard raise at level 12 for synced content. So it had to be put on Arcanist. They've taken steps to nearly fully divide SCH and SMN now, but they're unlikely to just straight up remove a utility spell as valuable as a raise.

Every expansion sees them getting a little bit closer to completely breaking the two jobs apart. But it's hard to say if they'll ever fully get there due to the amount of extra work on the ARR end, probably mostly due to the shared books.

Maybe it has something to do with levelling Arcanist before you get any job stones. I don't think they queue as healers though so they wouldn't need a useful heal ability then either, but if you don't have any job stones yet and are levelling Arcanist for the first time then any traits SCH gives you would not be available. Where as later when you have a SCH stone equipped even when you sync down you could still have active traits from your job.

Nothing, remove it.

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Originally Posted by Dyvid

Nothing, remove it.

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Or better yet: upgrade it (through a Trait) into Rekindle, so you can use it whenever you want.
Preferably at the same time as you get Summon Phoenix (at Lv.80) so it fits thematically.

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Originally Posted by gumas

but smn which supposedly a pure magic dps?

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Summoner has always had a utility bent to it, whether it be the single target job-based titles, or FFXIV. In FF3, its spells were mostly utility until you upgraded your job, and in FF5, you had a handful of spells (Remora, Carbuncle, Golem, Phoenix) which were solid utility-based, including battle-rezzing. In its debut in FF14, Summoner and Scholar had Virus (with INT/MND redux), Eye for an Eye, and Rez in their kit, and while Eye for an Eye was eventually removed, it was replaced with Aetherpact/Shining Light.

So, that stuff's always been a part of SMN's DNA, and should be.

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Originally Posted by Shuuli

In addition red mage also has a healing spell and is never turned to healer...

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From a lore standpoint, red mages heal and resurrect because they use a combination of spells associated with white magick (healer) and black magic (casters). Summoner has no such lore.

Don't like how Physick works? Don't put it on your hot bar.

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Originally Posted by DPZ2

From a lore standpoint, red mages heal and resurrect because they use a combination of spells associated with white magick (healer) and black magic (casters). Summoner has no such lore.

Don't like how Physick works? Don't put it on your hot bar.

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From a lore standpoint, Red Mages use a combination of (present-day) conjury and thaumaturgy.
They don't use actual white magick or black magick, as their practice has been "forbidden" (and/or available only to a select few).

As for Summoners being able to use Physick and Resurrection, it's because of Arcanist (integrating Summoner's knowledge into its repertoire).
As simple as that.