SUMMONER, WHAT WOULD YOU CHANGE OR ADD? (EVOLUTION & STAT ALLOCATION)

Summoners need a smaller cooldown on Enkindle (way way way smaller, seriously what is the reasoning behind it being so high when it's weaker than Fester?) a better means of maintaining their MP that doesn't cut into their DPS and a better burst option that doesn't require such a long ramp up time (BLMs get sustain, burst and AOE damage so I don't want anyone arguing it would be OP for SMNs to have the same).

In terms of general balancing though the egis need to be redesigned to fit specific roles. When 3.0 comes out we are getting two new pets. Unless they change the way the pets are designed these new pets will either immediately render all the previous ones obsolete or garuda will still be superior and the new ones will be dead on arrival... They need roles. We need pets suited to tanking, single target burst, aoe damage, crowd control, etc. Without dedicated roles there will always be one 'go to' pet...

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Originally Posted by Kio

Seconded, Fenrir as well. They used classic summons as mere dungeon bosses then had to make up their own primal for the expansion per their words, "We ran out of the classics to use." I mean it's fun and all to see something familiar to be used in dungeons but I feel their original ideas are better suited for the end boss there.

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The justification for this from the player base that I've heard is that they've only really been important summons in Final Fantasy XI because of Celestial and Terrestrial Avatars and the lore in XI itself. Diabolos the keeper of dreams and sleep, and Fenrir the most powerful Terrestrial avatar that was a combination of all the other Avatar's power. Both were only really important in XI, and I understand this myself having made SMN my one 99 job and having played it to end-game. They just haven't had important enough roles in any other games to be suited to be more than dungeon bosses in XIV.

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Originally Posted by Sandpark

I believe that balancing pet classes is a nightmare.
But I also believe that just because one job functioned a certain way in previous games doesn't mean it will function the same now.

However if you are going to implement summoner in the coolest and most iconic way. Summoner should be a spike damage pet class just as it was in most FF. This should take precedence over lore or current systems. Change the lore, separate summoner from arcanist if that has to happen. My friend thought it was stupid and sad she couldn't level summoner from level 1 anyways.

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Balancing a DoT class is impossible no MMORPG developer has balanced them at high levels of play not even Blizzard. Look what happen to Warlock after Catacysm their population plummeted at high levels and end game.

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Originally Posted by Brianmj

I don't want to heal your pets. That's your responsibility.

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Yeah.. because Summoner healing is so effective.

I'm not talking about Ifrit or Garuda. It would mostly be for situations when Titan is being used as a tank. Summoner heals are far too weak to be of any use in keeping Titan alive against dungeon mob groups and bosses. Obviously this would be a situation that was either planned from the get-go, or in emergency cases when a tank dies or otherwise disappears. Still, when Titan is being used as a tank, healers have no way to target him unless they mouse over (PC) and manually click him, which suffice to say is a huge pain in the butt. I'm not even sure if they added a way for Titan to be targeted by PS3/4 users, but I imagine it would be even more of a pain in the butt. (I play on PC)

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Originally Posted by Ecks007

Yeah.. because Summoner healing is so effective.

I'm not talking about Ifrit or Garuda. It would mostly be for situations when Titan is being used as a tank. Summoner heals are far too weak to be of any use in keeping Titan alive against dungeon mob groups and bosses. Obviously this would be a situation that was either planned from the get-go, or in emergency cases when a tank dies or otherwise disappears. Still, when Titan is being used as a tank, healers have no way to target him unless they mouse over (PC) and manually click him, which suffice to say is a huge pain in the butt. I'm not even sure if they added a way for Titan to be targeted by PS3/4 users, but I imagine it would be even more of a pain in the butt. (I play on PC)

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from PS4 you can mouseover click him, too....
but yes, it's still a pain >_>

They also need to adjust pet accuracy requirements for summoner. Pet needs more than the actual player but food doesn't affect pets so the summoner has to have a higher base accuracy to start with. And most gear is poorly optimized for summoner for some reason. Even our books which we don't share with blm like we do with everything else. It really feels sometimes like they aren't even aware of how summoner actually works, even though they made the game.

Ok these are specifically for ifrit-egi

1. Radiant Shield: Makes it counter ALL damage

2. Makes his damage scale with magic attack, and NOT physical attack.

3. Alternative to 2: Increase Burning strike from 120 to 180, and flaming crush from 110 to 160. This is because the damage difference between garuda and ifrit is so small that the difference doesn't amount to anything. At this rate, garuda will rise to be better than ifrit in damage as the intelligence stat increases with each patch where as physical attack power stays stagnant.

You guys rock :) there is once again good ideas around.

To add my little coin in the idea pool, I would get rid of the restriction with bane and its 3 targets only, today the game is way older and mechanics / players habits evolved a lot... There is many examples of why it is stupid that bane is ridiculously underpowered when it come to aoe as smn -.-; it doesn't even touch all adds during Shiva HM/EX xD and it is also why SMN is rejected from speed runs, taking a BLM is quicker when it come to trashs zerg.

By the way, I was wondering... Is there any similar threads in the JP board about SMN?
Being ignored for months in the English section seems somehow "legit" I guess but what about Japanese players?

Best thing to do is to bump all the smn related threads so SE knows there's people out there wanting it to be sorted.

For the most part, I love playing SMN. However, there are four main things that I think need changed. One is the MP. I think they could easily fix this by giving SMN (only SMN, not SCH) a trait that ups the percentage for Aetherflow. They could also add a special proc, that everytime SMN uses Aetherflow, there's a chance of getting a free Energy Drain. Meaning, it doesn't take away a stack, it's totally free.

Enkindle needs a shorter cool down.

Contagion needs to be a SMN skill, not a Garuda skill.

Finally, change Tri-Disaster to be useful for something other than Frontlines.