Yea, the job sucks....
Time to find a new main.
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Yea, the job sucks....
Time to find a new main.
Endwalker SMN is how a FF Summoner should be and feel like.
The argument about complexity is rather moot for the job itself; as by design of FF series, it was focused on summoning something, it deals (usually) large damage, then leaves. Should there be a job that revolves around dots and be complex? Sure, why not; but Summoner is not that job. First thing that comes to mind would be Arithmetician from FFT.
That all said, the damage numbers do seem a bit janky and some balancing could be done, over all though the job feels as it should with the summons.
Summons should absolutely be controllable in ideal situations but for the past 8 years they tried and failed repeatedly to do that in this game. At some point you have to pull the plug when something has reached that level of dysfunction. Please. Before 10 summons were 1 off attacks, I like the mix we have in FF14 now but I do hope we get more summons later on.
And to add onto this, the only games where this was reverted to single powerful summons before EW were Bravely Default and Bravely Second. And that's only because those games were styled in the vein of FF3. Even then Summoner in those games had a good bit more going for it than just shitting out a big DPS spell or three then running OOM. With a stat distribution that complemented Black Magic very well as well as a ton of abilities to not only amplify summons but do other things like a last summon on death or raise max MP. They also got combined with Conjurer in Bravely Second so they now acted like a hybrid between Evoker and Summoner from FF3, able to apply both huge buffs and huge damage while also gaining most of the nicer abilities both classes had. Yokai also was a summoner type class but it could shit out status affects and other massively debilitating stuff alongside the -ja spell summons it had.
TL;DR. Big cutscene boom then OOM SMN hasn't been a thing since real early FF. Even recent spinoffs improved on it heavily, too.
Imagine how I feel being both a healer main and a SMN main. Or going from one to the other, rather. :<
First SB AST gets shat on going into ShB, then SMN gets shat on going into EW. I seem to be cursed that every class I fall in love with near the end of an expac gets utterly trashed in the next one. At least the SMN rework wasn't a lore-destroying mess though.
The most recent spinoff, TFS, still uses the large hit/leave scenario. FFXI allowed the player the choice to keep it out yes, but it did little else than drain MP, so people did as before; Summon, damage, dismiss, other skills.
There is no doubt they've mixed it up a bit with X forward, but its still largely a summon/hit/leave system for summoning in many of the games and aspects.