summoner please don't take anything for it please improve the summoner

One thing they could potentially do, is keep the Carbuncle, but make it so the Egi are 1min bursts, that have a 3-5min CD(possibly longer for the more powerful ones like Bahamut or Phoenix). You would get 5 buttons essentially for those skills(Ifrit, Titan, Garuda, Bahamut, Phoenix), where the Carbuncle is transformed and acts similar to the MCH Automaton Queen or the DRK Living Shadow abilities. That's one way they could change it, but that would still get rid of some of the pet management aspect of SMN.

When my pet could no longer tank for me in the world I walked away from summoner entirely and swapped to BLM. If I am not going to have a pocket tank pet for solo play there is no reason to drive myself crazy with the summoners clunky mechanics. I am saying this as someone who has always played pet classes in games.

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Originally Posted by Igneous

God I hate they they removed them from pvp

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I don't. There's a reason no Summoners appeared in FRC and people picked literally any other range instead in their comps, because pets especially uncontrollable ones like bahamut made the job a nightmare to play in ranked.

As far as Egis are concerned, I'd appreciate it if they removed Summon II and III, and instead consolidated all of the various Egi Assaults into five spells. Just brainstorming, but it could work like this:

Egi Assault I & III: A single target and aoe attack sharing the same charges and cooldown.
Egi Assault II & IV: A single target dot and aoe attack that drops a damage field on the floor. Same as above, these two share the same charges and cooldown. For balance purposes the aoe version could deal less damage overall than the dot against a single target, meaning that in a prolonged fight it would be better to only use the dot unless you needed both for burst.
Egi Support: A self-targeted shield, basically Titan-Egi's current Egi Assault I. This only has one charge and does not generate stacks of Ruin IV, but is off the global cooldown.

Also, I'd really like it if changing the appearance of your summoned pet also changed the names and appearances of their attacks. For example, Ifrit-Egi, Garuda-Egi, and Titan-Egi would all have the same attacks as they do now, more or less, but Shiva-Egi's would be ice-themed, Ramuh-Egi's would be lightning-themed, and a Carbuncle's would be... uh, Carbuncle-themed, I guess.

I understand that this would be a lot of work, though, so I don't really expect it to be done. It'd also raise the number of buttons needed instead of reducing them (from 2 Egi Assaults and 3 Summons to 5 Egi Assaults and 1 Summon), which seems like something the devs have been trying to avoid.

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Originally Posted by Myrany

When my pet could no longer tank for me in the world I walked away from summoner entirely and swapped to BLM. If I am not going to have a pocket tank pet for solo play there is no reason to drive myself crazy with the summoners clunky mechanics. I am saying this as someone who has always played pet classes in games.

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I will still play SMN, but this disappoints me too. It feels like a waste of design space. Titan Egi doesn't really matter at all anymore but they wove it into the story so they couldn't remove it. Just feels like bad design.

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Originally Posted by Savagelf

i for one hope SE you take time to improve on summoner as job and tried make more like summoner away meant to be a pet job. i want more pet jobs SE please think of pet jobs

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If you're asking for pre-existing jobs to become pet classes; NO I hate Living Shadow on Dark Knight and it's one of the main reasons I don't play Dark Knight anymore... along with a not so fun leveling experience that came this expansion for ARR content and they can making the grind faster all they want it will not fix how boring and not fun 1-50 leveling is for most classes/jobs...

Edit: reworded my comment.

SMN has many issues and is a Frankenstein of all the different expansions. However that doesn't mean it is hard to fix.

Solution
The job feels great to use at 60, so just build upon that foundation. Which funnily enough, they did with Phoenix. It is only Bahamut that feels out of place and tacked on.

Basic Changes

• Merge Summon Bahamut into DWT, and change Ruin 3 and Outburst into something Bahamut related during DWT.
• Fix the Egi's ghosting issue, and the Demi's puppy behavior.
• Change Tri-disaster and DWT/FBT to a 1 minute cooldown.
• Return Shadow Flare
• Merge Enkindle Bahamut/Phoenix into Enkindle
• Personally? I'd suggest de-coupling Scarlet Flame and Wyrmwave from the SMN's attacks, just let them do these automatically without delays. I'd also change the Enkindle ability to how the MCH's Automaton Queen Pile Bunker works.

This would result in a much cleaner play style, that "feels complete" at 60 and just gets enhanced along the way. Granting it a far stronger identity and sticking to it. How I would see this is the following way:

My vision for this

• Core rotation is now complete at 60, higher levels expend upon this without tacking on new subsystems
• Remove Deathflare
• Give DWT its damage increase back
• At 70 Bahamut Is summoned during DWT, much like Phoenix is during FBT. Change Ruin 3 to Ruin 4 and Outburst to Painflare.
• At 80 Phoenix enters the game

You now have a core identity that is easy to expend (The replacement skills don't need to be cosmetic changes only), and duo to a tiny ability squash (Painflare, Deathflare, Summon Bahamut, Enkindle Bahamut) have design space to add more summon themed abilities like devotion to use in-between trances without creating problems for console players.

The root of all evil
The current SMN (pre 70) play very much like the antithesis of a Summoner we know and love. It primarily focusing on sustained low damage through the use of "poison"-like abilities instead of heavy burst.

It's quite obvious this is done because of the Arcanist. The base class needed to contain elements of both these jobs and thus certain elements that where needed for the SCH have bled over into the SMN and vise versa. For the Summoner to be fixed, the Arcanist either needs to be revised and taken away from either the SMN or the SCH (giving a different base class to the remaining one).

Personally I'd have loved to see the SMN act like an MMO version of Dissidia 1/Duodecim's Gabranth. An ebb-and-flow between very low damage, defences and movement and absurdly high, with some devotion-like abilities to fill the gap. How feasible this would be however, is a discussion for another thread.

Egi should not be temporary because of lore reasons, and being Demi-Bahamut and Demi-Phoenix already fill that role. The lore advantage of Egi is they can be out indefinitely, while Demi cannot.

Sorry but everyone talking about “For lore reasons” that all went out the window when they trashed astrologian’s cards. They had lore to them and SE didn’t care about that. So summoner lore means nothing either. Sorry to say.

Am I the only one who thinks that SMN is just fine? For the life of me I can't understand why people complain so much about it. I love how the current double trance rotation works and it feels very rewarding when you pull everything off perfectly. I have tons of fun with it.
All this talk about how pets and its rotation is "clunky", and I mean, where exactly? Everything in the rotation lines up perfectly fine. Sure, pets need a little more careful handling in order to be used properly but there isn't some uknown secret nor 4-D chess to pull it off, it's actually easier than ever to get the pet to do what you want.

Also big NO thank you to making the SMN as dumb as MCH is right now. MCH's rotation is so toned down, so without any real texture, that it's literally one of the only jobs with its own illegal rotation spam software where it keeps repeating the same perfect rotation over and over again in order to cheat good rankings on fflogs. That in itself speaks volumes.