Summoner revamp

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Originally Posted by Alaltus

I don't think ACN's background is a problem; from what i've seen/remember ACN = all about carbuncle, Smn = all about egis. The burden i think lies with Sch being tied to ACN and sticking it and SMN with the dots SCH needs to dd and heal. If they seperated SCH from ACN they then could make changes to ACN and SMN without harming or over powering SCH.

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It looks like it would be a delicate balance for sure. I don't know if DoTs were referenced, I'm reading up on the lore and the story so it doesn't say much though my guess, would be that we use so much concentration to summon and maintain the egi's that our talents can only be diverted for only so long (this is from a lore stand point only.) so Arcanists were able to create spells from their "arcane geometries" that didn't do a lot of damage initially but did them over time so we could put our focus back into the pets. Or maybe that's just a load of dung I spread around myself to mask the smell of disappointment...I will accept either! lol

Still, I guess if we are going by descriptions one of the things that stands out is how they make the pets in the descriptions defined as the defining power. Though that's not the case, I don't really fear Ifrit or Leviathan. I am afraid of that boat we fight on since apparently we can't swim. A bit of a downer to know that I'm a warrior of light that has travelled through space, time and taken down ancient evils yet I need floaties on my arms....and now all I can think about is Robin Hood Men in Tights and how Little John was drowning in the river..that's us.

I think besides just the pet skins being re-done we lack a lot of mechanics in this game to help each other out. I think there should be more party wide support (from all jobs), but that would come from our pets. I think there needs to be more debuffing on the mobs that isn't DPS based (Slow, Blind, Paralyze, Gravity-EvaDown). I feel going more into the pet is the best way to go, we are capped right now with what we need to do just to sustain our DoT's. So maybe you're right about removing them from SMN and ACN, and find another means of conjuring damage from the caster. Or even make a synergy of it from us and the pets. Say instead of Misama II, depending on the pet we have out, we get an elemental AoE DoT if they keep them around. Burn / Choke / Shock etc...

Though with 4.0, maybe they will change things. I do still enjoy my SMN, so I will complain a bit but in the end..I will always run in ready to book-slap the crap out of something.

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Originally Posted by Keramory

...And before people say its too late, let me remind you we've remade classes completely in the past. Hell, we took out the elemental wheel lol.

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True, they took out a rather large mechanic, so it is possible. I think it is possible to do it though we need to break a few things for it to happen...I'm sorry I am still picturing my Roe in a shallow puddle screaming he's drowning.

Personally I think Summoner is unsalvagable. It's a great job, but it's Arcanist. Let's call it Arcanist all the way through to 60, split off SCH to a separate job (that shares spells like Bio in name but no longer mechanically), and we can work on a new SMN. I think people that play SCH might thank us too.

Folding SMN into ACN would be easy - just replace the Egi and Carbuncles with the elemental sprites we see all over the place. Arcanima is all about higher geometry and "living but not quite" constructs and diseases - these crystalline, sort-of-alive sprites are perfect! The Dreadwyrm Trance stuff can be reflavoured just as easily - retool is as using arcanima to bring out the intrinsic tendency for stuff to decay and disintegrate all in one burst, or something similar. That's pretty much what Ruin is! As for the quests, I'm sure a lot of the SMN specific ones can be salvaged by some clever changing of dialogue and the swapping of Egi models for sprite models.

Obviously a lot of people like the existing SMN, so I think it's really important to preserve that whatever happens. I don't think rebranding the existing SMN as ACN takes anything away from that.

Rebuilding SMN as something new gives us the opportunity to avoid all of the lore reasons why Egi are so awful. It's all bound up in the fact that arcanima constructs drain us when they're created. If we can create some new summoning method that isn't full-on worship primal summoning and isn't "glue a bit of primal aether into this Carbuncle" then we have so much potential to work with! We know that Primals have some kind of soul that floats around in the void - can we link into that somehow? Actually conversing with some Primals like Garuda would be a lost cause, but Ramuh and Titan appear to actually be sane and rational beings that we could chat with. Certainly, the WoL is entirely opposed to Primal summoning, but so are some of the Primals themselves! We could work something out.

Of course it'd be silly to be summoning Primals just after joining the new "Summoner guild", whatever it may be called, so Carbuncle should be back on the cards as a "New SMN" exclusive. There's also no reason why we can't work our way up through various other obviously magical creatures - the summons from previous games like Fenrir and Diabolos - before we hit Primals at higher levels.

For personal context, I was extremely excited when I saw Arcanist added at the start of ARR. I jumped on that nigh instantaneously, got SMN to 50... and quit the game entirely, because it's nothing like what I actually wanted and I was so disappointed. I'm back now, for a while at least, but I'm not touching SMN with a 10 foot pole. I'm not one of these people who wants to put the whole dungeon into a 3 minute cutscene when I summon SuperBahamutUltraPrime, but I would like an actual pet class.

Thematically, FFXIV's version of SMN is definitely different than past Final Fantasy version. I was a longtime FFXI player where the Summoner consistently summons and most of the skills they use come from their pets. And when you think back to Yuna or Eiko you aren't exactly thinking Dots.

But I gotta say - this version works in this game. It struggled in 2.0, but ever since 3.0 SMN is a fun, engaging job to play and it's power level is at a good place. It's not what I would expected it to be, but I hope it receives no major changes.

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Originally Posted by Jerbob

Personally I think Summoner is unsalvagable. It's a great job, but it's Arcanist. Let's call it Arcanist all the way through to 60, split off SCH to a separate job (that shares spells like Bio in name but no longer mechanically), and we can work on a new SMN. I think people that play SCH might thank us too.

Rebuilding SMN as something new gives us the opportunity to avoid all of the lore reasons why Egi are so awful. It's all bound up in the fact that arcanima constructs drain us when they're created. If we can create some new summoning method that isn't full-on worship primal summoning and isn't "glue a bit of primal aether into this Carbuncle" then we have so much potential to work with! We know that Primals have some kind of soul that floats around in the void - can we link into that somehow? Actually conversing with some Primals like Garuda would be a lost cause, but Ramuh and Titan appear to actually be sane and rational beings that we could chat with. Certainly, the WoL is entirely opposed to Primal summoning, but so are some of the Primals themselves! We could work something out.

Of course it'd be silly to be summoning Primals just after joining the new "Summoner guild", whatever it may be called, so Carbuncle should be back on the cards as a "New SMN" exclusive. There's also no reason why we can't work our way up through various other obviously magical creatures - the summons from previous games like Fenrir and Diabolos - before we hit Primals at higher levels.

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Even if they just renamed summoner to evoker and went through all the job quests and renamed summoner to evoker and summoning to evoking they could then do with that what they want. The job can continue to evolve as they see fit and no one would care. This would then free up Summoner to be something completely different.

And I don't see why this new summoner would need to have any link to primals whatsoever, it could be something completely separate that doesn't have anything to do with primals or aether or all the lore junk people keep citing why our pet can't look good or be powerful.

Let's say in the next expansion we go to the village of the mists. There we discover that the people live near a gateway to another dimension full of powerful beings called the espers. Some of the people in the village have made a pact with the espers to use their power to project their form into our world, they call this act summoning. By training with the local summoner's in the village of the mists we learn to commune with espers like maduin, Kirin, Valefor and others and summon them to fight by our side.

So giving the basic takeaways from this thread we can see three issues; Egi Appearance, lack of Egi summons, and Egi rotations. I thought of an idea a few weeks back about time limited pets and summon/release type gameplay with summoner. The basic premise was Egi summoning rotation were you have a base line pet, carby, that is basically a place holder pet. The idea is you would summon an Egi that takes the place of carby for a set amount of time the returns back to carby until you cast the next Egi. The Egi's would have three different styles of purpose; AoE attack, Single Target, and Emergency tank. Each Egi would have a different ability to help out with the fights and preform their signature move when the timer is up.

Examples, and I stress examples, to you a basic idea of what I mean:
---Nevermind, examples always throw people off. The goal really is to have each Egi in the rotation do something different than it's counter part. You don't want Garuda and Ramuh abilities doing the same things.

Egi time limits would be 60s or 90s for Ifrit and Levithan, 30s or 45s for Garuda/Ramuh, 15s to 30s for Titan/Shiva. The idea would be to rotate Ramuh/Garuda on AoE trash mobs, Ifrit/Levi on single target stuff, and temp tank for either AoE or single target until party recovers.

As for Egi appearance, they need to look better. I would say Hume height that mimics the movement of the primal; some float and some walk. Keep the basic idea of element infused with primal Aether. An example would be Ifrit Egi as living fire encased in molten armor giving an appearance of the primal but have the horns, talons, and tail as flames. Garuda would be molded wind encased in feathers.

Also instead of Trance, create Bahamut Egi as a second pet that attacks the current target of the summoner. Last for 20s then does death flare and goes back to the aether.

P.S. - Excuse the grammar errors but don't have time to proof right now.

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Originally Posted by Cabalabob

And I don't see why this new summoner would need to have any link to primals whatsoever, it could be something completely separate that doesn't have anything to do with primals or aether or all the lore junk people keep citing why our pet can't look good or be powerful.

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Because if a summoner can't summon Ifrit, I'm not sure how well that would pan out.

[quote[Let's say in the next expansion we go to the village of the mists. There we discover that the people live near a gateway to another dimension full of powerful beings called the espers. Some of the people in the village have made a pact with the espers to use their power to project their form into our world, they call this act summoning. By training with the local summoner's in the village of the mists we learn to commune with espers like maduin, Kirin, Valefor and others and summon them to fight by our side.[/quote]

This is not FF6 Online.

I know it doesn't solve anything really, but what about aesthetics? What if our normal spells were replaced with "lesser summon" equivalents that do the exact same damage and effects?

Say you cast shadowflare(with a different name I suppose) but when it is done a Diabolos (no larger than a male roe) would come out and throw down an Ominous Ruin dome. That would be our new shadowflare. Cast bio2(with a different name) and Siren comes out and drops Requiem on the enemy and vanishes. Make all of our base spells these "mini" summons and then we can do something interesting with our actual Egi after maybe D: This way we would be summoning all the time and they would be classic type (one cast one effect) and we keep Egi.

It just goes to show if they can't get this pet class right, how are they going to bode if they add anymore? They probably wouldn't even add anymore, they developed themselves into a corner with their own mentality when it comes to this game, not just pet classes but all classes with the way the game works and how parties are built. It's not about fun and new things for the development team probably when developing new classes...its about how to work around the current system and not break the current balance. As much i love FFXIV, and i am very disappointed by the decisions of the development team ever since they said they introduced the broken class/job system when introducing ARR in the first place.

The only way i can see summoner truly being able to feel like the older version is if they revamped the job, and made all its ability not about summoning a pet but having different moves that are linked to summoning a lesser version of the primal temporarily. Like Titan for Earthen Ward, or Levi for Spring water etc. However as i said before my disappointment in how they designed the game and how limited their vision of what parties should be (tank/healer/damage dealer) Make it very hard to balance this properly, so this version of summoner couldn't have a lot of cool utilities..that were very powerful, otherwise it would make them too versatile or powerful. I believe that's why yoshi never wanted to introduce summoner in the first place cause a true summoner would be insane to balance, unless you made it bland and all the moves were attacks and not utilities. That's how we ended up with this mess of a summoner job, where most of the abilities are focused on the caster it just makes more sense for the caster to be all about doing damage, whereas a more focus on summons would disappoint people even more when comparing it to FF11 and other games were summoners had more varied abilities.

The way i see them balancing summoner is that they were allowed to choose a role beforehand(tank/healer/dps) and could gain access to certain summons/abilities based on what they choose so they are locked as that role for that fight when going in the duty.Once again though, that might make them too powerful, or too versatile. Why not bring a party FULL of summoners then? How do you add versatile abilities to summoner without destroying the current party system? As much as i love summoner and FFXIV, this whole game is a hot mess in its underpinnings.

I really think they should:

a) split SMN/SCH into ACN > SCH and Elementalist > SMN, or some variation where SMN and SCH stem from two separate classes.

and b) Rename Summoner to Evoker and retain the term "Summoner" for storyline NPCs or for a possible future job.

I'd be perfectly happy with that.

I think the issue here is simply that there is no place for a big huge kill-everything summon where you bring it up and it wrecks house. Something something expensive but things that are too expensive for an OK ability (ie Shadowall) are going to see little play with the way it works out. I think the best result is having more trances + deathflare style mechanics. Make a Zantetsuken deathflare thing for one enemy or whatever, just give flavor. You can claim that they somehow painted themselves into a corner by having ARC spawn both SMN and SCH, but I think it's unrealistic to say that any 'ideal' SMN will come out of this MMO setting. Either you want something which is big on a long CD (Shadowall issue) or something which just comprises a lot of your damage but won't do much more than a SMN already does (reverse the damage distribution) and still do less than a MNK/DRG and feel like your Summon isn't cool enough.