The Shadow Summoner: Bringer of Patch 4.4 Feedback

Patch 4.4 edition. Yes, it's me again. This time things are going to be a little different, though. I'm going to break up my comments into two sections, Fundamental and Personal. Fundamental should, ideally, be problems with the core job that aren't colored by my biases. Personal, obviously, will be influenced by those.

If you're asking, "Why now?" Well, this is basically the last time for anything to matter to the team, since the expansion is roughly six months out. Any later than now and it is possible they just wont have time to make changes before the expansion is locked in. With that in mind, let's get started.

Fundamental Feedback:

Pet Control:

Pets are still sluggish to commands and can easily gum up their queue when dealing with Enkindle and Aetherpact because of the unnecessary two step build up. First you have to activate a skill that does nothing except tell your pet to use a skill. Then the pet has to use the skill in its queue after being told to activate the skill. This adds unneeded wait time to both skills, when they could just activate when the Summoner presses the button.

Garuda-egi is especially bad at this because her basic attack is still a cast time spell, even though Scholar recently had the fairy's basic healing switched from a spell to an instant ability to cut down on Embrace gumming up the pets response time. This basic change should also be given to Summoner to make Garuda-egi more responsive, but I also think there should be changes to the skills to further reduce delay.

Having both Devotion and Enkindle Ultimates be skills that the Summoner controls and casts from the pet would drastically reduce frustration. So, instead of needing to tell the pet to use an ability and wait for the pet respond, you use the ability and it happens on top of the pet. Think of it like Deployment Tactics from Scholar. You deploy the buff (or ultimate) from the pet, not issue a command and wait for the pet to respond.

Titan-egi:

While I am on the topic of basic pets I would also like to point out just how useless and frustrating Titan-egi has become. His function as a tank is completely invalidated by Demi-Bahamut existing, since to summon Demi-Bahamut you have to kill your pet. This resets his aggro and basically renders him irrelevant to his only purpose, or you have to deliberately sit on dreadwyrm aether stacks and never use a massive part of your kit just to keep him going.

I really don't have an suggestions for how to fix this just because of how tied in Demi-Bahamut has become to the job. In the overworld you're usually better off just nuking enemies down, since they will rarely if ever be able to win in a damage race against you. I don't think turning him into a utility pet would accomplish much either, simply due to the fact pet actions all share cooldowns and midfight swapping can be very frustrating and mana intensive after several swaps. I would like to see something done to give this guy a better niche in the job, but I really don't know what that could be.

Aetherflow:

I still dislike that optimum use of Aetherflow and Dreadwyrm Trance requires you to throw away the majority of your first trance, and any other later trances that might be delayed due to jumps or boss intermissions just to keep the cooldown on Aetherflow rolling and progressing towards Demi-Bahamut.

If you don't want Summoner to use Aetherflow abilities during trance, just lock them out instead of locking out Aetherflow. It accomplishes the same thing but prevents you from needing to dump your entire opening trance just to keep the job moving. Let me Aetherflow in Dreadwyrm Trance, and simply disable abilities like Fester or Painflare if you don't want them to be used. It would help raise the skill floor since new Summoners wouldn't automatically be hurting themselves in the long run without changing the skill ceiling.

Demi-Bahamut:

Like Aetherflow, I do not believe that Demi-Bahamut accurately portrays his optimum use to the player, to the unnecessary detriment to new players trying to pick up the job and the frustration of veterans who know his limits but still must deal with them in a raid setting. Let me explain what I mean.

Summoners will quickly learn that Dreadwyrm Trance grants you an absurd amount of mobility. Not only is your basic damage spell, Ruin III, instant while under the effect of Dreadwyrm Trance, it also gives you complete control over your damage over time effects due to trance resetting the cooldown of Tridisaster. The only time you need to sit still is to AoE, since Tri-Bind still has a cast bar. Against single enemies or bosses, you have unparalleled freedom for a caster.

Demi-Bahamut appears to grant this same maneuverability because of his design. His abilities have triple the maximum range of your own, and the importance of casting Ruin II to weave off-global cooldowns to maximize the number of Wyrmwaves might lead you to believe that Demi-Bahamut is an extension of the Dreadwyrm playstyle, granting a high degree of mobility.

In reality, he is the exact opposite.

Demi-Bahamut has an absurd need to remain near the caster at all times, even though his range far exceeds almost every single boss arena and you won't stop to AoE most trash pulls until the tank has pulled as far as they want and settled aggro. His obsession with movement also results in lagged Ahk Morns, where he will prioritize moving closer to the Summoner over using his ultimate skill, even if that means he can flat out not use it, or visually fire the spell but result in no damage being dealt because he ran out of time. This is incredibly frustrating while learning the job, and still creates moments of irritation when you just want him to attack while you're off doing some bosses mechanic.

You can ram Wyrmwave commands down his throat to roughly keep him in place, but those can sometimes override priority on Ahk Morn and result in the attack being slightly delayed again for no reason.

What he needs is to go to a pet training school for separation anxiety.

Fundamental Conclusion:

These are what I feel to be the biggest core mechanical problems with Summoner in it's current state, and I would hope to see at least most of them addressed or at very least smoothed out with the changes to the job in Shadowbringer. I tried not to let me biases get in the way of this section, so please do let me know if I forgot something, or if there is another mechanical problem that you would like to see addressed come 5.0.

Now, with that said, it is on to my more personal feedback for both the job and the direction it is heading. This is going to get bumpy.

Personal Feedback:

As I said before, this section is more for my own personal feelings about both the job and its current direction. Obviously I don't expect the dev team to cater to my every whim, but I would still like to at least provide an outlook as to why I don't like some things and am not as satisfied with the current job's design. All of the above in the fundamental section apply down here as well, so I will try not to repeat myself too much.


Summoner is a thematic mess:

Starting off strong I suppose. Give me a second to explain myself though.

Right now, Summoner has a lot of different mechanics and themes at play, but all of them are incredibly shallow and have little interaction with each other.

It's supposed to be a DoT job since ~21% of your total damage comes from just them, but they do basically nothing for you except invisible damage. No part of your kit does anything interesting with them (except Bane, but that's an Arcanist ability), and the only thing they have an impact on is deciding if you Fester has any effect or not. You don't even need Fester to deal damage to go through the complete rotation now. Imagine trying to play BLM without using Fire or DRG without Mirage Dive.

Managing them has become really shallow since they both default to 30 second durations and Dreadwyrm Trance resets the cooldown on Tri-Disaster, so you always have them ready to go anyways. The add nothing to job now, and instead siphon power away from other parts.


It's supposed to be a pet job, except the pets are basically throw aways that you have virtually no way of interacting with. Out of roughly 24 abilities for job, you have... one buff that's just a cooldown. One attack that's just a much longer cooldown. One utility spell that's just a middling cooldown. Oh, and one heal over time that we'll probably lose at the same time random AoEs start doing damage to the pet, again. I'm not counting Sustain for this since the pets are basically immune to damage at this point, but they always start taking huge amounts of damage during the leveling process. At the very least your pets interact with you since they are the vehicle for Ruin IV procs, but for being such a core part of the experience they are very hands off and mostly just there in the background. You really do nothing with them.

It's also supposed to be another pet job, but the two pet types have anti-synergy between them. In order to summon Demi-Bahamut at all, your current pet has to die and remains dead as long as he's active. This results in wasting time if Enkindle comes off cooldown while he's out, since it's a completely different pet. Rouse and Aetherpact are likewise worthless, since neither can be used in conjunction with Demi-Bahamut. Why are the pets of the pet job competing so hard against each other and come with their own mutually exclusive spells? Why does Bahamut have to forced just to auto-attack, otherwise he stands still doing nothing? At least the basic pets can be ordered to go beat up something for your amusement. They can also walk away from you, which is more than Demi-Bahamut can muster.

The only thing that really ties any parts of the job together is ironically the most boring part. Being the Ruin Mage. Outside of your brief trance and Bahamut periods, you're just hammering Ruin and waiting for the fun to happen. However, the Ruin part is the only one where things play together. Your pets have a random chance to give you a Ruin IV proc (which is actually fun, I do like this), and that proc also reduces the cooldown on the spell you use to command the pet to do its ultimate attack. There's a synergy here between the different parts that really doesn't exist anywhere else. Your pets and dots don't care about each other. Your pets and other pets really don't care about each other. I want to see more of these interactions to tie the job together in the future.

Pick something and build a more coherent and interesting job out of it. Make the pets a more engaging part of the kit. Make the dots do more than a binary Yes/No check on Fester. Make Ruin Mage some unstoppable evil, just pick something and expand on it.

Being a Bahamut Mage isn't interesting to me:

Now I know this is going to get some people riled up, so I'm going to repeat myself here: this is my opinion. If you like being a bahamut mage, good for your then. Enjoy it. I don't like the overreliance on bananadragon, and this is why:

Bahamut is really starting to overshadow any other part of the Summoner job and it's making it feel really shallow and uninteresting to me as a result. The big main draws of the job are all Bahamut related now. Deathflare and Dreadwyrm Trance, Summon Demi-Bahamut and Ahk Morn. Even the limit break is more Bahamut. I didn't mind it originally, but now it's just getting overbearing.

I really feel like this is crowding out more interesting parts of the world and history of hydaelyn that we could be putting into the mechanics of the job. Tri-Disaster is supposed to be a spell referencing the Warring Triad, but literally the only connection there is it has Tri in the name. There is no mechanical link to the Goddess, Fiend, or Demon; or to any of there associated themes like Balance, Life/Growth, and Eternity/Infinity. We're not really seeing anything interesting about our adventures around the world and the primals of different cultures or origins, like Thordan in Heavensward or Susano in Stormblood. At best we might eventually get an egi-glamour out of it. It also feels really underwhelming to get all this Bahamut stuff when the lore book confirms that basically anyone on Aldenard could learn the same things given a soul stone and enough aether. Everyone got a dose of dragon dust when his body exploded in Cartenau, but only we have been traveling the world and seeing new kinds of primals. I would really like to see something that reflects our journey here, but that's just me.

Also as a side note here: I miss being a DoT mage. That fantasy really resonates with me and the focus on Bahamut really pushed it to the wayside. Really don't have much else to add, I just miss the playstyle.

Demi-Bahamut:

I really, really do not like this mechanic. It's really uninteresting to me to have the blue banana follow me around airhumping the enemy and occasionally throwing out a slightly bigger Deathflare. If he is going to be a part of the kit, I would rather he do something more unique and interesting.

A lot of people like to talk about Summoner in XIV not fitting the "theme" of classic Summoners in Final Fantasy, and I feel like this spell would have been the perfect place for that to happen. Have Demi-Bahamut show up and cast one big, impressive spell, and then leave. That's literally what the summons were all the way up to Final Fantasy X, so this would have been the perfect homage to that original fantasy. They could have even given him Teraflare (and renamed the Summoner limit break to Megaflare as that is basically what it is), since that is the most impressive and powerful spell he used in XIV, both in the fight itself and in the End of an Era cutscene. There was potential here and what we got was a secondary pet that can't share and needs constant supervision.

Personal Conclusions:

Looking forward I'm very cautious about the changes Shadowbringers will, uh, bring. I like that they tried to give the Summoner more pet interaction through Aetherpact, but the implimentation makes it occasionally frustrating to deal with. I didn't mind Bio and Miasma III at first, but the change to Tri-Disaster has had a knockon effect of erasing most DoT control from the job. Upkeep is extremely easy now and very infrequent compared to before, but they are still incredibly potent and limit the power other parts of the job could have while being effectively invisible. I don't like the implementation of Demi-Bahamut, and am worried about future changes to the job adding more mutually exclusive pets or stapling more mechanics on to Aetherflow without letting the spell cycle properly at the beginning of battle.

If I had to be optimistic about something, I would like to see where they decide to take the job in the future. There is a rich setting here to have a job that visually represents our journey through the world, similar in a way to the Dark Knight story showing the impact we have had on the people of the world and vice-versa. There is potential here to really dig in to some lore and integrate mechanics and thematics of primals that we face, like Tsukuyomi having a duality to her, or Bismarck giving us the ability to eat all the restaurants in Limsa Lominsa out of business.

If you managed to get through all of that, thank you for taking the time to read it all. I hope something is able to spark an interesting discussion, and that the changes coming in the expansion are solid and enjoyable.

I totally agree with you. For me, SMN is the one job where SE did not only not manage to sustain the job fantasy many people had from early games (I-IX), but they also failed to give it an interesting job design.

It's literally a ruin-mage with two burst phases put on top of each other.

It was kinda fun in ARR since it was the dot class and felt good if you liked that sort of playstyle.
In HW they were like:"Don't know what to do with this job...Let's put a burst phase on it..."
In SB they were like:"Don't know what to do with this job...again...Let's put another burst phase on it and scrap some dots..."

I still think SMN would be way more fun with the summons beeing actual spells of your rotation, building up resource for a big attack (Bahamut, Alexander, Phoenix etc.).

I feel giving them some burst was a good idea, as they had pretty much none in ARR, which made dungeons and soloing a slog.

But now that they have more burst than they need, I think it would be good for them to get some of that "DoT mage" flavor back and further look at their pets to make them feel more like a summoner.

This was a good read. I agree with the problems you've addressed. SMN is a thematic mess to put it simply, and a lot of the mechanics and design choices are frustrating, but somehow it's my favorite job in the game (well, for now).

Honestly, I'm glad the focus is less on the DoTs now. I didn't mind it especially in HW, but I think it's not what SMN should be about. It should be more about summoning, which brings me to Demi-Bahamut.
I like Demi-Bahamut. I feel it's pet summons done right...Well, just barely. Demi-Bahamut feels better to use than the Egis because you have to be actively controlling him in such a short time, his damage is very high and he looks cool unlike Egis that are just puny, forgettable and do small (but consistent) damage. There's a lot of glaring issues with Demi-Bahamut like you mentioned, but with tweaking, maybe adding more skills to him for variety and making him appear more frequently than every 2-3 minutes, this style of summons will be more favorable than Egis. I'm all for Egis getting removed from the game, too.

I have mixed feelings with SMN's future. I'm one of those people who want more Demi summons so this interview and that they've mentioned before that they're struggling with fixing pets gives me hope that they'll scrap pets in favor of more Demi summons (also the fact that they haven't done anything to Egi glamours makes me believe in that even more), but at the same time I'm also concerned that they won't fix the problems they do have right now, or even worse, add another mechanic to the already messy pile it has and dumb down the others in favor of this new one. I wouldn't like it to be more of a Bahamut mage than it was before, too. Give the other Primals some love!

Hopefully they know what they're doing this time. I hope for the 4.0 BRD treatment with SMN. All of the problematic jobs, actually.

I don't *mind* how the job plays now - I am the sort who plays the cards that are handed to her. You've given me a couple of items to gnaw on, I hadn't thought about. As you said, no reason for Demi-Bahamut to trail along behind like a giant helium balloon on a string -

I agree I would rather have seen the Summoner played like the traditional FF Summoner - Eikon, Summon, Primal-Egi, what have you - in a way, as you said, we manage resources to the point we fill a gauge, or fulfill some other set of conditions, which lets us pull out that One Big Summon every XX seconds, for various effects. Shiva, Ifrit, Titan, Ramuh, Leviathan, Odin, Alexander, Knights of the Round - making the one you choose be the strategy game...

Perhaps in FFXVI...

I just want Garuda/pets in general to be more responsive.
Mashing the same button during 6s and hoping the skill queued properly is boring and stressful, especially with Contagion where you don't want it to be delayed.

I also don't like Bahamut phase. Because you have no visual representation availaible for wyrmwave (except knowing what to do in your rotation) and Bahamut doing what he likes.
Akh Morn being a instant oGCD but needing you to stand still is weird. I mean, at this point, i'd prefer casting it myself, at least, if I have to move for whatever reason, I know it'll be my fault for missing it,and not Bahamut's who need like 4s to eventually find a good spot where he can cast his thing.

Yes,SMN is really mobile and all, this is good, but if something require me to don't move, at least, give me a true visual representation of what's really happening so I know how to adjust.

I personally am hoping to see some changes for 5.0 to incorporate more active summons (not egis) that act as a buffer - ends with massive attack then swap for another buffer. Probably more suitable if it was self-buffer but some active primal usage would be appreciated.

I'd ditch the DoTs completely. Diseases have always felt more like the Scholar's thing, anyway. Instead, focus on the interaction between the player and the summon. Perhaps make them respond via player action, a la Demi-bahamut, or have our aetherflow abilities directly affect the pet. Just a thought, but perhaps the player could rotate through summons the way a bard rotates through songs, each summon interacting differently with the game.

I know this may be unpopular, but I like the way PvP handles dreadwyrm trance. Your instant-cast ruin III turns into ruin IV, which is twice as powerful but has a short cast time. It really makes you feel powerful, which I prefer over the "mobility" button we have now.

My suggestions here might seem to limit the flexibility and mobility that makes the job popular, but I'd really like to see them nail the job identity and feeling of being powerful that I know the job is capable of.

I don't know where, but I have thrown some ideas around a more "primal flavoured" SMN somewhere on the forum. Basically I suggested that instead of being a pet job (which is tedious for all the reasons that have been listed above), I'd have "primal stances" similar to Bard songs but without any timers. Each stance would have a core value (Ifrit DPS, Titan defensive buff, Garuda offensive debuff?), and basic SMN kit actions would be altered based on that stance you are in (firey high potency fester if you are in Ifrit, Windy DoT if you are Garuda, dunno for Titan lol).
This would get rid of all clunky pet interactions, make it more SMN-esque than having a bland Ifrit/Garuda floating around, and would add more logic to the job itself, because it would be about managing burst windows around buff and debuff utility.

I mean it's a personal rambling about what I'd like to see the job move into. The focus would be to get rid of the pet itself, as the way it currently works does not make any sense in regard to the SMN overall rotation.