I MISS THE OLD SUMMONER!

I shall try to keep this short...

I have played XIV since the PS3 beta back in 2013. I wanted to play the 1.0 version before this point, however the lack of a Summoner class was the deal breaker for me. So naturally once it was announced as one of the new jobs for 2.0, I jumped straight on board! I have been a Summoner main ever since.

Naturally I have experienced every version and rework of Summoner and each version has had it's pros and cons. However, when I look at them all side by side I have to say the original version comes up on top! - Or rather a version akin to it comes up on top..

The original Summoner had a unique gameplay style that really helped give it a true identity - We could command our summons in the form of true pets whilst casting DoTs to keep a constant flow of DPS - When I played as this version of the Summoner, it really felt like my summons (Egi) were fighting alongside me and the ability to issue them commands added to that feeling because I was interacting with them!

However, if we look at the current Summoner - All of the unique gameplay/mechanics have been stripped away - We no longer have the Egi engage in combat (it just sits there doing nothing....) and we can no longer issue commands or interact with them in any way. Furthermore, the DoT's have been removed also, meaning there is quite literally nothing left of the traits that made Summoner unique and gave it an identity!...

The current Summoner is all visuals and nothing more - Sure when you cast a Demi/Gem summon and see it fill the screen looks super cool!...But, there comes a point where you've seen those same animations so many times now that the visual element just isn't enough!...Summoner truly needs something more than just visuals!

I honestly believe that the community would have fully embraced the original Summoner had it's visuals matched closer to the current Summoner - So have the Egi look closer to their Primal version and actually look like a living being, and have the DoTs be Primal element based!

I do however think Demi-Bahamut was a great addition and is what the 3.0 Summoner should have got instead of Dreadwyrm Trance! - So I guess I believe the ideal Summoner to be something more like it's 4.0 version, but retaining a focus on the Egi being a true pet that fights alongside you!

I agree. I agree

Most of new summoner is flash and ruin spam. People hated the idea of ruin spam. Strange all it took to make some people love it was call it titan mode etc.

If it wasn't easy, I don't think people would defend it. People seem to care more about the idea of an easy class to play with your brain off than having a good class fantasy of summoner and to me that is sad.
Sometimes I have done a mechanic and thought wow that would been much harder using old summoner. But then I remember I found old summoner much more fun too so I would have had the motivation to figure it out.

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Originally Posted by Milea

I agree. I agree

Most of new summoner is flash and ruin spam. People hated the idea of ruin spam. Strange all it took to make some people love it was call it titan mode etc.

If it wasn't easy, I don't think people would defend it. People seem to care more about the idea of an easy class to play with your brain off than having a good class fantasy of summoner and to me that is sad.
Sometimes I have done a mechanic and thought wow that would been much harder using old summoner. But then I remember I found old summoner much more fun too so I would have had the motivation to figure it out.

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I agree with this also - When the Summoner rework first came in 6.0, I was initially all for it because I was enthralled by the new visuals and full Primal summons. However after playing it for two expansions now those pretty visuals are simply not enough!...I've grown bored of them and now wanting something more from the job that it no longer brings! - At least with the older Summoner we had that in the form of pet management and DoT upkeep. It was fun to play and kept me engaged because we had to actually do stuff and pay attention!...Now with the current Summoner it's just, sit back and press one or two buttons and watch the pretty visuals play on a loop...That's it, literally nothing more!...

I agree the old Summoner would have difficulty with current fight mechanic trends - However, I think this method of trying to make content more engaging is a lazy attempt on SE's part...Boss fights now have essentially become a form of bullet hell game, where you have to be constantly on the move and dodging none stop, otherwise you die....It's literally to the point now where in order to successfully dodge a mechanic we have to move before the telegraph even appears!...Which defies the entire point of a telegraph!!...It also means players who are new to a fight are essentially being punished simply for being new and not knowing a telegraph would appear before it appears!!...This design is beyond moronic!!...It would be fine for the odd battle, but not as a foundation to the games combat as a whole!...It just doesn't work in an MMO or RPG setting because in order for jobs to have any kind of identity or unique gameplay, they need a slower form of gameplay in order to achieve that!...There's literally no other way! - So until that happens all the jobs will continue to be homogenized and continue to lose there unique identities...

Honestly I think SE have some nerve calling the current Summoner a complete job because it's quite clearly missing any semblance of a coherent role/purpose and identity...All of which the job had in it's older forms! - What proved this to me was when I decided to create a fresh alt character and level Summoner again from scratch - I hadnt done this since the rework so wanted to see how the new Summoner would play at the lower levels...As soon as you get out into your first battles you can instantly tell the job is totally missing any kind of glameplay or abilities...Your Carbuncle just sits there and no longer fights and you only have Ruin to cast...That's it!! - By the time you get to Sastasha you have access to the other Carbuncles and the Gemshine ability...but each one is just a slightly different version of Ruin, also Carbuncle will now go in for a single attack when you summon it then go back to doing nothing...This is pretty much Summoners entire gameplay loop all the way to 50+...The Carbuncles get replaces with Egi, but they function exactly the same and the gameplay is exactly the same! Meaning we don't see any significant change to the Summoner gameplay until 60+....That is insane to me and clearly shows it's a broken incomplete job!!

I agree with this. I love how our summons would fight, kinda reminded me of FF11 summons. FF11 summoner is so much fun for such a old MMO. Perhaps if Yoshi-P played FF11 and try the jobs there and maybe improvised it in FF14 it would be wonders!

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Originally Posted by Painx

I agree with this. I love how our summons would fight, kinda reminded me of FF11 summons. FF11 summoner is so much fun for such a old MMO. Perhaps if Yoshi-P played FF11 and try the jobs there and maybe improvised it in FF14 it would be wonders!

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Yeah, the FF11 Summoner was incredible! - Looked and played like a true Summoner, with fully commandable pets and each with their own individual purpose! - I'd love to see something like that for FF14's Summoner!...Though I guess the lack of an elemental wheel in this game would make that difficult - This is why I was fully on board with the Egi glamour system because it would give us access to a ton of different Egi that would function as one of the 3 pet types - You could just set up individual macros for each Egi glam so that when you summon, it also applies the glam assigned to said macro. That way you essentially have a whole host of summons to swap between at any time, even in battle!...Of course having each summon be truly unique would be the ideal though.

I 100% believe they would have been golden had they just made the Egi look like living beings - They don't even need to be the full Primal...Just something that resembles them in some way and actually looks like something that is alive, similar to the Carbuncles! - So essentially just make the Egi look like more realistic looking Pokemon. I think it really could be that simple, rather than constantly reworking and gutting the job, whilst awkwardly shoehorning in some random Solar Bahamut into the rotation that totally janks up the gameplay flow and doesn't really add anything that the original Demi Bahamut didnt already add!

I like the current Summoner (conceptually) but I liked the old Summoner too.

That said I’ll be the first to admit they’ve absolutely dropped the ball of the job completely. They’ve done literally nothing to develop the concept or gameplay since the rework happened - it’s still identical, just with a slightly different flavoured Bahamut every 120s. And it’s ironic that despite the entire point of the goddamn rework was ‘to make a traditional/classic style ff summoner’…which they do by making us summon a lazy TEMU Bahamut reskin?? Wtf? Where are the flashy ff summons you promised us, Yoshi? It’s like they want us to hate them. We’re still missing so many potential Summons but they think we need another Bahamut?

Can’t wait for 8.0 when we get reskinned Lunar Phoenix

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Originally Posted by Connor

I like the current Summoner (conceptually) but I liked the old Summoner too.

That said I’ll be the first to admit they’ve absolutely dropped the ball of the job completely. They’ve done literally nothing to develop the concept or gameplay since the rework happened - it’s still identical, just with a slightly different flavoured Bahamut every 120s. And it’s ironic that despite the entire point of the goddamn rework was ‘to make a traditional/classic style ff summoner’…which they do by making us summon a lazy TEMU Bahamut reskin?? Wtf? Where are the flashy ff summons you promised us, Yoshi? It’s like they want us to hate them. We’re still missing so many potential Summons but they think we need another Bahamut?

Can’t wait for 8.0 when we get reskinned Lunar Phoenix

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Agree… I think new Summoner is better conceptually. SMN isn’t really a pet class, and while I sympathize with those that miss it, the pet controls were so clunky! The only thing I really miss about old Summoner was DOT spreading; it felt satisfying!

Mostly Summoner just needs to have more summons. I don’t expect it to get to the level of older titles where you had like 30 to choose from. But they should utilize the gem buttons to give us as many triads as they can. Honestly I’d be satisfied if we just got the other 3 elements with Levi, Shiva and Ramuh. There are ways you could arrange things to allow for low skill floor/high skill ceiling, like an Astral/Umbral split for instance. But the long and repetitive rotation needs something other than just Titan, Ifrit and Garuda in between. There’s been enough little things in the lore, especially in EW, that could justify it on that front too.

But yeah we probably will get Lunar Phoenix… or some “dark” counterpart to Sol’s “light.” I’d almost bet money on it. Which would be fine IF we first got more gem triads to stick in there. They need to stop adding Demis and take advantage of the gems to give us more summons with their own actions/abilities without adding to button bloat (which is one of the perks of the rework). I liked the rework, but that was because I thought they were using it as a launchpad to give us more summons, and they just… didn’t.

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Originally Posted by Khryseis_Astra

Agree… I think new Summoner is better conceptually. SMN isn’t really a pet class, and while I sympathize with those that miss it, the pet controls were so clunky! The only thing I really miss about old Summoner was DOT spreading; it felt satisfying!

Mostly Summoner just needs to have more summons. I don’t expect it to get to the level of older titles where you had like 30 to choose from. But they should utilize the gem buttons to give us as many triads as they can. Honestly I’d be satisfied if we just got the other 3 elements with Levi, Shiva and Ramuh. There are ways you could arrange things to allow for low skill floor/high skill ceiling, like an Astral/Umbral split for instance. But the long and repetitive rotation needs something other than just Titan, Ifrit and Garuda in between. There’s been enough little things in the lore, especially in EW, that could justify it on that front too.

But yeah we probably will get Lunar Phoenix… or some “dark” counterpart to Sol’s “light.” I’d almost bet money on it. Which would be fine IF we first got more gem triads to stick in there. They need to stop adding Demis and take advantage of the gems to give us more summons with their own actions/abilities without adding to button bloat (which is one of the perks of the rework). I liked the rework, but that was because I thought they were using it as a launchpad to give us more summons, and they just… didn’t.

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Yeah the pet controls were clunky - That was definitely one of the drawbacks of the older Summoner, especially when trying to use Garuda's Contagion in certain situations...However, I think if a version of the old Summoner was to return, one way to mitigate that would be to remove important skills like that from the pet and put them into the Summoner's core skillset - The visual could still be of the pet doing an ability, but from a coding/mechanic view it's actually from the player and therefore not reliant on any pet programming. But the main thing about what felt good/satisfying about the job for me, was having that pet fight by your side - Even if it was just a simple auto attack, it still gave the Egi more presence than a flashy animation that appears for a couple seconds then disappears - I just prefer having something permanent on the field.

I agree historically Summoner hasn't been a pet class - With FF11 and FF14 being the exceptions. However Summoner initially came to FF14 via a community vote that asked the playerbase what job type they would like to see added next and the one that won was a pet class. So in FF14's case Summoner was very much intended to be that! FF11/14 are also the first two times an FF has been an MMO - I believe this is an important difference because all the other FF's are single player RPG's where you have control of a whole party of different characters. This allows for the game to add a character/job who's entire purpose is to constantly play a short cutscene of a summon coming in doing an attack and disappearing - This doesn't get boring because you have another 2 or 3 characters/jobs in the party that will do something completely different on their turn and thus keep the battle and gameplay engaging - However if we look at FF11/14, as MMO's we only ever have one character/job at our disposal at any given time and I believe the reason the current Summoner is so boring now is because it's trying to replicate that constant "cutscene" style summon of a single player game - Which does look cool for sure!...But again, after a while of constantly seeing those same animations over and over, it starts to get very boring when it's the only thing the job can do.

At least with a pet class Summoner there is a level of interactivity and complexity to the gameplay that is still focused on the summon and commanding it, which works very well in an MMO setting usually...Perhaps SE could just simply invest some proper time/money into developing better pet coding - If FF11 could do it and all these other far older MMO's then FF14 definitely can!

Oooff I wouldn't be surprised by a Lunar Phoenix either at this point tbh - But I agree that if at least a new triad of Gemshine summons separated these new Demi's then the gameplay loop would flow far better! and the job might be able to bring some satisfaction back! - If that were the case I'd at least like the Demi's to have more time on the field because at least those are still akin to a type of pet and at least visually appear to fight with you - One of my bigger issues with the current Summoner is that you barely get to see or take in what you are summoning because it's already left the field practically before you realize it's even there!...

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Originally Posted by Khryseis_Astra

Agree… I think new Summoner is better conceptually. SMN isn’t really a pet class, and while I sympathize with those that miss it, the pet controls were so clunky! The only thing I really miss about old Summoner was DOT spreading; it felt satisfying!

Mostly Summoner just needs to have more summons. I don’t expect it to get to the level of older titles where you had like 30 to choose from. But they should utilize the gem buttons to give us as many triads as they can. Honestly I’d be satisfied if we just got the other 3 elements with Levi, Shiva and Ramuh. There are ways you could arrange things to allow for low skill floor/high skill ceiling, like an Astral/Umbral split for instance. But the long and repetitive rotation needs something other than just Titan, Ifrit and Garuda in between. There’s been enough little things in the lore, especially in EW, that could justify it on that front too.

But yeah we probably will get Lunar Phoenix… or some “dark” counterpart to Sol’s “light.” I’d almost bet money on it. Which would be fine IF we first got more gem triads to stick in there. They need to stop adding Demis and take advantage of the gems to give us more summons with their own actions/abilities without adding to button bloat (which is one of the perks of the rework). I liked the rework, but that was because I thought they were using it as a launchpad to give us more summons, and they just… didn’t.

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Dot spreading was so satisfying!

And while it is true that pets were clunky, that doesn't mean the right thing to do was gut and remove them.
Why not, make them not clunky and feel good?

Like they did fix Bahamut when we move. And we basically are still a pet class. Why do we have Carbuncle?
Why do I need Carbuncle out to summon Bahamut? To do certain skills?

We are an even worse pet job now cause the pet doesn't attack but is still required.

I do, and I don't miss it.

I've been playing Final Fantasy from the beginning. I still have all of my carts from growing up. Summoners in games before XIV (with some exceptions to XI, considering the Job system) were pretty much static, with the inclusion of black magic.

However, something always felt missing from summoning. Example: Rydia from IV - being able to summon the Mist Dragon or Titan momentarily was, in my opinion, a much-needed change.

I will admit I do miss casting dots and spreading them out amongst groups like a plague. I feel like they could bring that casting mechanic back in the form of a new casting DPS or something similar to that effect. But I enjoy cycling my primal summons the most.