I Enjoy Summoner

The team didn't have to make Summoner fun for me, but they did. I didn't enjoy it back in the day because it felt like I was playing a WoW Warlock rather than an actual summoner, but it feels great now. I wish we got Alexander this expansion instead of Bahamut though. Just wanted to give a thanks to the dev team since there's so much negativity around here. Wish there were more positive posts.

I don't enjoy SMN anymore, but I used to, especially during Stormblood it was my favorite job.

I enjoy DT SMN even its EW SMN with few more buttons.I do not main in raid but def my second choice or off spec job.

I cant say iam enjoying but its still feel exactly the same as before so… yeah

Its also the least complex button press class which i like it lol

A job doesn't have to be complex/hard to be fun. :)

SMN also made it possible for my BF,
who isnt a gamer to experience this game

Almost any job is as approachable than SMN if you press buttons. The difference is that you won't play it optimally, that's where complexity lies, that's about it. If you're having fun with a class that has no skill ceiling and no fun with a class that has one, then you're basing your fun not on playing the job but on mastering the job.

yes, I actually enjoy smn when i do random roulettes while watching some netflix series or animes.

I like Summoner, however what I don't like is that they basically did nothing. The rotation didn't change, the mechanics didn't change, nothing new at all really... just reskinned stuff of things we already had. Even Paladin which is basically the exact same job as before got more new things than Summoner.

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Originally Posted by LoadedVirus

I like Summoner, however what I don't like is that they basically did nothing. The rotation didn't change, the mechanics didn't change, nothing new at all really... just reskinned stuff of things we already had. Even Paladin which is basically the exact same job as before got more new things than Summoner.

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this, they cant even bother to give us animation upgrade like... i dont know, change ifrit titan and garuda to shiva ramuh and diablo maybe?

the only thing "new" is pallete swap bahamut and wind swirling ability lol

Trolls really just going for the lowest hanging fruit huh? What’s next, a thread about how healer dps should be deleted forever? A ‘you pull you tank’ extravaganza? I can’t think of any other reason to create a thread you know everyone is going to disagree with

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Originally Posted by Connor

Trolls really just going for the lowest hanging fruit huh? What’s next, a thread about how healer dps should be deleted forever? A ‘you pull you tank’ extravaganza? I can’t think of any other reason to create a thread you know everyone is going to disagree with

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I don’t know how we can say everyone disagrees when clearly several people even here don’t disagree. I don’t disagree - I love summoner and always have. I think it’s way better now than before the EW rework and I’ve mained it for many years.

With that said, the DT changes are the biggest disappointment I’ve ever witnessed in this game and whoever is responsible has no business working on this job anymore.

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Originally Posted by -Xenia-

With that said, the DT changes are the biggest disappointment I’ve ever witnessed in this game and whoever is responsible has no business working on this job anymore.

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From what I’ve seen, I’ve still yet to see anyone who doesn’t feel this way about DT Summoner. Still,, for whatever reason, its like the cool thing to do in the community now to say ‘SMN bad SMN too easy’ etc, so I don’t imagine people are going to be flocking to say how much they love it. And I mean, I personally enjoy Summoner in its current form myself, but I don’t really expect others to agree with that sentiment based on the general discussion I see around the job.

Like, I enjoy Scholar so much I still main it, but I’m not going to make a thread about it, because I’d literally be eaten alive by every existing Scholar player for admitting I like that it’s a support/utility buffer and I don’t think DoTs added that much to the gameplay. I’d basically be asking for abuse lol, because literally ever post about Scholar is the exact opposite (‘more DoTs less everything else’)

I'm grateful to be able to level Summoner through Scholar.

You can enjoy any complex jobs without being good at it, many casual players enjoys BLM even when not being good at it. Because they accept it's a high skill job and they can make mistakes.
SMN is a job for players who don't like when the game tells them they made a mistake.

Summoners were great in 2.0, when you still had actual pets.
However, it's relaxing to play now and not in need of fixing. There really is no need to rework it. If I want more of a challenge, I play BLM or MNK. If I want more action, VPR or DNC.

Jobs like modern SMN are dangerous and somewhat toxic for the raiding scene on how they twist the challenge and distort the system enough to upset the balance to a point where more than half of the caster player base was actually using the job because "path of least resistance" which could raise and was perfectly capable of clearing like any other ranged job.

This is hardly good for the game, and its only raison d'etre is exactly this: satisfying players that don't want any skill ceiling whatsoever.

Maybe some players like the current Summoner, but it completely disrupts the balance of the Caster role.

It belongs to a specific category where frequent spellcasting is expected, ideally with special abilities to move only when necessary.
The old Summoner fit this category because it had no excessive mobility and could build up 4 stacks of Ruin IV and 4 stacks of egi-assault to move or during Phoenix Trance,
much like the current Pictomancer who can accumulate 5 stacks of White Miracle and has 3 Hammer hits for movement.

This is what every caster should have in their kit—not resembling another category they don't belong to, like a Physical Ranged DPS.
Having constant mobility makes it impossible to balance properly, it will either be abnormally low in DPS or too good, leading everyone to play it at the expense of other casters because it's no longer a true caster.

The fact that the Summoner is easy isn’t the problem; the issue is that it no longer respects the category it belongs to and the job doesn’t even have resource management.
The demi-summons are basically copy-pastes of each other, so the rotation lacks identity.
Each summon needs to be made unique, but currently, they aren't—except maybe for Ifrit.

I honestly love the design of new Summoner, and play it quite often.

Old Summoner comparatively was completely unapproachable to me, I felt it was way too complicated and looking at posts from back then you can see this was a pretty common opinion.

I do agree they overcorrected quite a bit and made summoner too easy to play, but at least I and others can play and enjoy it.

Some people enjoy watching paint dry, I guess smn fits that comparison best (along with healers).

I love summoner too but im honest, the current EW/DT Summoner has in my eyes more to do with "Summons" as the old ShB one, but it really lacks complexity, some people may say its fine how it is other will say the same as me, at the end you cant make everyone happy and i think summoner is a good entrance point for newer player so its fine

Current summoner have a nice flow and not too many buttons. Which is fantastic.

I'm probably the wrong demographic to be talking about how much they like current summoner as a Bard main but I didn't like any of the casters that much until they changed summoner in EW.

now it's the only caster I enjoy playing because it feels like an inbetween leading to red mage. Because of summoner being how it is it actually got me interested in at least leveling black mage and Picto to see what having a shit ton of cast bars can be like with a kit designed around giving small moments of movement rather than the cast bars being a window to fit into a relatively instant cast rotation.

I will say I think there needed to be more done in DT to give the class more fun additions to the rotation. I agree with a pretty popular CC named Larryzaur that they should give each demi summon more unique mechanical differences rather than just being a different design and slightly stronger than the previous demi summon till you loop back to Bahamut who is the weakest demi summon. I would have preferred seeing the other 3 ARR elemental summons finally make appearances as our level 100 ability or even the level 92 one. They could have done a lot more design wise with Shiva Ramuh and Leviathan. Shiva could have had a melee combo like Ifrit given her fight and then had one long cast that applied a DoT like frostbite. Ramuh could have had a shorter duration but focused more on landing as many casts of what I guess would be called Amethyst Catastrophe to build up stacks of Ramuh's favor which would dictate how much damage the button press would do almost like wildfire it would be best to have these on a 2 second cast time to create tension for dodging AoEs and getting more casts in. Leviathan could have had casts similar to titan as a less busy movement phase but have its favor ability apply a debuff to the enemy that increases the damage summoner deals to the enemy by 10% so they have something of a selfish buff that would slide in around the minute mark but could be moved around given how summoning works.

TL;DR

All in all I still enjoy how summoner plays but that's because I enjoyed EW summoner and I wish they'd either done more to differentiate the demi summons or given us Shiva Ramuh and Leviathan after Phoenix

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Originally Posted by AceOfCakez

The team didn't have to make Summoner fun for me, but they did. I didn't enjoy it back in the day because it felt like I was playing a WoW Warlock rather than an actual summoner, but it feels great now. I wish we got Alexander this expansion instead of Bahamut though. Just wanted to give a thanks to the dev team since there's so much negativity around here. Wish there were more positive posts.

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I also really enjoy SMN and would never have played it pre-rework. Were I to switch mains to caster, SMN would probably be my choice.

It's not shocking that you two like new SMN.
It has no cast times and it's flashy, that's all you really need for a magical job to appeal to melees and Phys range. It's pretty clear that SMN is kinda designed for that camp considering it has 2 casts in its entire 100 rotation. It's simply a job that went from being a caster to a simple magical option for people who don't like casters, it does suck that it was done to summoner though, really should of done this to a new magical job instead of basically removing an entire play style from the game and not giving it back in some form at all.

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Originally Posted by Ramiee

It's not shocking that you two like new SMN.
It has no cast times and it's flashy, that's all you really need for a magical job to appeal to melees and Phys range. It's pretty clear that SMN is kinda designed for that camp considering it has 2 casts in its entire 100 rotation. It's simply a job that went from being a caster to a simple magical option for people who don't like casters, it does suck that it was done to summoner though, really should of done this to a new magical job instead of basically removing an entire play style from the game and not giving it back in some form at all.

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I agree..

I don't think the current summoner is for people who enjoy casters..
it is for people who like range jobs but with summons.. which is bad IMO

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Originally Posted by Ramiee

It's not shocking that you two like new SMN.
It has no cast times and it's flashy, that's all you really need for a magical job to appeal to melees and Phys range. It's pretty clear that SMN is kinda designed for that camp considering it has 2 casts in its entire 100 rotation. It's simply a job that went from being a caster to a simple magical option for people who don't like casters, it does suck that it was done to summoner though, really should of done this to a new magical job instead of basically removing an entire play style from the game and not giving it back in some form at all.

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In my opinion they’d have been better staying with the Summoner we have now (ideally a better designed one lol but in concept at least lol) and creating a new job to accomodate its old playstyle. My main reasoning behind that is that Summoner ended up a little weird as it progressed until the remake, because there was a bit of a clash between the Arcanist ‘DoT’ aspects, the ‘Summoning’ aspects where they ended up vying for the design’s attention. You either end up with the old ‘Poison Mage’ type Summoner that some argue doesn’t feel like a ‘Summoner’ at all, or the current ‘Plonk down big primals and run in circles while attacking’ type Summoner that some would argue ‘isn’t an FFXIV-Summoner at all’.

Naturally when I say ‘new job accommodating SMN’s gameplay’ I don’t just mean giving something else its abilities and calling it a day. But I think a DPS job specifically built around DoTs, debuffs, powerful abilities interacting with DoTs, would be able to do the playstyle even more justice. It wouldn’t end up weighed down by things like needing to be doing ‘Summoner things’ on top of the ‘Poison/DoT’ things.
I think it could be like, a perfected realisation of what they were going for originally with Summoner without any of the baggage that came with being a traditional FF job

I think it's kinda fine that it's just primal spamming, but I think I would enjoy it a little more if each summon button had a short cast time, more filler primals, and primal mechanics that are more varied. As it stands, it's too much instant spell spam.

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Originally Posted by mallleable

I think it's kinda fine that it's just primal spamming, but I think I would enjoy it a little more if each summon button had a short cast time, more filler primals, and primal mechanics that are more varied. As it stands, it's too much instant spell spam.

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I said before but as hot a take as it seems to be I like the Summoner we have now. Or, maybe, I think the Summoner we have now has what it takes for me to like it lol. But, having played the old Summoner too (it was actually my first class to 50 in 2.0 since I’d levelled Bard in 1.0!), I do get why people who liked that one really don’t like this one.

They’re complete polar opposites to the point that if you looked at the abilities before/after rework without context you’d have genuinely believed they were two different jobs entirely. Even the way ‘summons’ works is the complete opposite to before, where from what I remember Egi Assaults gave you some fairly high apm moments since they activated as speedy gcds.

I like the idea of the summons themselves having cast times, it’d add a bit more ‘caster flavour’ to the job itself, and it would feel very ‘classic ff summoner’ too lol. Honestly I feel like they really need to do something about Demis. The current Solar - Bahamut - Phoenix cycle is just weird and super long. Over the course of a fight you barely get to see Phoenix once, and chances are you won’t get any actual usage from Everlasting Flight or Rekindle. Also Lux Solaris is just weird. I get that they’ve like specifically designed fights to have an AoE at 120s, but I still don’t get the point. It’s not much of an emergency heal if it’s never an emergency and you can’t use it when there is one lol.

Maybe it’d be cool if they made Bahamut/Phoenix interchangeable like in PvP? That way you could choose between the two based on the situation, then have Solar stay where it is for bursts?

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Originally Posted by Tunda

I agree..

I don't think the current summoner is for people who enjoy casters..
it is for people who like range jobs but with summons.. which is bad IMO

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It's bad that people like the thing they like?

Not every job needs to be complex or have a high skill ceiling. Playing classes like: Summoner, Dancer and Warrior is very relaxing.

Just wish we got other primal.

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Originally Posted by Ramiee

It's not shocking that you two like new SMN.
It has no cast times and it's flashy, that's all you really need for a magical job to appeal to melees and Phys range. It's pretty clear that SMN is kinda designed for that camp considering it has 2 casts in its entire 100 rotation. It's simply a job that went from being a caster to a simple magical option for people who don't like casters, it does suck that it was done to summoner though, really should of done this to a new magical job instead of basically removing an entire play style from the game and not giving it back in some form at all.

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I'm not sure if that was the intent behind the post, but people that enjoy phys range and melee don't necessarily just enjoy the absence of cast, the presence of flashiness, and absolutely nothing else. That sounds a little reductive to me.

Or maybe i'm completely out of touch with rphys and melee dps players idk.

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Originally Posted by Connor

In my opinion they’d have been better staying with the Summoner we have now (ideally a better designed one lol but in concept at least lol) and creating a new job to accomodate its old playstyle. My main reasoning behind that is that Summoner ended up a little weird as it progressed until the remake, because there was a bit of a clash between the Arcanist ‘DoT’ aspects, the ‘Summoning’ aspects where they ended up vying for the design’s attention. You either end up with the old ‘Poison Mage’ type Summoner that some argue doesn’t feel like a ‘Summoner’ at all, or the current ‘Plonk down big primals and run in circles while attacking’ type Summoner that some would argue ‘isn’t an FFXIV-Summoner at all’.

Naturally when I say ‘new job accommodating SMN’s gameplay’ I don’t just mean giving something else its abilities and calling it a day. But I think a DPS job specifically built around DoTs, debuffs, powerful abilities interacting with DoTs, would be able to do the playstyle even more justice. It wouldn’t end up weighed down by things like needing to be doing ‘Summoner things’ on top of the ‘Poison/DoT’ things.
I think it could be like, a perfected realisation of what they were going for originally with Summoner without any of the baggage that came with being a traditional FF job

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Honestly the new Phys Range next expansion could be this, dots don't need to be magical in nature. DNC and BRD kinda play the same except BRD is more busy while MCH plays the most unique a fourth Phys Range job that resembles the dot playstyle of SMN without the pet would be fine. Most of the fuckery in ShB SMN mostly came from the pet jank. I would probably main it because I like dot playstyles, SCH/SMN were a lot of fun.

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Originally Posted by Valence

I'm not sure if that was the intent behind the post, but people that enjoy phys range and melee don't necessarily just enjoy the absence of cast, the presence of flashiness, and absolutely nothing else. That sounds a little reductive to me.

Or maybe i'm completely out of touch with rphys and melee dps players idk.

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There was no bad intent I am just being honest, the job is made for people who want to play magical ranged who don't like casts which is primarily the other DPS roles Phys Range and especially Melees. New SMN doesn't have any depth so it is all flash and thats the appeal, its the same with VPR especially with the weakness dot removal its a very simple job but its flashy and that makes it fun. I don't think theres anything wrong with saying it how it is, SMN is a magical job for people who don't like casting, if anything I think they should go fully in with this and remove the casts that remain including Ruin III even though that move isn't used often, sure have magic job to fill in for people who don't like to cast thats fine. But old SMN players who played old SMN for 8 years deserve to have that gameplay back in another job.

I was a summoner main in SHB and unfortunately I heavily dislike the changes. Because of my attachment to the job, I kept playing it in EW but DT has been the first expansion in which I've leveled the job through scholar.

For what it's worth, I'm glad some people find enjoyment in the new version. Just sucks that the rework came to the detriment of people who enjoyed the job before with nothing to replace it.


Luckily I have Viper now. Oh wait, no I don't, they butchered that job as well :D

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Originally Posted by Ramiee

There was no bad intent I am just being honest, the job is made for people who want to play magical ranged who don't like casts which is primarily the other DPS roles Phys Range and especially Melees. New SMN doesn't have any depth so it is all flash and thats the appeal, its the same with VPR especially with the weakness dot removal its a very simple job but its flashy and that makes it fun. I don't think theres anything wrong with saying it how it is, SMN is a magical job for people who don't like casting, if anything I think they should go fully in with this and remove the casts that remain including Ruin III even though that move isn't used often, sure have magic job to fill in for people who don't like to cast thats fine. But old SMN players who played old SMN for 8 years deserve to have that gameplay back in another job.

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Also because, objectively, the smn brings nothing to the player other than the lack of cast, so it is necessarily the only thing that it can attract besides flashiness.

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Originally Posted by AceOfCakez

The team didn't have to make Summoner fun for me, but they did. I didn't enjoy it back in the day because it felt like I was playing a WoW Warlock rather than an actual summoner, but it feels great now. I wish we got Alexander this expansion instead of Bahamut though. Just wanted to give a thanks to the dev team since there's so much negativity around here. Wish there were more positive posts.

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Same.

I don't like our Bahamut Reskin, but everything else about modern Summoner is pretty awesome, and for me personally, much more enjoyable than the previous botched-pet-job implementation.

And I should say: I love pet classes. I'm sad they got removed entirely in FFXIV. But considering how both SCH and SMN were before the pets got removed, we lost less than nothing. A proper pet job would be nice, but this was not it, and what we got now has a ton of good game feel with the huge FWOOSH and BOOM visuals and meaty spell hits.

I too enjoy this current iteration of Summoner (even if I miss some aspects of its previous ones).

But if there's ONE thing that would make me enjoy it even more, it would be for them to finally implement the other Egis/"gemstone summons" (Leviathan, Ramuh and Shiva, at the very least), even if they worked exactly the same as our current Ifrit, Titan and Garuda (from a mechanic/game-play perspective).

I mean, come on...it's been (nearly) a decade now. It's waaaaaaaaaay past time they did so.

EDIT:
Oh, and also doing something about Physick being completely useless post-Lv.50.
It almost feels like a joke to leave it as is for long...

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Originally Posted by Exodus-E

But if there's ONE thing that would make me enjoy it even more, it would be for them to finally implement the other Egis/"gemstone summons" (Leviathan, Ramuh and Shiva, at the very least), even if they worked exactly the same as our current Ifrit, Titan and Garuda (from a mechanic/game-play perspective).

I mean, come on...it's been (nearly) a decade now. It's waaaaaaaaaay past time they did so.

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This… there are other ideas I’d like to see them implement, but I’d be perfectly content if they finally did this. They can add on 5 zillion more Bahamut Demis if they want to. AFTER we get Levi, Shiva and Ramuh! That really needs to be next… with such a long, repetitive rotation, we need new gem summons in between before they add yet another Demi.

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Originally Posted by Carighan

Same.

I don't like our Bahamut Reskin, but everything else about modern Summoner is pretty awesome, and for me personally, much more enjoyable than the previous botched-pet-job implementation.

And I should say: I love pet classes. I'm sad they got removed entirely in FFXIV. But considering how both SCH and SMN were before the pets got removed, we lost less than nothing. A proper pet job would be nice, but this was not it, and what we got now has a ton of good game feel with the huge FWOOSH and BOOM visuals and meaty spell hits.

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Yeah, screw that. I sort of see where people complain about SMN pets in the past (still mostly just parse heads that cry over losing a pet auto attack or cast here and there and landed us in a world where the current normal raids are more random and harder to maintain uptime on than the savage ones), but SCH pet went from being able to receive commands while you were casting something else to a totem that pulses oGCD actions that you cannot activate at all unless you're not casting.

It's a straight downgrade for SCH since ShB. Can't even deploy off the damn faerie anymore, though why bother addressing that when we can just make every AoE heal 50y and ignore positioning as a part of the battle system.

I'd say keep Physick on SMN how it is. It being in this state is actually the most interesting part of post EW SMN.

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Originally Posted by Ramiee

Honestly the new Phys Range next expansion could be this, dots don't need to be magical in nature. DNC and BRD kinda play the same except BRD is more busy while MCH plays the most unique a fourth Phys Range job that resembles the dot playstyle of SMN without the pet would be fine. Most of the fuckery in ShB SMN mostly came from the pet jank. I would probably main it because I like dot playstyles, SCH/SMN were a lot of fun.

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Bit of a late reply lol but I agree with this. It’s also worth mentioning that Bard’s DoTs / interactions with them have all but disappeared too, so there is a niche there. No idea what form the job would take identity wise, but it could still draw from the old SMN playstyle/concepts to appeal to players who still enjoyed it.
Not to mention with all the talk of walking casts on phys ranged it doesn’t even necessarily need to be entirely cast-free. Like, it could have cast times on its DoTs or something to make application more interesting, maybe it could fill a niche of ‘cast times on dots but higher sustained damage’, with damage output being more in line with Machinists. Naturally it could also forgo the raid buffs/support utility Bard/Dancer has to go all-in on dps output. I’d play it personally too; I always enjoyed old SMN and Bard when it’s DoTs were more than just relics lol

Now that I think about it, Dawntrail is the perfect expansion to implement further Egis/"gemstone summons" considering its FF9 influences (and more specifically, how its summons were tied to gemstones).
Please dev' team, make it so.