Adding complexity to SMN

As much as I enjoy the class fantasy of summoning things to fight for me, SMN (to me) has one big glaring issue: it's boring. The rotation is *very* stationary, and so there's not much thought I have to put in to what I'm doing. As a result, I have a few suggestions to making it an interesting job.
First: I would like the ability to choose between what I'm summoning during every trance phase, instead of the current linear Bahamut-Phoenix-Bahamut rotation. In order to prevent people from spamming the same summon every time, I'd suggest a cooldown timer that lasts longer than the egi phase. I recognize that this would make basic Bahamut obsolete, and so I'd also suggest replacing that with another of the classic FF summons: namely, Odin. However, I recognize that this change would run the risk of people optimizing SMN by only ever using the 2 most powerful summons. I don't have a good solution to this, but I could suggest 2 things:
1) extend the cooldown so that only 1 can be active at a time (and then make it linear, which I am trying to avoid)
2) add limitations to the summon-specific casts: let's say Odin does high damage, but the max distance is a bit over melee range, and there's a cast timer. Is this enough of a risk-reward move in order to justify having a 3rd summon option?
Second: I'd like some variety in the egi summons. Ifrit-Titan-Garuda is nice and all, but I'd really like to add Leviathan, Shiva, and Ramuh to the summoning options. Personally, I think this could work really well if it works similar to the current AST Draw mechanic: summon Ifrit-Titan-Garuda one rotation, then summon Leviathan-Shiva-Ramuh the next. That'd fill out the classic summons anyway, *and* we'd get more space for tools which could then make SMN a little more interesting. (Like Garuda's Whirlwind, Ifrit's Charge, etc. Maybe Leviathan could do a line attack which makes enemies take more damage? Or Shiva could stun enemies? But I don't know the best way to balance the game: these are suggestions without much thought put in.)
But those are the 2 suggestions I have for making SMN more interesting. I'd really like it if something like these were implemented. Thank you for your time.

SMN exists in the problem of the fact that the current summons are boring as hell but there’s functionally nothing they could add to the rotation within the current framework that would make a significant difference to it

The other three gemstones would just be 3 slightly different varieties of the current gemstones which don’t remotely add enough to the rotation. The Demi’s are a mess because they are forced to be summoned on a 1 minute CD to not desync but the class doesn’t have functional filler

The only way I can see an iteration of modern SMN to work is to functionally reverse the way the gemstones work. You “channel” an element or you can channel multiple elements at a time. Then once you have sufficiently channeled that element you can expend that channeled energy to summon a primal which will do an AOE attack then stick around for a few GCD’s and unlock some augmented actions

you only summon one Demi per 2 minutes and it’s based on which set of 3 primals you summoned. If you summon the three umbral primals you get Phoenix, if you summon the 3 astral primals you get solar bahamut, if you summon any other combo you get regular Bahamut. They have the same damage but different secondary effects

So the closest analogue would be imagining the six gems kinda like PCT’s muses but the more I think about it that way I don’t know if it’s too similar to PCT or not

The way I can see to add complexity to it without falling into the same trap as all the other jobs (utterly static rotation, all just finger-busywork) would be to:

1. Define 3 "types" of summons, one for each gem. Say the first gem is always slow casts but very high DPS. This is your damage summon. This is when you deal the damage of your minor phase, it should account for ~50% of the total damage. The second gem is about mobility. Either all-instant, or some form of movement ability. The third gem would be utility. This could be a host of things, usually it's some form of personal defense or group utility.
2. Rebalance the current summons to fit this pattern. This is somewhat easy, as they're surprisingly close to this already: Beef up Ifrit's damage massively. Reduce Titan's damage to compensate. Titan becomes the mobility summon, Garuda gains a 1.0s cast time on the nuke to reflect this. Slipstream takes from PvP, giving group movement speed while inside its - now larger but not infinite! - radius, in turn its tick damage is reduced.
3. Add at least one extra set, say Ramuh + Leviathan + Shiva (ordered to reflect Ifrit + Titan + Garuda). Same roles, different mechanics! This set is themed "all AoE", the two buttons do the same.
4. Ramuh has a single channel cast. While you channel, lightning bolts keep rapidly raining down in a radius around your target, preferring the main target but hitting around it, too. You can walk while channeling like PvP casts, but you cannot in any way about it, and it lasts 4 GCDs. Again the high-risk-high-damage idea. His "utility" is a 2.5s cast single hit large lightning bolt that grants a Ruin IV charge. Leviathan has line AoEs that are instant cast but have a relatively slow animation as the wave rolls through, his utility is a really wide version of this that has a very short cast however. Shiva as the utility summon is a debuff type: The 5 charges of the very low damage forward cone AoE slowly apply a stacking debuff. The higher, the less damage that target deals to you. The utility ability has no limit, but by itself deals no damage. It removes the debuffs, dealing damage, and if at 5 stacks applies a new debuff that heavily reduces damage to the summoner for the single next damage deal to them.
5. Importantly: Which set you get is random. You need to react mid-fight to what happens, you can't pre-plan your combat.

The Summoner needs a lot of changes because its structure is completely unsuitable and excessively rigid.

Yes, it would be nice if they added Shiva, Ramuh, and Leviathan, but above all, I would like them to rework the gameplay.
It feels slow, stiff, and bland, and it's a shame. I still don't understand why they haven't reworked the resource management system—Energy Drain is a relic of the old Summoner that I find completely absurd in the new gameplay.

Personally, I would like them to restore each Demi’s identity, making them a kind of mini-game with a unique passive effect rather than just pressing 1111 and getting an AoE heal that stays available for 30 seconds on Summon SolBahamut.
Maybe it's just copium, but I wish they would make them completely different from each other—not just in terms of spell power, but at the very least in terms of effects and gameplay.

I also want elemental summons to be better designed.
Right now, they feel meaningless and have no interactions between them that could add strategic depth, such as an elemental combo system—especially if they add three new summons.

I’d love for Carbuncle to be useful again.
For example, it could store Aether for the Summoner and provide one stack of Aether every 20 seconds, which could be used for Necrotize or Painflare in combat, with three stacks available at the start of an instance.

I would also like elemental summons to become OGCDs and for Carbuncle to get actions similar to Egi-Assault 1 and 2, giving two stacks each (counted as spells for weaving) with a 30-second recharge per stack. After using all four stacks, Carbuncle could temporarily evolve into Proto-Carbuncle, allowing it to freely use "Radiant Shield," which would reflect a portion of the damage dealt to party members as potency-based damage.

SMN has a lot of issues with how out of options you are if you want to deviate a bit from its rotation. It's basically forced on you or "just cast Ruin III". They need to separate the requirement to access the elemental summons from using the Demi summon first so that SMN begin to get some freedom. Of course that's not enough.

What I would like to see is we start with carbuncle, we summon an elemental summon, they come down and do their signature attacks, then we attune to their element and instead of carbuncle returning we get the corresponding elemental egi. The summoning buttons go on CD for some time and we get to use Gemshine elemental skills how many times we want and have the egi assaults back to command the egis. Since we can spend how much time we want attuned, we have some control and can delay things at will, however at a dps loss depending on the situation, so that needs planing.

The possibility of repeating summons so we could decide which better fit our situation would also be nice. The end goal would fit gems in the gem gauge (instead of spending it) and get a finisher skill to spend those gems on (Tri-disaster would be nice instead of the bland basic aoe spell it became) during the Demi summon phase together with everything else.

With this you could even get rid of gemshine slot and just make the elemental spell replace Ruin III while attuned.

And for the love of god, remove the healing abilities from the DPS class and replace with a buff to the healing received, like Mantra. DPS should have no strong AOE healing abilities, just a self healing one or a self shield for solo things.


Anyways, that's what I would like to see SMN turning into. But i don't have any expectation from the dev team anymore.

I like the idea of using the gem triads to add more summons… I’m sure a lot of people saw the rework at first and assumed that’s how they’d be adding new summons and skills! We need Levi, Shiva and Ramuh, at least, with their own unique actions. But in order to add more customization to the rotation, we need to be able to switch between gem teams. The 6 elements could be split among astral/umbral lines with the Demis assigned to each team, and an action similar to transpose that lets you switch between them. If potencies were more or less equivalent between the two teams, the choice of which to use would come down to which of their actions you want up for a particular part in a fight. New players could still just auto-pilot the gems/teams for an easy rotation, while more experienced players can customize it to their liking.

I don’t think they’re going to leave us with 3 Demis, and I expect the next big addition to be a fourth, probably a Lunar/Dark to complement Solar/Light… personally I’d want Shinryu for that, Odin would be cool too. But they need to add at the very least the rest of the elements as gem summons. Doesn’t matter how cool and flashy the Demis are; if you’re using the same three gems in between every single time, it’s going to feel repetitive.

At this point, we don’t know what they’re doing for jobs above level 100, let alone what “job identity” reworks they’re planning. I just want SMN to have all its elemental summons.

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Originally Posted by remiff

The Summoner needs a lot of changes because its structure is completely unsuitable and excessively rigid.

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This feels a bit like a non-issue to me insofar that no job has non-rigid gameplay, and it's a binary thing in FFXIV. Hence you can't be "excessively rigid", as you're comparing against 100% rigid, and more than that is not possible.

Of course, one could argue that they could add the ability to be drift-resistant, but they only did that in very few cases in the past, usually for jobs that had high oGCD loads and hence are expected to sometimes drift an oGCD here or there, in particular on tanks which might need to press a defensive oGCD instead, at the moment.

If anything Summoner, despite being seriously undercooked right now, shows a positive idea: Reduce the oGCD spam, implement an in-theory variable GCD chain, and enable gameplay focused on fewer but stronger spells instead of 3-4 hotbars of individually wet-noodle effects (see: Viper, Black Mage, Ninja, Samurai, hell, virtually everyone...). Yes, it won't work at a 2.5s GCD, and it still needs to lose its remaining oGCDs before it could become something like a 1.5s GCD caster job (with Garuda then being 0.7-1.0 GCD). It would also ideally - like I said above - get randomized elements in its gameplay, seeing how that is something FFXIV is utterly lacking right now, everything being static rotation type classes.

At this point I'm just happy it got buffed at all this patch. It's my favourite job aesthetically and its a solid pick for farming something easy like FATEs/old EX mounts/Deep Dungeons when I want to turn my brain off. It also makes it a solid pick as a prog job with the raise utility and low commitment to melee range. Would I like it to be a bit less autopilot? Sure. But we'll have to wait until 8.0 for that possibility.

Complexity this, complexity that. More often than not it boils down to simply button fetishism.

Summoner has a nice flow, which matters more than the so-called complexity.
And they still have to figure out the more optimal times to pick either of garuda, titan or ifrit.

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Originally Posted by GrizzlyTank

Complexity this, complexity that. More often than not it boils down to simply button fetishism.

Summoner has a nice flow, which matters more than the so-called complexity.
And they still have to figure out the more optimal times to pick either of garuda, titan or ifrit.

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“The most optimal time to pick the one that has 4 instant casts or the one that has 4 instants + a cast you swift or the one that has the only 2 casts the job has”

Yeah real big decision there, deciding when to fit in two (2) casts per minute is real gigabrain. How does SAM manage to figure out how to do five (5) casts per minute

This brings back memories... I quit SMN during Stormblood, and that version of SMN was still a lot of fun!

Can't even imagine how bland and boring it must be today in comparison.

SMN should have remained as it's 2.0 self!!!!....It's interesting seeing the discourse around todays' SMN and how it lacks any complexity. Yet for those of us who remember 2.0 SMN, the forums often complained it was too complex...This is why most of what it was got gutted in the first place. Granted there was some issue with pet reactivity to commands in high end raid scenarios. But other than that, 2.0 SMN was pretty solid in terms of a gameplay loop to me...I really enjoyed having commandable pets! - One of my fondest memories of "classic" SMN was when I tanked Great Gubal (Hard) with Titan because the actual tank dropped at the beginning and after waiting ages another never showed...But thanks to a very skilled healer and fellow DPS I was able to tank the whole dungeon by micro managing Titan! (This was when the dungeon was brand new btw) - Everything is so simplified down now, that there's no room for interesting gameplay situations such as this to appear anymore!

All the 2.0 SMN really needed was a visual change - Change the poison based DoTs to match the Primal elements and allow for the Egi to become more like their full Primal counterpart! - Had SE just done this, which is objectively much simpler than a full job rework...We probably would have seen the Egi glams expanded by now!
Sure the current SMN has very impressive visuals!...But there is only so many times you can see Titan's giant craggy arse fill the screen, before you start to miss the days of a more complex SMN with actual unique gameplay elements, such as DoT's/Pets!

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Originally Posted by Supersnow845

“The most optimal time to pick the one that has 4 instant casts or the one that has 4 instants + a cast you swift or the one that has the only 2 casts the job has”

Yeah real big decision there, deciding when to fit in two (2) casts per minute is real gigabrain. How does SAM manage to figure out how to do five (5) casts per minute

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This is definitely a bit disingenuous. It’s not just about the number of casts, you have to factor in that earlier summon choices imply later ones. So you have to have the order planned out well in advance. In the end, you map out the summon order for the entire fight and it’s hardly different than mapping the fight out on other casters.

Furthermore, since optimal play puts titan in buffs, you often lose your best mobility at a point where you don’t need mobility.

This also didn’t consider the difficulty of keeping slipstream on the boss for its complete duration. Not a problem in Endwalker with massive boss hitboxes, but something that has to be handled properly in Dawntrail.

Finally, it doesn’t consider optimization around downtime and the optimal way to condense summons around it.

This isn’t to say summoner isn’t easier than the other casters; it is, but I see a lot of exaggeration about its difficulty.

Thanks for at least trying to set that right.

Yeah, sure, Summoner is a very low-complexity job. But it's not without depth, as you say. Titan-in-buffs vs Titan-for-mobility is like a damaging-gapcloser decision on tanks, only with a pre-selection-timer, which is kinda neat. Weighty mid-fight player choice to make. Not super brainy of course, but still needs more braincells to perform than people give it credit for, maybe because making the wrong choice has a rather low penalty attached and we're used to seeing Summoners near the bottom and hence don't truly notice the difference in someone optimizing that vs not doing it.

More noticable now with M5S of course. The near-constant mobility in that fight makes correctly sequencing your minors a bigger deal than in many other fights. Low as the outcome effect of that correct choice will still be.

But yeah people keep exaggerating Summoner in simplicity. More so because people also never differentiate complexity and depth, thinking of the two as the same when in particular FFXIV struggles hard with a ton of complexity (mostly via button bloat, extremely so comparing other similar games) versus very little depth (all static rotations with pseudo-static solutions). So the teensy tiny bit of depth the correct sequencing of minor summons adds on Summoner while having such low complexity is actually really cool to see. High depth + low complexity is the top design result after all.

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Originally Posted by Carighan

But yeah people keep exaggerating Summoner in simplicity. More so because people also never differentiate complexity and depth, thinking of the two as the same when in particular FFXIV struggles hard with a ton of complexity (mostly via button bloat, extremely so comparing other similar games) versus very little depth (all static rotations with pseudo-static solutions...

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I think most of the criticism on SMN's simplicity don't come from mixing complexity and depth. Some players complain because they compare it to what it was before the rework, where the devs stripped it of almost everything (mechanically wise) and gave basically nothing in return, me included in this group. Some other players complain because they were expecting the so called "base to expand upon" to realize in this expansion but that never came and SMN stayed basically the same as it was in Endwalker.