SMN - Why it is not a very interesting job and not a good upgrade from ACN

[Divine_Ultima]

For anyone who's played Tales of Xillia, I wish the summoner could use the pets the way Milla uses her spirits.The lower tiered spells could be like her attacks and the more advance spells would be the Egi's using their powerful attacks. It would be way better than DOTs. This is only wishful thinking of course because in the world of Eorzea summoner is a dot class and SE will most likely never change that.

[rzr22]

So wait, this thread devolved into another "WAH SUMMONER AINT SUMMONER" whine fest. Is anything of use ever discussed here?

[ReverendBaka]

So wait, this thread devolved into another "WAH SUMMONER AINT SUMMONER" whine fest. Is anything of use ever discussed here?

No, it's mostly just people upset that Summoners' pets aren't cool enough looking and such. I actually like the Egis just fine, although I admit there are some designs I would have much preferred to see.

I don't think Summoner is less of an upgrade compared to most jobs. You get passive damage bonuses from the new pets, and Fester is a really nice ability. Spur is also very good. Enkindle is good but doesn't really warrant 5min CD. None of the job upgrades fundamentally change the class they progress from (at least so far as I know)

[Miridori]

Ok, I have no problem with the current Summoner. It could have been better but I am not complaining.
2 things people complain about SUM are:
Not enough burst
Class mechanic revolves more around DoT than the summons

Here are some of my suggestions:
Make Enkidnle 10s CD instead of 300s. Before you start criticize, hear me out. The ultimate utilities of summons have 300s CD itself.
Thus at most you can cast 3 Enkindles in 300s. Not that overly strong if you ask me. Holy has much more potential. Given Holy cost a lot of mana, we can balance around it and give Enkindle more mp cost. Thou summoning skills themselves cost quite a lot and take 6s to cast, opposing to Holy which only takes 3s and also stuns.


TBC

[Miridori]

(Cont)
Make a special AoE skill when the pets are summoned. Hey, the skills take 6s to cast, they should at least create a 100 potency AoE. Not to mention, it will be really close to what a Summoner actually is in other version of FF.
Revamp the active skills of summons. They have hefty CD of 30-90s, please at least make them worthwise to use. As of now, each pet have like 1 skill worth casting other than its auto.

[Miridori]

(Cont)
Why I think those change would help while not tipping the balance:
RIght now SUM has DoT. But when the DoTs are ticking, SUM has a big downtime. Aetherflow has 60s cd which limits the potency of Bane, Energy Drain and Fester. So with the above changes, Summoner can actually do something instead of spamming Ruin.
It also help to mitigate the fact that pet can die in end game content. SUM can re-summon them because it actually is worth to do so. 6s is a lot so the dps and positioning might suffer. But if SUM has a good AoE from the initial summon, a good arsenal of CDs from pet ability to utilize and an option to use Enkindle, re-summoning might not be that bad of an option. High risk, high reward. And the dps is still decent because of all the DoTs. SUM will have some burst when needed in critical time ( Swiftcast + summon + enkindle) but the burst is not sustainable to prevent the dps to be over the top.

Thank for reading and sorry for the long text or any grammatical error.

[ArcheDragon]

I recently decided that I was probably better off soloing as the arcanist rather than stay on the summoner because at least with the acn I had protect and other very useful cross class skills but as a smn I lose most of those and gain my least favorite character model since Hankey, the christmas poo. Oh, and don't forget that Ifrit also sucks in combat. I mean, I lost 1 dot dps skills (aero). Not even scholar loses that. It just seems like a bad trade off because they wanted the summoner to be a pet class so they revolved your new skills around your summons but then they end up sucking and you are weaker than you were before you "advanced" the job.

[Samuraiking]

...I was probably better off soloing as the arcanist rather than stay on the summoner...

Not to play the devil's advocate since I have spent the whole thread railing on SMN, but that's the point. The base classes get variety and survivability/balance for solo. The point of a job is to focus that role VERY specifically, which in SMNs case is dps. You gain fester and enkindle, but lose protect and such. Anyway, the SMN class needs a lot of work, but you are supposed to be switching off of the jobs and back to the classes for soloing. Just make gearsets so it can be done in seconds.

The biggest issue is not SMN, persay but ACN. A job just focuses what a class does, and they picked the wrong class to play SMN off of. ACN is a great idea, just not mixing it with SMN. melding both SCH and SMN into the same class was a bad idea. While I have NO complains about SCH, it's dots don't feel right. Being a healer with bio and diseases is just retarded, imo.

[Nushidorei]

For anyone who's played Tales of Xillia, I wish the summoner could use the pets the way Milla uses her spirits.The lower tiered spells could be like her attacks and the more advance spells would be the Egi's using their powerful attacks. It would be way better than DOTs. This is only wishful thinking of course because in the world of Eorzea summoner is a dot class and SE will most likely never change that.

Agreed, I was amazed out how fun the summons were to use in Xillia; completely different from what you get in any other game.

[Darkes94]

This is what a summoner is http://finalfantasy.wikia.com/wiki/Summoner not what we have is nothing like what we should be.