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

[Crevox]

It's lame that Garuda is the only viable pet. Titan is only really usable in parties without a tank (and it's absolutely terrible compared to a real tank, and makes a dungeon run take much longer) and Ifrit doesn't have Contagion/has nothing useful.

Why are pets for a summoner such a small side thing...

[Duelle]

We also keep garuda out because she doesnt have to run after the mob every time it decides to relocate. She can just continue dps'ing unlike ifrit and titan who have to follow the mob everywhere it runs losing dps

This is a matter of thematics. Would you rather Ifrit-egi and Titan-egi stand with the SMN spamming long range spells, despite the primals those are based on being melee?

The main issue is really that if you're going to do the parallel of imp/succubus/voidwalker for Garuda/Ifrit/Titan-egi, then Ifrit's damage needs to be bumped up and he needs to be given a channeled CC. The succubus could DPS via Lash of Pain spam and could use Seduction to incapacitate a target so long as the succubus was channeling the ability.

That's not even getting into the wonky pet mechanics this game suffers from (bad AI, bad pathing, terrible UI and command options, as well as the inability to truly control what your pet uses on cooldown individually).

add to that she also lives longer so you dont have to resummon every 5-10 minutes cause they die to a big attack or something, thus resummoning and losing both player and smn dps.

This is more because SE chose to not copy one of the more crucial aspects of pet gameplay from WoW - the greatly reduced damage taken from indirect damage sources. If I recall, indirect damage (AoE, line attacks, ground targetted attacks, incidental raid damage) taken by pets is something like 10% of what player characters take.

The funny thing is that this was done because prior to implementation pet classes whose DPS was reliant on the pet would get shafted in raids because dead pet made that DPS a liability (Demo warlocks and all three hunter specs know this quite well). That is also most likely the other reason why egi's relation to SMN's DPS works the way it does, specially when taking into account that egis do not have that native damage reduction and can die easily.

ACN (and SMN) spells scream death, decay and disease. This isn't a summoner's theme - it's a warlock theme. In addition to playing like one, even thematically I AM a warlock, I just summon Egis of Primals instead of demons (and, given their respective universes, aren't they the same thing really?)

Doesn't the bold pretty much justify the approach SE took with FFXIV's SMN?

[Kevee]

It's lame that Garuda is the only viable pet. Titan is only really usable in parties without a tank (and it's absolutely terrible compared to a real tank, and makes a dungeon run take much longer) and Ifrit doesn't have Contagion/has nothing useful.

Titan is actually pretty useful if you micro manage him.


I tanked a Hydra with him, and he held aggro off of some relic+1 folk.

He has ~7.2k HP, for me, but the kicker is that he took reduced damage from breath so all you had to worry about was Triumverate, and moving him out of puddles.


No, he's not really useful for dungeons. He doesn't have AoE aggro for squat, but it can tank bosses OK.

[pandabearcat]

I don't think it would be super thematically bad if ifrit was ranged.

I mean theres no reason for him to be melee except that the game wanted a "melee dps pet".

Summon depictions have always varied between games, but in almost all instances he has some version of hellfire as his main attack, whether its like a beam of fire, a giant fireball, or a ring/ball of fire around him.

[Noriega]

I wouldnt mind ifrit being melee but it doesnt make sense as it is.
Radiant shield is useless, its not a tank, so it shouldnt be getting hit much. If at all. It should a port or a charge (prefer port, possible one that ports it behind a the target, but if its a charge, obviously damage on impact, maybe a dot as well).

I personally do not understand why has a stun instead of summoner. Thats something i would like more control of.
Burning strike should be the default skill and Flaming crush the second skill.
Charge/Port skill #3
and some kind of self buff on a short CD for it as skill #4. Iunno, allows its melee hits to deal extra X amount of damage. Another Y if dealt from the rear/plank of the mob.

[Alan-ere]

You sound like a really nice group of people.

They sound like a group of morons^^

[LostCody]

"It's lame that Garuda is the only viable pet. Titan is only really usable in parties without a tank (and it's absolutely terrible compared to a real tank, and makes a dungeon run take much longer) and Ifrit doesn't have Contagion/has nothing useful.

Why are pets for a summoner such a small side thing... "

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all pets are viable,but only for there dedicated purpose.
titan is clearly a solo pet.
garuda is for boss fights
and ifrit is for all things leading up too the boss.
As for why the pets are so 1 key is because that's the way the game itself is setup.every pet,every job has its place/spot and that's what it is.
ifrit brings more damage too the table then garuda but the way the games boss fight mechanics are setup make him a poor choice not the pet itself.

[Borfin]

Doesn't the bold pretty much justify the approach SE took with FFXIV's SMN?

It would if every Final Fantasy from 3 to 13 hadn't set a precedent for the Summoner class (and summon-users in general) thematically being based around... yknow, summons... instead of death and decay

BLM still casts Fire, Fire II, Fire III, etc. It's still thematically the destructive spells that, for the most part, are recurring in the series.

The same could be said of WHM, PLD (remember Cover?); admittedly I haven't looked through all classes, but those are examples that support it.

It's a large thematic change, which I take issue with. I still have a ton of fun with the class, I just wish it wasn't a WoW warlock carbon copy.

[silentwindfr]

on some boss, like the demonic wall ifrit is far stronger, other point the enkindle of ifrit is more interesting than the one of garuda, the DoT is pretty heavy.

[Crescent_Dusk]

Just make all pets do the same damage, but give them different utility. Garuda would be a debuffer, Ifrit would be offensive group buffs, and titan would be defensive group buffs.

And quite frankly the summoner should have gotten more command skills to use. I'm not keen on the fact that we use Thunder, a BLM spell, far more than we use some of our SUMMONER spells like Tri-Disaster or Ruin II, and Enkindle needs to go down to a 15 sec cd.

Eye For an Eye is a terrible spell as well that should be re-tooled. I mean, come on, an RNG long cd defensive cooldown with a weak proc effect on a low chance? What a waste of an ability.

What's the point of having Bio I and Bio II if they do the same thing? I hate redundancy. Condense the spells into one and give Bio or Bio II a different use/interaction.

Miasma II is another candidate for serious retooling.

But all of this thread is probably not getting read anyways as I've yet to see a dev post here. These posts might be better spent in the General Discussion forum.