[Pole] Do you want to see the summoner class reworked?

[Mjytresz]

Yes.

Along Final Fantasy terms, Summoners are magic users, offensive or defensive, with a strong emphasis on using summons to fully realize that potential.
Honestly, aside from Contagion, it doesn't matter what the hell your pet is doing. The damage they put out is pretty unnoticeable and most of their skills are straight up useless or too situational.

If people didn't complain at me for it, I probably wouldn't even bother using a pet except for Garuda during boss fights.

I didn't want another Affliction Warlock clone, I wanted a goddamn summoner.

[givemeraptors]

Honestly, aside from Contagion, it doesn't matter what the hell your pet is doing. The damage they put out is pretty unnoticeable

O_O

Are you serious?

Wait...you're the same person in the other thread wondering why anyone would bring a SMN over a BLM to a raid. Yeah... I'm going to guess you don't know how to play your job properly.

[Ardan]

Yes.

Along Final Fantasy terms, Summoners are magic users, offensive or defensive, with a strong emphasis on using summons to fully realize that potential.
Honestly, aside from Contagion, it doesn't matter what the hell your pet is doing. The damage they put out is pretty unnoticeable and most of their skills are straight up useless or too situational.

If people didn't complain at me for it, I probably wouldn't even bother using a pet except for Garuda during boss fights.

I didn't want another Affliction Warlock clone, I wanted a goddamn summoner.

Go sit in Akiza's corner, you'd have two things in common: you don't know jack and have a cult-like love for summoner.

[Estevo]

Go sit in Akiza's corner, you'd have two things in common: you don't know jack and have a cult-like love for summoner.

You don't need to put down a summoner's wishes just because you want a warlock, besides his "cult-like love" for summoner is a good thing.

[Ardan]

snip

I never asked nor wanted anything, I chose SMN as my main in XIV based on it's own merits. If you or others don't like the SMN in this iteration that's fine, but don't waste the development teams' time complaining about aesthetics about the job, bitch about something that matters. If there IS something I want, it's better balance between our current pets and realistic adjustments to some of our skills, (tri-disaster, etc.).

I "put down a summoner's wishes" based on what Mjytresz said, not what he wanted. His statement about SMN being weak is completely wrong. Not to mention his belief the SMN pets contribute almost nothing. Pets, as they are now, are 1/3rd of our damage. Just like SCH's healing, our DPS goes down the toilet if our pet dies.

I just can't comprehend why threads like this continue to exist. Did you really think it was necessary to revive a 7 month old thread and make another one at the same time that's pretty much based on the same topic? Is the "feel" of SMN that important to you?

[Estevo]

I just can't comprehend why threads like this continue to exist. Did you really think it was necessary to revive a 7 month old thread and make another one at the same time that's pretty much based on the same topic? Is the "feel" of SMN that important to you?

No to your first question, and yep to the second. I actually didn't notice the thread date when I replied to it, but I'd like to see the topic put out there, not my ideas exactly, but the idea of being open to change with the class/job systems, which I'm hoping is already on their radar from the cryptic tidbits I've found in one or two interviews . Yeah, I'd say the feel of the summoner is important. I mean content staying true to the lore is important according to the dev team, so why is the Arcanist, known for arcane geometry and summoning, using infections and poison? Same question can be asked about the Summoner. Of course I could be missing something, but that's just my opinion on it.

[Sarynth]

I\\'d love to see some poles, maybe even dancers using them on a stage waiting for Gil to be thrown their way. Oooh, Gold Saucer might become a gentleman\\'s club!

Way off topic but my drg just plenty of 'pole' dancing in the streets of Ul'dah :3

[hdepaula]

If you don’t like being an Arcanist and if you don’t like the pets, why the hell are you being an Arcanist then? You wanna be a scholar but your not happy with the class, become a WHM. You wanna be a Sumner but is not happy with the class, become a BLM.

[Ashford]

I think the thread is relevant. When Yoshi-P first took over, one of the very first things he said he wanted to do going forward was to give more of the FF feeling in FFXIV. The job system was by design a way to get the classic Final Fantasy jobs back in the game, and he's implemented a multitude of (awesome) design choices and content that have really made it feel like a core FF game.

I think this is why a lot of people are put off by Summoner, myself included. Yoshi-P WANTS to appeal to fans of the series. I think with SMN they got some stuff right, but some fell off the mark for me.

I'm actually fine with the egis. As a Lalafell their size isn't really an issue for me, I understand both that people want the big summons of XI (I certainly do as well) and that this is not something the dev team is going to budge on, and I get their reasons of not wanting to clutter things up as well. I'm willing to concede this as long as the pet feels more like my priority, which right now it does not.


In general I don't expect there to be any sweeping changes to Summoner, but I think it's still worth discussing. To me, the main problem is, as other people have mentioned, the disease skills. They just don't fit lore-wise. The Arcanist and Summoner questlines are awesome, but they don't really justify why I can cause decay and incidentally summon things. It has much more of an arithmancy angle when it's explained to you, which doesn't match up to the skills.


If I had unlimited resources, and let me say again I don't think they're going to do anything like this but in a perfect world: keep the DoTs the way they are, gameplay wise I think they're fun. But the explanation/animation would change slightly. Make them quick-summon attacks, summon Carbuncle, Fairy or Ifrit/Titan/Garuda-egi for just a second, long enough to do their basic attack animation with the DoTs so it feels like we're actually doing something related to our skills.


I think this would help the feeling of the pet being extraneous unless you're using Contagion. Ideally as a Pet class you shouldn't be able to forget your pet is there, just using cooldowns every once in a while and focusing on your own damage output. Even if you're summoning an egi for a single attack, I think it feels more like "I'm a Summoner!" than the current class was.

I main Summoner and I do really enjoy the class, but it's honestly one of the only areas of ARR that I feel missed the mark a little. If I wasn't wearing a Summoner horn, I don't know that I'd call it a Summoner class. I don't expect any sweeping changes, the team is busting their butts on new content and I respect that, but if FF-ness is a priority for the team (and I believe that it is), it's important to at least make the Summoner class feel more cohesive. Right now it's several cool concepts that end up disjointed.

It is also important to remember that ARR is still in its infancy. While Summoner in FFXI was my ideal of what that class should be like, I also was there to witness it being relegated to a backup healer because, mechanically, it didn't know how to work well, and it took S-E years to make some of the necessary changes, and people still argue over the job's usefulness now. I don't think its an easy problem to fix, but I trust that over time the dev team will make tweaks and give the class more of an identity than it has now.

[givemeraptors]

In general I don't expect there to be any sweeping changes to Summoner, but I think it's still worth discussing. To me, the main problem is, as other people have mentioned, the disease skills. They just don't fit lore-wise. The Arcanist and Summoner questlines are awesome, but they don't really justify why I can cause decay and incidentally summon things. It has much more of an arithmancy angle when it's explained to you, which doesn't match up to the skills.

It actually does fit lore-wise. You cripple your opponent from afar while your pet goes in for the kill (Ifrit) or shields you from damage (Titan). In a raid where you are more focused on providing long-range DPS, Garuda shines by directly enhances your abilities via Contagion.

The role of Arcanist is that of strategy and being able to adapt and plan for situations. I would say being a SMN requires a lot of forethought and your approach changes in many situations. Titan for emergency tanking, Ifrit for trash and open world content, Garuda for raiding. To only look at the way the job plays in ONE aspect of the game... well of course the job won't make sense. I mean, there are awkward lore/gameplay issues all over. DRGs are supposed to be defending Coerthas from dragons, why are they fighting any primal not called Bahamut? And WHMs are supposed to use magic sparingly, but we have people spamming Holy in towns.

I think this would help the feeling of the pet being extraneous unless you're using Contagion. Ideally as a Pet class you shouldn't be able to forget your pet is there, just using cooldowns every once in a while and focusing on your own damage output. Even if you're summoning an egi for a single attack, I think it feels more like "I'm a Summoner!" than the current class was.

I micromanage my pet a lot. Attacking two targets at once, placing it out of harms way, using it as an alt-tank (screw Ramuh, I mean the Titan Ex adds), and don't forget that you can use Ifrit to stun/interrupt. In Pharos Sirius I run into so many tanks who don't know Giga Slash, Banish III, and Divide can and should be stunned. Then there's open world content and quests where sometimes I just sit back and let my pet kill things. Even so, it's a delicate balance. Sometimes having to constantly move and place my pet drives me insane and my DPS suffers. For instance, keeping your pet out of poison pools in Lost City of Amdapor and out of Diabolos's AoEs (which do a surprising amount of damage to egis). Could you imagine if that level of micro managing was ALWAYS necessary? It would just be irritating.