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.