Summoner revamp

[Eloah]

I'm glad to see no one i buying the crap in these 2 recent threads, that summoner needs an overhaul. Yes it has its flaws, yes these flaws can be fixed and adjusted. No Summoner should not be rebuilt from the ground up. I never played 11, but anyone i spoke to who has basically says the same thing, summkner was good, but half the time they got stuck as a healer because their summons werent needed. I do like that the people who aren't falling for this stuff, kudos to you guys, are offering valid suggestions on changes that would be appropriate: new skills, slightly bigger egis, and what i would like viable egis for any situation, poor titan, T.T

Also to the person who said a scholar could out DPS a Summoner in 2.0, no just no. As a Scholar myself i did the math, when the attribute points were being contested. And while my Scholar was on par with my Summoner it rarely beat it. Scholar just has more DPS skills that come from their skill set over Summoner, since in addition to the basics, Scholar will use Energy Drain more, and they have Aero. But Summoner has more skills from the Egis as well as Fester. I mean think about it if they have similar skillsets and Scholars is 100% of Summoners but a Summoners is only 70% of the total, how do Scholars do more DPS?

[WhiteArchmage]

Well before making Summoner a Job class they should have thought about the consequences of basing the entirety of their narrative around killing summon monsters. And furthermore not just using a popular job name to draw in people to try out and adapt their idea of an affliction mage.

This was already answered on this same thread, they didn't WANT to make the SMN, fan demand was too much, they compromised as much as the lore allowed. Lore didn't allow much. Then again, this is the FF fan-base, where every numbered game (and even spin-off) is the death of the franchise and will kill Square (and we've been saying it since, when, VIII?), I'm not surprised at the amount of salt in any thread in here.

Also, about the elemental balance thing that someone else pointed, if they overhaul the elemental defenses to make a summoner with different kinds of summons viable (and then we'd need 6 summons), they'd be shooting BLM and WHM on the foot, since BLM wouldn't be able to regain mp on Shiva and wouldn't even be allowed in Ifrit parties, would be next to useless in Titan and Bismarck. And WHMs would take SCH's place as DPS that ocassionaly heals in fights with many earth-aspected mobs. Take it one step further, DRK would be useless in VA/Mhach, since demons and undead normally are immune to dark-type damage, oh, and guess who has a Holy-aspected spell?

[Kabooa]

Summoner has always struck me as a role with a very loose definition.

In the single player Final Fantasy games, Summons represented early and mid-game power spikes. No one could Thunder as hard as Ramuh until later levels, where the damage cap was approached and the casting time of summons were far longer than the casting times of Bolt3.

The role summoners played were all-target heavy nukers, and in further iterations (Such as Final Fantasy 10) when the damage limit was extended, Summoner power lasted a little longer, up until you could haste a fighter and get 99,999 damage hits on every hit at 1/5 the turn cost. The long and the short of it, though, is that games with upward power scaling with stat caps made summons feel very weak in the lategame.

[raela]

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The point of the picture is to show that summons in all other ff games are like stallions and then ffxiv got a shetland pony.

Well, that was just about the stupidiest thing I've read this week. FYI, a stallion is an unneutered male horse and a shetland is a breed - there are shetland pony stallions, nice quality shetland ponies, and poor quality stallions. You really shouldn't use metaphors when you're clueless about them.

Traditional summon systems would be difficult to be implemented in FFXIV. I think the job works well here, and I'm hardly offended by the size of the Egis..

[Iromi]

I've said it before. Summoner is a complete joke. Poor man's Necromancer. But half the players love their Super Arcanist so I really think the traditional Summoner is screwed. SMN is pretty much lol garuda DoT spread lolcontagion and then spam fancy oGCD's and ruin popguns.

Ifrit is barely used and Titan Egi is well an afterthought.

Tank enmity ratio's got buffed. Guess who didn't? Titan Egi.

Any new pet skills in HW? Nope. When was their last skill? 40. What level are you now? 60.

This. SMN is a joke. It is not a PET class at all...it is a poison class. In 1.x we took a poll asking for a pet class, not some DoT mage with a "pet" that just stands there and shoots. contagion should have been a SMN ability long ago, more pets added and more abilities about the pet..not us.

It has been my "main" since 2.0 pre launch...and dont get me started on the pet glamours.

And as for the FFXI hate, SMN is totally different now. It is purely about the pets, buffs, debuffs, damage, and magical casting. We do not even sub /WHM anymore and rarely heal. You'll heal on SMN in FFXI as much as you physic in XIV. No one is asking for a SMN to stand there and heal in XIV...who in the world wants that?

People want a class that is about the pet and feels like the pet is a big role. That is easy to fix in XIV.

Just allow multiple pets with diff abilities. Hastega for the PT, how bout a cure ability that cleanses debuffs and heals a little. Then we can have abilities to make the pet cast strong magic. wnat more buffs..sure how bout increase stats on the PT. Refresh..etc..the possibilities are there but we are left with this bland job instead and battle system.

[Eloah]

same old stuff that has been said to death

Hmm... so a pet that has a hastega effect on the party, a cure ability, a cleanse ability... hmmm? Now i could be wrong but that sounds like a Scholar. Lets see, a cure, sounds like Embrace and Whispering Dawn, a cleanse, Fey Caress, a Hastega, hmm.. Fey Wind perhaps.

Seeiously, not to sound mean but please think before you post things like this.

[MagiusNecros]

Don't be a nitpick. The core concern you should care about is having the Pet be the bulk of the dps output. And not a glorified DoT. Players wanted a Pet class and they completely failed to deliver. Playstyle should be around the pet and not the master.

Funny thing with Titan Egi though. When it was able to Tank Ramuh Ex...the devs pretty much said "no no no a summoner beating content through it's pet? Poppycock! nerf nerf nerf"

Yeah exactly.

Why doesn't Ifrit have a line AoE rushdown attack? What about a party wide Earthen Ward? What about Rage of the Land being a Quake attack that does aoe damage with massive range? Why aren't we getting new egi's with new skills as primals get defeated and the SMN pulls partial strength from them? SMN doesn't need to summon the real thing. It could be a damn Astral Projection if they wanted it to be.

Why can we trance an Elder Primal but fail at life to conjure a sissy egi of Ramuh...who isn't a Elder Primal?

And then the kicker between BLM and SMN

SMN - Not enough aether. Can't summon shit. Taking aether from wasteland planet is bad.

BLM - Who cares. Take all the aether and mix it with your own and make em go boom.

But I'm sure Egi glamour will make ALL THE DIFFERENCE. Surely it will make me say "oh yes that's a summoner all right". NOT.

[WhiteArchmage]

Why can we trance an Elder Primal but fail at life to conjure a sissy egi of Ramuh...who isn't a Elder Primal?

And then the kicker between BLM and SMN

SMN - Not enough aether. Can't summon shit. Taking aether from wasteland planet is bad.

BLM - Who cares. Take all the aether and mix it with your own and make em go boom.

Lore reason or gameplay reason? Because both have answers.
Lore: We've stretched our own aether so thin that we're literally unable to attune and conjure another egi. A trance is the next best thing since we're taking that essence unto ourselves, and it's not like "oh, allagan summoners could summon whatever they wanted" because they couldn't, and the trance IS an allagan technique. Maybe in the future we'd get a Frost Trance, or a Levin Trance or whatever Alexander's title is, but for now we've spent so much of our aetheric reserves on giving shape to three mini-primals.
Your BLM argument is kinda flawed since Black and White Mages taking aether from the land was a direct cause of the flood that ended the War of the Magi, the consequences were that both Black and White Magic are now highly regulated and carry great stigmas with them. It is forbidden that any non-padjal use White Magic (with the exception of the WoL) and Black Mages were hunted down for the damage they could cause themselves and the planet. Not to mention that comparing archinima (which the modern summoner IS, by using an aetherial construct made of our own aether instead of crystals) with thaumaturgy (using the astral and umbral cycles) and conjury (borrowing aether from the land) is like comparing apples to oranges.

Gameplay reasons:
The devs know that to make the game balanced, they had to shift out the emelental wheel, making the resistances pretty useless. Maybe if the summoner had come out in 1.0 there would have been egis (since the plot line of primals draining the land of aether was from all the way in 1.0) from all six elements, making SMN a CNJ/pet hybrid (the 1.0 CNJ, which used all the elements). However, in 2.0 onwards, having 6 nearly identical pets whose only difference is the elemental damage they deal is redundant and a waste of already low resources; so, the trinity of melee/ranged/tank enters, make one pet useful for one thing. Unfortunately, that writes the devs into a corner: if a new pet is to be released, how do we justify it? what is the thing this pet has that makes it viable? Also, if the most of the DPS is on the pet then we go into the FFXI loldrg area. Lose your pet and you're useless until you can get it back.

Honestly, outside of making 4.0 into a "Oh, look, ANOTHER CATACLYSM! LET'S CHANGE EVERYTHING LOL" SMN is not going to change that drastically. Maybe 4.0 will actually give us a new egi, maybe it will allow us to do a Shiva/Thordan transformation WITHOUT it draining away all life on Hydaelin every time we need to stop the newest world-destroying abomination.

[TheMax1087]

Honest it's my opinion that dreadwyrm trance is the closest you can get to classic ff summoning(in which summons are summoned for one big attack then go away) and I hope they continue along that route.

[seekified]

Honest it's my opinion that dreadwyrm trance is the closest you can get to classic ff summoning(in which summons are summoned for one big attack then go away) and I hope they continue along that route.

Indeed, I hope they expand on this and give us a couple more avatars to rotate through and use in various situations. It is visually impressive and arguably fun to use, whereas DoTs and Ruin spams are not (even if it is satisfying to watch things melt while you twiddle your thumbs, so to speak).

In contrast, I think the SCH stuff makes a lot of sense - the lore says that a single scholar could support entire parties of marauders, and their pets make more sense. But then there's not really a clear FF precedent for scholars, lorewise. SMN by comparison feels very gimicky and I think the point that the last pet ability was at level 40 says quite a bit with regards to how SE views the job.