Why are summoners so neglected?

[Yamimarik]

/snip

Yeah that part was a lil' infuriating for me too. I was actually hoping to have Carbuncle back with all it's animations you have when you actually have the two Carbuncle's from ACN. Then to see it was literally just a model swap. Which was highly disappointing, but I still love my Carbuncles over those damnable Egi's lol.

[ZhaneX]

Said it once, said it a dozen times.

FFXIV's "Summoner" is nothing of the sort. I like playing it, but it's not fulfilling as a "Summoner" conceptually.

Should be renamed something more appropriate with the direction it's being developed ("Channeller" seems fitting imo) and the concept of "Summoner" shelved until the dev team thinks they can do it justice, whether or not that ever happens.

[Allyrion]

I think the Summoner embodying the summon is a good direction. At least, I like it over working with FFXIV's clunky pet system. But if they wanted to, they could make the pet system better. Instead they chose another path which I don't think is any less legitimate.

It is reminiscent to me of the FFX and FF13 in which you actively control the summon at the expense of losing control of the party. It may have not been a transformation (your party just becomes inactive) but gameplay wise, it may as well have been. I like that Iceheart has also set some precedence for becoming a summon and they could make some lore excuse for not consuming aether. Realistically, the dreadwyrm stance's, and even the egi's, lack of need for external crystals were handwaved without blinking an eye.

I'm not against SMN being a pet class but if the devs have a different vision, it's not being neglected. What's unfortunate is the lack of variety even in either scenario. What I think would be cool is if you can get a stance that changes you into different forms based on the spell - kind of like how Ultima works when he summons the primals.

But in the end, it will probably just be the summoner semi-turning into Bahamut more and more. He is the ultimate primal anyway.

[Ririta]

Because it is attached to ACN and SCH! Well part of the reason, but more indirectly because that issue runs into this:


They basically made SMN a real SMN in FFXI, here is just being lazy and can't come up with ways to get around the balancing issue from being attached to ACN and SCH.

Between 10 job exclusive spells (5 from ARR and 5 from HW), they could've added more summons, but at this point I'll accept even being separated from scholar if it means I'll finally get my Leviathan.

Just remove all the skills from smn, give it summon, and rouse, and spur. enkindle
and 18 summons that only have an auto attack and the enkindle ability.

There, you have summoner.

Sarcasm aside, that would be a step in the right direction, a clean slate if you will.

My point is... SMN has an exclusive glamour system. No one else does.

Therefore: Privileged

We didn't ask for glamour. Glamour was used as a compromise because Yoshida didn't want to fullfill his promise (still didn't, by the way).

The problem with adding more summons is balancing them. They already have enough trouble keeping Ifrit relevant with Garuda around. If they make a new summon that's too good then nobody will use Ifrit or Garuda anymore and if it's not good enough then nobody will use it. In this game, dps is everything. Whichever summon gives the most dps is what everybody will use.

Which is why they should remove Contagion from Garuda already. People have been saying it since ARR. But instead of removing it, they doubled down on Contagion due to how Dreadwyrm Trance and DOT potency works. This is either negligence or complacency.

Ironically, Thunder was quickly fixed for black mages after it went unused in HW. I wonder why having Thunder being usable was so important since black mages worked fine without it, shouldn't it have been too hard to balance?

[LunarEmerald]

The problem with adding more summons is balancing them. They already have enough trouble keeping Ifrit relevant with Garuda around. If they make a new summon that's too good then nobody will use Ifrit or Garuda anymore and if it's not good enough then nobody will use it. In this game, dps is everything. Whichever summon gives the most dps is what everybody will use.

Balance aside, what would another summon even do? We already have a melee, a range and a tank. Garuda's specialty is extending dots and Ifrit can stun. I feel the bases have already been covered. The only thing that comes to mind is having a pet that does nothing but aoe damage like Machinist's Bishop but then that kind of takes away something unique to machinist.

[Cabalabob]

I don't see the need to split SMN and SCH, as we level up and get more job skills they'll drift further and further apart, now that arcanist is basically out of the picture getting no new skills past 50, all future skills are going to be attached to the jobs so sch and smn won't have to share toys anymore. Then if they just remove stat point allotment completely and just boost the native stats on job stones, smn and sch will never have to see eye to eye again.

As for SMN, yeah, I really don't like what they've done with it, it's just not a pet job. And what yoshi said is laughable, SMN can easily work in an MMO they just have to do it right. Honestly I think they should have just taken FFXI's SMN and fixed everything that didn't work there, which is the direction I thought they were going in 2.0.

Like making it so the party can interact with your pet, heal it, buff it etc. FFXI's pet couldn't be interacted with at all even by the SMN. Splitting the ability timers on pet abilities, FFXI's SMN basically had a global cooldown on pet skills so you could only do 1 then had nothing to do. Which brings me to the next fix, giving the SMN something to do during pet downtime, which is casting some filler DoTs and debuffs.

But they simply didn't put enough effort into the egi's and they became nothing but a glorified auto attack and the focus became the summoner and their DoTs, which is why Garuda became top dog as the only pet who could help with that.

Then rather than fix it and expand on egi's in 3.0, they decided to roll with the direction it had gone and focused on giving more stuff to the summoner instead of improving the pets. This was a bandaid fix to make the job competitive rather than make it live up to the summoner name.

[Lithe]

Neglected? Still, they got 'glamour' options for their pets which is more than the other 'pet' classes have gotten.

I really wish people would stop bringing that up like smns are special snowflakes. Smns got stuck with some horrible looking lumps of god knows what as their pets for years. The fairies look decent at least, as do the mch turrets. Not to mention we were also promised more egis and that got scrapped. Which is why we now have egi glamours. Do I hope more fairies and turrets get made for other classes? Yes. Would I be ok if the other pet classes got egi glamours too? Yes.

[Iromi]

It's funny, "pet job" won the 1.x player poll for most wanted job and this game still doesn't have it.

They should rename summoner to something else until they can make it proper. I don't mind the job, but it does not , by any means, fulfill the pet job role..

[LunarEmerald]

It's funny, "pet job" won the 1.x player poll for most wanted job and this game still doesn't have it.

They should rename summoner to something else until they can make it proper. I don't mind the job, but it does not , by any means, fulfill the pet job role..

It feels like Summoner is more like a Witch Doctor job where you inflict disease (dots) and spread it to others.

[alimdia]

We're supposed to be summoners, not black mages. We already had enough offensive spells for ourselves - if not new summoning spells then we should've gotten at least new spells that are focused on our pets, but we didn't get a single one. This is a pet job but right now, fairies are more central to scholar's gameplay than egis are to summoner's.

What are you talking about? DWT and deathflare are closer to the classic FF summoner than anything else, if you really want a "real" summoner you'd ask for more skills like deathflare, skills that borrow the power of primals, because that's exactly what most FF summoners did, invoke the entity for one single attack. What we have now with summons being out 24/7 is pretty far from a summoner.

Lala Yukihime had the right of it, we need more ogcd attacks that are based off primal abilities.