Why are summoners so neglected?

[NolLacnala]

I like having a job I can play instead of watch.

Except that's literally what the Job currently is; sit and watch. You sit and watch your dots. Woo. I would love to be doing anything besides spamming Ruin.

[LunarEmerald]

Except that's literally what the Job currently is; sit and watch. You sit and watch your dots. Woo. I would love to be doing anything besides spamming Ruin.

Have you even played Summoner past 50?

No Summoner does nothing but watch dots tick and use ruin. You constantly use your aetherflow to go into dreadwyrm trance every minute.

[Ririta]

Before they do stuff like that they need to do something with the delay on pet commands first. It would suck if the egi misses the trance timer because it thinks its auto attack is more important than Deathflare. I'm not against more pet interaction but it's just too unreliable right now.

That's something I'd like to see fixed, they should cancel their auto-attack and execute the command instantly. I think that egi auto attacks shouldn't be casted at all, maybe it's false evidence but I found Ifrit and Titan to be more responsive than Garuda.

I kind of got used to putting Garuda on Steady before Contagion but it's not ideal.

[Magic-Mal]

Except that's literally what the Job currently is; sit and watch. You sit and watch your dots. Woo. I would love to be doing anything besides spamming Ruin.

You mean SMN's that don't know what they're doing put DoTs on and spam Ruin.

My rotation. It may not 100% accurate to what I do but I know it's close.

[Celef]

That's a lot of spells used under the Transe oO How much speed cast to you have ?

Played it yesterday evening on Thordan, yep, still feeling like playing a cute necromancer :/

[Magic-Mal]

That's a lot of spells used under the Transe oO How much speed cast to you have ?

Played it yesterday evening on Thordan, yep, still feeling like playing a cute necromancer :/

There are two Trances involved in my opener. I count them in because they all go in a sequence but my downtime starts after the 2nd Deathflare.

Also I have 925 spell speed.

[Duelle]

Look at how dominant Garuda is now. Yes, it's because of contagion, but even if it wasn't, either Garuda or Ifrit would still be better than the other, unless they were exactly the same.

The problem was two-fold. Garuda-egi had the benefit of being at range from the mob in addition to Contagion.

The above quote is a cool idea, but how would you balance it? If summoners had the utility to deal with every possible situation, they'd have to be made weaker not to be the de facto best DPS class in all situations. Having even six summons all with different and useful abilities would be a hotbar nightmare, especially on a controller. (And not for nothing, but this is exactly what the dev team has been trying to avoid going forward.)

This is the part that we should be discussing as a whole.

Re: Balance - Personally, it's a matter of having the context for each function with the needed damage trade-offs. For example, assuming we designed Leviathan-egi as an anti-caster pet that can interrupt casts and weaken enemy magic potencies (Gyre Spume), you might find yourself in a raid comp where the SMN would want to bring Levi-egi over Ifrit or Garuda because interrupting a boss attack is more important to group survival than dealing max DPS. The DPS trade-off should be enough that Ifrit has a clear advantage in raw DPS, but in this case Levi just has what the group needs to get a clear. This is on top of whatever utility they bring (battle rez) and they'd still be able to summon temporary and additional egi's to DPS.

Re: UI and Buttons - This can easily be condensed in a couple of ways. You could have a drop-down menu of sorts for summons. So instead of having Summon I-VI, you'd just have one button called "Summon", and when you click on it you get a small line of sub-buttons for your chosen egi.

As for skills in connection to UI/buttons, I'd increase player input when it comes to utility provided by egi. You could have a universal "utility skill" button that would cause Ifrit-egi to do Crimson Cyclone, Garuda-egi to do Shockwave, Levi-egi do Spinning Dive (interrupt spell casting), Shiva-egi do Dream of Ice (channeled CC ability). In short, a context-sensitive button that changes depending on what egi you have active.

Additional egi beyond the "main" 6 would act as cooldowns. You could consume 1 or 2 stacks of Aetherflow to summon Ravana-egi for 20 seconds, during which its attacks deal melee damage, and when the timer hits the 20 second mark, Ravana-egi does its version of Chandrahas to deal big damage or debuff the enemy with a Vulnerability Up effect for a short time.

Abilities to summon additional egi would also be basically DPS cooldowns. Say that if you have Ifrit-egi active, using this particular cooldown would temporarily summon Shiva-egi and Garuda-egi to deal damage to the mob for 20s (only auto-attack; no special skills or anything like that).

-----------------------------------

I admit that this means the devs have to create context for this to work. This means fights must force the raid to set up interrupt rotations for casted skills (that if ignored will either wipe the raid, kill the tank, or make it a lot easier to die), throw in adds where appropriate to allow crowd control to come into play, and so on. Currently the game is sorely lacking on said context, and I wish that people doing interviews would actually ask the devs about these things.

Note: I'm not asking for every boss to require interrupts or have adds that need to be handled in specific kill orders with CC/kiting involved, but those gameplay elements should be use a lot more than they currently are (read: almost never).

To recap, briefly: summons in most FF games are just flashy damage spells, and when they stick around they generally replace your whole party, which obviously would not fly in an MMO; even the people in this thread who like FFXI summoners basically admit they're only useful once every two hours [one hour these days]. None of these are viable designs in FFXIV.

Agreed 100%.

[Mature]

Anything over 700 SS is a waste of critical or determination points.

I'm at 1120 critical +food
812 determination
712 Spell Speed.
For my own liking this is optimal. I can fit perfectly 6 R3.

Back to the topic, it would be better to actually have the Egis actions rather than having the pets

Or something like

Ifrit stance
Garuda stance
Titan stance

(Maybe one day Ramuh Shiva etc etc stances)

So this way we open another channel to recruit new summons as their stances.hope it makes sense

[xxvaynxx]

But because of poor balance, Garuda is a must have. If they remove Contagion, Garuda will be garbage..

I wouldn't say it would make Garuda garbage but it would certainly make things more balanced and give us the chance to use iffy-kun based on the party comp.
Have a bard? use garuda. Have mch? use ifrit. Don't have any? Use what you want.
Though in dgn's you could always use what you want anyway because faceroll, but you'll never been in a savage raid static without a bard or mch.

[Magic-Mal]

Anything over 700 SS is a waste of critical or determination points

Off-Topic:

For SMN, Spell Speed is actually weighed higher than Determination. Just slightly. : p
https://dervyxiv.wordpress.com/stat-weights/

My stats without food:
Crit: 1095
Det: 526
SS: 921**

I'm only i265 though and stuck with i260 shire currently >.<

I wouldn't say it would make Garuda garbage but it would certainly make things more balanced and give us the chance to use iffy-kun based on the party comp.
Have a bard? use garuda. Have mch? use ifrit. Don't have any? Use what you want.
Though in dgn's you could always use what you want anyway because faceroll, but you'll never been in a savage raid static without a bard or mch.

What I meant by useless is that without Contagion, unless a new utility is added to Garuda, she has nothing to help anyone. Her Enkindle is weaker than Ifrit's, she doesn't have a stun(like Ifrit). she doesn't have a unique utility(like Ifrit's shield), her AoE is weaker than Ifrit's, and her basic attack power is alot weaker, since Ifrit has auto-attack and the slash. Plus, Inferno and his AoE thing are both magic.

Garuda would need a big buff to match.