Summoner Over-Nered (and A few other Problems)

[Ariomi]

A SMN can adjust to such things with big dps gains liberating all 7 others players from bothering about adds, what can a RDM do? He can switch to scatter (wow) when adds are coming up and maybe can use his 200 pot cleave, but therefore lose his strongest single target spell (Verholy/-flare Needs a single target melee combo).

I was a summoner for all of the last raid tier. Believe me when I say I know what their old Aoe capabilities were. The problem? Every Aoe that summoner has except for one has been gutted or nerfed. While Black Mage, Ninja, Samurai can easily surpass Summoner in Aoe with dragoons and monks being able to do enough while still having high single target damage. Samurai wins the aoe contest with their 800 potency aoe, but Samurai wins dps period. Ninja's are the most notable in my opinion with Ten Chi Jin being able to be a stronger deathflare with no damage fall off(making a 500 potency katon). Oh and speaking of which, Katon which is now buffed from Ninja's losing poison and gaining passive damage increase to everything (Not Just physical Damage), Kassastu, and being able to deathblossom. So let's take a look. ten Chi Jin 500 potency katon and hell frog medium 400 potency vs Deathflare 400 potency with fall off. Two Katons at 250 potency with one guaranteed to crit on all targets with kassastu and are 50 base potency higher then painflare and instead of bane, which does 64 potency for the second enemy, and 48 for the third, Ninja can death blossom them all for 110 potency each. Not to mention that ninjas can get 4 katons/dotons per minute and can very quickly build enough gauge for hell frog which is just a massive dps gain. Oh and Ninja's can buff the entire group's damage by 10%.

Blm can now flare adds multiple times, fire 2 on command, Thunder 4 (which does 230 potency to all adds hit) and foul them every 30 seconds for 650 potency with fall off. Pretty much outclasses Summoner's Aoes any time they want now.

Summoner's Aoe is heavily gimped on the fact that everything is a cooldown, has damage fall off, was nerfed in potency (dots) or requires aether stacks to be used. Bahamut has extremely awkward timing in fights and you can either use him as soon as you can, or hold onto him and potentially lose dps from Summoner's abilities just sitting off cooldown.

It's funny that you bring up Bard. Bard has two Aoes. Both 100 potency now. One has a 15 second cooldown timer than can be reset, the other is a spammable skill that does 100 potency. If You think Bard has the advantage, any class that can use spammable aoes that have more then 100 potency are at an advantage. Which would be anything except summoner with their 30 potency tri bind.

So out off the eight other dps classes, minimum of four classes can out perform them in Aoe. (Samurai, Ninja, Black Mage, Bard) Which also happen to outdps summoner is single target damage, and also happen to outperform their utility. Summoner doesn't even shine in Aoe even more. Literally no reason to have a summoner in your group when there are multiple classes that do everything better.

Seeing as most groups will probably have a samurai in their group their no point in having summoner. Just get a red mage or a black mage.

[TaranTatsuuchi]

...
Ninja's are the most notable in my opinion with Ten Chi Jin being able to be a stronger deathflare with no damage fall off(making a 500 potency katon). Oh and speaking of which, Katon which is now buffed from Ninja's losing poison and gaining passive damage increase to everything (Not Just physical Damage), Kassastu, and being able to deathblossom. So let's take a look. ten Chi Jin 500 potency katon and hell frog medium 400 potency vs Deathflare 400 potency with fall off. Two Katons at 250 potency with one guaranteed to crit on all targets with kassastu and are 50 base potency higher then painflare and instead of bane, which does 64 potency for the second enemy, and 48 for the third, Ninja can death blossom them all for 110 potency each. Not to mention that ninjas can get 4 katons/dotons per minute and can very quickly build enough gauge for hell frog which is just a massive dps gain. Oh and Ninja's can buff the entire group's damage by 10%.
...

I haven't tested myself, but I've read that the tooltip for the poison is incorrect and it doesn't actually apply to the magic damage from the ninjitsu.

[Robert_Ilcri]

Just gonna toss my two cents into this as a player who has mained SMN since 2.x;

a) We need Sustain back pretty badly as others have stated. Titan becomes Tissue at this point without the ability to heal it making it... pointless to really even have summoned. Hell I used my chocobo for tanking instead for a lot of solo content.

b) Devotion. Like some people have mentioned, why not make this something you can use to target someone specifically instead of it just being whoever is closest to it? Makes you have to stop and position the pet if you want to make full use of it.

c) Aetherflow. I will say I've had times where I've accidentally hit the button and it gets forced back into cooldown when I didn't want it to. If you already have three trails maybe block out the skill like when you enter Dreadwyrm Trance to prevent that? Kind of a waste.

d) Bane. This took the biggest hit for no reason whatsoever. Look at Holy/Gravity or Flare. Flare is only reduced up to 70% while Holy/Gravity is reduced by 50% at their max amounts. Sure they are dots and last longer than a base hit but... 80% is a very hard hit for anything past a fifth enemy and kills SCH aoe dps completely. Why not leave it at 60% at the bare minimum?

e) Physick. While SMN is not a healer of course, this could do with a buff. At 70 this pulls off maybe 646. My level 58 RDM does double that already with Vercure. Either that needs a nerf, or SMN needs a small buff of some kind to it.

f) This one is about SCH. I understand they still have most of their instant cast heals etc... But why does Lustrate not get boosted by Largesse/Fey Illumination etc? I've tested it, that 20, 40, whatever percent doesn't actually boost it. It's just... a flat 600 potency. Cure II is 700 and Benefic II is 650. While not instant, they still get that bonus with those skills soooo why is SCH's bigger heal not affected?

g) On SCH again, Aetherflow needs to restore more MP than 10%. It's not even enough for an Adloquium unless you pour a crap ton of piety into your equipment. I understand the nerf for it and that SCH has two other ways of getting mp back but I'm not going to waste stacks on Energy Drain when I need them for heals and if Lucid is on cool down... then what?

Can't think of much else at the moment, but SMN/Sch does need another re balancing thats for sure.

[Ahzarhuuk]

Removal of Sustain is absolutely baffling.

A Pet class that can't heal it's own pet is just..what.

[Ariomi]

RDM's real advantage is dualcast raise swiftcast raise. If it comes to that though that's ~7800 mp and some tears if Lucid isn't up. I've been in this position too often in Susan Extreme learning parties. And to add to the fun I also had healers demanding me to Mana Shift them after raising them as if I had MP for days.

Also I'm no expert of summoner but shouldn't you not be casting ruin 3 outside of dwt?

Before Stormblood, back when ruin 3 was 200 potency, if was a dps gain outside of Dwt assuming you could manage your mp. It still is in certain situations, (Mainly situations where summoner's need to burn a little bit of mana before they pot aetherflow/lucid dream.

Dual Casting works like this: You cast any spell and the next one is instant. You do not need to cast verraise then verraise again. You simply cast Jolt 2/Vercure/anything at all then you cast Verraise on the party member who died.

The only difference between Summoner's Rez and Red Mage's is that Summoner's dps absolutely plummet and the summoner can't do it quickly. or while mobile and needs the mana more then red mage does. (I literally only Lucid Dream as a red mage when somebody dies. Otherwise What is mana management?)

My Point was look at summoner's spell costs. Veraero costs 480 Mana 300 potency. Ruin 2 costs 480 Mana 100 potency. Red Mage's Strongest attack costs less Mana then Summoner's Dots. You will hardly ever see a summoner run low on mana just spamming dots and ruin 2

Dual cast makes it so that Red Mage can instantly raise anyone, and have it only be a minor dps loss. As a red mage I Just give up whatever I was going to dual cast and get on with my life.

[CatStarPrime]

"c) Aetherflow. I will say I've had times where I've accidentally hit the button and it gets forced back into cooldown when I didn't want it to. If you already have three trails maybe block out the skill like when you enter Dreadwyrm Trance to prevent that? Kind of a waste."

This here, is SO annoying. For pure QoL improvement, let's get this lockout taken care of as soon as possible.


"d) Bane. This took the biggest hit for no reason whatsoever."

Yes. I feel "Bane" has been transformed into "Embarrassing Rash". Sometimes, rather than using Bane, I just go ahead and Bio/Miasma each mobbie, individually. Subjectively it just doesn't seem worth the aetherflow to squiff off a Bane -

[Alleo]

You know I fear that Bahamut is really a double edged sword for us. It is one of the things that gives us our DPS at level 70, yet it takes away our egi for that time. Thus soloing stuff will be even less possible if you want to use Bahamut at the same time, because Titan egi will be gone in that time and thus the monster will turn to you..seeing how its hard for it to generate aggro again, Titan cant be used together with Bahamut. So if you want to solo stuff you either have a good chocobo that can do it for you (but no real heal to heal it in tank stance) or you have to not use a big part of your DPS..together with losing sustain it kinda feels like they either do not want us to solo things (which is bad since they introduced a new solo title for PotD which will be nearly impossible for us now..) or they never thought about the consequences for solo stuff..anyway I am just not having much fun with summoner right now...even if it would do the best DPS or something, I feel that it lost too much that made it fun for something that is here for a very short amount of time every two minutes..and is hindering us in solo content and is blocking the view in group content..(people wanted bigger egis..I did too..but not something that we cant move at all)

Titan-egi has always been useless. You shouldn't be trying to solo content with it because it sucks at keeping aggro. You should always be using Ifrit or Garuda to kill stuff faster.

Did you ever solo PotD as a summoner? Because Titan egi was a life saver against bosses and without him its impossible to do them. (And I do have the solo title so yes I tried it enough) As soon as Titan was down against a boss it was a certain death for me if the boss had more than a few percent of his life left. We cant take much hits as summoners so we needed Titan to survive. Also he was necessary in trying to beat content unsynch solo. We simply do not have much healing skills so surviving Titan ex with just Garuda or Ifrit is probably not possible..Solo content was already the only true part where we could use him but thanks to all the changes he even becomes useless there..so they could have just deleted him too..Nice how the pet job gets less useful pets instead of more and even less useful skills instead of more. (That devotion..its so frustrating)

Also I always just cry a little on the inside if I die (loss of stacks thus loss of Bahamut) and when Tanks are moving the monsters out of my shadow flare..it might be doing a good amount of DPS but it feels way more punishing, frustrating and on the same time boring..which is a really strange and bad combination for me. Because if you do everything right its just not fun to play it, if you die to a mistake (might be your own or someone else) you are punished way harder than any other job, and its kinda frustrating to see the pet aspect being so bad..especially since we do not own that contagion anymore but the new skill from Garuda feels exactly the same ("Please use it Garuda" *hits button like a mad woman). At the same time I got the feeling that my pets are taking way to much damage..one hit in that one dungeon nearly killed Garuda instantly (by a trash monster..)..and putting them on the correct position to not get killed feels just so clunky..I am sorry but when you are doing lots of mechanics and still have to DPS at the same time, it just feels bad to have to move your pet the whole single time too..especially since they often reacted way to slow on the command thus got hit anyway..and now we have no way to heal them up again and healers dont see them in their list thus often are not healing them too..resummoning them costs a lot of MP too..

[Neophyte]

So out off the eight other dps classes, minimum of four classes can out perform them in Aoe. (Samurai, Ninja, Black Mage, Bard) Which also happen to outdps summoner is single target damage, and also happen to outperform their utility. Summoner doesn't even shine in Aoe even more. Literally no reason to have a summoner in your group when there are multiple classes that do everything better.

But all of them (except SMN) lose way more single target dps while doing AoE.

You may declare it a disadvantage, but there are fights were having the choice of AoE/single target only applied to oGCDs instead of GCDs is an advantage.

I mean' it's not hard to test.. go A9s with a full group, a SMn there blows a RDM out of the water.

@Alleo: Soloing PotD is done with sustain potions now and probably every dps job can beat that with them.
SMN just don't have the unfair advantage anymore to be the only dps to fulfill tank/healing requirements on literally everything open world.

[Dualgunner]

Dual Casting works like this: You cast any spell and the next one is instant. You do not need to cast verraise then verraise again. You simply cast Jolt 2/Vercure/anything at all then you cast Verraise on the party member who died.

Cutting you off here. Go back and re read my comment. I said Dualcast raise and then swiftcast raise immediately after is RDM's main advantage that is not replicable by any other job. I at no point said you need to hardcast verraise to dualcast verraise.

Also yes, RDM's potencies are high but it has no DoTs. None, zilch. Factor that in when considering total potency per second. And again, it only has one MP refresh so when being the backbone of a party's rezzes you wind up in the last thousand MP of your pool unable to really do anything.

[SmallHobbit]

Physic needs to work like Red Mage's Vercure. Let us heal our pet/other party members Make Physic scale off Int or Mind which ever is the highest

Change aetherpact to just have the pet target whoever you select. Scholar's aetherpact already works like this.

this stuff wouldnt be that bad, dunno why but in my case always the bloody none dpsing healer gets my aetherpact xD
anyway i understand that they nerf the dps since it has now more group support but look who the hell get the profit from support skills? except the healers which are not dpsing?

SMN needs get a dps buff of course, SMN has the most complex rotation and nowdays even more than before which makes him a bit weak already.

in fact just not much profit for all other players from SMN support skills which need be changed.
just need take a look at fflogs SMN dps are really poor compare with other jobs.

regards hobbit