Developers Poor Attitude to Summoner

[Magic-Mal]

You could argue the same lame point about every other time people complained about class changes (how about that cast time for bards? amirite?) . The root of the summoner's problem is that it's tied weirdly to arcanist rather than being it's own class. It's always been an oddball and isn't a really great design. The heal thing is a side effect of that and taking away sustain was a mistake. If the class was better designed we wouldn't have a raise or a basic heal, we'd have a pet raise and a pet heal and a stack of eidolon focused abilities.

When SE changes something they change it based on player numbers and forum responses. When 3.0 BRD was released it got an insane amount of hate, hug not only that, it got a huge drop in people playing the job. Yoshida explained this as one of the reasons pushing him to finally change it after 2 years.

The problem with SMN is that despite the amount of people who dislike SMN right now(a small amount) SMN still remained the most popular job in the game just a few months past based off of the spring census. So numbers aren't on your side. Plus the changes people want require a full overhaul from the ground up. Why overhaul the most popular job because a select few don't like it?

[Teryaani]

When SE changes something they change it based on player numbers and forum responses. When 3.0 BRD was released it got an insane amount of hate, hug not only that, it got a huge drop in people playing the job. Yoshida explained this as one of the reasons pushing him to finally change it after 2 years.

The problem with SMN is that despite the amount of people who dislike SMN right now(a small amount) SMN still remained the most popular job in the game just a few months past based off of the spring census. So numbers aren't on your side. Plus the changes people want require a full overhaul from the ground up. Why overhaul the most popular job because a select few don't like it?

You're assuming that's not what's in SMN's future, especially when SE has introduced an alternative that has better utility and the same or better dps numbers with less effort. I'm not buying your argument about it being the most popular job. It was a forgotten child during much of ARR. It only spiked in popularity during HW thanks it having strong damage output and utility (when compared to existing alternatives). Both of those factors are gone.

You overhaul it because it creates a balance issue because the base class is linked to another class. The duct tape and bailing wire approach to game balance is ultimately going to keep causing square problems. That's why you overhaul it.

[Tsumdere]

-snip-

It used to be one of the most popular DPS class BEFORE SB. Since these changes, I've noticed a remarkable decline in SMNs. For example, I haven't seen one single SMN for weeks in anything except for one I saw today doing maps. None in farms, none in roulettes... Every former SMN I know (including myself) has left the job and warned others not to touch it.

It's not popular now. It's one of the least popular. Probably would be the least popular if MCH wasn't a thing.

[Magic-Mal]

It used to be one of the most popular DPS class BEFORE SB. Since these changes, I've noticed a remarkable decline in SMNs. For example, I haven't seen one single SMN for weeks in anything except for one I saw today doing maps. None in farms, none in roulettes... Every former SMN I know (including myself) has left the job and warned others not to touch it.

It's not popular now. It's one of the least popular. Probably would be the least popular if MCH wasn't a thing.

I haven't seen anything but RDMs and SAMs all day, everyday, every dungeon. Doesn't really prove much. Especially while everyone is still riding the hype.

I'm not saying SMN doesn't need buffs like sustain or -Miasma II. I'm saying it doesn't need an overhaul.

[Kallera]

I haven't seen anything but RDMs and SAMs all day, everyday, every dungeon. Doesn't really prove much. Especially while everyone is still riding the hype.

I'm not saying SMN doesn't need buffs like sustain or -Miasma II. I'm saying it doesn't need an overhaul.

So what will get them to come back to a clearly inferior class that uses the same gear?

[NolLacnala]

It's obvious when Yoshi can't decide when he's fine with SMN (3.0) or wishes he had just deleted it (2.4, 4.0)

[Claviusnex]

[B]Exhibit A:One example of this was the Summoner. That was highly demanded, but once it was in, there were more and more requests. "You should be able to summon all the Summons and Eidolons!" That can push a person to think, "Oh, I shouldn't have included a Summoner in there."]


The developers failed to meet even the lowest expectations with what they conceived of Summoner since its inception. That was your own failure, not the playerbase for rightfully expecting a better delivery. (Don't take this as me saying that having a pantheon of full-sized Summons is a reasonable request. It's not.)

I had said in another post more or less tongue in cheek that SE would say in meetings that they had wished they had never implemented the Summoner job. This makes me think I wasn't too far off.

[Kallera]

I thought they were trying to not adopt the whole "Flavor of the month" thing?

[Fatshine]

I thought they were trying to not adopt the whole "Flavor of the month" thing?

Not if it brings them the $$$

[Claviusnex]

The second comment is literally Yoshida's equivalent of facepalming. It's not the "poor attitude toward summoner" so much as "guys, come on, this really doesn't make sense for how we want the job to work." For some reason, people want all the classes to be able to do all the same things and that's the developer [politely] saying they are silly.

No it shows Yoshida doesn't really understand one of the problems. His responses show this lack of understanding over and over but instead of trying to understand the job and its problems he pushes back on the players as the issue.

With Exhibit B Yoshida is getting hung up on discussions of ways to resolve the lack of pet healing and confusing that with other types of healing. Sustain was the pet heal and was removed as near as I can tell based on someone's gut feeling. We were left with the useless heal of Physick. We have been saying we need a method to heal our pets. One option is the return of Sustain. Another is for Summoners to base Physick on INT so it has sufficient power to heal the pet. Yet another suggested a two level Physick where it is only more powerful for pets and stays its anemic self for players. Personally Summoners don't need a player heal. All we need is a way to maintain our pet. To me the simplest and most straight forward way to do this is replace Physick with Sustain at level 30. But given how SE frequently does things in a convoluted manner some type of Summoner buff to Physick would also resolve the immediate issue with dead pets.

I had many years where I worked with my company's labs and programming centers in Japan. From that I found it was very important to be concise with problem definition and resolutions. Using the American form of scattershot brain storming frequently led to misunderstandings and tangents being taken. It had nothing to do with the technical competence but the way language translation is processed and understood. While I think SE has a definite lack of understanding of how the Summoner works I also feel some of the problem is the language differences resulting in a lack of understanding of what is being said in the forums. I don't know SE's support structure but I think some of this would work better if they had some highly technical native English speakers distill the conversations into product requirements.