After years of playing Summoner, I'm shelving the job and here's why.

[Meng_Qing]

The current SUM is a weird version of RDM. Mobility, has a ress (though one time), Cure (weak), with some DoT. You have to basically fill and balance a gauge and instead of big single target DPS that RDM uses,, you're suppose to do big dps AOE with bahamut.

I feel that by oversimplify the job made it like that. They could make the pet easier to control with certain skills acting (like BnS summoner) in accordin with certain skills. And each pet will have its own unique skillset that share the same skill icon depending on what the summoned primal is. Example, skill 1 on Garuda can go through enemies stunning them but on titan, it pulls enemies from all around it into one central location. If SE don't give pets sustain, give a defense skill that makes it immune to damage for while or give some iframes when using certain pet exclusive skills so a skilled summoner, rewarded for knowing how to iframe certain stuff.

It's my own opinion and it's probably worse than SE's opinion.

[Flana]

I agree with basically everything in the OP. The new rotation is about avoiding damage loss, making sure you don't overlap anti-synergizing skills, rather than maximizing and lining up burst synergy. I think they definitely need to go back to the old system with aetherflow.. lots of things I'd suggest here:

- Bio 3/Miasma 3 durations reduced to 15s/24s, potencies increased to compensate.
- Contagion back to a 15s extension of DoTs (which means it has a 15s window to go off, so it being unresponsive isn't as bad as it's now)
- Flaming Crush gets a fester-like effect, dealing 30 extra potency per DoT.
- Ruin 4 instant cast, upgrades ruin 2 instead of 1/3.
- Ruin 3 potency increased to 200, MP cost increased by a ruin 2 cost.
- Shadowflare cooldown reduced to 30s
- Aetherflow and related skills can be used in DWT and Bahamut, Bahamut and DWT itself are still exclusive.
- Rouse affects bahamut
- Wyrmwave: Auto-attack, 5s cooldown, 1.5s cast, using damaging abilities will reset the cooldown.
- Like PvP, you can use bahamut after each DWT (edited)
- Only 1 ahk morn per bahamut (cooldown increased to 30s).
- MP return from Energy drain increased by the same amount as Ruin3 cost increase (it should give 1 ruin upgrade exactly).
- Tri-bind potency increased to 65
- Aetherpact affects the entire party (I just nerfed utility from contagion, so that compensates)
- Aethertrail timer back.. yes that means the guage needs to be changed (quick concept):

That sounds like a lot of fun, personally. Nice ideas.

[Gravton]

This was a really good post. Smn was my main since 2.0, I switched to drg half way threw HW. I've made a lot of mistakes in this game, but I'm "glad" switching wasn't one of them. I'm not going to post my suggestions for smn because I was vocal in the past and nothing happened. We have all seen various suggestions for smn and sadly even the dumbest suggestions would be vast improvements at this point. If you still enjoy smn then you should play it. But if you are sticking to the spirit of smn in hopes that it will get better, I have a history lesson for you.

Yoshi-P has always been a flake when it comes to smn. In 2.0 he promised new pets, kept saying it for 2 years, then a month before HW he said "pets are hard to design, but we can do glamors ". A year later, we got glamors with a promise for more. Here we are a year later and no new glamors but in the live letter, a promise to redesign. Following that track record smn MIGHT change in 5.0....but don't hold your breath.

At this point I am throughly convinced that the person in charge of SMN design is whatever intern wins employee of the month when it's time for changes.

[Kerrigen]

Really thorough post that completely echoes my sentiment about the state of SMN right now. I personally loved SMN's gameplay and complexities in 3.x enough to grind an anima weapon for it despite it not being my main, and while I'm not against a change of direction at all, current SMN feels like it's 2 iterations away from being good.

Most of its elements are completely at odds with one another and it feels like it is being pulled into too many directions at once. Its current iteration does not feel well-designed at all.

[Inosaska]

The job has needed an overhaul for a very long time ever since HW it needed one. They need to pick which way they want to go with the job and stick to it once they overhaul it. I would like to see it become a pet job where you give commands to your summon and it does the actions which would be very nice. They could even make it temporary for that summon for a period x time and then have to summon another one to replace when the other vanishes. Just random idea's but it would be way better then what we currently have in the game. The dev team doesn't seem to be very sure on what direction to take the job at all based on what we saw with stormblood.

They need to take time to review the job and figure out what they plan doing with it for the future otherwise it will get harder to give it new abilities in future expansions. I would also like to see them update the egi's visuals to make them look better as right now they're very low detail and not very interesting to look at in the game. I stopped playing the job half-way through HW because I didn't like the direction they were taking it and knew that this was going to happen with them going all over the place and not really picking what they wanted the job to be in FFXIV.

[Jybril]

so sad seeing so much of you leaving.... either its understandable by a fair degree... it's just sad somehow q.q

It is always sad when someone leaves their main because of poor treatment.
For me, SMN has always been a huge mess. We are all still paying the price of it being tied to ACN.
Here's why I dislike it.

- A pet job with little interaction with pets.
- Not really liking the DoT hero thing. It would be fine if I had pets that actually were pretty cool and did more.
- Very bland looking pets that people pretty much begged to sub in Carby skin over them. Carby is cute at least!
- One pet beats all; Garuda is almost always shown in every piece of content. No love for others, Chicken Nugget is in back burner. Least Hot Cheeto gets some screen time but Booger wins.
- The tie of ACN makes it difficult to do much.
- A pet job with little interaction with pets.
- Did I mention, a pet job with little interaction with pets?

Summoner was not what I visualized when I wanted to try it years ago.
Now, we have Bahamut, which I feel like it's cool and a nice step somewhere.

So my question to you guys: How would everyone feel if they redid Summoner completely, and make "Demi" versions of Primals for a period of time?
Just like DemiB. Who wouldn't love Ramuh, Shiva, Odin, Levi and more? Or maybe "Invoke" some of their spells and use them?
Maybe give em some supportive spells from one of them too. Remove Egi's, fix them, or do the "Temp" summon of the real Primals. Do something!
Summoner has never felt as a "Summoner" to me until Demi B.
I just think the entire Job needs a complete and total rehaul to be completely honest with you.
SE needs to sit down and take a hard long look at what they want and need to do with Summoner.
It suffers too much complications, the ebb and flow of the job is a huge mess.

EDIT: Sorry Inosaska, seems like you and me had the same idea but I posted right after you! xD
Basically what he said!

[darcwizrd]

One of the issues I have with people talking about Summoner is that they say it "Doesn't FEEL like a Summoner". And I'm just sitting here like "Feels pretty Summoner-y to me".

As far as I can tell a lot of the issues people have are more personal rather than comparative to other jobs. "I don't want to be a Ruin Spammer; I don't use my pet enough; We didn't get any real skills this expansion; I want all big summons." Like I understand but as far as I can tell these are all opinions based on aesthetics and lore and as far as I can tell. Especially the pet one though. TBH I like how little I need to tell the pets because the job would be unnecessarily complex for it. There are latency issues that should be addressed but that's another thing. If you don't like how this game has set up the universe for Summoners to exist in any sense of the word then maybe you should just not play it.

[darcwizrd]

Mechanically, I am fine with the change towards burst phase, the only issue I have is it feels as if I'm just being shoved towards getting out Bahamut as quickly as possible, without consideration to SMN's AoE abilities. Bahamut is cool but could stand to be stronger to better reflect it's purported power of 680 Potency Ahk Morn, which is less due to it being a pet.

[darcwizrd]

Having Bane's potency dropoff be reduced would be a good first step, as well as decreasing the cooldown of Shadowflare to say 45 secs, as well as improving Aetherpact. On paper is interesting and somewhat helpful BUT is not enough for anything outside of dungeon content due its randomness. I would at the very least like to be able to choose who gets Devotion and dreaming big, I would prefer a 5% damage or healing potency buff to nearby party members, thus in turn giving more those to pet management. Losing sustain to be quite honest is not really an issue unless it's Titan-egi since most of the time you needn't worry about the pet. But with Titan specifically giving it a regen effect on a skill would be good or as a possible passive ability for the Summoner as a self defensive measure. If I can't have an INT based Physick I want a regen at the very least.

[darcwizrd]

And I know this one maybe a little crazy but I think it wouldn't be a terrible thing to increase DoT potency, only by like 5 or 10 though. FFXIV's Summoner doesn't need to be straight single damage like BLM and RDM, just AoE King like all was intended. There are other improvements that could be made with the pets, but there are other posts with better ideas out there for that. My goal is just for SMN to not be lagging behind in it's one key area, AoE.