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

[TheLenrir]

Just to be clear we are talking about waiting for an additional aetherflow stack before summoning demi in order to push the waves right? If so I find it odd that the get max power we need 3 stacks of aether and not just the initial cost of 2 even though I don't argue the testing and math behind it. If anything that itself feels clunky. If we have the power to summon demi after 2 stacks we should be able to use the summon to its full ability at the 2 stack mark. If I am wrong in what you are inferring I would very much like someone to correct me though!

That's pretty much where I was coming from. Anything before and it's pretty much detrimental. I just find it hard to accept that Bahamut is an overall dps improvement for us when we need to wait on such conditions to follow through. Is it wrong to at least ask for his wyrmwave to be set to auto attack on the target I've selected?

[RichardButte]

I particularly agree with the part about it not FEELING like a pet class.

I wouldn't mind if classes like SCH and SMN CONSTANTLY had you repositioning your pets to maximize your efficiency.

As it stands, I feel like XIV barely has a REAL pet class, and that's a shame because I LOVE pet classes in MMOs...

[Angry_Evil]

That's pretty much where I was coming from. Anything before and it's pretty much detrimental. I just find it hard to accept that Bahamut is an overall dps improvement for us when we need to wait on such conditions to follow through. Is it wrong to at least ask for his wyrmwave to be set to auto attack on the target I've selected?

There's nothing to accept - you parse rotation with DWT skip and without DWT skip and look at DPS. Granted it should not be that much of a difference over 10 minutes cause smn is always loosing DPS cause of low mp and inability to spam r3 nonstop. That being said yeah it's hard to imagine that DWT is a dps loss and skipping it was intentional design. But either way it's SE fail. There's no win in this situation either it was conscious decision or mistake on their part. They failed to properly design job and bahamut phase.

[Trespar]

The only way they fix SMN now is separate it from SCH, leave the SCH with the medical/viruses dps and healing skills and make SMN an actual SMN with either more pet interaction or fast-paced summoning on each skill (that just works visually, like summon Garuda for a GCD and off she goes real quick) and of course balance it as a caster job without looking at SCH anymore.

I've felt this way since 2.0.

SMN just isn't a summoner, and it blows.

But you can't just eliminate the DoT dps archetype, either. I'd like to see that preserved as simply a job called ACN.
I'd make that more virus/poison focused, and renaming the DoTs for SCH to be more.. positively charged, I guess? Like changing Bio(which would be an ACN skill) into Dia(which was a holy type DoT in FFXI). Doesn't necessarily have to be Dia, because that is a traditional white magic spell, I'm just using it as an example.

I do like the idea of the poison using medic, but I ultimately feel like that is more something for a hypothetical chemist job, than scholar.

SCH would be torn from ACN, to eliminate balance issues and essentially have most of their kit renamed and rebalanced to make sense but still be basically the same.. ish.

And then SMN relaunched as a real pet job, that isn't just Bahamut, but not really.

Unfortunately, none of that will ever happen and I just wasted my time.
But the idea of a real summoner-style job is really appealing to me, so I can't help but throw in my two cents.

[Revanslave]

I cleared O1 and O2S with smn and it changes literally nothing that was said about how poorly designed smn is now...

I never said anything about that at all. I said it's not bad enough to quit playing my favorite job.

[Clover210]

If only this was posted on the JP forums this great feedback may have gotten attention from the devs

[corey1]

I like the idea of making them the caster version of a bard. Different summons do different things for the group. Summon 3 primals and then summon Bahamut.

Is Aetherflow more Summoner-y or more Scholarly? Either way, it's a good system. Let's keep the vibe, trim the fat, and call it Summon Points for simplicity.

- Each time you use Fester or Painflare, you get a Summon Point. Get 3 points, and you can summon a primal that lasts for 15 seconds. Different primals do different shit, as others have pitched. Primal summons have a 30 second cooldown.
- Each time you summon a primal, you increase your Trance Gauge by 1.
- Once you get your Trance Gauge high enough, up to 3 basically, you are "entranced" enough to activate Dreadwyrm Trance.
- You must stay in Dreadwyrm Trance for 8 seconds before your trance dance succeeds and you summon the mighty Bahamut. It's still a cooldown-esque ability, but it will feel better and more Summoner-y to build up to it. Plus you can do it every 90 seconds instead of every 120 which is nice.
- A whatever-seconds cooldown ability to auto-entrance. Call it Entranced, or some shit. It puts you at 3 Trance Gauge and auto-activates DWT so you can have your opener.
- 3 to 4 "Summon Skills" that activate your summons' different stuff and automatically change to whatever skills your pet primal has. Give them single target skills, AoE skills, DoTs, GTAoE stuff. Make it so that different primals will be better for different situations. Give all of these skills LOW COOLDOWNS (5-15 seconds.) This, more than anything I think, will make the summoner feel like a pet class, and a good pet class at that, without it being as weird and unsatisfyingly unwieldy as its pet usage currently is.
- Make Ruin 1 upgrade to Ruin 3, and Ruin 2 upgrade to Ruin 4. Make a cast-time AoE spell and an instant-cast AoE spell.
- Have a trait with a proc-chance to reduce Ruin 2/4/insta-AoE MP cost to that of Ruin 1/3/cast-time-AoE.
- (I know this reduces the complexity of Summoner's current kit a bit, but I feel like with the oGCD usage in Fester/Painflare and especially with a revamp to pet skills, it spreads out the complexity to more than just "Ruin is the only place for management & improvement in the kit."

[ThirdKeyOfSun]

As far as summon sizes are concerned, no one seems to take issue with there being roegadyn in a party right? Why can't our female form summons be female roe size and the more bestial ones be male roe size? Is it really that much of a hindrance to others at that point? D:

[Gallus]

I wouldn't mind if classes like SCH and SMN CONSTANTLY had you repositioning your pets to maximize your efficiency.

Sounds like a lot of fun.

[Gallus]

The problem about SMNs is that historically, you've complained about every single thing.

1 - SMN feels like a DOT class! I want a real SMN! / SMN lost one dot in SB! I want my SMN dot class back!

2 - SMN pet designs are ugly! I want real summons with 5 minute cutscenes!

3 - Sustain is useless! Make pets more resistant! Bring back sustain! I can't tank mobs in the open world!

4 - Give us REAL SUMMONS! Bahamut blocks our view!

5 - Give us some utility like RDM while we keep pretending contagion, devotion and radiant shield do not exist!

6 - SMN in 4.0 is too simple! We are ruin mages I'm getting bored make this harder SE! /SMN is too hard SE! There's too much difference between good SMNs and bad SMNs check fflogs!


You've lost every single grain of credibility and you've only done this to yourselves.