Revamp Summoner idea

[Shurrikhan]

The issue with this is that it would require tons of coding work to implement as there's nothing remotely like it in the game. I don't really get why you can't just have one summon button that summons the primal with the highest gauge.

It's literally some 40 lines of lua code in a WoW addon, albeit with necessary tie-ins to a prior UI skinning addon (some 13 assets and another 100 lines, for less than a megabyte of space and memory cost barely enough to be registered in the few events that it's running). Granted, it may well take years for SE to do what a casual programmer did in a few hours there. But my point was that simply "bloat" is rarely ever the issue.

A gauge mechanic would obviously work, too, but requires that the whole job be built around multiple elements of regular attacks just to allow for a difference in pets and thereby additional summoned capabilities (through said pet). You can abstract the controls, saving space, or you can couple it to another, again saving space, but also reducing free control. Those restrictions might increase the interest of gameplay, or they might not; it all depends on how it fits together. But facing bloat as a matter simply of control systems, rather than by surrendering that control to yet another system, solves it then and there.

[IveraIvalice]

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i think the answer to all your concerns is simply choice. currently every dps job in the game has you on a set rotation and combo that is optimal, and there's very little reason to stray from that other then its time to aoe vs its time to focus a monster.
There is no basic rotation exactly, there are no builder spells, your damage spells also build the bars, its just whichever one you choose to build up at that time.

For example, your starting a fight, you got 6 spells to choose from, cast maybe fire, your fire bar goes up by 5 (arbitrary number) after that stone and thunder proc. If you use one of those 2 those elemental bars will go up by 10 (again arbitrary). say you went from fire to thunder, then ice and water proc, you use water then aero and fire proc allowing you to go back to fire or go to aero. But every spell will branch off differently and cycle back around within 3 spells since they all proc 2. this allows you to focus around 3 spells if you want but otherwise you can also choose to juggle between 4,5 or all of them.

While your leveling up you dont need to have all of them in order to make use of a summon, you simply use the spells that lead up to the only summons you have. if you have only fire and air spells then you alternate between those 2 or focus on one and eventually summon ifrit or garuda. as you level up and earn procs as you learn more summons the job becomes more filled out just like any other job but your never unable to summon because you lack the other elements. Also currently the idea is that you have 1 elemental spell for each, but that would include fire 1, fire 2, fire 3 that all just get upgraded as you level up just like they currently do.

Also i think i already gave a number of examples of why you would use all the summons instead of sticking to 1. aside from the incentives it would be that you have to because the summons would be on cool down after you use them. The highest dps would be bahamut by filling all the bars evenly and to 100% but that would naturally take much longer then building 1-3 bars and alternating between those summons so its probably not the best thing to focus solely on. Not to mention its cool down would be much longer then the other summons.

I think part of the charm is that there is no set rotation, it wouldnt be something you learn and then mindlessly execute in every fight. You would make use of the summons buffs or attack benefits based on each fight. In theory it is very similar to rdm in that you build elemental bars in the same way and casting elemental spells proc other spells but its not so limited that you just cast A then cast B then cast A then cast B then eventually activate extra attack mode. In this way its more like, build whichever element you want and either summon immediately or save the summon for when you need it based on its buff. Like you can have the titan bar filled, the water bar filled, the thunder bar at half, and the ice bar at half, but you dont want to summon titan yet because your waiting for a tank buster to make use of his aoe shield (stone skin?) so you summon leviathan instead, when hes done that bar goes to 0 and you build a bit of thunder to summon ramuh, do damage with him then summon something else, saving titan for when you need him. or if your mages need mp and you use shiva. And when you summon its like changing your form because you dont cast your normal spells anymore, you solely control the summon and all your actions get replaced with his as a pet hotbar

i dont really know what to say about the size of the primals, i think thats also part of the appeal that they are not little things like they currently are.

[Stormblessed9000]

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What you're talking about with the mods is essentially just having another hotbar activate when you press a button. You could make a keybind to swap hotbars in game now and get the same effect. Also, if they actually implement something properly, they'd need to get graphics designers involved, make sure it plays nicely with all the other UI elements, and do extensive testing and iterative design on it. Making UI elements is easy. Making good UI elements is more involved.

Also, as I said earlier, the button bloat issue is also related to the fact that classes only get class actions at level intervals and the number they get in one interval is very small.

As for the gauges, I may have misinterpreted the OP, but this new summoner already has a bar for each element.

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Again, people will just choose whatever summon that gives the best DPS. Things like paralysis or DoTs vs direct damage are mostly inconsequential in raids. Even if they do have compelling options, they'll decide which element to build up right at the start since the system doesn't favor switching easily. After that, the rotation you suggest is very set since there will be a cycle that is best at building the appropriate element, meaning you'll just cycle mindlessly through your buttons until you can summon something. There's only one instant of decision making in the whole rotation.

You'd need to add other mechanics to make it necessary to deviate from the standard rotation. Samurai does this by having both sen building and big buffs tied to their three combos, so you need to balance sen generation, buff uptime and buff priority. This means that, especially when buffs fall off due to mechanics and the need to have exactly 1 sen with at least your damage buff up every minute to re-apply your DoT, you need to constantly be thinking about your next combo.

You need to add some sort of dynamic element that will promote these second-to-second combat decisions without removing control over which element the player builds.

[IveraIvalice]

I think i'd have to see more precise numbers to determine how effective it would be tbh, like how much each spell charges its respective gauge, if there would be oGCD's that charged all the gauges some amount etc. etc. Don't get me wrong, I love the concept of actually having large, impactful summons.

Oh yeah definitely, and thats one thing i havent put too much thought into. the vision is more of the flow of combat rather then the technical details but that is very valid concerns

Technically they COULD have 20+ summons and one button for them all that opens a radial selector on press. It'd start casting and you mouse or joystick in the direction of what you want and hit again to confirm. Faint delay when Swiftcasting, but worth the n-1 buttons saved.

At first thought i wonder how that would work for gamepad users, thats only my first thought because i play solely with a controller but it would work well as a single hotbar button that brings up the wheel so it would be similar for gamepad users as well.
My main focus is just that the experience be around using any summon at any time (as long as you built up to it) be it through 7 hotbar buttons dedicated to each summon or a scroll wheel to condense it. Whatever lowers the clutter of actions i would be down for

[IveraIvalice]

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I disagree that it doesn't favor switching easily. The idea is designed around alternating between them based on what your fight requires. If you have no need to use a Levi heal then you don't have to use it in a raid but that's not limiting in my opinion because there are other fights in the game that would benefit from using that or dots or refresh.

The idea of the job just seems different then what your hoping for. While Sam has you focusing on a lot of things to keep you thinking, this job isn't like that. This would be in the category of easy to learn difficult to master because the difficulty is planning what your going to do by knowing the fight. It's not second by second decision making it's planning for the longer term, maybe 30 seconds ahead, but the rotation means you will always have at least 2 summons ready to go at once.
I can't deny that people will find one way to get as much dps in the shortest rotation because that's true, but that doesn't mean that the benefits of using the other summons goes away. Like what works in a raid wouldn't be the same as what you might use in a dungeon.

It's basically what I've been saying that you choose what to use based on the fight. In a raid when a lot of things are covered by the other team mates you probably won't have much use for heals or shields or even refresh if your mages have no problem, then you can focus on whatever rotation gives you most dps but in a dungeon when it helps to assist the team then you may use a different rotation or just use whichever you want.
In the end that's really a number balancing issue because I think the incentives to switch along with the cool down requirements are there.
The intention is for them all to be pretty balanced between them but if some rotation is marginally better then the rest then people may use only that but I think the buffs are useful enough to make people switch around enough. I mean I think there is good variation in the design and to prefer a single simple rotation is possible if that's what you want but it would be boring in my opinion, I personally wouldn't play focusing on a small increase to dps over the utility of buffs and debuffs.
To be fair the same is true with any job, everyone goes for the best rotation that has the highest dps output but that's not really a bad thing and is kinda an impossible task to have it 100% balanced, but again the buffs and debuffs are useful so if a slight dps increase (which is the balancing intention) is more appealing then the other benefits then there isn't much I could do about that

[Ghanbaatar]

I like this idea a lot actually, very creative. My thought for how Bahamut would be that after you summon a primal to aid you at 100% it would give you a "Charge" or a "Gem" and once you have done so with all your summon bars you can summon the big B himself. This way it would force you to use all your summoned over the course of a dungeon/raid/encounter and when you final do summon him it feel really important and powerful. That is something I like about SUM right now is that you can't just walk around with Bahamut out all the time.

/continued

[Ghanbaatar]

I think the idea of having the summons do various things is a good one too, you just need to flush the ideas out more. The idea of DoT's is good but sadly status effects don't seem to do much in raids/dungeons so I would stay away from those. Maybe each summon does its own debuff with attacks? This would make a multi-SUM party have to figure out which order to do their summons in. So for instance Ifrit does really good single target damage and lowers the enemies armor due to heat, Titan does AoE and lowers their earth resist, Shiva does targeted AoE like the Freeze spell, and Garuda could speed up allies attack/caste speed? These are just what jumps out at me to make sure all the summons would have a place and still be at least a bit unique.

[IveraIvalice]

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That sounds cool, currently it was either a debuff on the target(s) vs normal attack damage and they all give some sort of buff to the party, but if dots aren't as useful as an enemy attack/debuff they could all add an elemental vulnerability to that specific element along with a party wide buff. The idea behind that is based on your mention of ifrit heat lowering armor or defense and Titan lowers earth resist. Since there is no actual elemental damage benefits in this game like previous FF games, this might be a cool way to make elemental vulnurabilies a thing through the Smn job. I like the idea of using spells based on the element they become weak to but there's the problem that some elements used by other jobs aren't really used as strong offense spells such as water. But it could still be useful for the smn themselves to increase their own damage.

I like the idea of a party haste buff for using Garuda and I haven't given much thought as to which moves would be aoe vs single target but I think all the summon openers (the one that gives the party buff at the same time) would all be aoe and then as you control the primal for its duration you would have a few aoe or single target attacks to use as you want.

I also like the idea of gaining a Crystal as you fill a bar to max that would eventually lead to summoning bahamut, in that way you don't need all bars full at the same time to summon him, you just need all crystals at one time and that would incentivize using all the primals at least once just to gain the crystals.

Very cool ideas, the more it gets fleshed out the more I wish it was real lol

[IveraIvalice]

Aside from the core idea I've also been thinking of some actions the smn can use for themselves, the only ones I thought of is an action that will fill all bars by 25% on maybe a 90 second cool down. And an action that will make any spell proc any other spell for maybe 10 seconds. And that would be on a long cool down

[Stormblessed9000]

I disagree that it doesn't favor switching...

The problem with the long-term strategy stuff is it two fold. Firstly, it changes very little once you know what's best for the fight, so any decision making is gone once someone figures out the "optimal" strategy. The second is that there's absolutely no depth to the gameplay between summons. With the current static optimal rotation system, you could just bind each ability in sequence and literally just roll through your hotbar until you get a summon. There has to be more than one decision every 30 seconds.

Every class has something that makes moment-to-moment gameplay interesting. Monks have positionals and buffs, black mages have to plan ahead of AoE and ration their mobility skills while doing their rotation, red mages need to watch for procs while making sure their mana doesn't unbalance. You need to add something to make it interesting between summons. Perhaps making abilities to proc two of three possible other elements instead of the same two each time? Or you could add buffs or DoTs to some spells so that you'd need vary from the otherwise optimal sequence to manage their re-application.