Summoner’s job identity

[Kreyd]

you guys do realize that they cannot change anything right the lore has been made I wish they made more summons but I guess we get what we get if feels like a Warlock but it still a summoner you have a SUMMON

Nothing in the lore specifically states that they cannot get more summons.

I mean, when you try to summon Ramuh-Egi it fails but the reasoning wasn't completely damning against getting a Ramuh summon.

Especially when you then went on to later get Demi-Bahamut...

All the other summons, you haven't attempted to summon yet. Partly because you got side tracked by trying to take out the Ascian and partly because you also needed to stop faux-Sari from being all evil and what not.

I think what Jukebox12 was refering to is, that the job quests itself pretty much decided what a Smn gets. The 2.0 questline was about how allagan Smn's summoned Egis and we learn this as well. The 3.0 questline was about obtaining DWT and the 4.0 about mini-Bahamut.

In my personal opinion this is a design mistake which wasn't done with any of the other jobs, since because of this Smn's are pretty much "traped" with having small pets, DWT and mini-Bahamut by their own jobquests.

So even if developers think about giving Smn a complete overhaul they can't do it because of their jobquests.

[Kalise]

I think what Jukebox12 was refering to is, that the job quests itself pretty much decided what a Smn gets. The 2.0 questline was about how allagan Smn's summoned Egis and we learn this as well. The 3.0 questline was about obtaining DWT and the 4.0 about mini-Bahamut.

In my personal opinion this is a design mistake which wasn't done with any of the other jobs, since because of this Smn's are pretty much "traped" with having small pets, DWT and mini-Bahamut by their own jobquests.

So even if developers think about giving Smn a complete overhaul they can't do it because of their jobquests.

Not so.

Job quests merely have Ifrit, Titan and Garuda Egis and Demi-Bahamut in the 1-70 quests.

Nothing in those quests say much about the power level of an Egi and in fact, during said quests you face off against a Summoner who uses more powerful Egi's (When you're fusing with Bahamut's essence you have to fend off larger and more powerful Ifrit/Titan/Garuda Egis) the only quest that suggests something about the power of Egi's is the optional side quest regarding the glamours (Which, as a side quest is non-canon).

This is to say nothing of level 70+ job quests opening up more Summons. Let alone the potential to learn new Summons without requiring a Job Quest in order to do so (It would be akin to saying that BLM can't get new spells because they learn them from Lalai reading about them in the Books of Nald'thal and thus cannot get new spells unless they're taught by Lalai from a Job Quest... Which is not the case with SB spells sans the level 70 capstone skill).

Heck, the fact that Prin just straight up teaches you Demi-Bahamut suggests this. Like, literally the most powerful summon you get, just given to you for free, no manifesting it and beating it like with the Egi's just "Here's how to summon it". With the quest related to it merely undoing the seal preventing Prin from accessing the knowledge placed on him by Sari.

[Cabalabob]

Not so.

Job quests merely have Ifrit, Titan and Garuda Egis and Demi-Bahamut in the 1-70 quests.

Nothing in those quests say much about the power level of an Egi and in fact, during said quests you face off against a Summoner who uses more powerful Egi's (When you're fusing with Bahamut's essence you have to fend off larger and more powerful Ifrit/Titan/Garuda Egis) the only quest that suggests something about the power of Egi's is the optional side quest regarding the glamours (Which, as a side quest is non-canon).

This is to say nothing of level 70+ job quests opening up more Summons. Let alone the potential to learn new Summons without requiring a Job Quest in order to do so (It would be akin to saying that BLM can't get new spells because they learn them from Lalai reading about them in the Books of Nald'thal and thus cannot get new spells unless they're taught by Lalai from a Job Quest... Which is not the case with SB spells sans the level 70 capstone skill).

Heck, the fact that Prin just straight up teaches you Demi-Bahamut suggests this. Like, literally the most powerful summon you get, just given to you for free, no manifesting it and beating it like with the Egi's just "Here's how to summon it". With the quest related to it merely undoing the seal preventing Prin from accessing the knowledge placed on him by Sari.

I think the point is, we’re stuck with them FOR NOW. You can’t do a ground up rework for SMN like you could any other job because the moves they’ve obtained up to this point have been directly tied to the job quests.

They could absolutely retcon everything going forward, but up to level 70 SMN is locked in to how it is designed.

For example now that we got all the ascian and Allagan business out of the way the book is free to give us proper training, it could see we’re using egi and trances which are outdated Allagan practices and teach us demi summon to replace DWT. Teach us the trick to summoning other egi like ramuh, shiva and leviathan and show us how to increase their power making them larger and more useful by changing our aetherflow attacks into summon attacks.

But up until that point in the job quest story we are stuck with what we’ve got.

[Grimoire-M]

They could absolutely retcon everything going forward, but up to level 70 SMN is locked in to how it is designed.

That's not entirely true. SE managed to remove Leeches and that was a core SCH ability for quests in ARR. They certainly can edit the questline around, they just want to minimize that work wherever possible. And that's kind of the key way to understand it here. Minimal effort. It's possible for them to upgrade DWT in the next expansion for sure, but I'd rather them go down the path of merging DWT/Rouse/Bahamut as I described in an earlier post in this thread. Even if people hate the lore in that part of the questline (Mostly because of Elemental Egi), mechanically speaking HW SMN was the most well implemented version of this job. Imo reverting back to that (aside from the Aethertrail timer BS and shorter Aetherflow cooldowns) and integrating Bahamut into that core rotation will fix a lot of the gripes people had with it at launch, And also give SE room to actually improve on the rotation and expand pet synergies without even touching that at all.

The other thing SE needs to do is alter the off Damage over Time and Pet Damage text so it displays as your damage in-game. No one actually appreciates the DoTs and Egi because you can't see their contributions to what should be a massive wall of incremental damage text. That needs to change.

[Flana]

Heck, the fact that Prin just straight up teaches you Demi-Bahamut suggests this. Like, literally the most powerful summon you get, just given to you for free, no manifesting it and beating it like with the Egi's just "Here's how to summon it". With the quest related to it merely undoing the seal preventing Prin from accessing the knowledge placed on him by Sari.

To be fair, this to me screams of fan pandering. They couldn't actually figure out how to make it work with the systems they had in place, so they just gave it to you for free and ignored all the problems. Everything is conveniently swept under the rug by prin and we're left in the dark as to what is actually happening.

One thing about that, I do want to point out that Summoners identity crises is unlikely to be fixed in Stormblood without an entire rework, because the dev team hasn't decided on what Summoner is supposed to be. DoT mage? Pet mage? Bahamut mage? Ruin mage? There are so many shallow mechanics at play that don't do anything or pay homage to anything.

Like, Tri-Disaster. Does anyone here actually think Tri-Disaster accurately represents the Warring Triad outside of it puts up 3 debuffs? I'm not even willing to count Ruination anyways because it can't be spread with Bane. More like "Duo-Disaster and Mild Annoyance." Does any part of this spell work at any of the themes we've seen from Sophia, Sephirot, and Zurvan? Where's the balance, growth, or eternity?

I feel like this is being compounded by Blue Mage actually getting primal spells that the egi's can't even use, despite them being miniature primals. Ifrit-egi uses Infernal Nails in the Austerity of Fire trial. Garuda-egi even summons Chirada and Suparna way before you ever get to see them in the level 45 quest. Where are these mechanics and traits for the Summoner job or the Egi's after you acquire them?

[Cabalabob]

That's not entirely true. SE managed to remove Leeches and that was a core SCH ability for quests in ARR. They certainly can edit the questline around, they just want to minimize that work wherever possible.

That’s a kind of different scenario though. With leeches it wasn’t a large part of the story, it was just the spell they pulled out of a hat for you to cast on an NPC at some point. It was a simple matter of going into the quest and changing any mention of the word leeches to the word physick (or whatever they changed it to) and changing the spell you cast from leeches to physick. Nothing actually changes storywise, just the spell you cast that one time in the quest.

Same with PLD, they decided they wanted shield oath to be level 30 instead of 40 so all tanks got tank stance at the same time. They literally had to change nothing because it wasn’t relevant to the story at all, it was just the reward you got at the end. So they just had to swap the levels learned.

With SMN it’s far more complicated. As an example, what if they wanted to change it so you learn garuda at level 30 and ifrit at 45? They can’t just change the levels you learn them because you fight ifrit in the story, going and learning the spell ifrit is what sets you on the path to becoming a SMN and most importantly, you haven’t fought garuda at level 30 in the main story so it doesn’t work with the lore of learning summons by being drenched in their aether.

So you’d go and fight ifrit in the main story, fight ifrit in the quest and learn... garuda egi?? It doesn’t make sense and SMN is the only job this applies to because it’s the only job where the spells you learn are directly tied to the story and the quests/battles involved.

Same with trance, you go and learn it because you can’t learn any more egi. So you go to cartenau to be around Bahamut aether to learn trance. So if they wanted to change trance to say, summon Demi-primal, it would no longer make sense for you to go to cartenau and be around Bahamut aether, so that entire quest would need to be redone.

While you’re right that it’s a matter of effort, I wouldn’t say minimal effort. It would be a significant undertaking to change summoner, it is practically on the level of requiring a reboot of the job if they wanted to change anything retroactively instead of just untangling it going forward.

[Kalise]

With SMN it’s far more complicated. As an example, what if they wanted to change it so you learn garuda at level 30 and ifrit at 45? They can’t just change the levels you learn them because you fight ifrit in the story, going and learning the spell ifrit is what sets you on the path to becoming a SMN and most importantly, you haven’t fought garuda at level 30 in the main story so it doesn’t work with the lore of learning summons by being drenched in their aether.

Which only means that they can't change the order/levels that you get the primal summons. It has no effect on the rest of their kit, nor even on the summons themselves.

I mean, changing Egi's to Demi's would be as simple as going to these quests and replacing the mention of Egi with Demi and then replacing the Egi model shown in cutscenes (Also, during the 3 fights against the primal essences) with a Demi model.

It doesn't exactly need them to swap around the levels you get the summons, or the way you go and learn these summons and thus the main structure of the quests. It's as simple as the examples you gave previously.

Same with trance, you go and learn it because you can’t learn any more egi. So you go to cartenau to be around Bahamut aether to learn trance. So if they wanted to change trance to say, summon Demi-primal, it would no longer make sense for you to go to cartenau and be around Bahamut aether, so that entire quest would need to be redone.

Technically, it's not that we "Can't learn any more Egi" but that we couldn't at that point, learn Ramuh.

Also, they can change that quest in a subtle way to make it not dependent on learning Trance. Since, the reason we couldn't learn Ramuh-Egi was that we couldn't hold enough aether to summon a manifestation of it. Going and fusing with Bahamut aether could be a way to expand the aether we have available for summoning manifestations of primals, thus allowing us to get a new summon from that quest if they wished to do so (As well as giving an explanation as to why after that point we can then go learn to summon more things after previously being unable to)

[Jandor]

Same with trance, you go and learn it because you can’t learn any more egi. So you go to cartenau to be around Bahamut aether to learn trance. So if they wanted to change trance to say, summon Demi-primal, it would no longer make sense for you to go to cartenau and be around Bahamut aether, so that entire quest would need to be redone.

You could still keep the core of the quest, just have to alter the reason for going.

"Y'mhitra thinks we can get around the aetheric limitations by using an ancient allagan technique known as demi-summoning, channeling environmental aether in to your current egi."

"Following the Calamity the Carteneau Flats became soaked in all sorts of elementally aspected aether, the area is also a suitably remote testing ground for our potentially dangerous experimentation."

"Your meditations are interrupted Ascians, who vow to deny you the advantage of even greater Summoning!"

"Despite the relentless onslaught, you are able to complete the ritual and summon a Demi-Primal. Wary of your newfound strength, your foe chooses to withdraw rather than risk defeat."

Essentially it would need text changes and a cutscene altering, which is still more work than altering many other jobs to be fair.

Aren't we talking about the same people that nuked the entire continent with a moon coming down to "rework" the whole game? Why are you so surprised?

The team don't seem particularly fond of retcons, which is ultimately what a pre-70 to 80 replacement of trance, or egis in general, would involve. It's ok to talk about dropping meteors and rebooting the game, but 2.0 onwards is a continuation, not a retroactive change to what came before.

[Kreyd]

snip

ARR quests clearly stated:"Smn's can summon Egis. Those are pets."
HW quests were like:"Ok you can't summon other Egi's for..."reasons" I guess...but hey, let's infuse you with bahamuth aether! Maybe this will do something cool!"


You're right in terms of "Egi's could be buffed to be more powerfull.", but often stated issues with Egis's are, that they:

-don't add anything to gameplay.
-don't offer much variety.
-don't listen to your commands.

Even if you buff Egi's, make them more reliable in responding to your commands and add more versions of them (Shiva, Ramuh etc.) you will still end up with 1 or 2 useful pets, that just autohit your enemies most of the time.

If you think having 1 Titan-Egi you never use is irritating, imagine having 12 of his sort...

snip

Lv 70-80 quests could basically change Smn's wihtout breaking with the lore. (I liked your idea with Princi teaching us "actual" summoning) However, this would mean, that the job would get a complete design change after 70 levels, which just would be chaotic.

Imagine playing Nin up to lv 70 and suddenly it has to play like Mnk.

[Kalise]

You're right in terms of "Egi's could be buffed to be more powerfull.", but often stated issues with Egis's are, that they:

-don't add anything to gameplay.
-don't offer much variety.
-don't listen to your commands.

Even if you buff Egi's, make them more reliable in responding to your commands and add more versions of them (Shiva, Ramuh etc.) you will still end up with 1 or 2 useful pets, that just autohit your enemies most of the time.

If you think having 1 Titan-Egi you never use is irritating, imagine having 12 of his sort...

But that's why I suggested making Egi's work more like Demi's.

Less "Pets" and more "Summons". So you don't care about them listening to commands because you don't command them, they do their thing like Bahamut does.

They could then have more variety because without being permanent pets, they can have more impact when they're on the field. Instead of being mostly there to slap things for Ruin IV procs and occasionally use a skill like Contagion.

They could then also add to gameplay by being things you periodically bring out (Whether or not you tie them to something like Aetherflow/Trances or whatever is neither here nor there) much like a BRD rotates through their songs (Even though they have 1 song that's objectively inferior to the other 2, they still use it to bridge the gap between the CD's of the other 2)