Summoner’s job identity

[Shiroe]

get rid off tri-bind (just buff aoe a tick in general), summoning Bahamut and use enkindle / akmorn should use the same action / button, dont make addle mandatory for wyverwaves.., those are things that can be used to save buttons/ actions..

but contagion would really be better off as a smn spell.. (obey pet is to much of a fussle for ps4 players)

[Kurando]

Tri Bind is fine during DWT, it shows that a near useless action can be given life in higher level content. Painflare and Bane were all nerfed in SB for a reason, I doubt they would be reverted in potency again, plus SMN is in a great spot these days, aside from the odd pet problem. Agree with the Enkindle Baha and Akh Morn merge, rest of the toolkit seems fine though.

As a PS4 player I don't have many issues, that's just me though but I understand not everyone has it easy to manage SMN, it can happen on either platform.

[Kalise]

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

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.

it still a summoner you have a SUMMON

By that logic, MCH is a Summoner because they SUMMON their turrets into battle.

In reality, neither SMN nor MCH have much of a link to the Summoner classes in previous titles. Outside the fact that SMN technically uses small versions of Primals (But in all honesty, Egi's could be literally replaced with Carbuncles and they'd feel no different...)

A quote from the FF wiki is as such:

Summoners use special magic that allows them to call forth summoned monsters. Summons usually cost more MP than the average spell, but are much more powerful. In some games, summoners also have the ability to cast either Black Magic or White Magic as well as to summon, thus making them more versatile.

Usually, summoners and their summons possess some important story element; such as the summoners of Final Fantasy IV, Final Fantasy IX and Final Fantasy X, where the concept of a summoner is focused and expanded further from a mere job class and where their presence and powers significantly change the landscape of the world they live in.

Which references that summons are usually "Much more powerful [than regular spells]" and the class is usually "Expanded further from a mere job class and where their presence and powers significantly change the landscape of the world they live in."

This is encaptured with Demi-Bahamut in how powerful it is but not so much with the Egi's which feel kind of lame and forgettable for the most part. With their major highlight being Garuda having Contagion and that's about it.

[Archwizard]

What I find curious, is that Titan-Egi is presently considered useless by many in end-game content, due to its purpose being limited to tanking for the SMN in open-world or solo content.

It seems like it would make sense to give him a cooldown the SMN could pop, so the Egi could absorb some damage for the SMN outright? Or perhaps grant damage mitigation to them both? A snap defensive option to be used in expectation of a big boss hit, to give it some use when you already have a tank.

[lulunami]

Right now, you just swap between Garuda and Ifrit egis to buff the party during downtime. If you are very analytical, you could also swap to Titan-egi sparingly to hopefully obtain a Ruin IV proc.

If they added summons like Ramuh, Leviathan, and Shiva, we could possibly have a Summon rotation that would satisfy players seeking traditional SMN gameplay. We could still have Bahamut being the ultimate summon that requires a resource gauge to build up to. SMN can still have the ACN spells like Bio/Miasma/Ruin since SMNs had other specs to do things besides summoning (white/black magic).

[Lumadurin]

They need to make the pet commands share buttons based on what pet is out, much like how Inner Beast/Fell Cleave and SAM's sen-consuming weaponskills all share the same button.
This would cut down on button bloat a great deal and lay a foundation for more proactive pet switching.

[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.