Summoner’s job identity

[Kreyd]

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.

Okay, I somehow managed to overread this in your posts. Sorry for that.

It's not about it being different it's about SUMMONING taking a back seat on SUMMONER and for no good reason at that.

Absolutely my opinion there. I Just dislike, that it doesn't has to do anything with Summoning, rather than beeing Ruin-mage.
The only thing that kinda makes me feel like a Summoner is Demi-Bahamut and just adding more Egi glamours wouldn't change anything about this.

You know what little detail shows how much of a Summoner we really are? Garuda and Titan summon, don't even have their own icons...

...just think about it for a moment...

[Orbus]

Most people don't even use the egi's in their base form, they glamour ruby carbuncle over them.
They're so insignificant that you can glam them.
And how appropriate that it's a carbuncle, since that's pretty much what they amount to.

[redcurrant18]

And how appropriate that it's a carbuncle, since that's pretty much what they amount to.

Don't disrespect Carbuncles like that. FFXI's Carbuncle was 1000x more useful than all of the summons we have in XIV combined.

[Dyvid]

Don't disrespect Carbuncles like that. FFXI's Carbuncle was 1000x more useful than all of the summons we have in XIV combined.

Yea... no. Only thing carby had going for it was low perp cost. FFXI's SMN 75/WHM 37 was nothing more than a poor man's healer with a few trick like aerial armor, stoneskin, and fenrir. At least in FFXIV you are a DPS with the ability to buff / debuff.

[Kabooa]

Personally I would like Aetherflow and Trance abilities to change based on what you have summoned, while making summon swapping less annoying. Make the pet more meaningful outside Demimut

[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?

[TsundereImouto]

I like summoner. It could change a little, but I hope the core identity remains the same. I agree with most in this thread that feel the flavor isn't being properly capitalized on, though. However, mechanically I feel summoner is a very rewarding job to learn and play.

[Jandor]

I like summoner. It could change a little, but I hope the core identity remains the same. I agree with most in this thread that feel the flavor isn't being properly capitalized on, though. However, mechanically I feel summoner is a very rewarding job to learn and play.

I like the core loop, stacking little bursts until you've got your big burst.

If the little bursts were more summon flavoured instead of trance based I don't think SMN would have any identity issues tbh.

[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)