SMN endgame how is it

[Shironeko_Narunyan]

Ok, what is an actual pet? What are the defining qualities and then how do you transfer those quality into FFXIV's combat system?

What we had before were actual pets. They existed in the world and were targetable. One of them was usable as a tank.

[wereotter]

SMN is very divisive among the community this expansion. Some think it's great, others feel like it's been ruined. Typically job changes don't normally elicit such a wide range of receptions from my experience.

Yeah, personally I love it right now. I think it's a blast to play... but I do think the divisiveness comes more from people thinking the job doesn't fit their fantasy of what a summoner should be more than anything else. And considering how varied summoners have been in just about every game they've existed in, this is always going to be a losing battle for Square to try to appease. Old school players might think the summons should be big one and done spells while others might think that every single action they take should be executed by the pet, and there's really no middle ground between the two.

As far as the play, I can't speak to you personally... but I was pretty easily able to get the flow of the job after a little practice and now love it for its high damage and high mobility, as well as for having a rotation that's just varied enough to keep it from getting boring. You'll have the occasional time of just casting Ruin 3 for a few seconds, but in general the job has a lot of flexibility and variety of things you're doing to keep it fun and interesting.

[JacobNewblood]

SMN is very divisive among the community this expansion. Some think it's great, others feel like it's been ruined. Typically job changes don't normally elicit such a wide range of receptions from my experience.

Heh.. Ruin-ed

[Vallhallix]

SMN is very divisive among the community this expansion. Some think it's great, others feel like it's been ruined. Typically job changes don't normally elicit such a wide range of receptions from my experience.

Which is basically no different from every other expansion. And the main reason is because people want them to do multiple things with the SMN and they all conflict. You have some people who want to keep the useless pets just because they want pets, you have people who want them to give us meaningless pet glamors for them. You have the outright weird suggestions like some people wanting summoner to go back to how it was pre-heavensward, which was basically just an Arcanist with a SMN tag, did not at all feel like a summoner or like an evolved job class with it's own identity beyond reskinned carbuncles.

Then you have people like me who prefer that they continue on with the demi summons that actually make the SMN feel like a summoner rather than an arcanist with a pikachu, letting us use the abilities of the primals which is inline with the actual lore of the summoner in this game. Just change our abilities around for each demi summon phase just like they did with Phoenix. It's the obvious route to go, and the one that works.

Summoner's main problem is that it never ever ever should have been attached to a healer class. It should have had it's own seperate identity from Scholar from the start, they should have NEVER shared a base class. This hindered Summoner's development from the start.

[Raikai]

Ok, what is an actual pet? What are the defining qualities and then how do you transfer those quality into FFXIV's combat system?

An "actual" pet, as in concept (seen in other titles) is a separate entity that you need to micromanage movement, health and skill administration, maybe with a level of customization on what they do.

Which right now the only thing that SMN checkmarks in that is the fact that is a separate entity from the caster that deals damage automatically. You don't need to command it around, you don't need to watch their HP, and their actions - despite the onus of lagging due to being "fired" from another entity - are ingrained to the SMN's GCDs.

I'm not mentioning this to say they are bad pet designers. They surely know what exacly a MMORPG pet gameplay means, however pets are just not compatible with how the combat engine works right now, and that's why they lost their "pet flavor" across 3 expansions. I don't know how this code works, so I'm at a loss on how to suggest anything to transfer those qualities without making the job even clunkier.

So, also in response to the person before, it's kind of hard to think about any other "pet jobs" being introduced to the current combat system as it is, unless they overhaul their combat engine, which is probably not happening for Endwalker, at least. To be honest, as far as pet flavored job goes, I find much more likely for a Beastmaster or Puppetmaster introduced as a limited job that explores a separate pet combat system rather than another pet user added to the regular jobs.

My hopes for the expansion, since they are most likely keeping the egis (Benchmark trailer), is to remove Egi Assaults and Devotion from them and convert those into actions from the Summoner themselves, and treat the "pets" just like the glorified dots they are now, and have the active egi change some of the caster actions, like a stance.

[Dyvid]

An "actual" pet, as in concept (seen in other titles) is a separate entity that you need to micromanage movement, health and skill administration, maybe with a level of customization on what they do.

Okay, lets break down FFXIV Egis based on your design requirements and how they relate to FFXIV battle structure.

1. Lets tackle movement and health first since they go hand in hand. FFXIV battle design is built around dodging and it's very hard as well as time consuming to command your pet to move out of the AoE all the time, we first had that in 2013 and didn't work out well. Slowly pets started taking less and less damage because of this until the devs decided it wasn't really necessary to take damage considering how Demi mechanics worked; fresh egi is summoned after Demi phase.
   
2. Skill Management: Egi Assault check the box there, doesn't it? You are commanding the pet to perform an ability. Now I can't say if it's faster now than clicking skills pre 5.0 but you can't just leave them on auto pilot anymore. Egi Assault make you command your pet which is what people wanted.
   
3. Let's talk about our tank pet though if we could and why it didn't work from the start. It was only good during solo situation because it's enmity was so low, it couldn't even manage to pickup adds if the tank died. Couple that with losing Egi when a Demi is summoned, you can see the writing on the wall that Egi Tanks days are numbered. I think getting a good shield is a nice trade off considering I can enter Demi Phases without any worries now.

[Raikai]

Okay, lets break down FFXIV Egis based on your design requirements and how they relate to FFXIV battle structure.

1. Lets tackle movement and health first since they go hand in hand. FFXIV battle design is built around dodging and it's very hard as well as time consuming to command your pet to move out of the AoE all the time, we first had that in 2013 and didn't work out well. Slowly pets started taking less and less damage because of this until the devs decided it wasn't really necessary to take damage considering how Demi mechanics worked; fresh egi is summoned after Demi phase.
   
2. Skill Management: Egi Assault check the box there, doesn't it? You are commanding the pet to perform an ability. Now I can't say if it's faster now than clicking skills pre 5.0 but you can't just leave them on auto pilot anymore. Egi Assault make you command your pet which is what people wanted.
   
3. Let's talk about our tank pet though if we could and why it didn't work from the start. It was only good during solo situation because it's enmity was so low, it couldn't even manage to pickup adds if the tank died. Couple that with losing Egi when a Demi is summoned, you can see the writing on the wall that Egi Tanks days are numbered. I think getting a good shield is a nice trade off considering I can enter Demi Phases without any worries now.

1. You're right, my point was that this movement managing mechanics can't be translated well into XIV's combat. And not just about them taking damage, but swapping targets is part of that micromanagement too, and it is a nuisance when the SMN has (had?) to do in XIV.

2. Egi-Assault - seems - to do, but in my point of view is more of a faux thing, because it's a spell that affects your flow (GCD), even though it is launched by the pet. Visually it feels like is a pet action, but in practice it works more like a SMN action that has a pet component to it. To be fair, it felt much less like that when it was an oGCD, but it had other issues though.

3. I agree that the tanking egi didn't work. Seems they didn't care a lot about Titan when they were designing the Demis, given the fact that the tank usability was so niche. It would be okay if the Demis didn't despawn the egis, but I'm not sure if that is because of the combat engine/code.

To note, I don't mind Egis, but they are in a some sort of weird middle point between a pet and the so called "glorified dot". I wish they either went to one or the other side of the spectrum... The pet side is unlikely due to it requiring technical overhauls.. the other side (that is even beyond the glorified dot thing) means a complete overhaul that makes the creatures tied to the SMN's spell animations/SFX. That seemed more plausible, but I had the impression that during the benchmark trailer, the Ifrit-egi still happened to be its own entity, so I'm not quite sure how it will turn out to be.

Also, to add to my previous post, the idea of a "pet job" to me entails into other 2 things, from all the other MMOs I've played with pets:

a) At low skill levels, is a beginner friendly class, because the team play, even if flawed and sub optimal, increases your survivability
b) At the skill ceilings, it's a class that (in theory if well balanced) rewards players that can multi task between them and the pet

XIV's iteration of pets right now doesn't fill either of those.

[wereotter]

Summoner's main problem is that it never ever ever should have been attached to a healer class. It should have had it's own seperate identity from Scholar from the start, they should have NEVER shared a base class. This hindered Summoner's development from the start.

This isn't really a problem any longer. If you look at the Scholar kit, there's only skill now that Scholar takes from the base Arcanist class, and that's resurrection. Even skills they both share in name, Scholar's version is technically different (even if the potencies and animations are identical) because they're all listed as Scholar job abilities. I do agree that it made things a massive pain for the developers in trying to make the jobs work for a long time, but they can now more freely create distinct identities for the two.

I now just wish they'd make the break permanent, and make Scholar a job that you can just unlock once you get any job to level 30, and starts at level 30 with no base class (and yes, that means you'd have to level the two separately)

[Dyvid]

1. You're right, my point was that this movement managing mechanics can't be translated well into XIV's combat. And not just about them taking damage, but swapping targets is part of that micromanagement too, and it is a nuisance when the SMN has (had?) to do in XIV.

2. Egi-Assault - seems - to do, but in my point of view is more of a faux thing, because it's a spell that affects your flow (GCD), even though it is launched by the pet. Visually it feels like is a pet action, but in practice it works more like a SMN action that has a pet component to it. To be fair, it felt much less like that when it was an oGCD, but it had other issues though.

3. I agree that the tanking egi didn't work. Seems they didn't care a lot about Titan when they were designing the Demis, given the fact that the tank usability was so niche. It would be okay if the Demis didn't despawn the egis, but I'm not sure if that is because of the combat engine/code.

1. I still multitask my pet depending on the situation. I've been know to hot swap from Ifrit to Garuda during add phase if the AoE boost is warranted. The only issue I currently have is that Ifrit, not summoner, needs a dash attack to close the gap.

2. I mean it was oGCD and people complained because the speed was too fast and Egi missed attacked due to server lag (1.5s to 2s is the delay I clock from EA to pet execute.) Now I don't agree with Ruin IV being tied to EA and prefer the pet's ability to speak for it self.

As for glorified DoT, sorry but all pets are pretty much this. Look at WoW's Imp. It's basically on auto pilot the whole time much like pre 5.X Ifrit. In fact the only reason Garuda wasn't set to auto was to link Contagion to Trance/Demi Phase. Sorry but in my opinion, Summoner has pets.

[abesut]

Well according to the benchmark trailer, we are going to re-learn summoner, since it seems they are moving in the direction of an Invoker; like SMN using Ifrits Fire Dash as gap closer.