I am going to disclose that I have only managed to play SMN for about 15 or 20 minutes at a striking dummy so no I do not know everything. I will say the little bit I did use it was fun and I actually enjoyed the simplicity, a job should not require months of study and 12 fingers to play. It is also at the same time really simple, there is absolutely room for more on the job and they should have maybe tried to get one or two more things on the hotbar. Previous summoner though seemed to me like two jobs fighting eachother. There was a DoT management job with abilities centered around that and the summon/trance job which had pets and DPS burst phases.
it'd be a shame if they ditched such a significant player fantasy because the engine can't handle it or they can't balance it while making it fun, but they know best so I'll defer
and I don't think every job should be as simple as clicking the blinking lights as they come up, the difference is the game already has that kind of job and has now lost one with some actual upfront complexity
I think for 7.0 I wish they would get rid of energy drain. Fester and painflare are fine, but are completely disconnected from the rest of the kit. Maybe give us 3 aether charges again, but have them generate from summoning Garuda, titan, and ifrit. Or maybe have them proc off of using our primal trance spells. That would give us more of a skill ceiling.
This is super nit picky, but fester could use a name change too. It literally was named after the ability to cause further damage on top of our disease spells.
I would rather have the worst DPS potential in the game and have interesting gameplay to go with it. There's a reason I fell in love with this job in HW, it certainly wasn't the damage. It was Arcanist and Summoner working together into a stronger job fantasy than their individual parts, and the lore actually adding to the themes of both the job and the worldbuilding of XIV overall.
I don't like Summoner because it all but abandoned every mechanic (pet related OR not) that made it interesting before due to a problem with encounter design that is easily rectified and a pet AI issue they literally fixed at the same time while refusing the fix the actual problem, something you'd notice if you had bothered to test for it. The only issue left is the ghosting issue which you have to go out of your way to force going into it now and that could be solved by using the same trick they used on Reaper but utilizing Carbuncle as the base for the avatar. They're still actually resummoning the pet for some god awful reason and that makes the already slow animations and clunky dash AI on the carby/egi iterations feel entirely disconnected from your rotation because they take as long to resolve as people who complained about pet delays prior to now actually believed they were. In ShB they weren't ever an issue if you didn't force two consecutive pet commands, and unlike ShB a single oGCD completely avoids the ghosting issue now, even if woven immediately before the resummon, even on SCH with Eos auto-healing.
Even so, the problem with Summoner isn't just the pet AI. The fact it takes 6-8 seconds to get access to Carbuncle's shield after each avatar use (apart from demis) is proof they fucked this iteration up royally. And once you move past that, you see it's for a generic phase kit not even worth the effort mechanically, as it has zero maintenance and SE's encounter design trends will kill any 'reactivity' it has. The other problem is there is no room in the rotation itself for anything else. You get one Ruin III and one Ruin IV per minute and everything else is spent on Egi-Spells, of which only Titan and Ifrit have any room to spare for any oGCDs. Garuda could with an adjustment to Slipstream's cast time. Even so, oGCD Summons is necessary just to free up 4 GCDs worth of space that should go to some other major button or two. Which is why I suggested readding DoTs in the first place. Low effort, already exists in their engine, easy to implement now if they wanted to. And alters the rotation in a manner worthy of pursuit. The only other option from there is altering the Demi-Summons, which I have said should have been the focus of their current attention in the first place.
ShB Summoner by contrast wasn't a phase-based mess that left no room for error. In fact, the only thing that was missing from it was pet interactions. The priority based structure actually was perfect for standalone ability additions. All manner of pet gauges could have been added to it. In fact, you could add the Avatars to that version and have them update the Egi Assault actions, and you could alter the 40 downtime however you wanted. How do I know that, because I literally explained how you could re-insert that back into the current rotation in the prior paragraph and post.
Straight up, Nothing SE had done prior needed to be removed to make this work. That's how easy it is to see they could have done this better.
Already am looking into alternatives. Been doing so for months. Speaking of, did you know Longtime fans of every single job across the board appear upset over the new direction and are citing similar concerns? In fact, the only ones that aren't are citing that it's kinda boring what was added. In other words, you might as well be asking me to play a different game instead, to which the response is: How about you accept that there's a reason people are pissed about the current direction even within the framework of SE's stated design goals and that they're well within their rights to expect SE to do better? Seems more productive. If you're happy with Summoner go and play it. I certainly am. Otherwise I wouldn't know what to be angry about and why. And I plan to if the alternatives prove less interesting, which the majority seem to be. So far NIN's the only alternative that fits the requirements of my static (Can't play BLM as we have one already, two static members are fighting over melee/tank slots and would prefer I kept the flex DPS slot, all the healer slots are taken by better healers as our static has 4, half of my FC are healer mains too), and my prefered mechanics (BRD got its DoT interactions completely gutted and initial tests prove it's both staler and more RNG prone than ever, no other job has a sufficiently diverse priority system to engage me long term, which leaves NIN, a job I'm certain will get destroyed by this same rework process in 7.0 given SE's inclinations, as new players still complain about mudras).
And, though it is completely ineffectual, I will miss my carby pet regardless of whatever else I pick. Taken together, where would you have me go?
I'm expecting SE to phase them all out at this point. High headcount instances like Alliance Raids and Bozja are the unstated reason why. SE could unlock the debuff cap, but noooooo, that's work. They're pressed as it is. The easier thing for them to do is remove them all, and they've been putting that work in since ARR if you haven't been paying attention. If you want a good DoT job (not caster, job) to stay, you have to be making the argument for them all to stay constantly, in order to put it in their minds that they're making a mistake. See the above why it still wouldn't be a sufficient answer. I like Summoner's aesthetic. I just want the kit to match that level of expectation. And it doesn't when given the scrutiny it deserves.
I'm sorry, but I'm tired of people not understanding where the problem is. I 100% am with the average player on the graphical side of things. It is a beautiful job to look at. But that's where my praise ends, as it should. A book-carrying intellectual channelling the power of corrupted divinities and spells of arcane design SHOULD have some serious metric of complexity to it. Or at least something major to micromanage. That goes hand in hand with the theme and fantasy of said job. This kit doesn't meet that bar. Hell it wouldn't even in ARR. And the Job guide being padded with trait upgrade after trait upgrade all but proves that.
Fact is, they could have done this and kept the entirety of the ShB kit while carrying over the alterations they did to prior actions and it would have been perfect. Anyone with a mind to figure it out could conclude that.
The only cost would have been numbers, and frankly I do not care about numbers. Let me play a deep, complex, and fun game first. Balance it after.
Last edited by Grimoire-M; 12-08-2021 at 05:47 PM.
Petition Thread for "Playable Loporrits": https://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/threads/436512-Make-them-Playable-You-Cowards
Are You Happy with the Endwalker Healer Reveal? - Poll: https://strawpoll.vote/polls/2e6mxhnx/vote - Thread: https://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/threads/443437-Poll-Are-You-Happy-with-the-Healer-Kit-Reveal-for-Endwalker
Mechanics are Aesthetics. Graphics don't make interesting gameplay.
alright let me break it down for seeing as you need some help (this is an example of condescending for future reference).
Anyone is allowed to enjoy a simple job, I don't care you do you. It doesn't make you less of an anything; it's just what you like. Having taken new SMN through the MSQ I can accurately say to anyone reading that there was no flexibility or effort to get to any part of the rotation. It was a flowchart of:
CDs>bahamut>titan>the others (this is your single point of variability/input, if you know the boss will move at a point don't put garuda there)>energy drain>phoenix>titan (if there are buffs up, otherwise doesn't matter)>the others>go to step 1
This was what you did every time, it was obviously what you did every time, it was what you did easily every time, and not doing the obvious+easy meant you were losing damage. It is for this reason I consider it to be a "clicking the blinking lights as they come up" job. I had a similar impression of dancer when I first tried it, but that job has much more room for optimization.
My limited impression of previous summoner was a long, predetermined, rotation. Mess up your two minute opener and tank your damage. How is that more "flexible" than the current version, exactly? I can see plenty of arguments for not liking the new summoner, primarily the much simpler rotation, but less flexibility is not it. Personally, I like the new version a lot more. Simple does not mean less fun - for me. If the abilities are fun and impactful when I hit them and the rotation is smooth, then that's a great start.
If you look at player metrics, simpler jobs have more players in general. That said, those that enjoy longer, more complex rotations are not going to be happy. Summoner is far from perfect in it's current state, but, overall, I really like it, and prefer the direction it's going in.
Need to have at least one happy player posting. lol
Compare a standard opener to a TEA opener in terms of rotation flexibility that is possible. Beyond the opener there were plenty of ways to play safe to learn a fight, then start squeezing out more hard casts to put more potency into buff windows, as one example. It was also a class that could move many spells around to fit into different windows with different comps more efficiently. New summoner is utterly devoid of any such process. It has exactly 2 GCDs of summon-flexibility per minute at base recast time (one ruin 3, one ruin 4) and whatever pointless flexibility exists within the elemental summons (where you put your 3 hardcasts, one of which depends more on the boss, and one of which should be swiftcasted for dps).
Simple jobs are cool for people who enjoy them, and I'm glad people do, it's nice to see people have fun. I struggle to find an appropriate word for it, but the 'complexity' minded people are being routinely herded into fewer and fewer jobs as time goes by. I don't think it's unfair for those players to want a job with a learning curve similar to old summoner, or even steeper.
I'm not a big fan of constantly referencing old summoner, because the developers clearly want to ignore it even existed. However, new summoner fundamentally betrays the expectations of people who did play and love old summoner and is otherwise poorly designed. I get the feeling that they felt they really had to do something drastic with summoner (they said as much in the live letter introducing the rework, I won't go into their detail) which is fine, and also that they ran around in circles and eventually settled on something without enough time to finish (not factual, I infer this from COVID struggles and when they said they went through a number of concepts in the same live letter) which is a shame because there are parts of the rework I really enjoy and agree with. Hopefully they run counter to recent history with Machinist and add some really cool stuff down the road, but I doubt it.
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