New summoner is unacceptable

[Shougun]

Apparently, if you have any grips whatsoever with the new summoner you're already attacking other people, by not letting them have fun. Either that or you're part of some evil clan that wants to bring WoW's warlock into Final Fantasy. lmao

You're allowed to have your own unique opinions as long as they agree with mine!

[Vicrtz]

I’m still trying to decide if I hate it or not. I’m getting over a bad case of the flu, so my brain isn’t working too great right now. This means that Change Is Bad. I might like it fine once I get my brain back. In the meantime , it’s back to scholar for me.

[Ralts]

I noticed the level 90 elemental summons don't have the same problems as the pre-90 egi's. When a level 90 primal is summoned, it spawns next to the player then does it attack right where is spawns. No travel times and the AoE is centered on the player's target. So the level 90 elemental summons work like pre-90 garuda. This is great.

I think this is my final verdict. The job is acceptable but only at level 90. I think crimson strike absolutely needs to be moved off the GCD. Then something needs to be done to make summoning the elemental summons a bit more fluid. I think I will stick with the summoner as my main but I will definitely be leveling some alts to do pre-90 content.

I weave fester in-between CS combo. I dunno if it lowers my dps, though. But I got a functional rotation running, weaving ogcds in between some spells. But i'm with you with the CS dilemma. Although, i'm pretty sure they'll adjust SMN throughout 6.X.

Still, i'm in love with this new iteration. It feels like i'm a playing a summoner in older FF games. Maining it thoughout EW.

[remiff]

Yes the summoner needs improvement,
because it seems incomplete and inconsistent,
phoenix burstphases lower than bahamut is stupid on a burst cycle of 60s,
ifrit ruby ​​rites cast and recast need to be the same, annoying to use swiftcast to gain dps , the job need more thing to do.

[Aerilon]

New summoner is great - just needs a few adjustments which I'm sure they will make in time. Its the play style I have always wanted for the job and the complexity in rotation is there at 90, and easily expanded upon for the future. It would be nice if Phoenix burst was higher, but in the its a much better update than all the previous poor dot management iterations the job has gone through. It actually feels like a s SUMMONER now.

Some of you in this thread haven't been outside for some sunshine in a while, and it shows.

People are allowed to have differing opinions. There is no right or wrong here. Think how boring an ice-cream shop would be if everyone only loved mint chocolate chip.

[Rin_Kuroi]

I weave fester in-between CS combo. I dunno if it lowers my dps, though. But I got a functional rotation running, weaving ogcds in between some spells. But i'm with you with the CS dilemma. Although, i'm pretty sure they'll adjust SMN throughout 6.X.

Still, i'm in love with this new iteration. It feels like i'm a playing a summoner in older FF games. Maining it thoughout EW.

That works but there's so many different places in our rotation where we can weave in fester. More my concern is being in melee range of a boss and having to wait around for a GCD to finish the combo before I can move out.

[Ralts]

That works but there's so many different places in our rotation where we can weave in fester. More my concern is being in melee range of a boss and having to wait around for a GCD to finish the combo before I can move out.

Yeah, ifrit is the black lamb between the 3 summons. I'm pretty sure they'll make minor changes to ifrit in the future. The other 2 are working quite well, specially titan. I love using titan, because it's spammy.

[Skiros]

I've farmed the extreme trials a few times on SMN and I do think that Lv90 SMN is capable of being interesting. That being said, it is highly dependent on the encounter design and what you want to do with the job.

I think it's pretty fun as a progression job for the purposes of clearing week 1 savage, as you derive almost no utility from using Swiftcast for damage (and hence can use it for resurrection much more easily) and the mobility of SMN is very useful for progression (compared to Dualcasting on RDM), so much so that I daresay it could even be a more viable pick than RDM, since SMN's damage *seems* to be quite significantly higher (which matters quite a lot for clearing week 1). It's a very noob-friendly progression job due to Radiant Aegis and its insane mobility.

It is also fun in dungeons and fights with regular forced downtime. Note that dungeons are pretty much fights with a string of forced, irregular downtime. The reason is that downtime forces the summoner to abridge their rotation and prioritize the hardest-hitting moves (the Summon attacks), and what is most optimal to be abridged and what is most optimal to utilize to its completion vary depending on the duration and position of the forced downtime, not to mention the interaction between abridgement and juggling summons so that you are not casting when you need to move.

However, it is going to be dreadfully boring in most savage fights, especially fights with next to no downtime or downtime that is so long that you cycle through a full summon window anyways. From the last tier, that would be E9S, E10S, and E12S p1. Even with E11S and E12S p2, I can imagine that half the downtime is "regular" enough that the decision on how to abridge the primal summons is straightforward enough. In this sense, ironically SMN seems to be more interesting in dungeons than in most savage encounters because of how the job works.

I stand by my initial thoughts on how the devs can improve Summoner, and that is by adding skills within each primal Summon window that imposes some mild handicap on the player in exchange for slightly increased damage. Such as a vortex that the Summoner stands in to increase wind damage dealt (like a Ley Lines). This will make optimization more interesting and build on the design philosophy of Summoner, which I believe is for players to consider when and how to summon the Primals. In essence, you have like 20 or so fixed actions that you have to execute between each Demi-summon (Bahamut/Phoenix) window and your decision is to order the actions so that you get a rotation that maximizes your uptime and damage. But current Lv90 SMN does not have enough differentiation between each primal Summon for the decision to be less straightforward. In other words, Ifrit, Garuda, and Titan are too alike (even with Astral Flow) for the player to want to think hard about how the order in which they use the actions, particularly on fights where the boss is largely standing still and not moving.

The job also needs to make the Demi-summon windows much more interesting, without making them feel like the pointless busywork that MCH's wildfire window has. I think a potential solution would be to extend the duration of Attunement effects and allow them to persist after summoning Bahamut/Phoenix, and let Attunement affect what you can do in a Summon Bahamut/Phoenix window. IMO the approach I prefer is to allow Gemshine and Precious Brilliance to be cast-able in Bahamut/Phoenix provided you have an Attunement stack, and be stronger than Ruin (Impulse/Brand), with the downside of requiring some sort of handicap (melee range for Ifrit, a long cast time for Garuda, and slightly lower potency for Titan). Shortening the CD of Enkindle to 8s would be helpful IMO as well.

[Ironman2ooo]

Its pretty fun spammy job miles ahead of the dot mess that it was.

Are you a former World of Warcraft Warlock main? lol

[Chocobits]

So the common complaints I see are that:

1. Carby does nothing (literally)
2. We lack an instacast Ruin of any kind anymore
3. Ifrit lowers DPS because of needing to Swiftcast
4. Needs a another/better OGCD

If all of that were addressed, would new SMN not suck in the eyes of the discontented?