Will SMN really stay like it is rn?

[CKNovel]

If you think 5.0 SMN was hard by any definition I'd hate to remind you of literally every iteration before it.

The job has been dumbed down a lot, and I don't consider 6.0 an accurate representation of the Fantasy of a Summoner mostly because it doesn't make you care about your pets as more than aesthetic baubles. And that bothers me when at least prior iterations were -trying- to integrate them directly into your core rotation. And of all those iterations, only ShB succeeded in a manner that made them actively interesting. And it had more room for scalability compared to the current iteration precisely because the 'filler' in 6.0 takes up -all- of the space available GCD wise. I don't consider that good for long-term management, graphics be damned.

Sorry, should've been clearer.
SMN felt hard due to the clunky pet.
I can take SB MCH as an example, it was hard by no mean, only Flamethrower was a terrible (and still is) ability and way to get into Overheat.

MCH felt hard and terrible but it was all down to Flamethrower and the SB heat gauge.

SB MCH, SB DRK and ShB SMN got the same treatment. They had little problems but SQEX applied big fixes to make the job more appealing to a bigger audience.
In my opinion, current SMN is a good base for improvement but you know the next part.

[Grimoire-M]

Sorry, should've been clearer.
SMN felt hard due to the clunky pet.
I can take SB MCH as an example, it was hard by no mean, only Flamethrower was a terrible (and still is) ability and way to get into Overheat.

MCH felt hard and terrible but it was all down to Flamethrower and the SB heat gauge.

SB MCH, SB DRK and ShB SMN got the same treatment. They had little problems but SQEX applied big fixes to make the job more appealing to a bigger audience.
In my opinion, current SMN is a good base for improvement but you know the next part.

I do not think Summoner was hard in any iteration outside of Stormblood, and that wasn't solely because of the pet jank. What I actually said was it had more to manage in every prior iteration. The pet barely factors into that assessment in any iteration other than Stormblood, which I consider the worst iteration. And that's the version a significant number of naysayers of the current iteration want back. Personally I don't. If I were to order them by preference, it would be as follows:

5.0 > 3.0 > 2.0 >>>>>>> 4.0 (with current pet AI response time) > 6.0 > 4.0 (with 4.0 pet AI response time)

That gap between 2.0 and 4.0 is meant to highlight the cutoff point where I think the state of the job was frankly unacceptable and an abject failure of not only its intended fantasy, but an unacceptable state for balance, scalability, or longevity. Here I'm also using the current iteration of pet AI as a comparison point to show how it much it factors into my assessment of 4.0, because that's how significantly it would affect game feel. However, in ShB, ARR, and HW, it wouldn't make any difference at all, and that's due to their rotational structure.

From that perspective you can assume that I rank 4.0 and 6.0 as nearly equally bad for significantly different reasons. But, for the record, I consider every single iteration a failure of the intended fantasy in some manner. ShB was just the closest we ever got to it being in a state where it could be called good.

On that note, jank makes things unreliable, not necessarily harder. A good example of this would be Cleric Stance in ARR/HW, where the combat was more than slow enough to support the internal lockout it had with some patience. Still didn't stop it from being janky. For the purposes of making this conversation easier, I would ask people to stop conflating the statement of "I liked Summoner Better in ARR/HW/SB/ShB" with "I think pets worked better in ARR/HW/SB/ShB". Those are two very different statements and that is blinding people who think the current iteration is good to the points I and most other critics are trying to make. The context of prior iterations is being used to highlight those criticisms. And they're warranted for the sake of improving future iterations of the job, even if we assume we'll never get the older versions of the job back.

As for my criticisms, it'll get addressed in my responses to Sequora.

Summoners in previous iterations were basically just casters with fancier animations. You use a summon, it uses its ability and then it disappears. This was how it worked in every single game until FFX. FFX it replaces your party and you have full control over it. It wasn't until FFXI that it became a semi-pet class. There has never been an iteration where the summoner had a tiny little pet that followed it around and mostly just does auto attacks.

This statement is ignoring the broader context of those older FF games. That is a limitation of the design employed in each game during those eras. And even in that regard I do not consider it a valid excuse. Why? Because you can find better examples of Summons across RPGs as a whole on similarly limited hardware, that still do more to make them impactful. And typically those are games that attempt to make Summons a core focus of their gameplay.

Golden Sun's Djinn come to mind as an example that maps onto ShB Summoner fairly well. You collect a myriad of small familiars (the Egi & Carbuncle) that grant access to additional abilities that could augment weapon attacks or replace certain spells, but in all cases, whenever you used a Djinn, they were actively present in each and every individual animation of the Djinn actions you used. They also had a managerial aspect in and out of battle. Using each one contributed to a collective resource that allowed you to use them to summon the actual Summons of that series, and you could control what state they were in before you entered combat to allow you to burst down certain encounters. You don't even need to get into the nitty gritty of how they contributed to the class and psynergy systems in that series to see they had significant impacts on gameplay. Where I agree they fall short as an analogue is in how little they factor into the lore, but it does serve as a useful contrast. FF has always had strong lore behind Summons, but rarely had strong mechanics backing them until modern iterations like FFX (as FF8's Junction system doesn't really track onto XIV in any meaningful fashion), and I consider those games that do try to make them interesting all the better for it. I do not consider FF3-9 worthy of pursuit. But, for the record, even by that metric the current Summons are an abject failure.

The 6.0 version of summoner is a combination of the older (FF3-FF9) and newer iterations (FFX, XI, XII, XIII). We have Garuda, Ifrit, Titan summons that appear, use their respective signature attack, and disappear, and then we have our demi summons, that are closer to summoner in the more recent games.

To me it doesn't fulfill either interpretation properly due to a combination of factors:

1) Resummoning pets doesn't function well as a mechanic in XIV's engine. The reason the Demi get away with it is due to how long they last. Even so, it hasn't worked in every iteration of the job that's taken advantage of it thus far (4.0 onward), and by all metrics it still will not allow you to build around pets as a core mechanic due to the necessary length to execute them properly. The 6-8s delay of the avatars not only completely prevents you from properly utilizing pets as an active part of your DPS rotation or for utility, it also creates this awful disconnect between when you use them and when they actually use their abilities. A good description of that feeling is like is that disconnect you get from watching a jump cut right before someone lands a punch in a movie, which has the resultant effect of making the actual hit (or in this case, button you pressed to Summon the Avatar) feel like wet air. And that is in no way the fault of the amazing animation work they did. They tried, and it looks good on a striking dummy. In an actual fight I forget I even pressed them then get surprised by the animations consistently because of that delay. And it's not entirely the fault of their engine. It's just inherent to how that mechanic works. Taking Summons off the GCD helps but will not solve this issue entirely. The resummoning itself has to go. Keep in mind that doesn't mean the animations have to. The technology utilized for the Reaper avatar would theoretically allow for the avatars to work when applied to our Carbuncle. And I would want it applied to our pet rather than ourselves, personally speaking. Doing that opens up a lot of potential oGCD space for Summons and on Carbuncle itself.

2) Having Carbuncle/Egi use pet actions wasn't up to par in prior iterations, but is finally up to a quality level where we can expect them to function, even if we added back in their auto-attacks. We know this because the Fairy can manage it now while triaging. Seriously. Go on Scholar and start mashing every pet action out, then compare it to Broil Weaving one at a time. We did not have that level of consistency even in Shadowbringers, though even Shadowbringers was much closer to our ideal now than people gave it credit for. The only problem would be making Carbuncle a melee pet, which I think would be an abject mistake given the Egi still have issues before they upgrade into an avatar. I would like all of them to be made into ranged attackers to facilitate that fluidity, as it's a known issue with -all- AI that use melee attacks in this game. NPC entities not having enough range to use their actions creates way too many disjointed AI problems that it's worth facilitating. And it's something I'd consider a requirement to fix before we ever got a Beastmaster equivalent, but it isn't a problem for Summoner if we keep Carbuncle as the base pet and keep it out of melee range.

3) The current rotation, whether it was tied to pets or not, is too tight to allow for necessary expansions in GCD or oGCD space without significant restructuring. This is why I'm asking for oGCD Summons now. That's 4 GCDs that get freed up to do something, anything else. The only additions you could realistically add are to the Demi-Summons, which need more to do. I'm not particularly fond of the bahamut spell animations we got either. Those need a tune up.

4) We do not have any carryover resources or anything major to manage. Nothing we stockpile, nothing that builds to anything extra. Not even significant potency differences between individual spells to create priorities. Slipstream and Ruby Catastrophe/Rite are the closest you get and it's still the same PPM gain compared to a standard spell. And that means all your goal is is uptime. And XIV is incredibly boring if that's all you care about and you have this many instant-cast spells and range to work with. Sure, you use your Demi and blow your Aetherflow during it, but even that is much less compared to prior iterations. It's done to get access to your avatars, but those phases are entirely self-contained. Your decision points equate to three to five a minute compared to before, and with significantly less execution barriers, to the point it's sleep inducing. Look at my prior post for contrast. DoTs and Egi Assaults and actual Hardcast Ruin spells at least facilitated encounter specific interactions, which were further augmented by Bane and Contagion in the past. Whether you liked Poisons and Egi or didn't, you had to think about them on a level the new rotation simply does not allow you to. The delay on the Egi resummons also means it's a DPS loss not to go into the next Demi-Summon asap. The only thing you really consider is raidbuff drift, in which you're still encouraged to keep your spell speed to a minimum for the sake of Searing Light alignment, which still suffers the same lockout problem Devotion did.

I think the bigger issue I've had with pre-endwalker summoner, is the poison aspect that we had. Why poisons? Is it because they based the job off of other MMO pet classes that were typically aligned with demons and disease? Why not have DoTs that match up with our summons? The summons felt like an afterthought. We were poison mages with a pet with really basic AI that were unresponsive.

While I do agree that this version is simpler, I hope that we build complexity from this version. 2.0-5.0 summoner was artificially complex. The complexity came from the jank. You were literally fighting with the job, hoping that when you pressed a button, that it responded.

The poisons and Ruin spells are a meaningful part of Arcanist. And I'm okay with that because Arcanist is a cool subtheme. I don't think it should have been the focus, but ShB had a much better balance between Arcanist and Summoner's contributions to the overall kit compared to prior iterations, while Endwalker goes too far by removing them entirely. My primary complaint against them is I felt they should have been integrated into how we -interact with- the pet. It's the same reason I'm mad at the Bard changes. But, to be clear, we've never truly had any significant pet interaction in any iteration of the job. In case you didn't notice, most of the complexity I mentioned didn't care about the 'pet AI jank' in the slightest. Even Endwalker's iteration doesn't care about them beyond color. I only mentioned the pet QoL at all in order to highlight how it has been improved over time, because I agree pets haven't in an acceptable state for the entirety of XIV's lifetime, including Endwalker. The difference is prior iterations still gave you multiple mechanics that you actively planned out on a per-encounter basis that barely even cared about the pet jank, while Endwalker finally fixed the jank then chose to abandon them entirely. Why? Because you can't use any of those former mechanics if you're locked out of using the pets themselves thanks to those constant resummons. That needs to go in order to improve the job, regardless of the direction any of us may want it to go in.

That's my problem with Summoner as a whole, across all iterations: It has never allowed for you to actively interact and care about your Summons when micromanaging them in your rotation in a -satisfying- manner. One and done GCD primal Resummons actively work against that goal, and additionally the rotation in its current form prevents us from adding auxiliary management mechanics in its place or in the future to make up the difference. Shadowbringers came the closest, and it did so by making pets an active part of our movement tools and let the Demis be the burst phase they deserved to be numerically speaking. Though it had some clean up to do, it still had room for significant additions. Hell you could map the Endwalker kit into it pretty easily, and I agree it would make the job better.

But in the long run I want them to abandon the resummon mechanic and these micro phases entirely. That is strictly necessary for growth. Doesn't matter how they look, what matters is how they feel and play. And it ain't good by the standards I expect SE to meet.

[OtakuSempai]

A bit off-topic, but I'd like to know what jobs people currently consider to be the more complex and engaging ones as of EW. As an ex MNK main thanks to the EW changes. The itch I used to be able to scratch is currently unscratchable.

I second this.

[Niyuka]

I second this.

First impression: Reaper at 90 is quite a dynamic optimization puzzle. Its certainly more complex than SAM or MNK (my previous mains) were in Shb, and more than any of the tanks by a mile. Not sure if it reaches NIN levels from Shb.

On topic of summoner. I am absolutely excited that SE finally took it into the direction of an actual summoner, and not an obvious and weak copy of the Affliction lock from WoW. It always felt like a bad transplant from that game.
Now they have to iterate on its complexity and decision space. I hope they do, and I think the current framework allows for inclusion of new summons rather more easily (one more lego stone, adjust some timings, or (gasp!) actually force you to choose between legos!), and so have hopes for its future.
Its still more complex than ShB Dancer.

[meowmaou]

First impression: Reaper at 90 is quite a dynamic optimization puzzle. Its certainly more complex than SAM or MNK (my previous mains) were in Shb, and more than any of the tanks by a mile. Not sure if it reaches NIN levels from Shb.

On topic of summoner. I am absolutely excited that SE finally took it into the direction of an actual summoner, and not an obvious and weak copy of the Affliction lock from WoW. It always felt like a bad transplant from that game.
Now they have to iterate on its complexity and decision space. I hope they do, and I think the current framework allows for inclusion of new summons rather more easily (one more lego stone, adjust some timings, or (gasp!) actually force you to choose between legos!), and so have hopes for its future.
Its still more complex than ShB Dancer.

What makes reaper dynamic? Just curious, I've only levelled it a little so far/checked out the PVP moveset. Seems pretty straightforward.

[SieyaM]

Current summoner is definitely fun and of course people are going to be upset with the rework, someone always is. It also feels like a good base for a job that they can build on, but since we are 6.0 and the job SMN has been around since 2.0 people are expecting a lot more than just a solid base to work on later. I really enjoy the new Summoner and will probably even end up playing it as my main, but I do agree that it could use a little more filling out, especially this late in the game.