6.0 Summoner: Thoughts on an Unsuccessful Rework After 1 Month of Gameplay

[Anvaire]

to be honest we can debate Mobility, we can debate damage but those are secondary. Look at all the threads and there is a common theme among them all.

The main issue Summoner faces is its rigid and overly simple rotation. It desperately needs some rotational adjustments to make it more complex. Im not saying to the level it was before. But something to make it more engaging and allow players to actually optimise beyond choosing which arcanum (Garuda, titan, Ifrit) summon to use. Even if they made Bahamut and phoenix operate in the same way they did before, where GCD mattered, or make more of them Casted turret phases to work aorund it would give something to work to improve. Once that is done, damage and mobility then can be considered... though i dont agree that mobility should = less damage and never have. If there is a tax, it should be on the ultility provided and not on being able to do dps while performing piroettes around the arena, especially when most of the time were all stacked on the bosses posteria until we do need to move and strats usually account for Melee keeping 100% uptime.

[Deceptus]

Ya'll say it's unsuccessful but I think it's fun and more akin to the actual theme of a Summoner. You know, SUMMONING things?

[ThorneDynasty]

Again with the "but the old summoner..." nonsense. It needed a rework, sure, I can agree with that. That doesn't automatically make the rework good. At least not just because it somewhat addressed aesthetic complaints.

[Riusvell]

Hey can we all agree to leave the theme behind and actually focus on the gameplay being a big problem? "BuT iT's aN aCtUaL sUmMoNeR!!11!!!" is not an argument at this point any more as it seems like it's the only point of defence you can think of while countless of others are articulating what is exactly wrong from a gameplay perspective. Not even touching on the thematic.

For me, the lack of gameplay, decision making and more actually forced me out of my job of seven years. Setting the bar so low that all the other classes which bored me before are more interesting now. That alone should tell that the current state isn't a very good one. More and more people are starting to see this and the sole reason why we're on the forums talking about it is so that our voices can be heard.

Some of us even have moved onto other jobs because it is genuinely not fun to play or not engaging to play as there's;
1) No decision making
2) It never really addressed the issue of "Ruin spam", in fact it actually made it worse and they're only flavoured ruins now
3) Somehow, the ghosting issues are still there. Something that people celebrated being gone due to the old system being gone, while it is actually still there.
4) Carbuncle's skills don't work properly not to mention it spams the chatbox. It seems to invalidate the shield it gives you. So what is the use?
5) The leveling process has been completely screwed over, meaning that if you get level synced, you barely have anything to do. Even less than a Dragoon that hasn't unlocked full thrust yet or Doom Spike.
6) There is no inherent flow to the kit, though this does tie into decision making. The differentiating cast times often disrupt the bare minimum of flow that you can possibly even get into, before one just completely throws you for a loop. It works for Black Mage purely because it's in actual phases, but not for Summoner. The two Ifrit charges are too disruptive for keeping a smooth gameplay.
7) Bahamut and Phoenix lack impact compared to their Stormblood and Shadowbringers iterations. (Phoenix is only Shadowbringers but still.)
The combo that Phoenix had going for it was good and made no sense to get rid of it. If anything, Bahamut should've gotten it as well. Also, why only one Enkindle for these two? There is nothing to do in that phase anyway, so why take it way in the first place?

These are but a few of my issues that I have on it. There would be more but for now it's entirely gameplay based. The job simply isn't complete and is unfinished. Not going to stick my head in the sand and pretend everything is ok with a job while it genuinely isn't. The rework isn't a success and I'm hearing from more people that it's indeed rather bare-boned.

Hate for the "old" iteration shouldn't cloud one's vision to the point where something unfinished is acceptable because it isn't. We get it, some of you hated the DoTs for some weird reason but it's time to let go of that. Same for the "b-but other game!", well guess what. Everything has been done and will be done at one point, sometimes things just resemble one another by coincidence.

[rewd]

Ya'll say it's unsuccessful but I think it's fun and more akin to the actual theme of a Summoner. You know, SUMMONING things?

You constantly complain about healers being boring with their 2 buttons rotation and you find the same thing fun on a DPS, of all things?

[Flatopia]

Despite being in the caster role, it has less DPS due to having freedom of position outside of 2 melee/gapcloser GCDs. It's effectively a hyper mobile ranged DPS, and in that regard it's doing extremely well.

It feels a bit weird, but not too strange when people already joked the job the was a Phys Ranged in ShB. I don't personally mind it, since Black Mage is right there if I want a high damage class that focuses on dealing with it's casts.

[Shurrikhan]

Ya'll say it's unsuccessful but I think it's fun and more akin to the actual theme of a Summoner. You know, SUMMONING things?

You mean egi-skinned/raid-blinding (pre-/summons size small) Fire, Earth, or Wind spells, each at most once per minute?

Our only persistent summons are Bahamut and Phoenix, which are each merely... turrets.

I've not played new SMN in a wide enough range of content yet to say whether I like it more or less than old SMN, but unless you count our Carbuncle minion as an actual summon, we have summons out for a far, far smaller portion of the time than previously.

[mugi999]

It's heartening to see that there are some people who actually agree with me. Thank you for sharing your thoughts.

Please keep in mind that I nowhere in my post ever mentioned the old SMN with DoTs; I think expecting them to completely undo this rework is entirely unrealistic. Instead, I simply wish for them to iterate on this version of SMN sooner than 7.0 because the state it is in right now is unacceptable.

Red mage might be able to switch things up on the fly but we're not going to pretend like that class has ever been complex or anywhere near as punishing as old SMN. When the player numbers of SMN tank and hit rock bottom then we can call the rework unsuccessful.

I wish to clarify why I called the rework 'unsuccessful'. Simply, I use that specific phrasing because I believe the rework has failed people like me who play at a high level. Almost every SMN main and SMN guide writer/theorycrafter has moved to playin RDM/BLM for world prog this tier. Think about what that means.

This post was never meant to be about the casual playerbase. In fact, I don't want the job to suddenly exclude them; it's extremely possible for a job to be simple to learn & hard to master. It's very closed-minded to believe that something is OK just because a majority of people are OK with it.

That aside, I also wish to address the point about RDM: RDM has always been a job that is simple to pick up, difficult to master. Again, if you had actually read my post, I discussed some of the things that make high-end RDM gameplay complex, and all of these things are readily accessible during normal gameplay, unlike the optimizations available for SMN, which are mostly around pet jank, awkward delays, clipping (gross), and changing your GCD speed. Also, as someone who mained, world progged 3 tiers on SMN and progged 2 ultimates on SMN? The job wasn't punishing to screw up on. To die on? Yeah, sure, but every job-- EVEN RDM -- is punishing to die on. And it's funny because RDM is now much more punishing to eat dirt on these days.

A lot of people said SMN's rotation now is overly rigid and that is the issue I am trying to make SE/CBU III aware of. Feedback is important. Please continue making yourselves heard.

[MyakotApelsia]

Unsurprised to see Aveyond wasting electicity here too. I wouldn't waste time paying attention to them.

I do agree with everything that was said. For the job that advertises its design as "decisions on using primals" , there aren't many, if any, actual choices to be made. The fact that only ifrit has that decision-making part, kinda says a lot imo.

Great idea, not great execution.

[Aikaal]

RDM rotation is less complicated for me because you have options to work around while the SMN rotation offers no option. You have a line, follow the line, deal with the line. It by far more complex for someone who wish to optimize and is stuck with papa SE holding your hand and telling you, "No my child, follow the line."

Removing the restrictiveness of the rotation would be a first step. Removing that absurd mobility nobody asked for would be the second step. Adding more firepower would be a third step.

To put it simply, with P2S as an example, on BLM I can set myself to finish with my good damage spells before the 9 seconds invuln and get all my burst ready after the invuln during the burst window. On RDM, I can set myself up so when I can hit again, I do a melee combo, have a second melee combo up so my biggest damage windows hits the buff windows and my Embolden. On Summoner. Well, since you must summon Bahamut before casting your elemental primals, I guess you either go out of sync from buff windows or your Ruin Mage for 12 seconds. None is a good option, there is only a worst dps loss option.

It is incredibly frustration, annoying and difficult to deal with. If you let my gems activate from an unrelated oGCD button that doesn't require Phoenix or Bahamut then I suddenly would have options and it would make the job more engaging.

To sum up;

- People wanted to feel like a real Summoner, good job they did. I do believe the old summoner should never be mentioned as a good Summoner class.
- People never asked restrictive gameplay which does not engage the player to think. That what was good with old Summoner and that people saying "Old Summoner was better" feel
- People never asked for Ranged Phys Mobility. Remove that. Make us feel like real casters and plan our mobility properly instead of having me dance around my white mage.
- Nobody ever asked Summoner to straight out do worst damage than Red Mage who has better support with good mobility toolkit.

The Summoner design has merits but it is fundamentally filled with issues the dev team clearly did not think through. I doubt they have any dev playing as a main Summoner.

I wonder how Yoshida-san would feel about Summoner if he was truly playing it during Pandaemonium and enjoy all the frustrations Summoners currently share. I don,t think the situation was create on purpose but it was create from ignorance of how the class playstyle feels. They didn't playtest it enough. If it was damage only the issue, the solution would be simple but it isn't just damage that I have issue with Summoner.