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

[Aikaal]

Gonna need to call out a few things here:

Now I'm not gonna sit here and state that Endwalker SMN is some free flowing job, it deffinitely is not, but it is in no way as restrictive as what we were working with before, and that was 100% something the SMN community asked for.

Yeah but none can boast to say they only see 7 casts per 2 minutes. Strong mobility should not outright just ignore the whole concept. Black Mages need to plan that mobility for mechanics. In that sense, SMN should never be punish or suffer from firepower because of that.

As for restrictions, what I mean is when I get in situations such as P2S and you drop down time during burst window and my party, with reason, go ahead and delays all CDs. That works fine but you suddenly have 4 options as a Summoner
1- You take the L and hold Bahamut becoming a Ruin III mage for 12 second and lose massive DPS.
2- You force the group to take the L and lose 9 seconds of burst (Who would ever do that)
3- You take the L, still use Bahamut asap and have your whole burst window out of sync from burst cooldowns
4- You take the L and try to make some sort of copium fast BiS so your Bahamut recast time is about 55s.

Those restrictions are punishments for you and your party. Other jobs have restrictions also, Black Mage and Red Mage have restrictions but they are fun restrictions to work around. In the case of the current Summoner, they are straight not enjoyable, they just refuse my right to optimize my damage with my party.

You can delay Searing Light but Searing Light is restricted to Carbuncle. Can't use it while Baha/Phoenix. You also can't use it while summon Ifrit/Garuda/Titan which all suck 5 seconds windows each. So you have a time frame of 30 seconds out of 60s to use your buff. Radiant Aegis is subject to the same restrictions but it has 2 stacks so you do gain niche over Manaward so this is fine.

Your gems are restricted to happen when you press Phoenix/Bahamut. I honestly do not understand the logic behind a super smooth brain rotation that forces your brain to remain smooth. It's just not fun.

What you're telling me is those restrictions are definitely fine. It's definitely fine to hinder your party because your restrictions prevent you to synergize with your group. I don't think that's what you wante dto say but that's kinda what you've just told me. You can take a look at the current P2S top summoner logs, This one since it has the fastest kill time in the top 10 The Summoner just took the L by take off his Bahamut burst from the buff window. It's a bad decision but in this case, it's the lesser bad decision you can take. We essentially have to just continue the smooth brain rotation because we have no option of optimisation from the restriction. I doubt any previous Summoner gameplay had this issue.

[Myon88]

As for restrictions, what I mean is when I get in situations such as P2S and you drop down time during burst window and my party, with reason, go ahead and delays all CDs. That works fine but you suddenly have 4 options as a Summoner

1- You take the L and hold Bahamut becoming a Ruin III mage for 12 second and lose massive DPS.
2- You force the group to take the L and lose 9 seconds of burst (Who would ever do that)
3- You take the L, still use Bahamut asap and have your whole burst window out of sync from burst cooldowns
4- You take the L and try to make some sort of copium fast BiS so your Bahamut recast time is about 55s.

Those restrictions are punishments for you and your party. Other jobs have restrictions also, Black Mage and Red Mage have restrictions but they are fun restrictions to work around. In the case of the current Summoner, they are straight not enjoyable, they just refuse my right to optimize my damage with my party.

I feel you on this, but honestly good luck trying to get people to understand things like this. The vast majority of players do not grasp these concepts because they don't engage with the game at that level. This introduces a problem where people have major blind spots when it comes to critiquing job design objectively.

Historically this is why jobs like the melees and blm have great PR. Even a novice player can relate to being out of range or unable to cast, so their skill component is never in question. In contrast, sources of difficulty that are nuanced or emergent are basically invisible to them. When a job forces you to greed for uptime, that's part of its skill expression. When you have to deal with juggling pets or dots or timers, suddenly it's 'clunky gameplay' or 'artificial difficulty'. Sound familiar?

This is why you see contradictory sentiments all the time, like combined trances getting rave reviews when bahamut and dreadwyrm trance being split was nothing but a benefit. Or wyrmwave cueing mechanics being panned despite being the only thing forcing summoners to stand still in Stormblood and Shadowbringers. If people resent summoner mobility that much, why are they not clamoring for that back? Evidently, distaste for difficult mechanics outweighs aversion to phys ranged gameplay.