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

[dinnertime]

Can you be more specific with flexibility? Or maybe give your definition of flexibility? I remember quite a bit of ruin spamming with lots of oGCD weaving.

In 4.x you can delay using Bahamut as long as Aetherflow was still under cooldown, you can also end Dreadwyrm Trance prematurely if needed and it won't affect your DPS. It gives you a lot of flexibility for downtimes during fights or if you want to use it during raid buff windows.

This wasn't possible anymore in 5.x and now because of the removal of old Aetherflow, which made the job so rigid in design. Now you have to blow your CDs when they're immediately available or it's a DPS loss.

[aveyond-dreams]

“Lots of people play it so it’s fine” It’s basically a new job, of course people are playing it. Lots of people played red mage and samurai when 4.0 dropped. Lots of people played DRK, Astro and MCH when HW came out. Doesn’t mean it’s good. Doesn’t mean it’s well designed. It means people want to try it out. I mean people played a bunch of monk in 5.0 thanks to GL4. We all know how that turned out. Give it six months and nobody will touch summoner in anything harder than a dungeon.

As of the latest census it is factually correct to say that on NA and EU SMN is the most popular caster. As one may guess, the only thing to beat it on JP is Red Mage. During this time in Shadowbringers I had decided that SMN in raids and extremes was absolutely not going to happen for me. It was the occasional dungeon for tomes until I got a different class to 80, after which I abandoned the job and wasn't planning on looking back until the rework took me by surprise.

So far on my main I've been having a blast being able to do harder fights while not having to deal with a mess of buttons and systems. Though I'm not opposed to some reasonable additions this job design has yet to exhaust me the way old SMN did in a matter of a few weeks. Straightforward and to the point. I do not see myself doing the latest msq/extremes as anything as other than this job now. Possibly the next savage too if they provide rewards I'm actually interested in, unlike this tier.

Time will tell what kind of job design really drives more people away over time.

[tearagion]

False. “Clunky” here doesn’t mean that someone didn’t like playing as the job or wasn’t good at it; it’s referring to multiple things that have been listed in past posts.

For one, weaving wasn’t as smooth as it could be, which is helped now by cast times being lower for some spells. A second thing was Bahamut annoyingly having to follow you around before he casted attacks that you requested he perform; asking him to attack could often not happen if it was done with only a few seconds left in his timer. That’s improved with the newer job design where he stops following you around constantly. But the biggest thing to me was that the egi actions in Shadowbringers often had an inconsistent delay, whether it came to attacks or Devotion; you would have to sometimes hold off on starting one of the demi-summons in case you risk one of your pet attacks not fully executing and thus being wasted, when they shouldn’t have had that sometimes awkwardly queued delay to begin with. And this wasn’t an occasional problem; it happened frequently and was irritating.

Dismissing legitimate criticism of the older job design as other players simply being bad is rude, uncalled for, and is less likely to have your own criticisms be taken seriously by Square Enix; they’ll probably be more likely to ignore criticism that involves harassment.

Weaving is the same then as it is now, it's just that 90% of your casts now are instant.

Bahamut would sort of stutterstep his attacks as of ShB, him standing still is a huge boost to consistency between encounters though and I understand why this would be seen as an improvement. I, however, enjoyed trying to minimize movement just like for BLM. Wyrmwaves no longer being triggered by spells, however, I do not think is an improvement.

The Egis would have their abilities delayed by either other abilities, movement, or retargeting. Two of these were largely non-factors and all of these could be worked around quite easily. This isn't a particularly valid point of contention though as the pet abilities are still delayed for the same reasons, all they've done is cull the total number of them.

So if a part of the reason for the rework was to remove these issues, then they kind of half failed. That aside they could have fixed them completely and it would not a good rework make. The rework can be considered a failure for any of the other reasons discussed in this thread.

[rewd]

False. “Clunky” here doesn’t mean that someone didn’t like playing as the job or wasn’t good at it; it’s referring to multiple things that have been listed in past posts.

For one, weaving wasn’t as smooth as it could be, which is helped now by cast times being lower for some spells. A second thing was Bahamut annoyingly having to follow you around before he casted attacks that you requested he perform; asking him to attack could often not happen if it was done with only a few seconds left in his timer. That’s improved with the newer job design where he stops following you around constantly. But the biggest thing to me was that the egi actions in Shadowbringers often had an inconsistent delay, whether it came to attacks or Devotion; you would have to sometimes hold off on starting one of the demi-summons in case you risk one of your pet attacks not fully executing and thus being wasted, when they shouldn’t have had that sometimes awkwardly queued delay to begin with. And this wasn’t an occasional problem; it happened frequently and was irritating.

Dismissing legitimate criticism of the older job design as other players simply being bad is rude, uncalled for, and is less likely to have your own criticisms be taken seriously by Square Enix; they’ll probably be more likely to ignore criticism that involves harassment.

Improve your reading comprehension. What was considered clunky in old SMN wasn't fixed in new SMN, it was just moved elsewhere. Unless we want to act as if Ifrit-Egi, Titan-Egi and Carbuncle are completely devoid of issues, of course. Hence, another reason as to why the SMN rework can be considered unsuccessful.

[dinnertime]

Except you SEVERELY underestimate the casual joe. He doesn't care about complexity, he just wants to finish his raids and trials and cruise through content in easy mode while looking at nice animations and getting the summoner feel aesthetically. These players are MANY, and will most likely stick with the job. You bring up monk, but for most players, pre 5.4 monk was very hard for a LOT of players, so naturally they would bow out after a while, summoner is NOT of that ilk.

I'm a casual joe. I play the game only for several hours a week these days and the only difficult content I bother doing is Extremes but not all the time. My opinions should matter then, right?

Even I think 6.0 SMN could be more complex than it is right now. Casual content is already easy enough you can sleep while doing it that letting a job like this have an extremely low skill ceiling shouldn't be okay.

Like... It would be okay if SMN was easy to pick up but takes effort to master, but right now it's just easy on both things. That's boring.

[Sequora]

Improve your reading comprehension. What was considered clunky in old SMN wasn't fixed in new SMN, it was just moved elsewhere. Unless we want to act as if Ifrit-Egi, Titan-Egi and Carbuncle are completely devoid of issues, of course. Hence, another reason as to why the SMN rework can be considered unsuccessful.

I mean the issues with ifrit egi and titan egi are pretty easy fixes and are only an issue while leveling.

I will agree that carbuncle is clunky. I kind of wish they would give him a really weak pre6.0 wyrmwave style attack where he would just use an attack. That way they could take radiant aegis and searing light away from him and just make them summoner abilities.

That to me would fix all or most of the summoner jank

[Shiroe]

in savage (or even extreme trials), i enjoy playing Smn (also simple but enough fun trying to optimise a fight with the summon & cast order(

Smn has imo only 3 issues only:

1) dps obviously (way) to low for such low utility dps job (should be on par wirh Mnk)..
maybe cut the Searing Wind CD in half? (if that even helps), or just potency adjustments aka buffs

2) wierd CD system for Searing Wind & Radiant Aegis.. just so ffing wierd & clunky, when both CD reseted, but can't use either till a certain time laps after summoning the prinals (or not at all during semi-primals)

3) rez is a "weak" Smn utility, .. Smn now has MP issues late into fights (like savage), either straight up can not rez cause MP is too low, or just barely enough, .. 1st (or 2nd) rez can only happen after lucid kicks in

(dunno how its with other jobs and rezing, but rezing is a weaker utility than it used to be for Smn ,.. and coming back to the 1st problem, Smn still has the lowest dps, aside of "real utility" aka physical jobs, and needs a buff)

[Madoka]

It's Ok when it's not my job.

They'll come for you too one day. Just wait

[rewd]

I mean the issues with ifrit egi and titan egi are pretty easy fixes and are only an issue while leveling.

I will agree that carbuncle is clunky. I kind of wish they would give him a really weak pre6.0 wyrmwave style attack where he would just use an attack. That way they could take radiant aegis and searing light away from him and just make them summoner abilities.

That to me would fix all or most of the summoner jank

"Only an issue while leveling", but that's 89 levels out of 90, almost the entire game's content. Whether they are easy fixes or not, it doesn't change that the issues exist. You could avoid a lot of old SMN's issues by playing the job correctly, but this doesn't change that those issues still existed.

It's not just about jank and clunkiness, either. People were expecting the rework to actually make Aetherflow an interesting and integral mechanic to SMN's kit for example, yet the devs managed to make it even worse. There are many, many things that show how the rework is a failure. They managed to give SMN an unified and coherent identity, but they missed the mark with pretty much everything else.

[Dahlinea]

Well, the rework boils down to make Bahamut standalone and replacing the phase where we used DoTs, Pet Action to gather Further Ruin stacks, and Ruin casts to maintain the DPS with the 3 summons.
It feels like they only thought how each set of Summon skills should behave, completely independent of each other, adjusted timers to fit the old window and loosely implemented them like that.

It would make sense to have to use the lesser summons first to be able to achieve the greater ones (our still bursts Bahamut/Phoenix) like, instead of expending gems to summon you gain them as you do the summons and can only use Baha/Phoenix when the 3 are filled. But the rework does it backwards.