Summoner changes that should happen onto 7.0

[aveyond-dreams]

And people wonder why those of us in favor of the divorce of SMN from its warlock aspects want nothing to do with those who still long for the latter. Needless to say I remain unmoved by these discussions and maintain that Summoner should first and foremost live up to its namesake along with having a complete kit that is consistent with its thematic identity. The sooner that kit is completed, the better.

[fulminating]

I’ve been reading these summoner threads for a while and all I see is “summoner sucks, the new rework is terrible etc” I haven’t seen a single post of how to rework it again or make it better other than give back dots and give back the depth it had before. Obviously Yoshi said he got sick of people calling it a knock off wow warlock. I think instead of attacking each other and trying to prove right and wrong. We should work together to help the devs to build on this current iteration of summoner because it looks like it’s here to stay.

The niche that summoner occupied prior to 6.0 is unfilled, what is wrong with reverting it back to the summoner identity and refilling that niche? Cutting off your nose to spite your face is nothing new, but shouldn't be the foundation for change - particularly one seemingly as rushed and unfulfiled as this. There is also the related point that - and I'm not sure how to word this more nicely - people are having doubts with the battle design team's ability to handle their ever-increasing workload. The charitable interpretation of this push for homogeneity is that they simply do not have enough hands or time to balance 19 jobs while retaining any meaningful sense of individuality. Take healers for example, in stormblood they had distinct identities, more involved rotations and come shadowbringers they were made near clones of one another - same for tanks. As of endwalker, this corruption is being spread into the dps roles and frankly the response of revulsion and concern is entirely warranted.

[Deveryn]

Do you actually have some numbers to show SMN has become more popular? Not that popularity means everything (which is the mistake SE does with every job except BLM). I mean, I still do my roulettes as a healer half the time not because I find healers well designed or fun 90% of the time, but because either I get to turn my brains off grinding or I luck out and score a trashfire party that is actually tricky to keep alive (which might actually become more interesting with level sync instead of it just neutering my rotation, since you don't have one in the first place lol).

Also, it's really, really not our job to design the game. While people make these day-dream threads about how they would design or redesign whichever job, not one has been been implemented by the devs so far. Clearly normal criticism is more effective than playing video game developer.

I can't speak for numbers, but I've definitely seen more summoners than ever before pretty much everywhere. It's my main, but I often have to go for something else in PF. I wouldn't be surprised if some people were more mad at that than the rework itself.

Love it or hate it, it's far more functional than it used to be and despite what some claim, it lines up more with the traditional summoner.

[fulminating]

I think this speaks for itself. The release of the second pandaemonium tier will of course make this data much more valuable (as the shiny newness of endwalker summoner will have likely worn off), however for a starting point it is probably not too bad. I have some very severe doubts about whether or not this slight increase in summoner frequency is sustainable.

Anecdotes are worthless. With that said every summoner I know is quitting for other jobs. The third eden tier was omitted due to the number of parses being 2 orders of magnitude lower across the board. What this data shows is probably not enough to say anything conclusively yet, even if you were to also factor in that chinese player survey that indicated summoner was liked the least by its mains, and considered to be the easiest across the board.

[Bacillus]

Uff just said i want dots back and there i see a nuclear meltdown.

Yes it is true that now SMN is more popular than before, even i think that now is better than before. What my problem is that once you get in the rotation the class GETS VERY BORING and still see skills with no synergy at all. Im very happy to got rid of spells like enkindle (which were just another cd push button), but still we have energy drain/fester, which.... there is no decision making, you just push them everytime they are available, it is the same for swiftcast, it is only used for resurrection becasuse everything is instant, why almost everything is instant?

Everytime i summon bahamuth/phoenix i have to press akh morn/revelation, why not make them use their main damage spell inmediatly when i summon them (same than egis II) and use that enkindle button into another usefull, new and fun spell?

[Kulve]

Uff just said i want dots back and there i see a nuclear meltdown.

Yes it is true that now SMN is more popular than before, even i think that now is better than before. What my problem is that once you get in the rotation the class GETS VERY BORING and still see skills with no synergy at all. Im very happy to got rid of spells like enkindle (which were just another cd push button), but still we have energy drain/fester, which.... there is no decision making, you just push them everytime they are available, it is the same for swiftcast, it is only used for resurrection becasuse everything is instant, why almost everything is instant?

Everytime i summon bahamuth/phoenix i have to press akh morn/revelation, why not make them use their main damage spell inmediatly when i summon them (same than egis II) and use that enkindle button into another usefull, new and fun spell?

While I would agree that making the demi's do a strong entry attack very much like we have with PvP. Doing this would create the impossible flow of fitting one of our currently most powerful abilities fit under raid buff windows since we have to pop Demi's on cd and that would be on the 0gcd on opener.

This just opens back up the argument that we would need to have it reworked to allow us access to the Arcanums from the word go and not after feeding Carbuncle to Bahamut so he can shit out some gems for us. Again not against this either, this would open up the impact of summoning Demis to feel powerful again if summoning to an extent was required to gaining access to demi's.

I would have the preference to making Energy Drain/Fester abilities that are only filling a useless void to be a mechanism that could be managed to do either of these things, but again that's another slight rework.

[ThorneDynasty]

I'm so ecstatic for this game being 90% about waiting for the 120s cooldowns so you can spam everything at once. Can't fucking wait for Yoshi-P to finally cave in and make Flare and Despair 120s oGCDs too because everything must fit perfectly to the 2 minute meta. Does everything actually need to line up with the raid buffs perfectly for a job to have a fine DPS output? Demonstrably no, but who cares, every job must completely center around stacking resources for 2 minute windows because

[Supersnow845]

I'm so ecstatic for this game being 90% about waiting for the 120s cooldowns so you can spam everything at once. Can't fucking wait for Yoshi-P to finally cave in and make Flare and Despair 120s oGCDs too because everything must fit perfectly to the 2 minute meta. Does everything actually need to line up with the raid buffs perfectly for a job to have a fine DPS output? Demonstrably no, but who cares, every job must completely center around stacking resources for 2 minute windows because

Isn’t it hilarious that pretty much the only job that doesn’t give a crap about the 2 minute burst window is BLM which is simultaneously the best designed job in the game and yoshi’s main

I don’t know why we settled on doing nothing for 1 minute 40 then doing finger gymnastics for 20 seconds but it certainly doesn’t feel great

[ThorneDynasty]

There's also PLD, which people are already crying to be made into WAR 3.0 because it's, I quote, bad game design that it doesn't fit the 2 minute meta

[fulminating]

Yes it is true that now SMN is more popular than before, even i think that now is better than before. What my problem is that once you get in the rotation the class GETS VERY BORING and still see skills with no synergy at all. Im very happy to got rid of spells like enkindle (which were just another cd push button), but still we have energy drain/fester, which.... there is no decision making, you just push them everytime they are available, it is the same for swiftcast, it is only used for resurrection becasuse everything is instant, why almost everything is instant?

Not by nearly as much as people would have you believe. If the cost for making an already fairly popular caster even more popular is every bit of fun that it used to offer, firstly the cost is way too high, secondly why bother and third why try and make summoner more popular when it’s black mage that has a disproportionately low user base? The cynic in me says this is sabotage because of its popularity - some bean counter has arbitrarily decided that to encourage people into jobs other than summoner, summoner must be killed. You will notice that all the jobs with lower play rates in Eden received more substantial reworks than the higher. Was a spreadsheet wizard expecting the disgruntled former summoner mains to flock to bard after they killed dot synergy on it? Only SE knows.