Summoner/Make Carbuncle useful again

[Ggwppino]

Pet AI* has been fine since mid-Shadowbringers, that isn't the problem. Demi-summoning killing your pet is. As long as this awful mechanic continues to exist it completely screws with the default pet AI because the pet dies and wipes the action queue. I did a lot of testing near the end of ShB and it was near impossible for the default pet to drop/ghost an ability or not fit its entire repetoire in a 15 second window by itself. As soon as you include demisummoning, that all goes out the window and it becomes an absolute mess.

Demi summoning is the mechanical cancer infesting this job and the only thing that actually needs a rework, but SE continues to double down on the awful mechanic every expansion making the problems worse than before.

*Specifically normal pet AI. Demi AI is still a flaming pile of garbage and they can refuse to attack on summon unless forced to by an action.

Exact!
They created the problem of ghosting and unresponsiveness in shB. There was no such problem before. Previously the pet worked fine.
Instead of making it work fine, they decided, instead of introducing a new entity into the game, to lazily replace by resetting the "pet" entity, screwing up a system that worked perfectly before.

Here it is clearly not the fault of the pet system, but it is the fault of the lack of desire and laziness to introduce a new entity that acts as a demi.

[Raikai]

Exact!
They created the problem of ghosting and unresponsiveness in shB. There was no such problem before. Previously the pet worked fine.
Instead of making it work fine, they decided, instead of introducing a new entity into the game, to lazily replace by resetting the "pet" entity, screwing up a system that worked perfectly before.

Here it is clearly not the fault of the pet system, but it is the fault of the lack of desire and laziness to introduce a new entity that acts as a demi.

If I could guess, adding a new actor to the combat setup could be something that requires a bigger overhaul to the game's code, as it seems to support only 1 extra actor (carby, fairy) and 2 additional ones outside of instances (chocobo + minion) and when they made it like that was without future-proofing back in ARR.

Not that it's any justification to not do it, but maybe it would require way more work than it seems. I really think they should see to it because it might impact other aspects of the game positively, and I wonder if something like this was thought for 7.0... Maybe we'll only know by JP Fanfest.

[Ggwppino]

There's a lot of money going around ff14. They procrastinated for 5 years destroying a perfectly functional system. I personally don't accept the "it's too hard to implement" excuse. It may be a spaghetti code that has been working for 10 years by a miracle, but they have the resources and they also had the time to fix the crap they've done.

Then by doing so they fix the smn, but also the sch, and they also open up to being able to exploit this with other new classes or even the old ones that could have a demi alongside.

[Mikey_R]

They created the problem of ghosting and unresponsiveness in shB. There was no such problem before. Previously the pet worked fine.

I believe it started in SB with Demi Bahamut. Before that it wasn't an issue as you didn't have to queue several things in quick succession and it was only started being an issue when the summon disappeared, either for the Bahamut summon or the dismissal of Bahamut, meaning it couldn't execute the queued action.

[Flana]

I believe it started in SB with Demi Bahamut. Before that it wasn't an issue as you didn't have to queue several things in quick succession and it was only started being an issue when the summon disappeared, either for the Bahamut summon or the dismissal of Bahamut, meaning it couldn't execute the queued action.

It was with Stormblood, and it's the reason I'm always in absolute disbelief when people say SB was peak Summoner. Does no one else remember what a disaster trying to get Garuda to contagion before the demi window was? God what an awful experience. Either it took so long you started drifting from Trick and other buffs or you'd just ghost it because the demi registered first. There was no good solution and it would only be infinitely worse in the current meta.

---

While its true that there is probably some shenanigans with having multiple pets, this is only true for demi-summoning itself. There was zero reason for gem summons to be tied to the demi system though. It would have worked identical to how it is now if the primal summon was just a VFX that had no impact on Carbuncle at all. In fact it would be significantly better because there wouldn't be a delay on damage caused by the entity spawning in before it can attack. Just an utterly absurd decision. Anyone actually playing Summoner could tell within 10 seconds what an awful idea that was even with the pet being made damn near vestigial but they did it anyways.

Honestly I have 0 faith in Dawntrail fixing anything for Summoner. I've been saying the demi summon mechanic is awful since it came out in Stormblood, and yet the dev team has doubled down on it to the exclusion of everything else in the jobs kit. It's just stripping everything out while ignoring the problems this one mechanic has infested the job with, and even with all of that it still hasn't fixed anything. They'll probably just delete the rat and happily exclaim they finally fixed ghosting without having fixed anything at all.

If I sound bitter, it's because I am. I've given them 3 expansions to solve the root problem and they've not only ignored it every single time, they've also just doubled down and made it worse every single time too.

[Cabalabob]

It was with Stormblood, and it's the reason I'm always in absolute disbelief when people say SB was peak Summoner. Does no one else remember what a disaster trying to get Garuda to contagion before the demi window was? God what an awful experience. Either it took so long you started drifting from Trick and other buffs or you'd just ghost it because the demi registered first. There was no good solution and it would only be infinitely worse in the current meta.

---

While its true that there is probably some shenanigans with having multiple pets, this is only true for demi-summoning itself. There was zero reason for gem summons to be tied to the demi system though. It would have worked identical to how it is now if the primal summon was just a VFX that had no impact on Carbuncle at all. In fact it would be significantly better because there wouldn't be a delay on damage caused by the entity spawning in before it can attack. Just an utterly absurd decision. Anyone actually playing Summoner could tell within 10 seconds what an awful idea that was even with the pet being made damn near vestigial but they did it anyways.

Honestly I have 0 faith in Dawntrail fixing anything for Summoner. I've been saying the demi summon mechanic is awful since it came out in Stormblood, and yet the dev team has doubled down on it to the exclusion of everything else in the jobs kit. It's just stripping everything out while ignoring the problems this one mechanic has infested the job with, and even with all of that it still hasn't fixed anything. They'll probably just delete the rat and happily exclaim they finally fixed ghosting without having fixed anything at all.

If I sound bitter, it's because I am. I've given them 3 expansions to solve the root problem and they've not only ignored it every single time, they've also just doubled down and made it worse every single time too.

At this point I honestly think they should just rip the bandaid off and get rid of carbuncle and turn everything into nothing more than animations, similar to dissidia’s Yuna. I have HATED that suggestion every time I’ve seen it come up in the past when people talk about SMN reworks, but we’re basically there already and carbuncle is just a delusion that we’re still a pet job. If they removed him and just made it so when you used radiant aegis a carbuncle jumped out of your book, shone a light on the target then vanished, I don’t think it would make any difference at all…

Searing light could then be given a new Carbuncle animation, OP’s suggestion to replace fester and painflare with Carbuncle related animations could fit, maybe just throw them on a charge system and do away with energy drain and replace ruin with egi-assault (really just ruin with a new animation of a carbuncle auto-attacking) just to completely eradicate any trace of arcanist from the job.

They could then rework the gem summons into just animations as well, replace the gemshine animations with just an egi coming out of your shoulder and launching the attack, demi-summons could be put on a stack system similar to what other jobs are getting like WAR’s inner release, other than that they wouldn’t need to change because there’s no janky carbuncle interaction for them anymore and we’re there.

It’s not the route I would have chosen personally. In my opinion SMN was on the right track with stormblood and particularly shadowbringers, it just needed some refining. But the endwalker rework killed my hope that they could give me the summoner I wanted to see.

[Supersnow845]

At this point I honestly think they should just rip the bandaid off and get rid of carbuncle and turn everything into nothing more than animations, similar to dissidia’s Yuna. I have HATED that suggestion every time I’ve seen it come up in the past when people talk about SMN reworks, but we’re basically there already and carbuncle is just a delusion that we’re still a pet job. If they removed him and just made it so when you used radiant aegis a carbuncle jumped out of your book, shone a light on the target then vanished, I don’t think it would make any difference at all…

They could then rework the gem summons into just animations as well, replace the gemshine animations with just an egi coming out of your shoulder and launching the attack, demi-summons could be put on a stack system similar to what other jobs are getting like WAR’s inner release, other than that they wouldn’t need to change because there’s no janky carbuncle interaction for them anymore and we’re there.

It’s not the route I would have chosen personally. In my opinion SMN was on the right track with stormblood and particularly shadowbringers, it just needed some refining. But the endwalker rework killed my hope that they could give me the summoner I wanted to see.

I support doing this as well but since they got so committed to the Demi idea they also messed SCH up with it so they would also have to do something to fix SCH which can still kinda cling to the title of pet job

[Cabalabob]

I support doing this as well but since they got so committed to the Demi idea they also messed SCH up with it so they would also have to do something to fix SCH which can still kinda cling to the title of pet job

To me it’s long overdue that they split SMN and SCH entirely. Either it’s time to do away with the class system altogether and just make us jobs from the start, or update it so arcanist is made into the SCH base class and rework it into a healer and give SMN a new evoker base class that’s just a subsection of the arcanist guild.

[Ggwppino]

At this point I honestly think they should just rip the bandaid off and get rid of carbuncle and turn everything into nothing more than animations, similar to dissidia’s Yuna. I have HATED that suggestion every time I’ve seen it come up in the past when people talk about SMN reworks, but we’re basically there already and carbuncle is just a delusion that we’re still a pet job. If they removed him and just made it so when you used radiant aegis a carbuncle jumped out of your book, shone a light on the target then vanished, I don’t think it would make any difference at all…

Searing light could then be given a new Carbuncle animation, OP’s suggestion to replace fester and painflare with Carbuncle related animations could fit, maybe just throw them on a charge system and do away with energy drain and replace ruin with egi-assault (really just ruin with a new animation of a carbuncle auto-attacking) just to completely eradicate any trace of arcanist from the job.

They could then rework the gem summons into just animations as well, replace the gemshine animations with just an egi coming out of your shoulder and launching the attack, demi-summons could be put on a stack system similar to what other jobs are getting like WAR’s inner release, other than that they wouldn’t need to change because there’s no janky carbuncle interaction for them anymore and we’re there.

It’s not the route I would have chosen personally. In my opinion SMN was on the right track with stormblood and particularly shadowbringers, it just needed some refining. But the endwalker rework killed my hope that they could give me the summoner I wanted to see.

Currently the smn is very average class. Very nice to see for the VFX, but on the gameplay side it really doesn't have anything different compared to the other classes and it doesn't have anything actually characteristic that influences the way you play and optimize.
I personally am convinced that by reintroducing the pet system done as it should be done, it would make the class a one of a kind class again.