Feedback: Summoner 8.0 Job Direction & Addressing Caster Raise Tax

[Reginald_Cain]

If yall dont like raise taxes then throw your coerthan tea leaves out into Scholars harbor. Revolt against king Yoshida and establish eorzean independence !

[mallleable]

Maybe a thing they could do for SMN is that when you summon Phoenix, it removes that cast time, and cool down on Phoenix Down so you can spam rezzes so long as you have a stash of Phoenix Downs in your inventory. And then make Summon Phenix its own cool down.

[Ayden]

Either

(A) Add raise to all casters (caster role)

or

(B) Remove raise from all casters

then balance from there. EASY

[Carighan]

Either

(A) Add raise to all casters (caster role)

or

(B) Remove raise from all casters

then balance from there. EASY

Yes please homogenize more, really the thing we don't have enough of yet... /sigh

[Aoyanagi]

I think personally smn should be reworked so you build to demis not from them. Instants should become casted GCD'd with the exception of Garuda and Maybe Phoenix.

Beyond that, add something that needs managing / choice. An easy route would be to add three more Arcanum summons, but retain the ability to only use three. Split them into high damage / low movement and High Movement / Utility and provide the choice of when you use them.
Im not good enough to figure out what this would look like on an ability to ability level.

I also feel like demis and arcanums shouldnt remove carbuncle. There is zero reason for it, but make carbuncle function like DRK's living shadow. It runs through a steady rotation, (and give it glamours beyond carbuncles for flavour) Give summoner ability OGCD's that empower or draw out speific things from that constand pet. Hell even make it so cabuncle acts like old Bahamut demi where it will execute an attack based on when you do.

final change id make is to allow banking of arcanum on a minute cooldown for Garuda, ifrit, Phoenix and Temu Banamut. So you can choose when to use it rather than force it within the window it currently is.

Overall it wouldnt likely change much, but breaking the punishing conveyer is needed and would mke the job a bit more difficult.

SMN could be a bit like blm in that conceptually its rotation isnt hard, but executionally is it.

Currently both concept and execution are easy unless you have high ping.

thank you :3 finally someone who comment on actualy redesign idea rather than the raise tax me added at the very end. would also appreciate if u read the redesign idea.

agree about the pet not replaced by demis, also bring back pet actions. as somethin that empower pets, maybe remember enkindle, rouse, spur?

Some really cool ideas here and I agree with more arcanum and making the one you chose more nuanced.

However im opposed to reverting summoner to a ramper like in stormblood. While summoner should be harder I dont think it should have a 2 minute opener just to build up 1 demi. The current ability to have a demi during the opener is something many of us begged for.

1st, i didnt mind 2mins opener, it wasnt that hard. 2nd, pls read about my redesign 1st. u can ignore the raise tax part if u not agree with it. yes raise tax shouldnt be a thing in a 1st place if u read my other comments.

god forbid people read before comment

[Carighan]

So to slightly re-iterate on something I wrote before because I really like the idea of building to demis, I'd envision Summoner like this:

You start with a random "set" of minors drawn. See below.

• You use those three minor summons.
• Only one minor generally has all-instant-casts or something comparable.
• After you used all three, you can summon a demi. Also randomly picked, as they all do equivalent damage (see below).
• With one exception: Demi-Phoenix. This one is always available but on a 120s. It essentially "aborts" the current cycle, instantly goes to a Demi, and this Demi is support centric. Damage down a lot, in turn it ground-targetted 15y AoE rezzes (with a short delay while the phoenix summons/forms, it's instant for us though), then has a very strong regen effect around itself and your filler becomes instant and pulses healing around the phoenix + the current heal/trigger buff is made a lot stronger and automatically applied on us the moment we summon the Phoenix to ensure we survive. This replaces the current rezz.

The "sets" mentioned above would be a set of 3 minor summons that each have 1 minor of the 3 categories:

• Ruby = high DPS, but also slow casts or even channels.
• Topaz = high mobility, medium DPS. This is the one that is all-instants.
• Emerald = medium mobility, low DPS, support-ish. Might be AoE runspeed, might be AoE regen, might be a passive self-only mobility while the summon is out, might be a teleport, whatever.

The demis are all equivalent in damage, but differ in their specific spell pattern only. This is purely for mechanical variety and to be able to add more summons/animations to the job, not balance.

[Connor]

I get the idea behind ‘building to Demi’s’ as opposed to starting with them but isn’t the job designed this way by necessity?

The way openers/120-rotations work means every job by necessity has to have its ‘big potency attack’ available at the start of a fight. Look at White Mages being changed to start with Afflatus Misery, all the ‘instantly charges gauge’ abilities, etc. Considering that, I wouldn’t be surprised if current outliers will change eventually to match. Bards starting with 100 song gauge, Black Mage starting battle with 3 Umbral hearts or 6 fire stacks, etc etc. Though I suppose technically they already have access to their ‘big potency attacks’ with Radiant Finale and Flare Star being fairly fast to reach with Ley Lines.

And personally, I don’t want them to replace Resurrection with a cooldown. Not only because it wouldn’t actually affect the ‘overall dps output they allot to Summoner’, but it would largely defeat the purpose of the skill in the first place if it was a cooldown.

There’s not much benefit in ‘covering mistakes that happen within an extremely short window during a specific summon’. The unreliability of Everlasting Flight and Lux Solaris are examples of this. Since you can’t control when you actually want to use it because it’s only available in a very narrow window, the whole thing ends up being wasted overhealing that nobody actually pays attention to. Cool-down raise would just fall into the same pitfalls; ‘I can’t use it when I need to so what does it even matter if it have it’.

You might get one or two moments where the stars align and someone dies during the ‘raise’ window, but I personally I think it’d be better to just continue with ‘you can Raise when you need it [rather than when cool-down dictates] but accessibility is balanced out by long cast time and prohibitively high MP costs’.

[Carighan]

Not strictly true. As fights tend to have a rather reliable length of either roughly 10 minutes or 25-ish minutes, we know the number of burst windows that happen, so having designed-one-less and having the other ones be marginally too strong is easy.

If the devs are willing to fudge with numbers (compare how WoW very early on started fudging PPM mechanics as that just works better to not frustrate players) then the game could even "taper off" such a bonus. As in, you don't have a 0s burst, your 120s burst is a fair amount stronger, your 240s a bit less so, and so on, on a curve, until after like 10 minutes there's no difference at all any more as you've made up for the total lost damage of the missing 0s burst by now.

But yeah it'd be more complex than just having a 0s burst. But then the whole burst thing is a separate issue their ought to solve, not use as a leash to constrain all further class design with.

[Connor]

Not strictly true. As fights tend to have a rather reliable length of either roughly 10 minutes or 25-ish minutes, we know the number of burst windows that happen, so having designed-one-less and having the other ones be marginally too strong is easy.

If the devs are willing to fudge with numbers (compare how WoW very early on started fudging PPM mechanics as that just works better to not frustrate players) then the game could even "taper off" such a bonus. As in, you don't have a 0s burst, your 120s burst is a fair amount stronger, your 240s a bit less so, and so on, on a curve, until after like 10 minutes there's no difference at all any more as you've made up for the total lost damage of the missing 0s burst by now.

But yeah it'd be more complex than just having a 0s burst. But then the whole burst thing is a separate issue their ought to solve, not use as a leash to constrain all further class design with.

Wouldn’t that cause a ton of variation in damage outputs overall though because of buff stacking? It would be massively impacted by things like ‘this job has no 0s burst when half buffs are up but it gets a big attack at 100 where all the buffs are up’; if a job diverged and had it’s main burst at the 0s mark, wouldn’t it just end up weaker overall than every job that had their main burst at like 120s because it’s when every buff is up? Or vice-versa. It would inevitably just collapse back into ‘stick everything good in the one window where it’s most optimal and call it a day’ lol. I think, based on current design anyway.

I mean, I agree that 120-meta shouldn’t be a constraint to job design, but at the same time there is the reality that devs simply don’t sadly. Easier to balance if they just stick all the big stuff in the exact same window for everyone, lol. Whether that’ll remain in 8.0 is yet to be seen though (but I won’t hold my breath lest I suffocate lol)