So why was Summoner advertised as a pet class

[Dragonskin]

I'm of 2 minds on this. While I really liked that in XI your summons had more abilities per summon and kinda had roles.. the issue was, when were you in a group where you actually used your summons more than just for 1 attack or buff? Almost never. In XI SMN was a healer in almost every group I was ever in. So you never really saw their summons unless there was some buff or specific attack they wanted to use anyway.

Now in XIV your pets stay out all the time and because they are out all the time they have less abilities.. well not really that many less, but you don't have to manually control all of them like you did XI so it kinda feels like less. At least in XIV you aren't stuck to healing as your primary role and just using pets occasionally. Which I think is better in my opinion. My main issue is the lack of summons and their appearance more than anything else. I miss my Fenrir, Leviathan and Ramuh.. they looked so freaking cool in XI and now we have to wait to see if they become available in XIV as some elemental looking avatar .

[Sadana]

I think it would be kind of neat if ALL of the summoner's actions had to be done through the pet. That makes sense to me. Trying to swap between spells I'm casting and spells my egi is casting makes me feel I'm playing two characters at once. I'll readily admit, in general, I need more practice in the ACN jobs.

Of course... I think it would have been more FF-ish if summoners actually summoned things for attacks. But I guess, graphics wise, that would be too much for the ps3 (or just about anyone)?

[Dragonskin]

Of course... I think it would have been more FF-ish if summoners actually summoned things for attacks. But I guess, graphics wise, that would be too much for the ps3 (or just about anyone)?

FFXI you had true avatars of the primals. I don't believe them when they state that it was a limiting factor for these machines with even more power behind them than a PS2 had. Maybe if they weren't so focused on making FATES their primary new feature then they could have focused more on other things. You couldn't display as many people in FFXI at 1 time, but honestly I don't care because you can't display all the people in FFXIV either. So if culling was the reason to restrict primal avatars then they messed up... because you can't see everything anyway so they shouldn't have tried to give the illusion they could.

[Lodiodrive]

At the end of the game in raids, Ifrit and Titan have no application. If you pull out Titan because a tank dies in any fight unless its in the first minute most of your DPS are going to die before he gains enough hate to hold the monsters attention. Ifrit still does lower damage than garuda even though you would think its higher based on his baseline potency and if you want to use him in a fight you have to use so many sustains and focus so much attention on him that he's an additional dps loss. Garuda Egi is the only pet you will use end game in a _raid_ and shes a graphically manifested DoT/Auto-attack spell for summoners. Enkindle is great but its on a 6 minute cool down and is hard to notice going off sometimes so lacks a lot of the flashyness we had come to love from the summoner class. I'm a summoner forever and I enjoy the class, but it doesnt feel like a summoner. I'm a warlock from WoW in the Final Fantasy universe. My pets should be the focus when I'm fighting someone not my DoT rotations. I should also be required to change pets in a fight for the max efficiency. I should have pets that provide offensive damage and buffs as well as defensive buffs. Each Egi should have its own set of cooldowns, the class should have a much higher skill cap, and the pet controls need to provide more positive feedback and should have the pet react immediately even if you're going to clip a cast, however clipping a cast should not put the ability on cooldown without providing the desired affect.

TL;DR

Make summoner like it was in ffxi, but do it smarter.

[Zarzak]

While I found XI's lacking as you mentioned. I think they went too far the other direction in XIV.

I would like to see closer to mages in EQ (if you played) Simple explanation would be mages were EQ wizards who lost some of their DD power and pumped it into their pet. And most of their cooldowns were based around their pet (draw energy, aka hp, from your pet to empower your attacks for example) Overall their dps was similar but its source was more divided.

I like the persistent pets we got in XIV but I feel that SMN should be more focused on doing things with their pet than ignoring its existence and focusing on a dot rotation. Give them a big cooldown that allows them to summon all 3 egi for 10-15 seconds or something once every 3 minutes. Would be fun/interesting. Give their pets powerful enkindles/abilities.

[NefGP]

The reason we have Egi is because YP wanted to keep the Primals "special" and introduce them as a weekly occurring instanced battle in random locations for FCs to battle them and earn the right to summon them (once) after filling up a meter similar to an LB. We've yet to see any real details materialize on this however, and in the mean time we have what is in my view a very half-arsed Job (much like BRD) that suffers from "job confusion" i.e. it's not sure what it's really supposed to be about and just has a bizarre mix of skills. Seriously, Bio, Virus, etc... all of that stuff screams Dark Knight, but they stuck it on ACN/SMN?! The hell?!


Scrap the whole damn class/job. Remove the spells (they're effective, but they don't feel like they fit SMN... maybe leave Psychik in place) and put a greater emphasis on controlling the pet and spending our MP on pet commands and other abilities. I don't mind the micro-management aspect of SMN, I'd just rather it be more geared towards directing my summon's actions.

This also raises the skill ceiling on the job, as the player would become much more closely invested in the pet and said pet's performance would be more directly determined by the player. Again the problem in XI wasn't so much that SMN was spending too much MP (though it was to a degree) it was more that the MP being spent wasn't worth it. That's easy enough to fix, especially in this game. Summoner should have its role defined not by a set of default spells, but why which summon it has out at the time. To that end, I'd like to see Leviathan be a healer type pet (since it's water-based). As for Ramuh, hard to say - the only thing that comes to mind is another dps but one that is based on critical hits and/or inflicting status ailments like Paralysis which is lightning based now (was Ice in XI).