Adding fuel to the fire, Summoner's future

[Charisma]

I will give you the graphics if you concede on the size. The screen blocking behemoths of the past have no place in a 'dodgeball' mechanic game, regardless if you put them in a corner or not.

I dont even think the majority wants them in the original size.. they just want them to look identical and not some weird looking glowy silhouette

[Crxssroad]

I'm not a summoner, nor do I plan on being a summoner so my opinion may be completely irrelevant(tbh, the only real knowledge I have of summoners I have is from my brother), but I think Summoners play just fine the way they are. As someone looking from the outside in, I can say it's a VERY versatile class. They're able to dish out decent damage(second highest I believe?), provide supplementary healing and rezzing, while also being able to tank(with the titan-egi). What other class provides this kind of flexibility? And this flexibility lets it live up to its name.


The biggest thing that seems to be bothering some people is how the damage is being dealt. I've heard no one complaining about the amount of damage it actually puts out(which, as I mentioned earlier, is fairly large) and the fact that they can fulfill multiple roles.

I think part of the problem stems from it's base class(arcanist is it? I'm not sure, just bare with me) and how it's shared with another job. This base class affects both Summoners and Scholars so any change done to the Arcanist class in benefit of the Summoner job will also affect the Scholar job. Now, I don't know how rotations work for either class, but I assume it's a little of the same during scenarios where the player is soloing. During dungeons/boss fights, DoTs are very appropriate for Scholars as their main job is to heal, applying a DoT to the boss and quickly switching over to heal is most effective. In a sense, you could even say that their play style is "summoner-like"(other players being the pseudo-summons). These DoTs and the like come from the Arcanist class, which Summoners have access to, as a result, they use these skills to increase their damage output. That's why the job seems to focus on managing DoTs. You have access to them, right? So why not use them? And since your job is to deal damage and not heal, you'll be using them even more than the Scholar.

The only way this job would be able to change its play style is if it, one, creates a new base class specifically for Summoners that forces the Summoner to use skills that directly affect its summon, thereby increasing the damage it deals and shifting the focus of the summoner to "summon managing" rather than "DoT managing", or, two, with further updates and level cap increases, forgoing the arcanist class(by this I mean stop adding skills to the base arcanist class) and increasing the number of skills each individual job receives.

If the first thing is done(changing the base class), Summoners would lose some of their versatility(by this I mean their ability to directly aid with healing and rezzing) but they would gain a new arsenal of skills that would focus on aiding the summon(damage increases, attack speed increases, ability to inflict element-specific damage) while not completely forgoing DoTs as they could, theoretically, initiate a DoT and return to Summon managing. If the second thing is done(forgoing the arcanist class after level 50 in favor of more jobcentric skills) this could create a "rift" in Summoner playstyles. By this I mean that Summoners could opt between "DoT managing" and "Summon managing" as the base arcanist class would still be there(although I assume that the later skills might entice more players to "summon manage" rather than "DoT manage".

And that's my uninformed two cents!

tl;dr You guy seem good the way you are even though I don't know the specifics.

EDIT: Forgot about the actual summons. They do seem kind of pathetic, tbh. They could definitely use an increase in size. Not ginormous, mind you, there's no point in cluttering a screen for an ego boost regardless of the impact it would have on a server. At the most, the size of a chocobo as everyone can summon one. It seems like an ideal size.

[Ardan]

Of course I miss an entire two pages worth of comedy gold. Why oh why did I decide to have a 4 hour nap while this witch hunt was happening?

[abzoluut]

Let's hope SE chooses to go the overhaul route for 3.0. This means they decide to drop the current class/job system and just give us jobs.

While I don't play SMN myself, I love to see them around. Unfortunately they are nothing but casters with one pet right now. There is nothing wrong with that except that it's a summoner. You would think it would actually summon stuff during battle. Right now SCHs are summoners too since they summon their pet one time and that's it for the fight.

Why not give summoners abilities which their summons execute? For example: summoners will have a rotation where they at some point have to execute X1 ability. This particular ability is Titan's. So we'll see Titan summoned quickly and does the attack and disappears followed by the appearance of Ramuh because ability X2 is ready. I could work this all out, but you get the general idea. This not only makes one feel like a SMN, it will also give the devs more oppurtunities to implement useful stuff for a job.

I still have hope..

[Exstal]

I think Beastmaster is what all these people will migrate to, if it releases.

[Ardan]

I think Beastmaster is what all these people will migrate to, if it releases.

They'll find some bullshit reason to hate on that too, probably. Then we'll start seeing threads based on "I don't FEEL like a Beastmaster!".

[abzoluut]

They are not going to do an overhaul of a class that's working perfectly fine minus a little QoL changes here and there. What's so hard to comprehend about that ?

I emphasized the fact that they don't give me the SMN feel. They work fine as is, I didn't say they're not.

As for your friendly comment about comprehension, I just wanted to push on words Yoshida said. I thought it was common knowledge by now.

Last year when Scholar was introduced at E3, it was mentioned that it would branch off from the same class as Summoner, and this would be a mechanic that would be used more, but it has yet to happen for any other class. You haven’t announced anything yet, but are there any other plans to introduce anything like this? For example, another swordsman besides Paladin?

Well, we need to look into this and whether we want to keep that plan, it’s something we have to consider as we add new jobs and classes. One of the more difficult things with the system is that when a job is derived from a class, it's tied to the class's actions. Also, when we make multiple jobs from one class, the weakness with having multiple jobs branch out of one class without being able to freely switch stats around is exposed. This wasn’t a problem initially because both of those jobs were simultaneously added and it was planned from the start, but now we have to carefully think about this. One thing we could consider, for example, is a hybrid job derived from more than one class, but it may change depending on what we want to add. The number of jobs will increase even further with 3.0 (the expansion pack), and at that point we might decide on an entirely new mechanism, so please hang on for further details.

So yes, I hope they will overhaul things so they don't have to worry about the aforementioned issues which are basically poor 1.0 remnants.

If you want to read the whole interview to comprehend it a little bit better: http://www.bluegartr.com/threads/122...edia-Interview

[Assirra]

That sounds less like an complete overhaul and more like a stat allocation change tbh.

[Dwill]

I emphasized the fact that they don't give me the SMN feel. They work fine as is, I didn't say they're not.

As for your friendly comment about comprehension, I just wanted to push on words Yoshida said. I thought it was common knowledge by now.

Last year when Scholar was introduced at E3, it was mentioned that it would branch off from the same class as Summoner, and this would be a mechanic that would be used more, but it has yet to happen for any other class. You haven’t announced anything yet, but are there any other plans to introduce anything like this? For example, another swordsman besides Paladin?

Well, we need to look into this and whether we want to keep that plan, it’s something we have to consider as we add new jobs and classes. One of the more difficult things with the system is that when a job is derived from a class, it's tied to the class's actions. Also, when we make multiple jobs from one class, the weakness with having multiple jobs branch out of one class without being able to freely switch stats around is exposed. This wasn’t a problem initially because both of those jobs were simultaneously added and it was planned from the start, but now we have to carefully think about this. One thing we could consider, for example, is a hybrid job derived from more than one class, but it may change depending on what we want to add. The number of jobs will increase even further with 3.0 (the expansion pack), and at that point we might decide on an entirely new mechanism, so please hang on for further details.

So yes, I hope they will overhaul things so they don't have to worry about the aforementioned issues which are basically poor 1.0 remnants.

If you want to read the whole interview to comprehend it a little bit better: http://www.bluegartr.com/threads/122770-Yoshida-Interview-(June-12)-Joint-Media-Interview

You're the one that doesn't seem to comprehend it and taking it out of context.

That quote refers to the them not wanting players to be penalized when switching from a class to a job. It has nothing to do with overhauling any of the currently existing classes and jobs.

[abzoluut]

I see a question: will there be other jobs branching out of current classes? Answer: "we need to look into this whether we want to keep that plan". One argument for this is the attribute system. There is no context bending on my part, literally what it says.

Not to mention the part in bold text where it clearly states an "entirely new mechanism" might appear. Let's agree to disagree, time will tell.