SMN Feels Underwhelming?

[Akiza]

Trance was your idea because you wanted to be a primal and nuke like Bahamut. That isn't good enough?

Since SE used my idea for the Heavensward Expanison maybe they'll use another one of my ideas for 4.0. I will say I told you so when SE gives Summoner a new form of summoning which allows us to summon Hydaelyn and the Twelve.

[SoloWingMetatron]

Since SE used my idea for the Heavensward Expanison maybe they'll use another one of my ideas for 4.0. I will say I told you so when SE gives Summoner a new form of summoning which allows us to summon Hydaelyn and the Twelve.

Not to sound cheeky but I think it's more likely SE had Dreadwyrm Trance in the works before you or I even picked up on the idea of Primal fusions. SE start developing content at least one year ahead of schedule after all. So development of this would have started before Dreams of Ice was released, which was when we first learnt Iceheart could fuse with Shiva's Aether. So it wasn't really your idea it was the devs, but anyways that's neither here nor there.

I wouldn't be against the idea of an ability that summoned a portion of Hydaelyn or the Twelve. However these are entities that are directly linked to the Warrior of Light, not just Summoners. Which would suggest if a Summoner can call forth Hydaelyn/The Twelve, then all of the other jobs would need to be able to use their power/essence also in some way. Which would be kinda lame I feel as every jobs new abilities would all look the same practically.

[Akiza]

SMN kind of feels underwhelming in terms of abilities but I can't argue with the effectiveness of them. No one quite wipes out crowds like a SMN can.

Do I still want to summon a full primal like Shiva (story reasons preventing that, get out of here!) or have the abilities feel better in general? Sure.

Pretty sure just about anyone can summon Primals in this game since its common place so thats part of the reason why Summoners don't summon primals.

Not to sound cheeky but I think it's more likely SE had Dreadwyrm Trance in the works before you or I even picked up on the idea of Primal fusions. SE start developing content at least one year ahead of schedule after all. So development of this would have started before Dreams of Ice was released, which was when we first learnt Iceheart could fuse with Shiva's Aether. So it wasn't really your idea it was the devs, but anyways that's neither here nor there.

I wouldn't be against the idea of an ability that summoned a portion of Hydaelyn or the Twelve. However these are entities that are directly linked to the Warrior of Light, not just Summoners. Which would suggest if a Summoner can call forth Hydaelyn/The Twelve, then all of the other jobs would need to be able to use their power/essence also in some way. Which would be kinda lame I feel as every jobs new abilities would all look the same practically.

Even though Hydaelyn/The Twelve are directly linked to the Warrior of Light other jobs still wouldn't be able to use their power/essence like the Summoner since they haven't learned the Summoning Art. If Summoner did call forth Hydaelyn/The Twleve based on lore other jobs will get goddess/god form.

[NovaLevossida]

SMN kind of feels underwhelming in terms of abilities but I can't argue with the effectiveness of them. No one quite wipes out crowds like a SMN can.

Do I still want to summon a full primal like Shiva (story reasons preventing that, get out of here!) or have the abilities feel better in general? Sure.

[myahele]

The most I can think of is that we'll get more Bahamut-like spells for dreadwyrm trance since we it seems we'll be very tied to Bahamut.

That and due to ability bloat I don't think we'll 5 abilities ... but I guess we'll find out next expansion. With Pet glamours then perhaps it wont be necessary to have new egis.

[Akiza]

I think we will get 5 new abilities next expansion then 5.0 onwards will be upgardes to existing skill and new traits since with a 99 level cap MMO's tend to give all of the abilities a job will ever have at 70.

[ShadowWolf252]

So I feel weird posting about this given that I have yet to get a class to max level but I guess that shouldn't necessarily invalidate my opinion. I also felt like SMN was a bit underwhelming when I found out you only got the three Egis and that one wasn't even that used outside of a solo setting. Now I do enjoy the rotation (although I do wish the pets were a little more involved) but I miss having all the summoners be relevant. One solution that I've been sort of enamored with was to actually bring back elemental weaknesses. Now, I know, the system sucked in the original FFXIV and, let's be frank, in FFXI as well. But, there are fun aspects of having elemental weaknesses too and maybe getting rid of it completely was throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

[Sorry this is a long post, continued in next post...]
[1/4]

[ShadowWolf252]

The way that I would see it working for SMN is like this:

-You have a monster that is weak to a specific element. This weakness is indicated by an icon or colored dot or something similar next to it's name. No pointless scan ability or looking up weakness charts.

-You take out the pet of the element the monster is weak to, e.g. Garuda for wind, and that changes your DoTs to deal wind aspected damage. It would be nice if it changed the spell names from like Ruin to Choke (a la the FFXI debuffs) and the visuals but that's not necessary.

-The DoT damage is then affected by a damage multiplier >1, that would be tuned obviously to keep it in line with classes that don't deal aspected damage. This would be the primary impetus for using one pet over another.

[2/4]

[ShadowWolf252]

-It would be nice though if the egis then had some damaging abilities of their own that you could use off cooldown that were aspected to their respective egis element but were otherwise sort of identical (although they could be flavored differently, if you will).

-It would be nice if each egi could give the group an elemental specific buff (think like the mass blink in FFXI) that could provide some sort of utility to the raid. But, this would admittedly have the potential of being really difficult to balance. In theory, if the damage mulitplier for elemental weaknesses wasn't too large you would have the interesting choice of do you use the egi the monster is weak to or the one that has a more useful utility ability, but that might be going a little too deep.

-Otherwise the spells SMN uses are exactly the same, they just have a different elemental aspect depending on which egi you have out.

[3/4]

[ShadowWolf252]

-Maybe have a relatively even distribution of elemental weaknesses instead of like having only 5 monsters weak to earth and everything under the sun be weak to lightning like in FFXI.

-Elemental resistance gear is something that never happens.

What is nice about this solution, I think, is that it allows for a way to make each egi useful in different fights and bring in a bit of diversity without actually changing the job too fundamentally. Of course, this would require some modifications to BLM as well. But they could do something similar with having BLM switch "Elemental Stances" (you know...like GW2 elementalists) so if the monster is weak to water you have like an "Astral Water" and "Umbral Fire" sort of thing going on, circling the elemental wheel as necessary. And same with Thunder I guess? But basically it's the same thing, you're using elemental weaknesses to add a bit of simple diversity without actually changing the mechanics of each job really.
[4/4]