Summoner revamp

[Awful]

I don't mind the DoT dmg based gameplay SMNs are in a MUCH better place then what they were in before WHMs and BLMs were the AoE kings back in 2.0 before the Flare and Holy nerfs I remember only being able to Bane 4 targets what a joke that was. What really made me mad at the start of 3.0 with SMNs was Ruin III how underwhelming was that? 120 potency when you have SCHs Broil doing more? I loved getting Deathflare and Bobhamut Trance but having Ruin III having such low potency made my stomach turn. Back in 2.0 i'd just roll my eyes when I had a SMN in my group instead of a WHM and a BLM with a BRD doing Myth runs in Brayflox HM but hey it was what it was back then.

I really do like where SMNs are at there's things they could improve on but for now destroying everything with Deathflare and a Bane that actually hits everything is a god send. Even single target DPS is really solid once you get the hang of it it's just a little tricky and takes practice is all like all DPS classes.

[Zaresin]

I'll be completely honest I've been wanting the summoners summons to actually resemble the primal they are modeled after. The class for the longest time was so under whelming. With trance and ruin 3 they have some flashy skills but their name sake.....it leaves me feeling disappointed. I could never stick with it because it felt like yoshi and his crew were trying to copy WOW's warlock but failing at it. Their skills are not noticeable half the time and overall design quality of the egi is abysmal. That prob won't ever change.

[Kaeoni]

@OP, Agreed.
The Summons should play a FAR greater role than they currently do. What we're currently playing in XIV isn't a summoner. And I think the titles of these jobs are pretty important. If you're going to label a job as a Summoner it should be a Summoner. Summoner as it stands in the game is fine. It functions great and It's fun.Strip the jobs title from it and aside from the actual avatar related abilities which are in the minority and are nothing less than supplemental damage and utility to your kit; the class could have been literally named anything. I mean really, make up a new class for the FF franchise, you have the ability to do that, or some other DoT class that exists that i don't care to research. 80% of it's toolkit has nothing to do with your Avatar. Which traditionally in the franchise these numbers would have been flipped. I'm fine with the Actual summoner doing actions to supplement Avatar Damage. But currently it's the other way around.

I've never been upset with how Summoner as it stands currently performs. But It would have been a better move to strip the Avatars from the class, Or lock the Class into Carbuncle only (the best looking Avatar in the game which we almost never see) and named the class something else. Leaving the Summoner title to a real summoner where the power is flipped from The Carbuncle wielding Dot Spreader.

You don't have to agree with me. But that's how I would have done things.

However... Summoner was one of the classes hinted at by SE for the release of 2.0 which got even myself hyped. It was "accidently" shown on their site even. I believe it's burdened with it's Arcanists Background, and I'm not sure how you fix a class without making most of it's current toolkit either worthless or removing it entirely for Avatar heavy related abilities and skills.

I believe it was that hype that SE wanted for the 2.0 release. Everyone knows what summoner is and how cool a class it was. So in that sense, mission accomplished.

[Alaltus]

I believe it's burdened with it's Arcanists Background, and I'm not sure how you fix a class without making most of it's current toolkit either worthless or removing it entirely for Avatar heavy related abilities and skills.

I don't think ACN's background is a problem; from what i've seen/remember ACN = all about carbuncle, Smn = all about egis. The burden i think lies with Sch being tied to ACN and sticking it and SMN with the dots SCH needs to dd and heal. If they seperated SCH from ACN they then could make changes to ACN and SMN without harming or over powering SCH. If there was a demand for a dot class to assume SMN's role then they could make another seperate job; Mystic maybe? They would have to completely remake the cutscenes for ACN if they took carbuncle from it where as dots aren't even referenced in them when i checked.

[Leigaon]

I don't think ACN's background is a problem; from what i've seen/remember ACN = all about carbuncle, Smn = all about egis. The burden i think lies with Sch being tied to ACN and sticking it and SMN with the dots SCH needs to dd and heal. If they seperated SCH from ACN they then could make changes to ACN and SMN without harming or over powering SCH.

It looks like it would be a delicate balance for sure. I don't know if DoTs were referenced, I'm reading up on the lore and the story so it doesn't say much though my guess, would be that we use so much concentration to summon and maintain the egi's that our talents can only be diverted for only so long (this is from a lore stand point only.) so Arcanists were able to create spells from their "arcane geometries" that didn't do a lot of damage initially but did them over time so we could put our focus back into the pets. Or maybe that's just a load of dung I spread around myself to mask the smell of disappointment...I will accept either! lol

Still, I guess if we are going by descriptions one of the things that stands out is how they make the pets in the descriptions defined as the defining power. Though that's not the case, I don't really fear Ifrit or Leviathan. I am afraid of that boat we fight on since apparently we can't swim. A bit of a downer to know that I'm a warrior of light that has travelled through space, time and taken down ancient evils yet I need floaties on my arms....and now all I can think about is Robin Hood Men in Tights and how Little John was drowning in the river..that's us.

I think besides just the pet skins being re-done we lack a lot of mechanics in this game to help each other out. I think there should be more party wide support (from all jobs), but that would come from our pets. I think there needs to be more debuffing on the mobs that isn't DPS based (Slow, Blind, Paralyze, Gravity-EvaDown). I feel going more into the pet is the best way to go, we are capped right now with what we need to do just to sustain our DoT's. So maybe you're right about removing them from SMN and ACN, and find another means of conjuring damage from the caster. Or even make a synergy of it from us and the pets. Say instead of Misama II, depending on the pet we have out, we get an elemental AoE DoT if they keep them around. Burn / Choke / Shock etc...

Though with 4.0, maybe they will change things. I do still enjoy my SMN, so I will complain a bit but in the end..I will always run in ready to book-slap the crap out of something.

...And before people say its too late, let me remind you we've remade classes completely in the past. Hell, we took out the elemental wheel lol.

True, they took out a rather large mechanic, so it is possible. I think it is possible to do it though we need to break a few things for it to happen...I'm sorry I am still picturing my Roe in a shallow puddle screaming he's drowning.

[Jerbob]

Personally I think Summoner is unsalvagable. It's a great job, but it's Arcanist. Let's call it Arcanist all the way through to 60, split off SCH to a separate job (that shares spells like Bio in name but no longer mechanically), and we can work on a new SMN. I think people that play SCH might thank us too.

Folding SMN into ACN would be easy - just replace the Egi and Carbuncles with the elemental sprites we see all over the place. Arcanima is all about higher geometry and "living but not quite" constructs and diseases - these crystalline, sort-of-alive sprites are perfect! The Dreadwyrm Trance stuff can be reflavoured just as easily - retool is as using arcanima to bring out the intrinsic tendency for stuff to decay and disintegrate all in one burst, or something similar. That's pretty much what Ruin is! As for the quests, I'm sure a lot of the SMN specific ones can be salvaged by some clever changing of dialogue and the swapping of Egi models for sprite models.

Obviously a lot of people like the existing SMN, so I think it's really important to preserve that whatever happens. I don't think rebranding the existing SMN as ACN takes anything away from that.

Rebuilding SMN as something new gives us the opportunity to avoid all of the lore reasons why Egi are so awful. It's all bound up in the fact that arcanima constructs drain us when they're created. If we can create some new summoning method that isn't full-on worship primal summoning and isn't "glue a bit of primal aether into this Carbuncle" then we have so much potential to work with! We know that Primals have some kind of soul that floats around in the void - can we link into that somehow? Actually conversing with some Primals like Garuda would be a lost cause, but Ramuh and Titan appear to actually be sane and rational beings that we could chat with. Certainly, the WoL is entirely opposed to Primal summoning, but so are some of the Primals themselves! We could work something out.

Of course it'd be silly to be summoning Primals just after joining the new "Summoner guild", whatever it may be called, so Carbuncle should be back on the cards as a "New SMN" exclusive. There's also no reason why we can't work our way up through various other obviously magical creatures - the summons from previous games like Fenrir and Diabolos - before we hit Primals at higher levels.

For personal context, I was extremely excited when I saw Arcanist added at the start of ARR. I jumped on that nigh instantaneously, got SMN to 50... and quit the game entirely, because it's nothing like what I actually wanted and I was so disappointed. I'm back now, for a while at least, but I'm not touching SMN with a 10 foot pole. I'm not one of these people who wants to put the whole dungeon into a 3 minute cutscene when I summon SuperBahamutUltraPrime, but I would like an actual pet class.

[Cabalabob]

Personally I think Summoner is unsalvagable. It's a great job, but it's Arcanist. Let's call it Arcanist all the way through to 60, split off SCH to a separate job (that shares spells like Bio in name but no longer mechanically), and we can work on a new SMN. I think people that play SCH might thank us too.

Rebuilding SMN as something new gives us the opportunity to avoid all of the lore reasons why Egi are so awful. It's all bound up in the fact that arcanima constructs drain us when they're created. If we can create some new summoning method that isn't full-on worship primal summoning and isn't "glue a bit of primal aether into this Carbuncle" then we have so much potential to work with! We know that Primals have some kind of soul that floats around in the void - can we link into that somehow? Actually conversing with some Primals like Garuda would be a lost cause, but Ramuh and Titan appear to actually be sane and rational beings that we could chat with. Certainly, the WoL is entirely opposed to Primal summoning, but so are some of the Primals themselves! We could work something out.

Of course it'd be silly to be summoning Primals just after joining the new "Summoner guild", whatever it may be called, so Carbuncle should be back on the cards as a "New SMN" exclusive. There's also no reason why we can't work our way up through various other obviously magical creatures - the summons from previous games like Fenrir and Diabolos - before we hit Primals at higher levels.

Even if they just renamed summoner to evoker and went through all the job quests and renamed summoner to evoker and summoning to evoking they could then do with that what they want. The job can continue to evolve as they see fit and no one would care. This would then free up Summoner to be something completely different.

And I don't see why this new summoner would need to have any link to primals whatsoever, it could be something completely separate that doesn't have anything to do with primals or aether or all the lore junk people keep citing why our pet can't look good or be powerful.

Let's say in the next expansion we go to the village of the mists. There we discover that the people live near a gateway to another dimension full of powerful beings called the espers. Some of the people in the village have made a pact with the espers to use their power to project their form into our world, they call this act summoning. By training with the local summoner's in the village of the mists we learn to commune with espers like maduin, Kirin, Valefor and others and summon them to fight by our side.

[Shurrikhan]

However... Summoner was one of the classes hinted at by SE for the release of 2.0 which got even myself hyped. It was "accidently" shown on their site even. I believe it's burdened with it's Arcanists Background, and I'm not sure how you fix a class without making most of it's current toolkit either worthless or removing it entirely for Avatar heavy related abilities and skills.

I'll agree that in terms of power, and clearly in terms of gameplay to all those who are playing the SMN currently, the current SMN is definitely solid. It probably should have been named Evoker or the like instead, given its gameplay component and subsequent identity, but it is solid.

However, I don't think that style has to be sacrificed to offer a more "SMN"-like playstyle alternative. It doesn't even need specs. All it needs is shared resources, choice of spenders, and balance. And it already has Aetherflow, a perfectly reasonable shared resource to work from.

Let's put it another way: does using Rouse and Spur on cooldown (except in the rare cases that Enkindle is desynced and they must be saved for its burst) in any way enhance SMN gameplay as it currently stands? But clearly neither do Fester, Energy Drain, Painflare, or Bane (apart from Garuda's Contagion) have any synergy with what your pet is doing, or even whether it exists?

So, trim the fat, and put it aside to create a second, newly attractive path. Increase the Aetherflow cap. Give Rouse and Spur stack costs. Rouse now gains some additional effects, including increasing pet size per stack. Change Spur to a pet-based attack, as responsive as a caster ability, but with pet interaction and dependence. Indirectly, you decrease SCH baseline pet output, which Yoshi has mentioned wanting to reduce, but giving them another useful spender option to spice up their arsenal as well. SMN in turn can now capitalize either upon his pet or himself. That, to me, is the simplest path.

What I'd want to do most though, is something that would have SMNs thinking their "blessed with their Arcanist background" rather than burdened by it. Rework it from the ground up as an immensely tactical and highly versatile class, viable between and alongside SMN and SCH, and then work the jobs from there. But that's a massive pipedream.

[crc0427]

It would sort of be interesting if:

1. The Egi was redesigned and larger
2. You control the Egi, and the SMN does the sort of "auto damage" roll and sort of hovers off to the side (or on the shoulder of the larger Egi?)
3. Have it so you have to have your Egi out to do more than just your basic damage of dots. Modify ruin etc to be specific spells or attack from the Egi you now control directly

While I play it, it definitely was not planned out well.

[Neela]

2. You control the Egi, and the SMN does the sort of "auto damage" roll and sort of hovers off to the side (or on the shoulder of the larger Egi?)

this would fit the term summoner very well for me... controlling the Egi itself like the monster-buffs down at palace of death would make so much fun. [dream] giving the player the choice of being a 2nd off-tank in demand, a melee fighter or caster to react to any given situation would be something the base can't complain about. it would focus the Egi over the dots - sure skills have to be balanced but raising/dropping potency on skills shouldn't be a problem at [/dream]

another interesting mechanic would be a fusion-skill if there would be more than one smn in the grp - f.e 2x summoned Ifrits will fuse for a stronger hellfire-enkindle or 2x Garudas for a "real" hurricane-enkindle. but i doubt that FF14 will ever implement char-combo-skills at all : (((