Summoner revamp

[MagiusNecros]

I've said it before. Summoner is a complete joke. Poor man's Necromancer. But half the players love their Super Arcanist so I really think the traditional Summoner is screwed. SMN is pretty much lol garuda DoT spread lolcontagion and then spam fancy oGCD's and ruin popguns.

Ifrit is barely used and Titan Egi is well an afterthought.

Tank enmity ratio's got buffed. Guess who didn't? Titan Egi.

Any new pet skills in HW? Nope. When was their last skill? 40. What level are you now? 60.

[Iromi]

I've said it before. Summoner is a complete joke. Poor man's Necromancer. But half the players love their Super Arcanist so I really think the traditional Summoner is screwed. SMN is pretty much lol garuda DoT spread lolcontagion and then spam fancy oGCD's and ruin popguns.

Ifrit is barely used and Titan Egi is well an afterthought.

Tank enmity ratio's got buffed. Guess who didn't? Titan Egi.

Any new pet skills in HW? Nope. When was their last skill? 40. What level are you now? 60.

This. SMN is a joke. It is not a PET class at all...it is a poison class. In 1.x we took a poll asking for a pet class, not some DoT mage with a "pet" that just stands there and shoots. contagion should have been a SMN ability long ago, more pets added and more abilities about the pet..not us.

It has been my "main" since 2.0 pre launch...and dont get me started on the pet glamours.

And as for the FFXI hate, SMN is totally different now. It is purely about the pets, buffs, debuffs, damage, and magical casting. We do not even sub /WHM anymore and rarely heal. You'll heal on SMN in FFXI as much as you physic in XIV. No one is asking for a SMN to stand there and heal in XIV...who in the world wants that?

People want a class that is about the pet and feels like the pet is a big role. That is easy to fix in XIV.

Just allow multiple pets with diff abilities. Hastega for the PT, how bout a cure ability that cleanses debuffs and heals a little. Then we can have abilities to make the pet cast strong magic. wnat more buffs..sure how bout increase stats on the PT. Refresh..etc..the possibilities are there but we are left with this bland job instead and battle system.

[Eloah]

same old stuff that has been said to death

Hmm... so a pet that has a hastega effect on the party, a cure ability, a cleanse ability... hmmm? Now i could be wrong but that sounds like a Scholar. Lets see, a cure, sounds like Embrace and Whispering Dawn, a cleanse, Fey Caress, a Hastega, hmm.. Fey Wind perhaps.

Seeiously, not to sound mean but please think before you post things like this.

[MagiusNecros]

Don't be a nitpick. The core concern you should care about is having the Pet be the bulk of the dps output. And not a glorified DoT. Players wanted a Pet class and they completely failed to deliver. Playstyle should be around the pet and not the master.

Funny thing with Titan Egi though. When it was able to Tank Ramuh Ex...the devs pretty much said "no no no a summoner beating content through it's pet? Poppycock! nerf nerf nerf"

Yeah exactly.

Why doesn't Ifrit have a line AoE rushdown attack? What about a party wide Earthen Ward? What about Rage of the Land being a Quake attack that does aoe damage with massive range? Why aren't we getting new egi's with new skills as primals get defeated and the SMN pulls partial strength from them? SMN doesn't need to summon the real thing. It could be a damn Astral Projection if they wanted it to be.

Why can we trance an Elder Primal but fail at life to conjure a sissy egi of Ramuh...who isn't a Elder Primal?

And then the kicker between BLM and SMN

SMN - Not enough aether. Can't summon shit. Taking aether from wasteland planet is bad.

BLM - Who cares. Take all the aether and mix it with your own and make em go boom.

But I'm sure Egi glamour will make ALL THE DIFFERENCE. Surely it will make me say "oh yes that's a summoner all right". NOT.

[WhiteArchmage]

Why can we trance an Elder Primal but fail at life to conjure a sissy egi of Ramuh...who isn't a Elder Primal?

And then the kicker between BLM and SMN

SMN - Not enough aether. Can't summon shit. Taking aether from wasteland planet is bad.

BLM - Who cares. Take all the aether and mix it with your own and make em go boom.

Lore reason or gameplay reason? Because both have answers.
Lore: We've stretched our own aether so thin that we're literally unable to attune and conjure another egi. A trance is the next best thing since we're taking that essence unto ourselves, and it's not like "oh, allagan summoners could summon whatever they wanted" because they couldn't, and the trance IS an allagan technique. Maybe in the future we'd get a Frost Trance, or a Levin Trance or whatever Alexander's title is, but for now we've spent so much of our aetheric reserves on giving shape to three mini-primals.
Your BLM argument is kinda flawed since Black and White Mages taking aether from the land was a direct cause of the flood that ended the War of the Magi, the consequences were that both Black and White Magic are now highly regulated and carry great stigmas with them. It is forbidden that any non-padjal use White Magic (with the exception of the WoL) and Black Mages were hunted down for the damage they could cause themselves and the planet. Not to mention that comparing archinima (which the modern summoner IS, by using an aetherial construct made of our own aether instead of crystals) with thaumaturgy (using the astral and umbral cycles) and conjury (borrowing aether from the land) is like comparing apples to oranges.

Gameplay reasons:
The devs know that to make the game balanced, they had to shift out the emelental wheel, making the resistances pretty useless. Maybe if the summoner had come out in 1.0 there would have been egis (since the plot line of primals draining the land of aether was from all the way in 1.0) from all six elements, making SMN a CNJ/pet hybrid (the 1.0 CNJ, which used all the elements). However, in 2.0 onwards, having 6 nearly identical pets whose only difference is the elemental damage they deal is redundant and a waste of already low resources; so, the trinity of melee/ranged/tank enters, make one pet useful for one thing. Unfortunately, that writes the devs into a corner: if a new pet is to be released, how do we justify it? what is the thing this pet has that makes it viable? Also, if the most of the DPS is on the pet then we go into the FFXI loldrg area. Lose your pet and you're useless until you can get it back.

Honestly, outside of making 4.0 into a "Oh, look, ANOTHER CATACLYSM! LET'S CHANGE EVERYTHING LOL" SMN is not going to change that drastically. Maybe 4.0 will actually give us a new egi, maybe it will allow us to do a Shiva/Thordan transformation WITHOUT it draining away all life on Hydaelin every time we need to stop the newest world-destroying abomination.

[Alaltus]

Snip

So the dev team lacked the imagination to make 6 Egis relevant without the elemental wheel?

Garuda- ranged piercing damage + piercing resist down
Ifrit- melee slashing damage + slashing resist down
Titan- melee blunt damage + blunt resist down
Ramuh- ranged blunt damage + magic resist down
Shiva- ranged slashing damage + evasion down
Leviathan- melee piercing damage + a strong dot.

Resist reductions already exist in the game so none of these would break the game. The choice of which Egi would mostly come down to whatever the party make up was and the summons pair up when in parties with multiple SMN. Thats just from 30 minutes of thinking on this, SE are more capable than i. Loldrg isn't an issue because the requirements for summoning aren't high in the first place.

The issue is that SE wants to run a skeleton crew on this game to make extra money/to focus on XV and a real SMN would require more development. Also Sch is an affliction mage with heals so they had to dump affliction spells on ACN and by extension SMN neither of which reference these spells in their lore; an experiment SE already admitted was a mistake.

[Duelle]

So the dev team lacked the imagination to make 6 Egis relevant without the elemental wheel?

one approach

Garuda-Egi - Caster pet.
Titan-Egi - Tank pet.
Ifrit-Egi - Melee pet.
Shiva-Egi - CC pet.
Leviathan-Egi - Anti-caster pet.
Ramuh-Egi - Damage aura/AoE pet.