Summoner revamp

[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.

[Delily]

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.

Because if a summoner can't summon Ifrit, I'm not sure how well that would pan out.

[quote[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.[/quote]

This is not FF6 Online.

[ThirdKeyOfSun]

I know it doesn't solve anything really, but what about aesthetics? What if our normal spells were replaced with "lesser summon" equivalents that do the exact same damage and effects?

Say you cast shadowflare(with a different name I suppose) but when it is done a Diabolos (no larger than a male roe) would come out and throw down an Ominous Ruin dome. That would be our new shadowflare. Cast bio2(with a different name) and Siren comes out and drops Requiem on the enemy and vanishes. Make all of our base spells these "mini" summons and then we can do something interesting with our actual Egi after maybe D: This way we would be summoning all the time and they would be classic type (one cast one effect) and we keep Egi.