Summoner revamp

[YohSL]

Seven hells what is wrong with you people?

The one consistent thing is that Summoners summon, usually great honking magical creatures.
Sure the mechanics vary and the caster isn't always called a summoner, but the practice is the same. Through item or contract you expend your energy bringing them into the world, and they blow shit up for you. You summon, and sometimes support (thou in an mmo you would have to), and they do all the damage.

This is one of the few in the series where the summoner doesn't really summon anything, where the caster does all the work.
It's like having a Dragoon but finding out that they don't use spears or jumps, or a White Mage that doesn't use white magic and barely heals. You wouldn't bloody well call them a Dragoon or White Mage now would you? Even if they work well in whatever skill set they have, they still wouldn't fit the role, they would be that job in name only.

[Duelle]

Esp FF11, where you went on an epic quest for each and everyone of your summons, where they felt like part of your family by the time you were done.

And like unwanted relatives, you left them hidden where no one could see them while you spent your MP bar to heal in parties, since avatars had no justifiable reason for being out sans Astral Flow until the lv70 Blood Pacts were introduced. Yes, avatar potency scales with summoning skill, blood pacts were split into ward/rage, bloodpact recasts were shortened, and perpetuation was eased up, but that stuff was implemented almost a decade too late. Before that, SMNs had to deal with the inherently terrible design for avatars.

And it wouldn't be the first time in the series where an originally antagonistic summon becomes your ally in the end, usually after defeating them in battle and proving your worth to them. So Lore wise there shouldn't be anything prevent this.

There's a pretty good reason for this. Summons in prior games were independent entities that can choose to help you. FFXIV primals are built on a LOT of faith & crystals and are more like concepts brought to life, heavily reflecting the desires of those doing the summoning. Now consider that even if you alone could amass the crystals needed, you still lack the needed prayers/faith to do a summoning. Also consider that the machinery needed to simulate prayers for summoning is gigantic (I'm talking about something about the size of a building).

Egis are essentially constructs of aetherial residue that you can tap/control without a) the need for massive amounts of crystals, b) massive amounts of faith, and c) won't have an easy time killing you the way a full primal would. Lore and concept-wise it makes perfect sense why you have egis instead of full primals.

If anything, I'd focus on the fact that the egi system hasn't been built upon going into the expansion (looking at you, Dreadwyrm Trance). That's a better talking point for wanting to see improvements to SMN rather than what the egis look like.

[Neophyte]

1. How could a SCH (which has same toolkit as SMN.. but without a pet, which deals about 30% of your dps as extra dps + damage oGCDs) out dps a SMN?
He has literally nothing (except healing) to deal more damage then the SMN, even on 50.

2. There are many things that speak against the 'usual' summons:

• game mechanics don't allow X giant creatures covering everything (imagine a 24 man raid with 6 SMN [could be up to 15])
• no elemental weaknesses: what will differentiate Ifrit, Ramuh, Shiva, Titan, Bahamuth, Leviathan, Garuda?
• no crowd control effects on bosses (only adds), not much CC in general; only a handfull of traditional FF-buffs available; no fancy stuff like Zantszuken...
• Arcanist/SMN still needs (idk) ~20 class-related GCD/oGCDs... this is a game system, where everyone is supposed to do something every ~2,5s to keep up a 'rotation' or fulfill a 'priority list', while doing dodge-/stack- or other mechanics: SMN in all those listed other FF-games was just: stand there and cast spells of other classes and then go invulnerable while you get your big thing out (until it casts his signature attack or dies).
• lore

Things like 'summons', but also every other command/ability has to fit the game mechanics and lore. In FF10 summons where supposed as shields for the group as well, to counter specific attacks. In others they were only big damage spells. In other ones they were motorcycles and bound to a character and not a class/job.

[YohSL]

Before 2.0 yoshi said he didn't want a smn job because he wanted summons to feel like super powerful beings, and that having a summoner job has to have balanced summons which belittles them being powerful.

So the simple reason summons in 14 are bad is because the director is spiteful!

Honestly I think Yoshida has right core philosophy when it comes to summons, if a little dogmatic and over the top. And I'd rather he had not buckled to fan pressure and put out this piece of crap because all he and his team have done is disappoint a lot of their fans and create unnecessary work for themselves.

And even if Primals do deliver on the feeling of power, it's all relative since players hand them their ass to them on a regular basis. You don't need to be able to summon the originals, just avatars of them, smaller very similar looking version of themselves, that are still very powerful, just not as powerful as the original.

[Neophyte]

Seven hells what is wrong with you people?
[...]
It's like having a Dragoon but finding out that they don't use spears or jumps,[...]

Funny thing is:

In every other FF-game the jumps are used to dodge attacks, while in this FF-game they're 'used' to get into attacks.

[YohSL]

2. There are many things that speak against the 'usual' summons:

1: They don't need to be as large as the originals, just larger then your character on average. You could also implement a transparent effect when summons get between you and the camera.
2: Elemental properties could be something they implement correctly on the back end, since it's sort of there but doesn't really do anything atm. It's really no different then distinguishing Black Mages spells as is.
3: This still leaves room for debuffs and buffs, and CC is still will have it's usages, just not on bosses.
4: A summoner could buff/debuff, keep their summon alive, perhaps resource management.
5: Lore wise I'd imagine that first you wouldn't be summoning the primals themselves, but rather smaller avatars of them, lowing the cost requirement. But perhaps the advent of new technology to fill in the gaps and make the process easier. Like how computers made complex calculations easy.

[Samsta]

These threads have been popping up since the launch of 2.0 and believe me, they are not gonna change the way the job works now.

[YohSL]

These threads have been popping up since the launch of 2.0 and believe me, they are not gonna change the way the job works now.

Well, if you ask you might receive, if you don't ask then you'll likely never receive.

[Samsta]

Well, if you ask you might receive, if you don't ask then you'll likely never receive.

I would not get my hopes up. Like I said, these threads with really good ideas have been constantly made for 3 years now, clearly the devs are not gonna change 1 job so drastically.

[Alaltus]

The devs stated that tieing SMN and SCH together to the same class was a mistake and is harder to balance. I'm hoping that SE will cut that tie between the two and hand over the vast majority of the dot mage skills over to SCH. That being said i had ideas to make some more satisfying changes without a big change like that in the last SMN thread.