Why are summoners so neglected?

[Stitches1974]

Also, yes Rydia was a BLM.
http://finalfantasy.wikia.com/wiki/Rydia/Gameplay

No. Just no. From the link you posted: She is the first dedicated Summoner in the Final Fantasy series, and also excels in casting Black Magic, making her an excellent offensive mage and thus her stat growth is geared toward magic use.

Please tell me where it says she's a BLM? SMN use black magic, yes, but they are no BLM.

Also, "Rydia can use Black Magic and learns every spell, up to and including Meteor, but she learns them later than Palom due to her emphasis on Summon Magic" "As a Summoner, Rydia has high magic stats but low physical stats and can summon Eidolons, magical creatures that appear at her behest to devastate enemies."

EDIT: Just fired up FFIV. Notice no BLM next to Rydia's name.

[Valkyrie_Lenneth]

Just remove all the skills from smn, give it summon, and rouse, and spur. enkindle
and 18 summons that only have an auto attack and the enkindle ability.

There, you have summoner.

[Duelle]

Just remove all the skills from smn, give it summon, and rouse, and spur. enkindle
and 18 summons that only have an auto attack and the enkindle ability.

I know you're trying to be sarcastic, but let's try to make something useful out of your post.

Let's establish some rules first. 6 "main" egis that represent the elemental wheel (nothing to do with elemental affinities; this is more for thematic reasons). You get Ifrit-egi (melee pet), Garuda-egi (caster pet), Titan-egi (tank pet), Leviathan-egi (anti-caster pet), Shiva-egi (CC pet), Ramuh-egi (AoE/damage aura pet). Gain abilities that allow you to temporarily call upon egi beyond that (Ravana-egi, Bismarck-egi), and a skill that allows you to summon more than one egi (this would be a DPS cooldown). An aetherflow skill that lets you quickly switch to a new egi (on a 45s cooldown). Throw in pets dealing greater damage on targets affected by your DoTs, a couple of skills that deal with pets (an Aetherflow skill that temporarily increases damage dealt by your active egi), and you have a decent starting point.

[Talraen]

Let's establish some rules first. 6 "main" egis that represent the elemental wheel (nothing to do with elemental affinities; this is more for thematic reasons). You get Ifrit-egi (melee pet), Garuda-egi (caster pet), Titan-egi (tank pet), Leviathan-egi (anti-caster pet), Shiva-egi (CC pet), Ramuh-egi (AoE/damage aura pet). Gain abilities that allow you to temporarily call upon egi beyond that (Ravana-egi, Bismarck-egi), and a skill that allows you to summon more than one egi (this would be a DPS cooldown). An aetherflow skill that lets you quickly switch to a new egi (on a 45s cooldown). Throw in pets dealing greater damage on targets affected by your DoTs, a couple of skills that deal with pets (an Aetherflow skill that temporarily increases damage dealt by your active egi), and you have a decent starting point.

This is the only post in this thread that actually lays out what they want summoners to do. Just having more egis isn't going to make the class better. You can still only summon one at a time. Literally every extra egi is just more content that's guaranteed to not see use at any given time. Also, from a dev perspective, if you give new level abilities to summons instead of to the summoner, you're doing three times the work right now, and more than that if you add summons. As people have pointed out, if the new summons do more DPS than the current ones, the current ones will stop being used, and if the new ones do less DPS than the current ones, the new ones won't be used. Look at how dominant Garuda is now. Yes, it's because of contagion, but even if it wasn't, either Garuda or Ifrit would still be better than the other, unless they were exactly the same.

The above quote is a cool idea, but how would you balance it? If summoners had the utility to deal with every possible situation, they'd have to be made weaker not to be the de facto best DPS class in all situations. Having even six summons all with different and useful abilities would be a hotbar nightmare, especially on a controller. (And not for nothing, but this is exactly what the dev team has been trying to avoid going forward.) My summoner macros in FFXI use up all ten pages and are still incomplete, that's not going to fly here.

The more I read in this and similar threads, the more I understand why the dev team regrets making a summoner at all. I don't see how they make a balanced class that can compare with the rose-tinted nostalgia of previous games' summons. (To recap, briefly: summons in most FF games are just flashy damage spells, and when they stick around they generally replace your whole party, which obviously would not fly in an MMO; even the people in this thread who like FFXI summoners basically admit they're only useful once every two hours [one hour these days]. None of these are viable designs in FFXIV.)

[Duelle]

Look at how dominant Garuda is now. Yes, it's because of contagion, but even if it wasn't, either Garuda or Ifrit would still be better than the other, unless they were exactly the same.

The problem was two-fold. Garuda-egi had the benefit of being at range from the mob in addition to Contagion.

The above quote is a cool idea, but how would you balance it? If summoners had the utility to deal with every possible situation, they'd have to be made weaker not to be the de facto best DPS class in all situations. Having even six summons all with different and useful abilities would be a hotbar nightmare, especially on a controller. (And not for nothing, but this is exactly what the dev team has been trying to avoid going forward.)

This is the part that we should be discussing as a whole.

Re: Balance - Personally, it's a matter of having the context for each function with the needed damage trade-offs. For example, assuming we designed Leviathan-egi as an anti-caster pet that can interrupt casts and weaken enemy magic potencies (Gyre Spume), you might find yourself in a raid comp where the SMN would want to bring Levi-egi over Ifrit or Garuda because interrupting a boss attack is more important to group survival than dealing max DPS. The DPS trade-off should be enough that Ifrit has a clear advantage in raw DPS, but in this case Levi just has what the group needs to get a clear. This is on top of whatever utility they bring (battle rez) and they'd still be able to summon temporary and additional egi's to DPS.

Re: UI and Buttons - This can easily be condensed in a couple of ways. You could have a drop-down menu of sorts for summons. So instead of having Summon I-VI, you'd just have one button called "Summon", and when you click on it you get a small line of sub-buttons for your chosen egi.

As for skills in connection to UI/buttons, I'd increase player input when it comes to utility provided by egi. You could have a universal "utility skill" button that would cause Ifrit-egi to do Crimson Cyclone, Garuda-egi to do Shockwave, Levi-egi do Spinning Dive (interrupt spell casting), Shiva-egi do Dream of Ice (channeled CC ability). In short, a context-sensitive button that changes depending on what egi you have active.

Additional egi beyond the "main" 6 would act as cooldowns. You could consume 1 or 2 stacks of Aetherflow to summon Ravana-egi for 20 seconds, during which its attacks deal melee damage, and when the timer hits the 20 second mark, Ravana-egi does its version of Chandrahas to deal big damage or debuff the enemy with a Vulnerability Up effect for a short time.

Abilities to summon additional egi would also be basically DPS cooldowns. Say that if you have Ifrit-egi active, using this particular cooldown would temporarily summon Shiva-egi and Garuda-egi to deal damage to the mob for 20s (only auto-attack; no special skills or anything like that).

-----------------------------------

I admit that this means the devs have to create context for this to work. This means fights must force the raid to set up interrupt rotations for casted skills (that if ignored will either wipe the raid, kill the tank, or make it a lot easier to die), throw in adds where appropriate to allow crowd control to come into play, and so on. Currently the game is sorely lacking on said context, and I wish that people doing interviews would actually ask the devs about these things.

Note: I'm not asking for every boss to require interrupts or have adds that need to be handled in specific kill orders with CC/kiting involved, but those gameplay elements should be use a lot more than they currently are (read: almost never).

To recap, briefly: summons in most FF games are just flashy damage spells, and when they stick around they generally replace your whole party, which obviously would not fly in an MMO; even the people in this thread who like FFXI summoners basically admit they're only useful once every two hours [one hour these days]. None of these are viable designs in FFXIV.

Agreed 100%.

[ADVSS]

i ,eam besodes 10/11/12 They normally just casted a one time burst spell for lots of mp. With how mechanics are in this game id almost rather give up the pet for more burst since i gotta dodge anyway, often times having the pet die in certain situations. hell half the time i dont even pay attention to the thing, while dodging aoes and mechanics.

[Fluffernuff]

Why did the OP proceed to make a post quoting a line in an interview that addressed the "concern"? It was literally the first sentence. And even the last one. just because you don't like the answer doesn't mean you didn't get one...

You guys can argue until you're all blue in the face, but HW took a different direction than ARR. just like other classes did. For better or for worse, it happened. Like it or not, but SMN is probably pretty solidified for Stormblood too, at this point. (obviously without patches to change things at a later date)


Let's maybe, I don't know, see what Stormblood does to SMN? I mean... you guys with either get...

A) more summons
B) new glamours
C) a continuation of dreadwurm stance (be it more bahamut stuff or another primal)
D) another direction of SMN completely
and thats IN ADDITION to the abilities everyone else is getting, too


What's -actually- the problem here? Last I was ever told, SMN was pretty beloved in raid slots right now. I always hear about how hard they hit and the utility they bring. Sounds very neglected, yes.

Please don't mistake direction for neglect. Let's see where the storm blows them. it's in 3 months. Please, try to hold your horses. If Stromblood takes them in a wholly new direction out of left field that is nearly unanimously disliked, then perhaps there would be more to chew on here.

[ResiakTtam]

What's -actually- the problem here? Last I was ever told, SMN was pretty beloved in raid slots right now. I always hear about how hard they hit and the utility they bring. Sounds very neglected, yes.

Please don't mistake direction for neglect. Let's see where the storm blows them. it's in 3 months. Please, try to hold your horses. If Stromblood takes them in a wholly new direction out of left field that is nearly unanimously disliked, then perhaps there would be more to chew on here.

The problem is the feel of the job. Fans of the Summoner job, like me, dont like the design of the job. It has nothing to do with our performance. Theres two options I would have seen the job go. Either a fully fleshed out pet job that has access to all of the primals. Or a job that makes use of all of the primal similar to dreadworm trance. Either one touches on the traditional summoner mechanics.

Imagine if dragoon didn't have jump. Or white mage didn't heal. I don't feel like the current form of the summoner job really fits how I, as a long time final fantasy fan, sees the traditional summoner. And it really makes the job unenjoyable for me.

[Mimilu]

The devs made XIV's SMN the way it is because they didn't want it to have the same issue SMN had in XI, where the SMN's pets did everything and if that pet is defeated, the SMN was at a loss ad had to rely on their subjob. They also felt controlling pets would be too hard for "less-hardcore" players... >x>

[ZhaneX]

Said it once, said it a dozen times.

FFXIV's "Summoner" is nothing of the sort. I like playing it, but it's not fulfilling as a "Summoner" conceptually.

Should be renamed something more appropriate with the direction it's being developed ("Channeller" seems fitting imo) and the concept of "Summoner" shelved until the dev team thinks they can do it justice, whether or not that ever happens.