Why are summoners so neglected?

[silentwindfr]

I don't know if it's been said here previously, but with regards to new summons, the biggest question would be "what will it do that the others don't already do?" Titan is a tank pet, Ifrit a melee DPS, Garuda a ranged one. Can't give them a healer pet because we run into balancing issues next. I know people really want more summons, but the last thing I'd want is more summons that don't offer anything unique.

that the reason they have begin the egi glamour... summoner is far to be neglected like some want... it's only a summoner different of what they was expecting. do it make it a bad summoner? nope far from it. just different

[SendohJin]

Unless you just mean skills that don't make sense, in which case fair point. I'd still argue that, at least from a naming point, most of them don't really fit...

this is a Class to Job issue, not a Summoner issue.

none of the Archer stuff besides Swiftsong makes sense for Bards, Bards aren't Archers/Rangers.

do Ninjas really Mug people?

there are plenty of split SMN/SCH topics, that doesn't mean SMN is neglected and SMN doesn't have less functional abilities than other jobs.

almost everyone has acknowledged that branching two jobs off of one class wasn't the greatest idea but that's what they did and they are not going back on it. the lessons they learned were to never do it again and to not make classes at all. if it's functional enough which both jobs are, they are not going to rebuild them from the ground up when they have better things to do like actually make new jobs and new content.

if development time was free, sure go and do all of those things but it's not.

[Shougun]

I don't know if it's been said here previously, but with regards to new summons, the biggest question would be "what will it do that the others don't already do?" Titan is a tank pet, Ifrit a melee DPS, Garuda a ranged one. Can't give them a healer pet because we run into balancing issues next. I know people really want more summons, but the last thing I'd want is more summons that don't offer anything unique.

WoW is not perfect but it has 7+ pets (and all the main pets also have upgrades that make them better/different looking, which is what the / will denote).

• Imp/Fel Imp: Support damage, single target. In the current demonology build you hit an enemy with an attack that spawns a few of these that then attack the target, so frequently used (also popular for specs that didn't talent into demonology as it has decent damage and support, can heal the master and remove debuffs).
  
• Voidwalker/Voidlord: Tank pet, used .. to tank lol
  
• Succubus/Shivarra: DD, CC pet
  
• Felhunter/Observer: DD, Anti-Mage
  
• Felguard/Wrathguard: Great overall, bruiser (will be used a lot in general circumstances once earned)
  
• Infernal/Abyssal: Temporary strong AoE DD
  
• Doomguard/Terrorguard: Temporary strong DD
  
• Darkglare: Single DD, temporary
  
• Dreadstalkers: Calls 2 pets to attack - DD, temporary

Relates to the imps but, Hand of Gul'dan: mass wild imp summon (up 4 imps) and they have another talent that makes their shadowbolts sometimes spawn imps on impact

Temporary spells are just like super summons you get to momentarily have before they leave for a while on cooldown. Keep in mind all the pets have abilities (some more than others).

The thing to consider though is that Warlocks that focus on pets are Zoolocks as they can 11+ pets on the screen lol, but I think we can take a few hints from there.

For example temporary summons, or the utility types. Right now we have Tank, Ranged DD, and Melee DD and specifically the two DD have grabs at a bit of everything. I believe it would be entirely possible to design 6 summons (the main primals) but I think you would need to narrow the summon's pro(s) to specific things, allowing them a place to shine better or worse. I predicate this on a new summoner skill that lets you switch between or temporarily use another Egi easily and quickly with perhaps encouragement to do so. This is to give players more thought, so instead of just "this pet for this thing" its okay more like "okay I'm this phase, what would be best in /this/ phase", because circumstances can make a niche choice change rapidly through a fight. Suggested stuff before, a buff mechanic of some sort could encourage changing to force multiple decisions, temporary summon, or even simple stuff like perhaps Fast Cast has a talent that it reduces the cooldown (Fast cast's) by half and returns half mp (summoning cost) when used to summon - meaning summoners can be more dynamic in their Egi choice.

Trying to think of their actual primal mechanics that might be able to translate into pet stuff:

Ramuh: High single target damage, specifically good on stationary long standing targets and bad when there isn't time to build up the potential: Judgment seems like a good single target, the stacking debuff that does a lot of damage. I like the idea that Ramuh has a spell to summon an Arbiter or two (your summon has summons haha) and whenever you cast Ruin they also cast Ruin, also like the idea that he has a hidden passive that lets him blink to a location every X seconds rather than float there.. lol

Garuda: Utility / CC with acceptable AoE: Aoe Feather attack (bind), AoE plumes including the AoE sleep plume, perhaps a tether with a heal (or mp)/support skill of some type (empower attacks), auto attack applies a 1.5 second 45% (lower in PvP) ms slow every 5 seconds (no resistance build up, unless immune by default).

Levithan: Anti-mage/squish (high burst) / Rogue, Trickster / Debuffer: Worst tank sustained tank (once the shield drops, will die the easiest), most agile (just has awesome movement speed, pretty much impossible to run away from) with perhaps drown bubble (temporary silence/damage) and armor (within the bubble, perhaps on an armor stack like FFXI blink stack - but make sure it doesn't lead to tanking lol), debuff and burst attacks (basically your assassin).

Titan: The Tank, bad damage, hard to kill.

Ifrit: AoE / DoT (aoe damage focus): Big group, have tank? Ifrit will give you the most AoE damage. (While Levithan is more agile, Ifrit of course needs a charge just like the primal ifrit)

Shiva: Bruiser with decent single target damage, if you were in PvP this is what you'd send after the melee (the non-super squishy ones at least) / effective single target non-elite tank (worse than Titan, better than the rest): Taking the sword and board form being a bruiser, with the other spells relating to the other forms (also can give players the option to glamour the other forms, just if people care - but there would be a spell for each form, like a sniper bow ability). Perhaps a debuff she applies on bow and mage ability attacks that allows her sword strike to charge towards the target and deal bonus damage (because of the bow/mage cooldown sword strike would be a natural follow up, as it is the auto attack/default attack but also due to the cooldown she doesn't have infinite chase).

Single Target : Ramuh > Levithan (higher burst/adaptability than Ramuh, less sustained damage) > Shiva > Ifrit > Garuda > Titan
Area Damage: Ifrit > Garuda > Levithan > Shiva (not too great a difference between Levithan and Shiva) > Ramuh > Titan

None of the above is "fixed"/"non-negotiable" if someone was like "but I think Garuda is a better aoe DD than Ifrit" or w.e. Just what I see in the primals.

You could of course just stick with the three, but assuming they don't give the summons more abilities I believe it would hurt the maximum possible potential a summoner may have in the long run even if they don't use those niche summons every day all the time. Like I didn't see Warlocks always CCing everything but when we needed it they had it, and that was nice. Haven't played recently but I would add that you actually needed CC in WoW, since you could wipe on the Trash if you weren't careful - seems a bit more generous in FFXIV.

Also as said before I believe where they stopped feels incomplete, and at least personally see filling out the main summons of FF games and specifically the primal elemental (Ifrit embodying fire, etc etc) could make a nice close on the lore as well (and why Summoner can only use visions of other primals as glamour as SE sees fit in the future). So imo personally stopping at 3 and just adding glamour feels more amiss than finishing the elemental set and then never adding any more permanent pets (then continue with trance mechanics/Elder Primal magic, and perhaps temporary summons if SE feels like they wanted a new summon but didn't want to make a whole new permanent scheme that requires more work).

[Dyvid]

I don't know if it's been said here previously, but with regards to new summons, the biggest question would be "what will it do that the others don't already do?" Titan is a tank pet, Ifrit a melee DPS, Garuda a ranged one. Can't give them a healer pet because we run into balancing issues next. I know people really want more summons, but the last thing I'd want is more summons that don't offer anything unique.

Well ironically at work we had to go to training about problem solving. If you have a problems, you can't fix them with excuse like blaming others, limit design, simple choices. As stated above you can change it where pets are defined by AoE, Single Target, PvP, Emer Tanks, time limited, etc...
You could give each pet one or two unique skills that would encourage summon and release play style.
Another is develop a rotation style around the elemental wheel where as Shiva would fight for ___ time limit, cast Diamond Dust and placing a Primal Fire buff on the player making Fire based Egi's stronger.

The point is a creative team can make it work but just throwing your hands in the air and give up isn't a solution.

[Atlaworks]

Well ironically at work we had to go to training about problem solving. If you have a problems, you can't fix them with excuse like blaming others, limit design, simple choices. As stated above you can change it where pets are defined by AoE, Single Target, PvP, Emer Tanks, time limited, etc...
You could give each pet one or two unique skills that would encourage summon and release play style.
Another is develop a rotation style around the elemental wheel where as Shiva would fight for ___ time limit, cast Diamond Dust and placing a Primal Fire buff on the player making Fire based Egi's stronger.

The point is a creative team can make it work but just throwing your hands in the air and give up isn't a solution.

It's pretty easy to say "they can make it work" when you yourself can't make it work.

Ideas are fine and all, but balance is a thing. If you look at 2.x, by the end of that patch cycle summoners were the weakest class bar none. They complained a lot then, and back then they actually had a good reason to, as well. It got fixed in 3.0- sure, they gravitated away from a conventional "pet class" some, but mechanically, they became much more stable, to the point that at 3.5 they are the most played class in the game according to the census. While mechanically, they feel less like the idealized version of a summoner some people want, the class is now arguably the most mechanically stable while still fitting into the lore reliably. If you want to change that, you should bring more to the table than "It's not what I want" and "I want more".

Your ideas(And thank you for bringing some to the table!) are nice, but can make the class a little too bloaty. You can't have one class do everything- which is why there's no healer egi, and only three egis. You put more in, each role becomes more niche, and balance becomes more and more of an issue. Really, to make them more prominent at all they'd need a complete overhaul and the class would need rebalancing to not be nearly as strong on it's own. It's also bound to Scholar due to the dual nature of the Arcanist class, and that can't really be stopped.

By that point, isn't it easier to just start from square one, and request something like an "evoker" class?

[ErryK]

that the reason they have begin the egi glamour... summoner is far to be neglected like some want... it's only a summoner different of what they was expecting. do it make it a bad summoner? nope far from it. just different

QFT. This thread is just basically a bunch of people saying "I want THIS type of Summoner, not that type!", except they aren't running the show, and SE would like to express some kind of creative freedom by altering Summoner to be what their vision of it is. If you don't like it, XI is still running I hear.

[Duelle]

Ideas are fine and all, but balance is a thing.

Balance is mostly a numbers game. The rest goes with ensuring the ideas match the numbers generated by the other classes, or that the tradeoffs are worthwhile for whatever advantage/utility those provide.

If you look at 2.x, by the end of that patch cycle summoners were the weakest class bar none. They complained a lot then, and back then they actually had a good reason to, as well. It got fixed in 3.0- sure, they gravitated away from a conventional "pet class" some, but mechanically, they became much more stable, to the point that at 3.5 they are the most played class in the game according to the census. While mechanically, they feel less like the idealized version of a summoner some people want, the class is now arguably the most mechanically stable while still fitting into the lore reliably. If you want to change that, you should bring more to the table than "It's not what I want" and "I want more".

Except that when you have to turn a pet class into a non-pet class to make it "stable", that underlines severe issues with the design of the battle system. And that's not a good thing.

Just because something looks good in the damage meters does not mean it is soundly designed.

Your ideas(And thank you for bringing some to the table!) are nice, but can make the class a little too bloaty. You can't have one class do everything- which is why there's no healer egi, and only three egis. You put more in, each role becomes more niche, and balance becomes more and more of an issue.

Again, balance is a numbers game. Concepts are simply to put together; the tricky part is making sure the numbers come out comparable to other classes.

If we made Shiva-egi a primarily crowd control egi (channeled CC to mirror the WoW warlock's Succubus), that egi is not going to be hitting hard compared to Ifrit when it comes to melee. It's edge would be the ability to crowd control, which could prove useful both in PvP and PvE encounters that make it grant your raid an advantage (also, instead of putting in a million memory games in raid fights, they should start adding adds that need to be CC'd or kited; not only would this give Shiva-egi a purpose, but it would also make Sleep and Repose no longer be wastes of space).

Leviathan-egi would also be an excellent candidate to mimic the Felhunter as an anti-caster pet. This means it'd be the only pet with the ability to reliably interrupt spell casts and weaken casters in general. We already have a template with what Levi does during the fight, with stuff like Gyre Spume being a debuff you apply on enemy casters to drain their MP/weaken their Magic Attack. Spinning Dive would be your interrupt on a 30s cooldown. Its overall DPS would be decent, but still behind Ifrit because of the ability to debuff casters. Much like Shiva-egi, Levi would be pretty useful in both PvP and PvE since you could make SMN part of an interrupt rotation if you decided to bring a DRK and WAR to tank a raid and only had 1 BRD, but needed a second person to help interrupt enemy spell casts (by the way, the devs should also add spells that need to be interrupted for raid fights).

If you have all your bases covered, Ifrit would still be the go-to DPS pet, but there's something to be said for having some flexibility in giving your group options for a comp. it wouldn't be a new idea either, since Warlocks used to have a buff called Demonic Pact that increased the HP of the raid when they had their imp summoned. The amount was comparable to the priest's Power Word: Fortitude, and was there as a back up in case you didn't have priests in your raid.

Really, to make them more prominent at all they'd need a complete overhaul and the class would need rebalancing to not be nearly as strong on it's own. It's also bound to Scholar due to the dual nature of the Arcanist class, and that can't really be stopped.

By that point, isn't it easier to just start from square one, and request something like an "evoker" class?

Having two classes that are conceptually the same thing is a true waste of resources.

While I understand developers don't like rebuilding something from scratch, sometimes it's the only way to get a cohesive design and at least show a clear direction for the system in question. If SMN/ACN/SCH wasn't such a mess, sure I could say "leave it alone", but between the lacking implementation of the job crystals (because either the SMN crystal or the SCH crystal should be notably changing ACN baseline abilities to meet each job's needs) and the schizophrenic design behind SMN, I just point at the drawing board and say "redesign".

[Atlaworks]

Words

Let me repeat myself: It's pretty easy to say "they can make it work" when you yourself can't make it work. Especially when what exists already works.

You can't just say "SMN only looks good on damage meters, that's why everyone plays it!", because if it was only good at damage and nothing else, it wouldn't attract people as it does. Other classes can output higher sustained damage than it, and I'd say it's far more soundly designed than it was in 2.5 by a long shot- by the addition of further damage abilities not tied to pets. You can say it's not what you want, and that it's not a reskinned WoWlock, but saying it's not soundly designed seems pretty far off base to me.

A great deal of your argument as well is "balance is only numbers, concepts are simple to put together it's just the numbers that make it seem tough". Well, let me let you in on a secret: Everyone is an "ideas guy". Everyone has some idea on how to fix the class to their own specifications, and how to "fix" the class with the highest playerbase in the game. No one has solid mechanics on how to do so, and why it's broken in the first place other than "It's not what I personally want". Anything they request is, at best, a request to fully dismantle a class that is not only functioning perfectly well, but to an extent that the changes you vilify made it go from the single least played class in the game to the single most played, and replace it with mechanics akin to what made it so underplayed to begin with. Now, I don't mind you requesting what you want personally, everyone is entitled to that, but there's no reason to get rid of what exists when it functions exceedingly well in reality. If it is not broken, it does not need to be fixed.

In line with your thoughts on balance and ways to implement new egis, the thing I notice most is that you and most other folks who want a radical redesign of the class just want more stuff. There's very little "Change" and a great deal of "add" to requests, and having 5-6 egis all with some special niche means that you have a class that either is overspecialized into using just one of the egis commonly, or has too wide an array of skills to justify doing the damage they do, and would have to lose something to compensate. Every class has a niche, and some ways to support- giving a single class all the options and unparalleled flexibility on top of the high burst potential summoners already have would be an absolute disaster for balance as a whole, and would have precious little to do with numbers.

[Shougun]

In line with your thoughts on balance and ways to implement new egis, the thing I notice most is that you and most other folks who want a radical redesign of the class just want more stuff. There's very little "Change" and a great deal of "add" to requests, and having 5-6 egis all with some special niche means that you have a class that either is overspecialized into using just one of the egis commonly, or has too wide an array of skills to justify doing the damage they do, and would have to lose something to compensate. Every class has a niche, and some ways to support- giving a single class all the options and unparalleled flexibility on top of the high burst potential summoners already have would be an absolute disaster for balance as a whole, and would have precious little to do with numbers.

Adding more Egis doesn't require a radical redesign (unless you're suggesting any change is radical). Besides adjusting for the situation with your Egi the rotation would be pretty much the same (excluding any other suggestion, like the ones made to the trance system). I thought the more stuff thing was pretty apparent lol, besides its been shown to work before so its not like people are asking things that /can't/ work.

The idea of being able to rotate egis out easily would allow, good players, to summon to the tune of the fight - of course bad players will stick with one but I don't know what to say about that besides.. so? Boss summons adds that need to be taken out, obviously your crap single target damage egi won't do, tank biffed it - must help, tank buster coming whip a buff up, there are a lot of opportunities where you could slide your egi around, if the potential to quickly cycle them existed. The smallest change that was just suggested was that fast cast has less cooldown when used to summon and returns a portion of the mp cost - could make new mechanics sure, but it isn't required. A type of aetherflow fast cast might allow a finer-tuned brush on balance control though.

Just to add Summoner already has near unparalleled flexibility and it isn't that weird, since similarly Warlock was that way too. (Hunter to an extent, but didn't have all the tools like Warlock). Pet and transforming classes usually have ridiculous flexibility, and people live with it just fine (although usually switching gears requires a wrench in your rotation, it's true you at least had the option to wrench your gears and switch tracks - but again this isn't some weird thing that has never been proven to work before).

[Ririta]

By that point, isn't it easier to just start from square one, and request something like an "evoker" class?

So they can be half assed too in the name of "balance"?