Necromancer Identity Crisis

[Dyvid]

You never asked yourself why a pair of WHMs would come complain about a DPS class did you?

These are the comments that bug me the most about your rebuttals. You just assume that someone who plays another job has never touched or main'ed SMN before. That "WHM" has more jobs at level 60 than you do including ACN. I would be willing to bet everyone at this discussion has ACN at 60. I changed my main class to Miner but do you honestly think that's my main?

[Shurrikhan]

Still no one can argue with the fact the Heavenward changes have made the job incredibly popular and powerful now.

But, how much of that is definitively because we shifted power away from the concept of pets... as compared to, say, simply shifting it away from clunky systems and introducing macro-rotation (via Aethertrail in this case, but just as easily doable instead through meaningful pet mechanics and pet-swapping as to introduce multiple possibilities for overlying rotation in that way)?

The issue seems simply to be time and time again that SE is not willing to figure out how to make mobile AI units function well in their combat system. But that's a systemic issue, not a conceptual one. And the aesthetic of pet class does not actually even require persistent, hitboxed units.

[xJimmehx]

If summoner had more summons, or at least focused on one shot abilities that summoned a primal for a single move before it returned, I would probably like it.
The poisons and dot management is boring and has nothing to do with summoning primals. I dont understand why it was tacked on. It makes no sense. Summoner is one of my biggest disappointments in the game. I don't understand why they even made it..or scholar either. Even they dont know what the heck they were thinking. Summoner should have been like weaker versions of either the whm or blm with summons for npc-dps/nukes instead of spells(making them just as good instead of sub par). Then, they should have added a dot class separate. Something like the alchemist (item using job) though it would have a different name than that because we have potion brewers with that name already. This is all my opinion.

[magnanimousCynic]

Something like the alchemist (item using job) though it would have a different name than that because we have potion brewers with that name already. This is all my opinion.

I hope you don't mean something like needing to buy or craft ammunition. Jobs that require inventory space or Gil to complete their rotations are badly designed.

But if you mean something akin to Mudras to make potion for use mid-battle as extra abilities or ability enhancers, then it sounds neat.

[xJimmehx]

..

Oh, of course not! That would be horrid. I ment moves that use false "items" that arent actually there. Something like mudras does sound cool. Even slots with random effects would amuse me.

[ZhaneX]

Not like it would be hard to rename Summoner. What with the Job's lore being that it's an artifact of Ancient Allag, it'd be super easy for the quest-relevant characters to discover new information revealing that "Summoner" was a mistranslation of what the Allagans called it, thus revealing the "Real" name.

[Blueyes]

Summoner is the primary DPS job that I play. I actually really enjoy the combat style, however, the assumption cannot be made that everyone that actively plays as a Summoner believes that what we have is a well-conceived interpretation of the job because I am not one of them. I wholeheartedly agree with the stance that the job feels and plays like a Necromancer more than anything. Swap out the egi with undead and no one would bat an eye.

The only part that makes the job feel like a Summoner, in my opinion, is the Dreadwyrm Trance and Deathflare combo (and even then I feel inclined to say that Ninja's new frog summon abilities does it better). Now I'm not necessarily saying that I agree with the decision to not give more power to egi (here's hope that the Stormblood New Actions video won't have the egi sitting there doing absolutely nothing) however I appreciate that they at least gave us something to try appeasing fans who were dissatisfied with the version of Summoner we had at level 50 which was little more than a poison mage.

I consider it unlikely that we will receive "Reworked Summoner" as a new job down the line which is why I hope that with each increase in level we will see Summoner taking leaps and bounds towards reaching that Summoner experience so many players wish to have.

[spelley]

They would never do a massive rewrite like that of an existing class because it would upset the sizable portion of the audience that enjoys the Job/aesthetics as it stands. This would be an order of magnitude more disruptive than the Bard-cast-time change and people lost their minds over THAT. Can you imagine either fundamentally changing the SMN Job as a whole, OR completely warping the aesthetic of the entire Job out from under them? The playerbase would riot, and it'd be completely justified.

[Sushikins]

As a SMN main since 2.0 and someone whose favorite job in the franchise is Summoner, I've long since given up any thoughts of a massive job overhaul or change, at least for the foreseeable future. I will say that compared to the other jobs in the game, Summoner in general fails to live up to the expectations of the job that fans of the series have come to expect, which is why I see these threads crop up constantly, but people hoping for a massive rework or XI-sized summons are probably only going to be disappointed.

I think things will get better when the Egi Glamour system starts to get expanded and takes off, when we have more than Garuda/Ifrit/Titan and Carbuncle as summons, and gets a bit closer to the job that is capable of summoning the many primals present in the game. My greatest fear for the system: the Carbuncles were just a model swap of the Egis, with the attack animations being the same as the egi they were pasted over. While it is a lot of work, I'm hoping that isn't the case when using a glamour of a primal egi, with their attacks and enkindle animations changing to match the egi glamoured.

Between the egi glamours (and it looks like maybe the appearance of egis are getting improved in SB as well) and hopefully an expansion of DWT abilities in SB, I'm cautiously optimistic that Summoner will slowly get closer and closer to what a lot of people generally expect it to be. I certainly wouldn't mind if the poison-based ACN abilities got animation/name changes when equipping the job stone or if the job was eventually split from ACN/SCH and reworked to some degree, but I'm not holding my breath waiting for such a thing to happen.

While it's not my favorite version of SMN from the franchise, I do enjoy playing the job as it is now, and I think that with the right adjustments and QoL changes, it can be brought closer to the sort of job people expect from SMN without changing how the job works in a major way, but of course, not everyone will be happy regardless of what SE decided to do with SMN in the future (especially since SMN has been presented in a number of different ways over the course of the franchise).

[Silverquick]

Well guess what there dude...

Maybe you should start thinking this through first...