How Would You Do... Summoner?

[Silverquick]

Some more minor suggestions that I thought of earlier;

Pet Damage is shown as if you did the damage yourself. This helps shows how much the pet directly contributes to battle compared to now, where their damage is hidden with the other players. If players don't like this due to it mixing their damage with the pet, maybe it could be an option in the character settings?


SMN skills get a minor nerf in damage (maybe 10%, possibly done as a trait) in exchange for higher Pet Damage, equaling about the same or slightly more to compensate for Pet AI (maybe also a pet move speed increase?). This is another change to make the pets a bigger part of your damage, a main thing that people want from "a better SMN", without giving SMN as a whole a straightline buff.

That as an example is something that won't work and will create a class imbalance issue... but when you play DPS classes you understand this.

Its what NOT to do.

Example here:
Why does the SMN come out so far ahead of the BLM in damage in higher level instances?

Well the BLM will be doing a large chunk of damage after 3 seconds. Say 6000 (not including thunder procs and fire procs, and not talking Enochian and Fire IVs)

The SMN meanwhile will be doing 2000 in DoTs and the pet will be doing 1000 in damage... while the SMN will cast a 3000 damage spell.

Seems balanced on the surface right?

So why does it come out so lobsided in the SMN's favor?

Because the BLM is stationary while doing damage, the SMN has free movement. So in ANY instance where there's heavy mechanics, which is just about all higher level instances... the BLM's Damage completely stops. While the SMN still has 3000 damage on target from Pet and DoTs. So suddenly at the end of the fight the SMN has outdamaged him by an enormous degree. The more you increase pet damage, the worse this will becomes. And then it starts to overshadow even OTHER DPS melee jobs who still will have to move at some point.

So the more damage you leave on the SMN the more controllable this is from a Class Balance standpoint.

The flipped side is... if you reduce this damage... then you start to affect the SMN OUTSIDE of instanced dungeons.

This is the real reason I suspect the SMN hasn't seen any new DoT additions since ARR either and likely will not see any more of them in the future.

Again the real reason you need to go with more Aetherflow stacks and controllable, balanceable powers the way Dreadwyrm and Deathflare are.

Now... without the movement, the BLM is going to come out on top in Single Target damage...

His Enochian and Fire IVs are doing more damage to a single target than your Deathflare/Teraflare.

You do one Deathflare... to his 4 Fire IVs. Deathflare though is AoE so hits multiple targets.... So it would be like us being able to do Deathflare 4 times in a row. It shakes out that because of this we end up being able to clear large armies of mobs due to the massive AoEs we have, but he COULD end up being that compared to the SMN in Single Target Boss Mobs. If not for the movement problems and massive amounts of mechanics at high levels. That's a Dev screw up though... not an actual Class Powers balance issue. The real issue to solve this is bringing Swiftcast, and Surecast to about 30 second CD or less for a BLM and making his Manashield able to absorb more damage if he has to stand in AoEs.