After years of playing Summoner, I'm shelving the job and here's why.

[Flana]

Summoner has no identity anymore. None of it's core mechanics work in conjunction with each other, and in fact several directly contradict. Optimal play involves making bizarre decisions and constantly fighting against the job's design.

Let's get one thing out of the way first; I love damage-over-time effects and classes. I will be biased for that. Summoner was the perfect DPS for me and was the only thing I truly enjoyed playing. Even after the fantastic story of Dark Knight got me into tanking, I still preferred playing a damage dealer and played Summoner for my static and did a very large majority of the story as a Summoner because it felt right. Both for me and my character.

With that said, Stormblood has killed almost everything I liked about this class.

This is why.

1.) Summoner no longer plays a Damage-over-Time Job.

Every change in Stormblood has massively de-emphimized the role of Damage-over-Time (DoT) effects. We lost two dots to consolidation and the remaining two have been copied into identical duration and potency removing all of the difficulty and destroying the identity of both. Summoner operates in one-minute windows, and with our dots lasting 30 seconds that means both only need to be cast a maximum of 2 times, at exactly the same time, every single time.

This only gets worse because Tri-Disaster is updated to only apply these two dots and resets on every Dreadwyrm Trance. You no longer need to cast any dots during the opening moments of a fight, and only need to refresh your effects a single time in window before Tri-Disaster comes off cooldown in an optimal environment. They exist still, but you don't ever hardly use them and make virtually no decisions around them. Upkeep has been rendered braindead and requires no awareness or skill.

Nothing has been added to make up for this shift in gameplay, so the majority of a Summoner's time is now spent spamming Ruin. A spell with no bonus effects, a very bland and uninteresting animation, and virtually no interaction with the rest of the kit.

In addition to the above, no abilities added in Stormblood interact with a core part of the Summoner's kit outside of a passive upgrade. Fester is still the only Summoner ability that has any gameplay with a major theme of the job. I do not ever see the developers walking back from this, so I can only assume a major reason I loved the class is dead and gone now.

At the very least there is still the mana conversion aspect of the job with Ruin III, but even that has been downplayed by the large nerf to Ruin III's damage and the moderate buff to Ruin's damage. There isn't anywhere near the gap there once was to really make the different spells feel that different.


2.) Summoners don't play like a pet job.

Summoner already had very little to do with the pets, but this has been exacerbated by Stormblood. Not only are there no new abilities to interact with the pets, but Summoner actually lost skills they used before. This is coupled with the fact that Summoner pets are incredibly, irredeemably, infuriatingly stupid.

As a "pet-job" your pet does not care about your input at all. They are incredibly sluggish to respond to even the most basic of commands. You pet can get pushed to a position where they will no longer attack if placed on stay, and one of the only abilities that does interact with the pets, Enkindle, can outright fail because the pet refused to use the ability immediately, or because it suddenly had to move for more than a few seconds in a dungeon environment.

Even the pet's innate abilites are sluggish to respond to the master's direct commands when placed in manual mode, as they will often prefer to cast their auto-ability once queue'd over the Summoner's commands.

What should ideally happen is the pet immediately cease it's action and respond when the master issues a direct command. Abilities like Contagion are a breeding ground for unsatisfying play when sluggish pet AI makes valuable cooldown abilities like Tri-Disaster or Deathflare miss the debuff. There should be absolutely no delay between command and pet action.

This isn't even going into the fact that Summoner lost valuable pet support abilities, such as Sustain to keep them alive when they will take AoE damage. Losing a pet costs a massive amount of mana and cast time (or another minute cooldown to make it instant) that not being able to support them is frustrating when they do take damage. There is an uncertainty of if it will be fine or not, and nothing you can do about it.

Titan-egi is rendered virtually useless by extension, as a tank pet has no way of avoiding auto-attacks from enemy mobs, and sluggish response time means it is often hard to manually move him out of AoE effects in the overworld. This also makes the loss of Eye for an Eye annoying, as it was another ability the Summoner could use while solo to support their pet in addition to the incredible support it brought to parties in dungeon and raid content. Demi-Bahamut also renders Titan-Egi even worse, as casting the ability will despawn him and wipe the aggro table. He has no reason to exist.

Stormblood added nothing to the Summoner for interacting with the pet, and the pet sluggish AI makes the valuable debuffs the melee and caster pets bring frustrating to time and the only direct pet-to-Summoner interaction is a passive random proc to upgrade your most boring spell.


3.) Summoner doesn't play like a 'Summoner.'

To preface this with brutal honesty, honestly I do not really like the Summoner style in past Final Fantasy games. I liked Final Fantasy XIV's incarnation far more, but what I liked was mostly stripped out to make room for this. Kind of a shame it doesn't even do that right.

He has a roughly ~135 second build up time (2 Aetherflows + the duration of the second trance, assuming you do not discard it for a faster Demi-Bahamut). If you die at any time, that progress is immediately reset. To make matters even worse, unlike other jobs with a short build-in time to the stacking mechanic (like Blood of the Dragon and Enochian, both 30 second cooldowns), Aetherflow is still 60 seconds until the build up can begin and it has to cycle. The only other job that comes close to punishing a mistake so hard in any environment is Dragoon with Eye stacks and Life of the Dragon.

Demi-Bahamut clashes with a lot of themes and mechanics that want to be at work here. He's a big, visually impressive summon that does nothing without explicit prompting from the Summoner in question. He won't even use his so-called signature attack of Akh Morn without being ordered to. He won't even auto-attack.

Instead what he does is follow the Summoner around like a neglected pet who just needs a cuddle really badly. What's worse, is this even plays against summoning Demi-Bahamut in the first place because of the next point.


4.) Summoner has too many competing actions and themes.

Aetherflow and Aethertrail used to have a very solid flow and cadence between the Summoner build-up and bust phases. That is gone now, as these two abilities are mutually exclusive and no longer interact. You are forbidden from using Aetherflow while Aethertrail is active, which has awful ramifications for a Summoner's thought process.

At the start of a fight, you want to quickly expend all three of your Aetherflow abilities and immediately go into Dreadwyrm Trance. This is supposed to be your burst phase for the Summoner to get free Ruin III upgrades while passively doing more damage over the duration, however you are actively encouraged to discard this first Trance as fast as possible.

Aetherflow is locked the entire time you remain in Trail/Trance mode, which means your highest damage off-global cooldowns are being pushed further and further back into the fight and out of the opener window of Trick Attack, Battle Litany, or other enhancing effects while you remain to capitalize on Trance.

This changes the flowing cadence of Aetherflow and Aethertrail into a completely stop-and-go style where you are constantly running into roadblocks.

In addition Demi-Bahamut is locked behind two uses of Dreadwyrm Trance, and Dreadwyrm Trance is locked behind Aetherflow. Every second using the first trance is pushing everything else in the Summoner's kit backwards.

Demi-Bahamut himself is a mess of design. His only two abilities, Wyrmwave and Akh Morn, both have an absolutely massive one-hundred yard range, and yet he will prioritize standing behind you whenever possible. This also has a negative effect for raid mechanics, as his large model can block out icons and markers for players. Why doesn't he just remain in place and fire off his abilities? I can think of only one raid and one trial where your combat arena is larger than one-hundred yards.

Demi-Bahamut is also somehow stupider than your average pet, as he will refuse to even attack if the Summoner is otherwise incapacitated, such as force-stunned during Susano (Extreme) or a fight like Deltascape V3 with Ribbit. The fact he must be forced to attack leads to unintuitive and selfish play to maximize damage by saving off-global cooldown support abilities like Addle to enable Wyrmwave attacks. This can also lead to wasted Ruin IV procs, as you will need to use Ruin II to weave in enough abilities, all the while his Wyrmwaves have the chance of proccing a new Ruin IV.

And speaking of Ruin IV, this new trait also serves to go against the theme of supporting and empowering a pet by completely desyncing your only pet buff ability (Rouse) with your pet's absolute best cooldown (Enkindle), when they otherwise would cycle together perfectly. Enhanced Enkindle should have also lowered the cooldown on Rouse by the same percentage to keep them tied together.

Another ability that fights against itself is Aetherpact/Devotion, and by god is it a bizarre ability. It only effects the closest party member, which can be wildly different depending on if you have a melee or caster pet out on a per fight/comp basis. So, you want to use it on your best DPS... except that involves either them moving into range for you to push the button (and the pet to use the ability) which could result in lost positionals or casts, or you need to move the pet to them which results in no actions from the pet until it resumes attacking, depriving you of all of the pet's dps and any possible Ruin IV or Enhanced Enkindle procs. Demi-Bahamut also can't use Devotion, as far as I'm aware, which creates deadzones where the ability is worthless.


5.) Summoner received virtually nothing new in Stormblood.

Despite all of the above changes drastically pulling at Summoner in almost every direction, Summoner didn't actually get anything new to tie it together. Ruin IV is a random proc that overwrites both Ruin and Ruin III, so you passively hit by pushing the same buttons as always.

On the dot front, Summoner lost access to Bio and Miasma II, hurting their identity as the plague job and the aoe job, while a passive trait forcibly upgrades Bio II and Miasma straight to Bio III and Miasma III at level 66. You gain nothing new outside of a new effect on a spell you were already using some 60 levels ago, except now you use those abilities even less.

Aetherpact changes nothing worthwhile about the way Summoner would play, except to make the sluggish pet control even more infuriating when trying to force the pet into position and to cast Devotion.

The only new spell with any gameplay changes is Demi-Bahamut, but as I discussed above instead of trying to tie any of this together or to enhance the strengths of the class, he just pulls it off in a completely different direction and adds even more complications to the mix.

To make things even worse, the only new thing Demi-Bahamut adds to your repitoire is... Wyrmwave. His basic attack that he won't even do without being forced into it. Akh Morn is literally just a bigger Deathflare, instead of any other mechanic from the fight that would have been more memorable, or the biggest abilities he used from the End of an Era, Teraflare (to attempt to destroy Eorzea) or the Summoner version of Teraflare, with the arcing exploding bolts of aether.


6.) Summoner isn't fun at any level anymore.

With all of the themes pulling at Summoner, and the de-emphasis on dot play in general, has reduced Summoner to being a primarily Ruin Mage. Ruin is the most basic spell in the entire kit, and yet it is the only ability left that doesn't (entirely) conflict with other abilities or get locked by the Aether- gates.

This also makes it ridiculously unfun to play the further under level cap you are, as more and more abilities are stripped away or offloaded into more powerful versions of themselves later. Ironically being below 66 does make the dots require more attention, but their power has been dramatically gutted by the loss of a third dot, and Summoner's power for area damage has been kicked further out of the theme by the loss of Miasma II (Also it makes almost no sense for Bio - Bio II - Bio III, but Miasma completely skips the II step now and goes I - III).

There is entirely too much at work here, and too many basic fundamental problems plaguing the job right now. What is the theme of this job supposed to be? Dots? Pets? Summoning? Your primary spell over all of that is a generic Ruin (that you got at Level 1), and none of those are really supported by the rest of them. Why does Demi-Bahamut follow you when he has a range twice the size of an average battle arena? He has more range than any other player spell in the game, by a massive margin, and yet he sticks to you like glue. Why are all of your upgrades passive and change nothing? Ruin IV is passive. Enhanced Enkindle is passive. Bio/Miasma III are passive upgrades that result in you using them less and filling the gaps with more Ruin.

Where is this job supposed to be going?

I don't know, and I'm tired of waiting of find out. I've sat on Verity and Omega drops for two weeks now in the hopes that something would change. Summoner would get at least one identity back, or at least have the glaring core problems fixed. To the developers credit, they did fix one of many core problems, so maybe there is hope.

For almost all of my time in Eorzea, I've enjoyed being an Arcanist, and later Summoner. The playstyle appealed to me, the lore was interesting and engaging, and it was fun dreaming of what would come next.

But for now, that dream is over. I'm not going to play through a broken mess to get a new temporary pet that's signature additon to the game is an auto-attack (I already got Akh Morn for myself 2 years ago now), and that's the only real new thing added. Everything else I can already experience now, so until then this grimoire is being shelved.

If you suffered through that salt manifesto, I salute you. If you're actually having fun with the new Summoner, then good for you. I hope you enjoy it. I don't, and will be (impatiently) waiting to see if the things I liked about the class will ever make a comeback. I looked for a more appropriate feedback subforum but couldn't find one, so if this is in the wrong place, I'm sorry.

TL;DR:

1.) Summoner has too many themes at play, and none of them interact well if at all. DoTs, Pets, Summoning, or Ruin mage. None of it meshes anymore.
2.) Summoner has core design problems, like sluggish pet AI or fact that Bahamut follows you when he has triple your range.
3.) Summoner's competing abilities have created a backwards logic, where your opener and Bahamut-phase have become a mess of decisions that never feel good to make.
4.) It's really not fun anymore. Send help.