Revamp Summoner idea

[IveraIvalice]

Before i say my vision for a smn that feels like smn and works in an mmo ill say that i dont actually expect any kind of revamp at all in any way so please put down the pitch forks. i know if they were going to revamp smn they would have done that in beta when i was asking for it then lol

So what if the current smn as a dot job was something else so everyone who likes a dot job can still have that basically but as something else.
what if smn was this:

A mage job thats a mix of blm and rdm with the way it plays. You alternate between the six elements to raise 6 elemental gauges. the spells that you cast are like using the elemental attack of the primal that it represents. When you cast the fire spell it raises the fire bar, that could then combo to have an stronger next spell, maybe 2 elemental spells could proc off of fire but you dont need to start with fire.

When the elemental bar of your choosing is full to a certain % then you can summon that primal to do alot of damage. The primal stays with you and you command it (maybe your hotbar gets replaced with a pet hotbar until the primals timer runs out)
The primal will be fairly big but alot smaller then the real primal, similar to how bahamut is now. The % of the bar needed to summon the primal would be at 50 and 100%. if you summon at 50% the attacks wont be as strong and it wont last as long. If you summon at 100% then when the primal is dismissed it does a powerful finishing closer before vanishing. The finishers will have special effects based on the primal, more on that further down. But alternatively these effects could be used at the start of the summon as opposed to the end so you could better time its use, so instead of a finisher its a powerful opener.

There would be 1 summon button for each primal for a total of 6 with 1 exception, if you raise all the bars to 50% evenly or 100% you can summon bahamut that is stronger then the others and will drain all the bars. It seems like alot of buttons just to summon but currently ast has like 8 buttons just for cards i think? So its not too crazy considering its ment to be the focus of the job to both summon often and alternate between them.

Every summon and its attacks (along with your standard elemental spells) can have varying power and effects based on how they currently are in the game for example:
Fire is raw damage
Aero would be a dot
Lightning would be a weaker dot but add paralyze
Water will add a slight heal to people nearby the attack
Stone would add a shielding affect to team mates (i dont think the spell itself but definitely as titan's finisher/opener)
Ice would be weaker then the rest and have a low refresh effect and add heavy to its targets

This gives utility to the job and adds a reason to both alternate between spells and summons and adds focus depending on the fight. Meaning you may want to use one element/summon over the others depending on what the fight requires.
Know that all these spells or summon attacks do damage so aero wouldnt simply be a dot it would do a hard hit and also add a dot, lightning would be a weaker hit then aero but also adds a dot and paralyze.

Potencys and durations and rates of raising the bars isnt what this idea is about. im not here to give exact numbers that show how balanced it is but everything from cast times to summon durations to how quickly you build the bars would be tweaked for balance. but thats the general idea of what i would have liked in a smn job in this game. Spells hit slightly weaker then blm but summons hit harder, the elemental juggling of both blm and rdm, the building of elemental bars and the focus on summoning. It makes sense gameplay wise compared to the other mages, it adds utility and a reason to use summons of your choosing depending on your fight but also not a downside to choosing one summon over another. (it actually encourages alternating between summons since with procs it would fill bars faster)

But most importantly in my personal opinion it feels like a summoner

This would have been my dream vision for summoner but id like to know what you think.

[Ariomi]

+1 for Creativity

[Tommyhawk]

All I need is for them to get rid of ruin mastery trait and give me an aetherflow mastery trait that lowers aetherflows recast time by a measly 10 seconds and i'd be golden

[PrismaticDaybreak]

I like the concept, but for my 2 cents, you'd probably have to max it out at 4 elements or so and give you different summons based on which ones are higher at the time or something like that. E.G. Water + Air = Shiva (Ice) Fire+Air = Ramuh etc. etc.

[IveraIvalice]

I like the concept, but for my 2 cents, you'd probably have to max it out at 4 elements or so and give you different summons based on which ones are higher at the time or something like that. E.G. Water + Air = Shiva (Ice) Fire+Air = Ramuh etc. etc.

Would that be to save hotbar space? I haven't really counted out the amount of actions it would be with 1 button for each summon and at least 1 elemental spell but I don't think it would be too many compared to other jobs. The other jobs that have sort of activation actions are Sam and nin and I think they have 4 each so 4 makes sense but I also don't think 6 is too many when compared to ast

I haven't thought of any kind of buff actions that would compliment this type of gameplay but a lot of the buffs just come from using the summons so there may not be many other actions required, maybe a pet buff off gcd.
Personally I think having the ability to cast all 6 spells and summon all 6 without combining them to get a 5th and 6th makes it more unique compared to whm and blm that have only 3 elements each

[PrismaticDaybreak]

Well the thing is AST has one button for 6 different actions and the action is RNG, you'd have to create a system where 3 elements cycle to their opposite element under certain conditions or something in that area. And then you have the underlying issue that plagued SMN before 4.0, only using whatever summon maxes your throughput, in that instance Garuda. You'd have to give incentive to switch elements, perhaps have some base spells that change with your elemental attunement or put them on a timer, kind of like how Bard rotates through their songs.

[IveraIvalice]

Yeah but the only ast move that becomes different things is draw, but they still have undraw, redraw, spread, undraw spread, royal road, empty road, minor arcana and sleeve draw. They are all useful but still take up hotbar space all for the function of using cards. The similarity to Ast is just that there are so many buttons that are solely dedicated to doing one core function.

The incentive to use other summons or other spells is that they have different buffs to the party depending on what you want. In some fights you could help with a quick Titan stone shield if you know a tank buster is coming up or use Garuda dots if you know a lot of movement is coming up, or if there are trash mobs in a raid and you can paralyze them with ramuh, or you just need a quick heal to help out your healers with leviathan. The other incentive to alternate between the elements is that they proc off of each other so someone can stay with just fire spells and summon ifrit over and over but that probably won't be better then building bars faster by making use of procs and also assisting the team in the process.

I'm not really in favor of the idea that 3 spells turn into 3 other ones because it seems very limited and doesn't leave a lot of room for choice and a lot of jobs currently work like that where there is a best rotation and a set combo path to maximize damage. But I think choosing which summons to build up to whenever you want gives a lot of control to the player that I just don't see in other jobs currently.

Also I think aside from the incentives the other reason to switch is because you would have to. I guess I didn't mention this in the op but summoning is something you would do often mid combat. The summons would last maybe 15-20 seconds and be forced to dissipate and then be on a cool down to use that one again (maybe 35- 45 seconds? Idk). You'd still be able to build that element but you might not be able to use that same summon again by the time you've built up that gauge. So where summoners used to use nothing but Garuda and be able to keep that out as long as they want, it wouldn't be that way with this version

[PrismaticDaybreak]

I think i'd have to see more precise numbers to determine how effective it would be tbh, like how much each spell charges its respective gauge, if there would be oGCD's that charged all the gauges some amount etc. etc. Don't get me wrong, I love the concept of actually having large, impactful summons.

[Shurrikhan]

Would that be to save hotbar space?

Technically they COULD have 20+ summons and one button for them all that opens a radial selector on press. It'd start casting and you mouse or joystick in the direction of what you want and hit again to confirm. Faint delay when Swiftcasting, but worth the n-1 buttons saved.

[Stormblessed9000]

I have a couple of concerns with this idea. The biggest is probably that it would be very difficult to design a rotation around building your choice of six different resources. If you have distinct builders, you either have a stupid amount of buttons, have weird complex combos for determining what you build, or have some sort of stance system. Remember, each class actually has mostly the same number of class actions since they unlock at level intervals. This means you actually can't give a class too many buttons, even if the rotations end up being simple.

Red mage suffers somewhat from this problem, in that many of it's skills are black/white clones and it only has two elements to balance. It gets around this somewhat by adding depth with a proc system, but it is still a very simple class.

Secondly, six summons sounds good but you need good reasons to use all six or or the unused one are just a waste of development time. People will just use whichever one give the highest DPS 99% of the time. They also aren't reactive since you need to build a separate resource for each so you couldn't, for example, quickly put out the healing primal if one of the healers goes down if you'd been building for your damage one.

Lastly, big summons are cool but there area already LoS blocking issues with Bahamut and he's barely ever up. If you intend these summons to be up ~50% of the time, they need to be as small, if not smaller, than players.

Honestly, your idea would work far better if you just had three primals. That would mean you could have enough button allowance to make the basic rotation interesting and few enough primals that it wouldn't be that hard to find a niche for them (Maybe single target, AoE and support?)

Edit:

Technically they COULD have 20+ summons and one button for them all that opens a radial selector on press. It'd start casting and you mouse or joystick in the direction of what you want and hit again to confirm. Faint delay when Swiftcasting, but worth the n-1 buttons saved.

The issue with this is that it would require tons of coding work to implement as there's nothing remotely like it in the game. I don't really get why you can't just have one summon button that summons the primal with the highest gauge.