Summoner change to allow beastmaster class

[ElminaNiet]

So I have heard many people wanting this class, that class, or another to be added to the game. But the two I hear the most are dancer and beastmaster. While I don't think dancer would be very implementable with how FF14 works, beastmaster would work well! Except for one issue. We have a "beastmaster".

[ElminaNiet]

Honestly I would welcome a complete summoner rework. Sure they are fun and all but in no way shape or form are they final fantasy summoners. In every final fantasy game that includes dedicated summoners they use holy or healing magic, or even nonaspected but by no means slews of diseases, disaster, and ruin. My idea for this though is... Just change the darn names... The mechanics of those in my opinion are fine but why are summoners playing like necromancers or warlocks?

What would truly need to be overhauled is the pets or "summons" and how I would suggest doing this is get rid of them. At least how they currently are. Make them like an actual final fantasy summon. Make it so we have to unlock each summon and they'll do some specific special feature that's a one off or has a duration that suits the summon.

[ElminaNiet]

EX

Carbuncle: all party members receive 10% less damage for 30 seconds from all sources. (it would normally be reflect but that isn't much of a mechanic in ff14)

Phoenix: Either revive all dead party members with 5% HP and a really long CD (healers better be quick or it wont stop a wipe) Or possibly puts a buff on the party and the next person to die in say 1 minute is auto raised with 70% HP and Mana.

Ifrit: Fire aspected damage and increase physical damage dealt to targets hit by 10% for 30 seconds.

Garuda: Wind aspected damage and increase magical damage dealt to targets hit by 10% for 30 seconds.

Bahamut: Large unaspected damage (Duh)

Etc Etc.

Then put each one of a timer and have like a minute shared recast between all summons and give individual summons their own recast timers that depend on how powerful they might be.

[ElminaNiet]

This would allow for special summoner quests say with the release of any new primal or even certain trials where they can add a new summon to their list. Some summons would definitely be used more than others but if they were all unique with different effects, no one summon would ever simply not be used.

Then buff summoner basic spell potency to make up for losing their pet and BOOM suddenly we have an ACTUAL final fantasy summoner class and have room for the beastmaster class because now there's no pet class anymore.

Thoughts?

[Mhaeric]

I don't understand how Summoner precludes a Beastmaster job. The game is not so granular in its design that you can't have two dps pet jobs. See rdm and blm for two direct damage caster jobs.

I do understand how this premise is being used as a means to start another "smn should be a summoner" thread though.

[Enkidoh]

Firstly, you're wrong about SMN being "in every FF game" - it's not. Summoning magic first appeared in FFIII, and until the PS1 era were just a glorified fire or ice spell with a fancy (non animated) graphic. So in a way, FFXIV's SMN is actually going back to these roots, having a pet like 'modern' FF game summoning but with more of the 'glorified fire spell' effect of the earlier FF games (FFXIV actually owes quite a bit to the very first FF game in it's ability system, despite first appearances).

Also FFXIV's SMN is never going to be like Yuna's summoning in FFX or FFXI's SMN Job where the summon is a huge pet that stays on the screen and does it's SMN's bidding - and that's because of how the lore of this game has been written completely prevents it. Here, full summoning of the Primals is extremely dangerous, both for the summoner, everyone around them, and the world itself. Sure our character is immune to Primal influence (due to the Echo), but they still have to be mindful of everyone around them, which, given that they're Hydaelyn's champion, kind of runs contradictory to that. So instead we use the Allagan-developed short-cut SMN Job, which manipulates a fraction of a Primal's essence without any of it's soul-searing corruption, but the trade-off is the resulting 'egi' is far smaller and less powerful than the 'real thing'.

Having said that, I can see SE in the future maybe upgrading the size of egis to be perhaps more in line with the full size Primal, but you are simply not going to have a full FFXI-style SMN Job (a Job which had too many issues that the development team ignored), that's just facing facts (I also do not believe Phoenix will ever be summonable, given who that particular Primal was originally in the storyline).

[Duskane]

Having said that, I can see SE in the future maybe upgrading the size of egis to be perhaps more in line with the full size Primal

Not after those Demi bahamut complaints they wont

[ElminaNiet]

I never said there is a summoner in every final fantasy. Ive played over 20 of them So I think I would know that.

I said in every final fantasy that includes a dedicated summoner.

Very big difference.

Also I'm in no way proposing it become anything like yunas or the summons in 12.

AND ff14 is NOTHING like the original summons. They were basically just large spells. Which is what I am proposing here. Bring it closer to the summons that were used from 3-9 as well as tactics, tactics advanced, and from what a friend of mine tells me also was used in 11.

Effectively I'm proposing that instead of even summoning an "egi" summoners just momentarily bring the summons power into existence then seal it away again. Just as It was in the older games. And would make sense here.

it would be like egi enkindle, but turning everything the egi is into just an enkindle. Would still fit the lore perfectly.

And It would allow a beast master race to not just be a "clone" of summoner.

It would take a good amount of work to incorporate two pet classes without having them step on each others toes. Especially with the variety of melee and ranged weapons we currently have being used as well as magics.

Bringing summoner to its roots would add an even more unique caster element to them and allow beastmaster to thrive in uniqueness. And heck leave scholar pets alone. They aren't even summons so that's fine. And then both scholar and summoner as well would have marked difference beyond one being the healer arcanist and one being the dps arcanist.

[MStowastiqVahlshdeh]

I really want beastmaster but I do not welcome changes to summoner as a result. To begin with, just adding new classes/jobs to the game will require adjustments to other existing ones by default.

I'm curious about the purple mobs inside of the new raid that are basically bigger ifrit egis with different names that I cannot remember at the moment.

[Enkidoh]

Re-reading Elmina's original post I do indeed seem to have misread it, so I'm really sorry for that. However, I still stand by my comment that SMN will not be changed in any major way, neither making it more 'FFXI-SMN' nor 'old-school FF SMN', for the reason that the single-player games and MMORPGs simply require different design paradigms. 'One-attack-per-battle' and then chuck regular spells worked in games like FFVI which had turn-based battle systems. But here, in a real-time battle environment, players are just too impatient to sit around waiting for the cooldown on a summon spell to become available (they're already complaining that the current GCD in general is too long, even though I do not agree with that complaint, this would just make things worse)., so a pet-based system is ironically more suitable.

This is also why FFXI's SMN was unbalanced, there they literally tried updating FFIII's SMN to be more like FFX's summoning, and the end result was not entirely successful (to the point the summons became such a drag on resources when they were out SE had to implement restrictions on the more larger - read: more powerful Avatars like Alexander in that you could only summon it once every two hours, and that they drained enormous amounts of MP every second they were summoned, restrictions which were mostly easily counteracted anyway. And why Bahamut was never summonable in FFXI and now never will be, so that's something FFXIV's version of SMN has over it's FFXI counterpart ). But a balance has to be reached.

BST is a whole different barrel of moogles - FFXI's BST became broken for different reasons, it's original form is personally what I would like to see here (enthralling random enemies and temporarily using them as their pet), but how BST ended up in FFXI just made it too overpowered (when the 'jug' monsters were added, it just became a situation of 'get the most powerful jug monster and only use that, and some were effectively god-tier in that a BST could solo many bosses with it), and thus this is something I would not want to see here.

But again, it's all about reaching a happy medium, so I don't know. I guess I'm just optimistic in that whatever happens Yoshi himself is aware of such issues and is thus using them to guide his decision making for new future Jobs.