Thread: Summoner 5.0 changes - summoning -

So, I'm still leveling my SMN and you can take my opinion with a grain of salt.

But.

Personally the design of SMN is... bizarre to me. I get that a lot of it is because of the holdover from Arcanist but it never made sense to me why a job that ostensibly specializes in summoning has such high focus on DoTs. If SCH had been a DPS job it would've made sense to make it the DoT job, but SMN should focus on the pets and temporary summons.

I'll grant that it's not up to me, but if it had been, I'd have started with eliminating Egis, making the Carbuncle the primary pet and utilizing all six of the original elemental Primals as Demi-Primal cooldowns. Give each of the Carbuncles a mix of unique utility skills (like their current damage de/buffs, Ruby Light reflective barriers, free Erases, potentially even being SMN's source of Resurrection) and balanced damage skills, limit each Demi-Primal to only be available when a specific Carbuncle is active (2 per), then have each Demi-Primal temporarily "evolve" your Carbuncle and have a different stance or effect on specific spells. Have the SMN's main skillset be based on swarming the field, and swapping or powering up their Carbuncle while their summons are inactive as a means to reduce the downtime of their other summons, even reducing their cooldowns while their associated Carbuncles are active. Use Aetherflow skills to issue commands to your current Carbuncle, with each swap replenishing one Aetherflow outside of the cooldown, the SMN's main attack having a chance to replenish one, and stronger utilities or Demi-summons consuming multiple Aetherflow on top of their CDs.
No buildup to Demi-Bahamut, just trying to cycle all of their Demi-Primals as quickly as possible, with Demi-Bahamut being just their strongest cooldown/LB3 not associated with any Carbuncle.

Idk, just me dreaming pie-in-the-sky ideas that would require way too much change I suppose.

At the very least they could allow more reskins of the existing Egis.

Better be careful with that logic you have there Archwizard, or people will flame you for "having an IQ of 300" in this thread


Interestingly, the way that BRD currently works was what I'd originally envisioned for SMN before 4.0, rotating through the primals as summons on 30 second cooldowns and while they're up you can use a certain rotation or set of skills that give various benefits to yourself and possibly the group.

Originally Posted by Llugen

Interestingly, the way that BRD currently works was what I'd originally envisioned for SMN before 4.0, rotating through the primals as summons on 30 second cooldowns and while they're up you can use a certain rotation or set of skills that give various benefits to yourself and possibly the group.

I would personally love this tbh. I think if SMN played similarly to how it plays but instead of having egi's you had 30 second windows of different primals to call out on a timer, that each had their own personal effect you could weave together to either add buffs or debuffs to the target, would be great. I will say that I think the biggest problem most people have with SMN is that it does not have much visual summoning representation. If SMN played exactly how it does now but it's spells looked like primals were doing them (Dissidia Yuna) then I think most people would be happy. SMN as it stands is isn't a bad job, in fact it's pretty damn fun to play, but it does NOT feel like a Summoner because the egi's are garbage visually and Bahamut is the only real summon we get.