Summoner Early Post-Launch Feedback at level 80

[Taranok]

*snip*

While the class will never be a "real summoner" such as a FFX summoner, the devs are remarkably close to getting as close to a "real summoner" in FFXIV as is possibly, but it requires basically accepting that the first couple iterations of summoner were deeply flawed, and that the DWT/FBT cycle is the closest to "real summoner" that FFXIV has ever had, and emphasizing that is better.

To the people who want a poison mage, the devs should take all the ideas they've had for SMN pre-SB and find a way to work that into a class that functions well as that type of class, and split the "real summoner" off and design it based on the other half of the class, the DWT/FBT rotation, and possibly add more pseudo-summons. Consider removing the DoT nature from the class outright, definitely remove egis because the egis are stupid at this point, and find ways to allow the player to more meaningfully interact with the demi-summons beyond simple enkindles and GCD copying.

I've heard ideas for making it so "egi assault" instead temp-summons a summon, partially, to do a singular attack before fading away. The two camps are divided because some people legitimately like SMN's base gameplay in ARR and HW and, despite it breaking the game balance wise, there are legitimate reasons to like how it played, and it might work well for a different class altogether. But the people who saw ShB's changes and went "Wow, it's starting to look like a real summoner" want to push it towards the best version of summoner that FFXIV can possibly have.

What I think we can all agree on at this point is that, whether you like its business or not, the class has serious flow issues right now, and they need to be addressed.

[HeulGDarian]

why does yuna from ff10 comes to play? is it cause it was called a high summoner? yuna also had healing magic and the null magics is that any different from having the poison magic and ruin spells? Sure one is healing the other is dps but you can't judge a job in ff14 by looking at other ff games that's the beauty of those games, every iteration is different. Honestly sb smn had some problems but what they did wasnt fixing the problem as much as wiping half of it call it fixes and creating more problems . This is a summoner the argument of this doesn't feel like summoner is honestly dumb.

For arguement shakes let's say they remove all the arcanist build up cause that's what they are trying to do and people seem to ask for it and leave the summoning part. now you d have a job that only fights with their summons and nothing else . isn't that the beastmaster job? let's take the arcanist part and make a job dots only and a couple ogcds that would probably be the necromancer job from ff5 though I'm sure it had more tricks up it's sleeves. In arr the job was made like that cause the devs took inspiration from WoW so it makes sense that it was like warlock . at Hw they didn't expand the "poison system" they added the trance and deathflare system which lorewise was the way to summon bigger summons . at stormblood it finally happened we reached what we wanted we finally learned how to do demi summons . And what did Shb do? all this build up got destroyed cause some people wanted more summons . Actually no that's False, old summoner and new summoner summon just as much . if you remove everything that has to do with the rework and only put the updates summoner would still be summoning just as much and not only that it would have made the ruin spam after the 2 min demi summon less if trance and pheonix were a different button like they made it with bahamut . So really all these rework changes were just a detriment. PS before i see this answer coming in dungeons you get to summon more by swapping garuda and ifrit for trash and bosses which is great but if they just have made them instant they could have been more usable in 8mans by simply swapping to use radiant shield and contagion though if it would have been usable that i don't know.