Summoner Early Post-Launch Feedback at level 80

[Duck_Omega]

Summoner has three issues that it is currently faced with: it is weak, it is awkward to play, and it is having an identity crisis. The first two issues can be fixed with a simple patch but the last one can only be fixed with additional skills (i.e. next expansion.)

Fixing the weakness problem is the simplest of the three. All that needs to be done is a potency increase across the board and the return of the third aetherflow stack. The removal of the third aetherflow stack hurts low level summoner since that is really the only burst damage that they have access to.

Fixing summoner's awkwardness is far more difficult. Here are my thoughts on how this could be achieved:

1) Make all of summoner's attack magic instant cast.
2) Make the upgrade path of the ruin spells this: ruin 1 -> ruin 2 -> ruin 3 -> ruin 4
3) Increase the potency of Egi-Assault skills to compensate for the loss of ruin 4 procs.
4) Reduce the duration of Garuda-Egi's Slipstream action by half and double its potency.
5) Give Dreadwrym Trance a different effect than the current decrease cast time effect (maybe a personal attack buff like how it use to be.)
6) Give Demi-Bahamut an aura skill like Demi-Phoenix has (Probably something along the lines of a party attack buff.)
7) Have Demi-Bahamut have a spell combo much like Demi-Phoenix does.
8) Alter the effect of Devotion because as it currently is implemented it does not feel like a meaningful addition to summoner. The options I can think of are: increase its effect, increase its duration, or add more effects to it (i.e. have it increase critical or direct hit rate as well.)
9) As stated before return the third Aetherflow stack.
10) Also as previously stated increase summoner's overall potency.

As for fixing summoner's identity crisis that is something that will have to be fixed in next expansion. In the next expansion summoner should not receive another Demi summon but rather more oGCD skills to weave with the existing skills. These new oGCD skills should be temporary summons that would preform an action then leave. The actions that they preform could be an attack, a buff, a debuff, or some sort of utility spell. Doing this would resolve summoner's ongoing identity crisis by having it play more like how summoner is other Final Fantasy games.

[HeulGDarian]

Summoner has three issues that it is currently faced with: it is weak, it is awkward to play, and it is having an identity crisis. The first two issues can be fixed with a simple patch but the last one can only be fixed with additional skills (i.e. next expansion.)

Fixing the weakness problem is the simplest of the three. All that needs to be done is a potency increase across the board and the return of the third aetherflow stack. The removal of the third aetherflow stack hurts low level summoner since that is really the only burst damage that they have access to.

Fixing summoner's awkwardness is far more difficult. Here are my thoughts on how this could be achieved:

1) Make all of summoner's attack magic instant cast.
2) Make the upgrade path of the ruin spells this: ruin 1 -> ruin 2 -> ruin 3 -> ruin 4
3) Increase the potency of Egi-Assault skills to compensate for the loss of ruin 4 procs.
4) Reduce the duration of Garuda-Egi's Slipstream action by half and double its potency.
5) Give Dreadwrym Trance a different effect than the current decrease cast time effect (maybe a personal attack buff like how it use to be.)
6) Give Demi-Bahamut an aura skill like Demi-Phoenix has (Probably something along the lines of a party attack buff.)
7) Have Demi-Bahamut have a spell combo much like Demi-Phoenix does.
8) Alter the effect of Devotion because as it currently is implemented it does not feel like a meaningful addition to summoner. The options I can think of are: increase its effect, increase its duration, or add more effects to it (i.e. have it increase critical or direct hit rate as well.)
9) As stated before return the third Aetherflow stack.
10) Also as previously stated increase summoner's overall potency.

As for fixing summoner's identity crisis that is something that will have to be fixed in next expansion. In the next expansion summoner should not receive another Demi summon but rather more oGCD skills to weave with the existing skills. These new oGCD skills should be temporary summons that would preform an action then leave. The actions that they preform could be an attack, a buff, a debuff, or some sort of utility spell. Doing this would resolve summoner's ongoing identity crisis by having it play more like how summoner is other Final Fantasy games.

2 things
1) Do you mean aetherflow as in energy drain stacks . cause if so making it 3 solves nothing . if you mean they should give the old aetherflow then i agree with you
2) What identity crisis? it's the mage who summons egis to do his biding till he gets aether to make bigger and stronger entities. the problem in all this is the fact that they don't balance the egis well. make it so that smn has a reason to swap egis throughout the fight and you won't need to add instacast 1 hit animations. this instacast 1 hit "summon" is the current egi actions.

[Duck_Omega]

1) I feel that they should return to the older system of aetherflow where we use the skill and get three stacks to use on various skills. That system is the only burst damage that low level summoner has. As the class is currently returning the third aetherflow stack will only make the issue worse, but if they get rid of having to spam hard cast ruin spells then it will be no problem for higher levels.
2) The identity crisis is what the class is as a whole. Is summoner more of a pet based class like FF 10? Is it more of the Warlock/Necromancer type class from other MMORPGs? Is it more of a summoner from Final Fantasy Tactics where you have summons that exist only for a single attack/effect. Or is it the mage class that weaves GCD and oGCD spells together? Currently we have all four at the same time and it does not work at all. They need to resolve this and pick a direction and focus on that rather than continuously adding new mechanics to the class and hoping that it all works out in the end.

[HeulGDarian]

1) I feel that they should return to the older system of aetherflow where we use the skill and get three stacks to use on various skills. That system is the only burst damage that low level summoner has. As the class is currently returning the third aetherflow stack will only make the issue worse, but if they get rid of having to spam hard cast ruin spells then it will be no problem for higher levels.
2) The identity crisis is what the class is as a whole. Is summoner more of a pet based class like FF 10? Is it more of the Warlock/Necromancer type class from other MMORPGs? Is it more of a summoner from Final Fantasy Tactics where you have summons that exist only for a single attack/effect. Or is it the mage class that weaves GCD and oGCD spells together? Currently we have all four at the same time and it does not work at all. They need to resolve this and pick a direction and focus on that rather than continuously adding new mechanics to the class and hoping that it all works out in the end.

1)you can't compare this summoner to older summoners of final fantasy games that is the whole thing of the series. you can ignore this but yuna was a summoner who can use white magic at the same time so she wasn't a pure summoner either especially since if her summons died like for example by getting banished she was nothing without her white magic so this comparison everyone makes is just forced. i like ff10 as well but ff10 is ff10 and ff14 is ff14
2)Warlock from what i see in the wow skills spams more summons. it also interacts differently the parallel you can make is that both have dots both have pets ,they interact differently warlock uses pets as an army, in fact he can sacrifice them to heal himself or gain their abilities while also buffing all of them. on the demonology tree the affliction tree is proc based with the procs refunding resources and buffing his dmg on that target or healing the warlock .the destruction tree makes his spells just flat out do more dmg.
3)We Don't have any ability that's a summon that does one hit and then goes away Demi summoning is a 20 second summon, bahamut auto attacks with us and brings his akh morns and now pheonix was made to be better by also power upping our gcds and also giving a hot on entrance.
4)Yes we got gcds and ogcds . what you mean is why do we have less castimes and why do we have so many abilities compared to the other casters. because the devs gave that freedom to summoner on 4.1 and it literally made the gameplay 10 times more fun. this doesn't impact the identity of smn whatsoever. he still is the job that summons egis till he has enough power to summon demis.

[HeulGDarian]

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I want it like it is in ff13 i wanna use ruin 10 times and then summon bahamut for 20seconds who will make flexes and then fly on top of him blowing rassberies to the boss and going home to my people. can't w8 to ride shiva estinien will have some great things to say to me after that

[Duck_Omega]

1) The point is in FF14 summoner's mechanics are all over the place and none are developed to the point that they should be. Our DoTs are in a pathetic state, the new Egi system did barely anything for them, our utility is a joke, we have Demi summons that somehow have less functionality than Egis, and a good portion of our damage comes from spamming ruin. We have the most instant cast abilities of all casters but we now have worse mobility than black mage because of how much we need to spam ruin.

2) 2.0 and 3.0 summoner played more similar to the warlock archetype than 4.0 and 5.0 summoner does. Previously, summoner was based on getting the strongest possible DoTs onto the enemy and keeping them up while managing a pet, and dealing with aetherflow and later dreadwrym trance. This is what drew me to playing summoner in the first place.

3) The point I was making there is for the future Square Enix shouldn't dismiss the possibility of having a summon that only exists for a single attack or effect before disappearing. I would really love it if they stopped breaking the flow of summoner each expansion.

4) Yes, summoner has the most instant cast times of all casters but right now we are forced to hard cast ruin most of the time while trying to create opportunities for weaving oGCD in. This leads to a really awkward flow of skills. In some cases I have to try to fit more than three skills in during a single GCD so I don't waste Ruin 4 procs. The flow would be infinity better if all offensive summoner magic became instant casts.

[Exodus-E]

Personally, I feel that they could easily fix its current "clunkiness" by simply:

• Replacing Outburst with Deathflare during Dreadwyrm Trance (at a lower potency to compensate), proc'd from Ruin III (similar to Firebird Trance's Fountain of Fire -> Brand of Purgatory)

• Reverting the Enhanced Ruin II trait back to its Stormblood's roots (ie. grants a 15% chance that a pet action will grant Further Ruin)

• Removing Egi Assault II entirely, and re-assigning each pet's actions into their only Egi Assault (ie. Garuda-Egi = Slipstream / Titan-Egi = Earthen Armor / Ifrit-Egi = Crimson Cyclone)

• Increasing all Egis' damage (especially Ifrit-Egi's)

• Changing/improving Ifrit-Egi's Crimson Cyclone, so it becomes a "gap closer" (ie. rushing to its target)

• Integrating Demi-Bahamut into Dreadwyrm Trance (at Lv.70), instead of being a separate action/"phase"

• Making it so Demi-Bahamut/Demi-Phoenix use their Enkindle actions automatically at the start and at the end of their timers (similar to MCH's Rook Autoturret/Automaton Queen)

(And of course, finally implementing proper Egi glamours, but that's not the issue at hand here...)

[HeulGDarian]

1)the mechanics are all over the place cause they removed the thing that connected them the old aeherflow rotation . sure our dots Don't have anything else for them going besides fester and bane but that's why they made ruin gain potency from them which is actually worse cause there are points where you have to hard cast due to tridi and trance having issues . bahamut has less functionality than an egi currently but pheonix doesn't and i hope and pray they take that road with bahamut on 5.1 . our utility is a joke i agree cause they removed it and everlasting flight is currently unusable cause the rotation isn't flexible . our ruin is our filler gcd so it makes sense for it to be but it's also cause our numbers are fcked . and we have less mobility cause again our numbers are fcked and ruin 2 is too much of a dps loss.

2)old summoner was a thing with emphasis of was a thing . i started at late heavenwards if i remember so i didn't play alot of it cause i was a small sprout back then and I'm grateful of its existence i was i am and i will forever be a smn main cause of that glamourless garuda player with miasma bio2 bio and miasma 2 (ignore the card saying drk i didn't know how to do it so i clicked random shit and now I'm too lazy to change it)

3)the problem with that is that why just one attack what could possibly one attack from a summon do besides only look cool . Demi's are like that and the way pheonix was designed makes it feel much better it is like a bigger more powerful egi it has 2 enkindles 1 devotion and transforms your ruins into 2 spells from it while also doing follow up attacks. not to mention why would such a thing exist while we have another summon out . only way to implement is by saying screw all of the summoner lore and design.

4)the problem isn't the hardcasts it is that we get punished too much for moving . we have to hardcast more than before which sucks but if we try to move we lose so much dps that also sucks.


look dude i agree with you we got ripped off everything that 4.1 brought to us was mostly taken away . our mobility, our new utility, our pet dmg ,the awesome feel we had during bahamut, our aoe . but that is just the devs plan backfiring this isn't a new summoner that lost his identity that's the old summoner being completely broken down . aetherflow now has no correlation with demi phase or trance phase .all of his cooldowns are now fcked hitting phases where they can't be used devotion hitting firebird trance , dots need to be hardcast much more often, being unable to get ruination on every ruin spam , trances and demis getting fcked by transitions , garudas own ea 2 with itself. all we can do now is hope that the devs keep the good ideas they had and revert the bad ones lets stabilize first from this trainreck before trying to run another marathon

[Aniond]

• Add damage boost to both trances.
• Remove Iftit, Garuda, and Titan as a "pet" make them summon able like Bahamut and Phoenix. Have 1 egi assault deliver a melee attack, and the other one perform and AOE. Have Endidle effect all of your summons including Phoenix and Bahamut
• Have DWT increase damage Ifirt, Garuda and Titan
• Have a seperate trance that works with the Greater Summons ( Bahamut and Phoenix)
• Have ether flow damage increase the duration of the summon that is out

My concept is pretty much to remove the pet idea and each function just like Bahamut and Phoenix.

[HeulGDarian]

at this point I've been writing too much but i thought of something after reading exodus-e idea of giving ifrit a gap closer instead of the aoe.


The idea he provided is a really good idea and it build upon the quick agressiveness ifrit has being the essence of fire. I thought from that an idea of balancing the pets. The idea would work much better if the egi actions didn't exist and we had the old 15% chance to get ruin 4 procs.


Garuda:
We keep the aoe autos
We keep slipstream but we make the duration longer and the cooldown bigger bugging the potency accordingly
We make aerial slash be a dot make the cool downlonger and also adjust the potency
Enkindle remains the same
Devotion becomes a 10% magic dmg buff to all allies in the area

Ifrit
We keep the autos although they do need a buff currently
We keep crimson cyclone but make it have a lower cooldown
we replace flaming crush (that's the aoe i checked) with a gap closer that does the same damage as crimson cyclone with a bit bigger cooldown than it
Enkindle deals double the dmg on the first enemy
Devotion changes to 10% physical dmg to all allies

Titan
we buff the autos to be as much as ifrits
we make earthen armor able to be targeted and used on other players ( I'd prefer it to be instead of a shield a 5% dmg reduction)
instead of mountain buster we give him the old radiant shield effect aoe buff to all allies to do 50 potency dmg back if they get struck name is debatable
We buff the dot of enkindle to potentionally do more dmg than garudas enkindle
Devotion becomes 10% damage reduction to all allies

on single target
This way it would give incentive to use the big spells that garuda provides for a potency gain and even devotion if you got alot of magic dps swap to ifrit so he can go ham and then use titan to not only mitigate dmg from the tank or anyone else but also get a potentionaly good dmg depending how things are going and then swap back to ifrit to keep on the heat going.

on aoe
This way you could use garuda for aoe like now but if the tank could hold still titans actions would give an incentive to swap to him and then back to garuda and of course to ifrit when there is like one add


That's my thought at least i could be completely wrong ofc