Summoner Early Post-Launch Feedback at level 80

[Shougun]

I've played some more summoner and just wanted to add some more opinions / feelings.

Although with a tl;dr- I think so long as they keep emphasis and or increase emphasis on primal related content while making the job mechanically smoother and fun then it's good. Any change that lowers the emphasis of primals (without replacing it with another, even if the emphasis is purely visual) I think would be a not good change for summoner.

Some random maybe semi-reasonable and vague desires:

• Would like to see egi weaving become smoother where possible, and I'm sure there are many ways to do that including not even touching the egi system and doing stuff to other parts of the job- so I don't have a huge preference. One thought was that they have a minor cooldown but can be cast even during the cast of another spell. In this way you could be casting ruin and get off an egi assault, but you'd only do one (as cooldown would prevent you from triple lol). Cooldown can also act as a means for more damage on the egi attack and a literal stop on how much weaving you could be expected to accomplish lol. Just having goals that there is little (preferably no pause) / delay / stuttering, but I do like the idea of egi assaults .
  
• Summoning Titan egi gives the caster a shield (without delay, or at least very very short delay), this allows summoner to shield themselves with the titan theme on demand even when they're without egi assault. This effect can be on cooldown to prevent spamming (effect triggers once every 30 seconds or something, or whatever else to manage spam like egi costing mp to summon if you spam the summon in a short interval- also keeping in mind spam summoning would drop your dps too). I would suggest that perhaps the other egi also have some sort of bonus idea too, to encourage some cycling but this is not needed (could just be a special of titan egi). Now you can change Titan egi's secondary assault or just leave it similar, I was thinking it could be cool to have it be a shield built from your damage (while the buff is active). Like damage dealt while earthen shield is up turns into a shield on summoner (X% damage converted to a shield for Y seconds, refreshing of course on cast). It would be exciting, I think, if the effect looks a bit like cover (Paladin) and you give Titan-egi that shielded Hp. This would make it feel like Titan is taking the damage for you, a bit like how it felt before (rather than you're taking it yourself, which feels a bit less magey). This would allow Titan to "tank for you" like before but maintain the fact it doesn't really (there is no enmity or titan to heal, it'd be untargetable bar of hp that's covered you).
  
• All of egi's (specifically Ifrit's and some demi moves) attacks and spells cause them to lunge forward to connect their attack [if they need to]. A boss running around shouldn't be able to outrun ifrit unless that's part of the mechanic of the boss (being so fast you can't chase). Egi/Demi should initiate what they're told to do successfully asap, at any point and placement in the arena. One idea mentioned below was that if too far away the Egi will turn into a ruin like projectile of the color of their element and launch themselves at the target and explode out of that projectile with whatever skill you queued (for times when your target is like halfway or more across the room).
  
• Combine buttons that cannot be possibly used outside of each other and match in theme. Like some of the demi/enkindle of stuff doesn't really need to be separate. (cooldowns of combined abilities don't need to be shared, where important, but the slots themselves could take great advantage out of this).
  
• It's nice that the skill tells you that the egi will cast it, but I don't think that is a good reason not to show what the skill does on your tooltip. So it should say that egi casts it and then it should tell you what it does. "casts enkindle, does 800 potency". I feel it's unnecessarily hidden/tucked away information, I hope this can be adjusted so the skills don't feel like a secret you have to look up and memorize.
  
• Devotion can be "cast" by the egi but that the aoe is around yourself (like a cure III on white mage is cast by them but the aoe is around the target). Massive range (to prevent ifrit from running back to target you).
  
• Increase reliability and speed at which damage from egi assault is applied (less often/no casting egi assault to see the boss vanish the skill go on cooldown but no damage triggers).
  
• Aethertrail regenerate outside of combat. If both then over an interval of time (like mp), and if only one then perhaps instantly at the end of combat you regenerate up to one and only one.
  
• Physick has a moderate cooldown, maybe no cast time (depends on cooldown/potency/cost), scales with intelligence, and heals more than a vercure but cannot be used as often (at all). Still has a mana cost (maybe make it cost more too, such that using it too often, like Resurrection, will put you into negative mana upkeep). May also consider themeing it, so Titan has a shield and cure that totals more than Ifrit's strong cure (but the cure alone is lower), and Garuda has an aoe cure (obviously weaker in potency than ifrit or titan's but AoE means potentially stronger).

Experimental / disruptive / pipe dreams (many conflicts):

• Make Resurrection instant cast, remove swiftcast, and give Resurrection a cooldown of however long swift cast cooldown is perhaps +/- (still has mana cost).
  
• Keeping the job mechanically the same.. change the theme of all the spells to primal. Visually everything is primal related, and perhaps specifically relating to what you've got summoned. For example the visual / name and concept of bio / miasma changes to something else.

Random rework idea:

1. Change bio and miasma to like spur and rouse sort of concept named spells that you cast on your egi, buffing them (no target spell, they're just cast). May have some play with the spur and rouse buff mechanic (replacing the dots) by having certain abilities remove certain buff's duration and other abilities increase it, making it a sort of black and white magic balance act to keep your egi full powered.. but this experimental idea is experimental so.. lol.. /shrug
2. Ruin now triggers attacks for your egi (like painting the target), some damage can come from the painting of target but a lot of it will come from each egi's unique response to the attack. Ifrit will do strong single target attack, Garuda an AoE, and Titan can do less damage than Ifrit but adds a short shield on you (like Garuda tier damage but it's single target). Egi Assault animations might be used for this ruin attack, in that case new egi assault attacks might need to be added. If the ruin target is too far away for the egi to reach (attack) then the egi will turn into a ruin like sphere projectile and launch themselves at the ruin'd target and appear there (mostly for Ifrit and Titan).
3. Outburst like the above but adjusted for AoE.
4. Bane will name change and cause each egi to do something different in an aoe, ifrit will cause high damage in a very low radius, garuda moderate damage in a very large radius, and titan will moderately damage everything in a moderate radius and apply a light shield to allies based on each enemy hit (so large trash packs would be a large shield and a boss would basically be a very small shield).
5. Fester and painflare may be changed to act as different types of baby enkindles or they can remain as is.
6. Like Pheonix Bahamut will have new Ruin / Outburst.
7. [So nearly everything is coming from egi, the structure if vaguely similar (though dots have been changed quite a bit), and ideally egi respond exceptionally reliably for this lol]

Experimental Continued:

• Even more pipe dream- move away from dots and scholar structure entirely and into everything primal related. Disconnect the two jobs, so that arcanist moves into scholar but summoner only uses arcanist as a quest requirement like paladin uses white mage. Making the job like a combination of dissida Yuna and FFXI summoner (no subjob).
  
• Look more into that Tempus idea Dyvid had, I imagine some really goofy (in a good way) could be put in that for future expansions. Alexander come down here and do something ridiculous lol.

Minor QoL:

• When you get too far away from your summon the summon should be dragged to you, whichever egi is active should be dragged around through instances and other content walls (doesn't unsummon). If possible, this is just a QoL but I'd like it - whichever egi is up is up at all times and is never unsummoned and is dragged to you.
  
• The icons for each egi being changed to represent who they are (rather than carbuncle, carbuncle, ifrit, which feels a bit funny that one has a proper icon and two don't lol).

Anyway, like the above tl;dr so long as they keep adding primal elements (I don't care for the arcanist side of things, but don't want people to feel like the job abandoned them either lol), and more points if it's grandiose primal elements, and the job gets tuned to be even more fun and smooth / that work in and pay off is fair then I think they're doing really well. Whatever that is. I've seen a lot of cool ideas in the thread too, and I'm aware some of what I said is basically some of that, but just having started leveling it up again those were some of my thoughts.

[Flana]

The second is to offload abilities from the pet. The game constantly throws errors if you throw more and more pet abilities at the pet too quickly, and it's possible on some abilities, such as Devotion, to rebound the actual cast of devotion. The interaction of commanding the pet to do something and the pet doing something is still slow and frustrating, and it's still prone to errors and delays just as it was before, it's just not as obvious since there's a somewhat poorly written queue system thrown onto it.

While I agree with you that casting from the Summoner prevents problems down the road, this one isn't actually a problem with the option I proposed because the pet doesn't actually do anything. It's why I compared it to Deployment Tactics, deployment doesn't care what the target is doing. They could be afk or a 1.5gcd memespeed monk, their actions don't impact the cast because the spell is cast by the Scholar.

This way it still looks the same but eliminates any action on the pets part and should (theoretically) reduce the cast delay to nothing. That said demi's still exist and kill the pet, so just centering it on the Summoner would make it the most future-proof solution.

There was nothing inherintly "broken" about SMN

It's interesting that you say that after saying this:

You could say this about many things. Why does Bahamut/Phoenix move? Why didn't we get Aetherflow 3 Stacks after every wipe as the solution to waiting for Aetherflow? Why were pet abilities not instant? Why don't we get Ruin 4 stacks instantly on button press than having to wait for their animation? Why can abilities ghost? They all should never have been problems and yet they were/are.

(Underlined emphasis mine)

Ghosting was not a problem in HW. Laggy pet AI was always a problem but way less of an obnoxious one when you had a minimum 15 second window (old Contagion only had to hit before your dots fell off) for the pet to respond. This is why I say Stormblood broke Summoner, because it introduced failure points all over the place.

You needed to (new) contagion before Bahamut for the best results, oops the pet died just short of applying the debuff. Contagion didn't apply and went on cooldown anyways. Over a year ago I called that Demi summoning would have ramifications down the line, and here we are with Devotion lining up on top of Pheonix and the pet dying rears its ugly head again. I'm absolutely positive people would be (at least) more receptive to Egi Assaults if the pet didn't die during Demi-summons, because then you could freely weave with Ahk Morns and the entirety of Firebird Trance.


Even in a vacuum the Demi mechanic introduced failure points for itself. Demi-Summons don't auto-attack without being forced to and so just follow the summoner around when given the chance, to the point where they could outright ignore commands until catching up to you. Or you could ram too many Wyrmwave commands down Bahamut's throat and he'd just auto for the last ~6 seconds of time and ghost his own Ahk Morn.

There are still problems they need to fix and they absolutely should have with the launch of Shadowbringers. But that does not absolve Stormblood for having introduced some of those problems in the first place. The Demi summon mechanic will always represent a potential problem in its current form. They can't expand on or change regular pet abilities without potentially running into this same problem again.

People can like it all they want. I will freely admit I wasn't very good with SB Summoner. But that doesn't change the fact that I consider the above to be objective design flaws with long-reaching effects that should never have happened. We're still dealing with problems created in Stormblood, and unless they change that design it will continue to create problems down the road. Just like we now have to deal with Pheonix and Devotion, and both Demi's with movement.

I personally want Bahamut to have more movies similar to FBT, but I don't think that would be implmeneted anytime soon.

Just out of curiosity, what would you be looking for here? You mentioned in this post and your other thread that you were open to the idea of fusing DWT and Bahamut together, so do you want to see DWT follow in a similar trail to FBT (ex: single - aoe - single -aoe - etc), or would you rather see something else to differentiate them?

About Titan Egi

Would you like to see Titan-egi's other Assault turn into a skill like this and just have him be the 'shield pet', or would you still want to see him interact with the enemy and have abilities centered around dealing damage?

[Shougun]

Would you like to see Titan-egi's other Assault turn into a skill like this and just have him be the 'shield pet', or would you still want to see him interact with the enemy and have abilities centered around dealing damage?

Good question. Personally I think since Ifrit is single target king, Garuda is AoE queen, that then Titan should be sustain and "everything has hit the fan, everything is on fire please help me god" guy lol. Like those moments in previous FFXIV summoner where players take out the titan egi because something really bad just happened (except not as OP as it used to be because SE nerfed it because of that lol). It's a ... little.. that way at the moment but I feel like it could be quite a bit more to add a lot more value to Titan (and it can be designed in a way that means Titan isn't tanking for the party).

So here you might find that titan hits as hard as or maybe slightly harder than Garuda but absolutely at no point stronger than ifrit in single target, or stronger than Garuda in AoE (when Garuda goes to aoe blast perhaps titan hits harder on a sole target, but that'd be the extent of Titan hitting harder than the other egi). Yet Titan egi will provide a number of support opportunities that can make it quite helpful in a pinch.

That first support concept you read of course was that when you summon Titan he basically auto casts a shield and some mechanic may need to be in place to prevent spam. Although as mentioned before resummoning egi is a great way to plummet your pet damage so that in and of itself might be enough of a proper deterrent but might not be. I imagine a nice way to control it is a cooldown on the effect could be enough, with a little gold/yellow gem on bahamut's/Pheonix's chest UI or something to show if it's possible to get the bonus or not.

The second was to be a sort of shield on damage mechanic. But due to your question I think I'll reformulate it all a bit because I can (in general I always assume SE is going to be inspired by a fraction of an idea anyways lol (if they even like it), so I don't try to be specific other than just to suggest different concepts they might utilize and because it's fun):

Titan has a passive barrier mechanic that comes in two parts, the first part is that he has an HP bar and a portion of all damage he deals turns into a shield to absorb damage on your behalf (0 hp does not mean death for titan egi, just empty shields). The second part is when he is first summoned his shield will start out with a portion of your max hp (%). Having an HP bar I feel will greatly increase that feeling he is tanking for you, but of course will only be a visual representation of the shield created for you as all attacks will be target at you and titan is untargetable (so his HP acts as a sort of permanent cover on you).

His secondary can be he casts Earthen Armor (name and visuals as is), with an added visual effect of a sort rock storm (like Titan's goal broken into many pieces, rotating around). Low aoe potency damage for duration of the armor (lower than slipstream), and with increased damage conversion to shield rate for duration (perhaps based on ability rather than a flat rate, for balance control) - even with balance control this should probably be quite helpful in trash packs and while less extreme still very nice in single target situations as titan uses his other skills. It's important that while it doesn't have to be massive that there is a clear damage difference from using Garuda and Ifrit for what they're good at compared to taking the hybrid sustain option. In solo situations when you're doing FATEs Titan should probably be the grand choice (allowing you to sustain comfortably), when things are going south in dungeons so he will be there too, but when you're attempting to be most optimal you wont use Titan for any sustained period of time in dungeon content because that's not optimal (however, because of titan's summon to gain shield mechanic you can still summon him during transitional damage before going back to your other egi, so he isn't necessarily forgotten).

Since I'm going off anyways lol I figure I'd touch upon maybe making the Enkindle of the egi a bit more different. With perhaps enemies within the Earthen Fury are stunned upon entering or exiting the area (only once) and are slowed like Ninja's Doton (also the damage makes shields which is pretty helpful). Meanwhile Ifrit when using his single target attacks will deal an increased potency (minor potency boost) to those inflicted with inferno (so probably just to his burning strike attack, which is the auto 3 second move). Garuda's is pretty strong but it might be a bit cool if her enkindle caused slipstream to increase in size (her puddle of wind), just adding an interaction because it's fun lol (the damage increase would in most cases be minimal but just encase basically now it's for sure her aoe would hit the whole mob pack)..

Anyway like I said before I'm glad they're slowly adding more and more primal to summoner and so long as they keep doing that when they make changes I'll probably just keep giving a thumbs up. My selfish, ruin the job for other people, dream would still probably to remove all of arcanist from the job and go full hardcore primals, Yuna Dissida, FFXI big boi summons, big spell visuals, etc, but I think with Demi they went a bit that way and so I was happy and Phoenix is definitely an improvement on the trance concept (demi are neat, egi still give me an "eh.. wish it was a demi, wish it was a FFXI summon/etc" but I do like the egi assaults).


So whatever they choose hopefully it'll be smooth, fun, feel rewarding for the work put in, a bit diverse options (even if they're locked in a way to allow summoner more damage, like Titan being more supportive but strictly worse damage and so he shouldn't really count much against summoner's peak dps), and ultimately primal-y .

Just to add I don't think Titan is in a dire situation for summoner since.. well since he's not really needed to be used (although I've heard some old missions are a real challenge now without his tank ability). It's that I really wanted to add onto him so he felt more useful even if not always "for that moment". He's a bit cumbersome right now and it does feel a bit sad that he can't tank for us anymore (I mean he was bad at it in the recent days, but he was pretty great in the beginning).. so I feel this idea of him having a passive cover mechanic that makes him tank for just you and holds no enmity.. that might actually work out okay. Plus if you added that then you don't need to adjust the story quests (he could "tank" again).

[Madoka]

If they want us to actually swap egis often (as them becoming instant and lowering the cooldown seems to suggest) then they egis should do something on entry and probably not reset position to where we are. So titan throwing down a shield on the party (protective Gaol?) on entry could add some support to make up for our raise tax. Garuda could force a tornado on entry to match her animation and ifrit could come up from the ground under the target with a single target attack. Would also help with ifrit needing to close gaps again after demis leave.

That also adds more weaving so I'd only want that if something's done about egi assaults. For those I just think making them both 1 minute CDs with real potencies and each give two R4 stacks would be a nice consolidation. Make titan's shield action also give a regen or make it like a tank CD with a long duration rather than a damage bubble to make up for the longer cooldown.

[Sequora]

Any idea when 5.08 is going to drop?

[Exodus-E]

Any idea when 5.08 is going to drop?

...Tomorrow?
I mean, both the Lodestone and the game's launcher said as much.

[Shougun]

Any idea when 5.08 is going to drop?

Isn't 5.08 today?

From the launcher:

In order to accompany Patch 5.08, we will be performing maintenance on all Worlds at the time below, during which FINAL FANTASY XIV will be unavailable.

We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause, and we thank you for your understanding.

[Date & Time]
Aug. 28, 2019 11:00 p.m. to Aug. 29, 2019 3:00 a.m. (PDT)
* Completion time is subject to change.

[Affected Worlds]
All Worlds

* The Home World Transfer Service will be suspended 30 minutes before maintenance begins, and will be unavailable until maintenance has ended.

* Certain features in the FINAL FANTASY XIV Companion app will be unavailable until maintenance has ended.

* Any duty recorder data recorded prior to this maintenance can no longer be replayed after this maintenance.

[NovaBismarck]

Guess we'll see tomorrow. The patch notes state:
"Regarding DoTs, we've received lots of feedback saying that players would like DoT durations extended, but we are instead considering reworking Ruin spells so that their potency will no longer be dependent on the number of DoTs inflicted on the target.

Easing the difficulty of playing summoner is still in a phase where it's being considered. On the other hand, the change to Ruin spells will be scheduled for patch 5.08 if we determine that the adjustment is effective.

Ninja, samurai, and summoner are on high priority for changes, but these are still in development so we cannot go into too much detail for now."

Patch notes ref:
http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/threads/402453

Personally as a full time casual player doing midcore content and only savage occasionally, I can definitely state personally damage tied to dots is a pain for reasons too numerous to count. Think I've recounted this several times before in smn threads, so I won't rehash. It'll be a welcome change for me. Now that is not to say they should remove dps, I would like to see a damage increase somewhere else to compensate.

[Absimiliard]

Let's take a moment to laugh about the fact that the SMN change didn't buff it at all. It's barely even a quality of life improvement.

[ShariusTC]

any chance that they will separate DWT and FBT into 2 action so we can have 3 burst phase back to back?