Thread: Fix Summoner Once and For All in 6.0 Please!

Originally Posted by Anhra

If executed properly, killable egis/demi summons would allow SMN not only to micromanage with say, egi and demi summons, it would also allow the SMN, Grimoire-M stated already, to allow to use his summons as a "extension" of his range of influence with abilities which can be a very useful thing if executed properly. It would also grant alot of Room for design since there is ALOT if stuff you can do, just by having killable "pets" again.

Beyond that "niche" use (and even then, it was only SCH that benefited from it), I still don't see why would anyone want them "killable" again.
Having to constantly refresh Sustain on Titan-Egi (against anything it wouldn't survive long for) or having to re-summon them mid-fight was not fun.
As I said, making them immune to any and all damage was a step in the right direction (in that we didn't have to worry about their "welfare" anymore).

Originally Posted by Anhra

I haven't played said game but from what i can tell (correct me if i am wrong), SMN in FFXI has pretty much no offensive abilities on his own aside from the weapon it wields. Literally anything he does, is being done trough his Summons, from attacking to support. And boy does it have alot of stuff to summon (most of those need to have a quest completed in order to get summoned).

Summons include: Carbuncle, Ifrit, Titan, Garuda, Ramuh, Shiva, Fenrir, Odin, Diabolos, Alexander, Cait Sith, Atomos, Spirits of each Element and Leviathan.

The problem is that, unlike in FF11, FF14's elements are pretty much for "flavor" and don't really matter in terms of game-play (outside of certain content like Eureka or The Masked Carnivale).
With that in mind, you really can't do much with "summons" here outside of aesthetics, which is exactly what the Egi glamour system was meant to do: allow us to apply different "skins" to what we've already covered (role-wise) from the start.
Still, we shall see what else they'll bring to the table in 6.0...

Originally Posted by Anhra

but even titan was quite weak defensewise.

Which makes perfect sense.
Otherwise you'd get a repeat of what happened back in Patch 2.3 and Ramuh EX (as in, you could totally let Titan-Egi tank him).

Originally Posted by Anhra

Might as well delete SMN then and allow Minions to fight for any Job and turn Egis into Mogstation exclusive Minions then.

Pet-based classes in MMOs have alot of room design- and gameplaywise and it is a shame that Squeenix keeps going for the easy Route of just dropping a idea, instead of fixing it and learn from the mistakes they made. But i guess all is fair and games as long as the money keeps on rolling and people praise yoshi p. as the god-emperor of mankind equivalent of FFXIV.

Now that's both, harsh and unfair.

What about the other jobs that used to rely on elemental resistances/weaknesses in other games (such as WHM or BLM), then?
Should they delete them as well?

Personally, I think they did a pretty good job at making all classes/jobs as balanced as possible, so they're all viable (unlike in FF11, which was a mess).

Also, it's still too early to tell on them "not fixing and learning from mistakes" when 6.0 is just around the corner.
So let's wait and see what they come up with by then, shall we?

Originally Posted by Anhra

And currently, a group of 5 SMN are technically capable to outheal any damage E4S can throw since the wings of immortality HoT stacks with itself.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=zdDxjXMMWgU

Not (quite) the same thing.

Back in Patch 2.3 you could literally let Titan-Egi tank Ramuh EX by itself (no dedicated Tank needed at all).
It was such a glaring "exploit" that the devs' quickly adjusted all the pets so they wouldn't be able to (safely) tank anything as dangerous as an EX trial.

By contrast, that video showcased a party composed of 1 PLD, 1 WAR, 1 DNC and 5 SMNs. And every non-SMN in that party also had healing options.
As for the SMNs there, they all used/had Earthen Armor (the one action you called "generic") and Everlasting Flight (the HoT buff).
The latter being unreliable at best, considering you can only get it once you reach the Firebird Trance part of your rotation (i.e. at the very end of it).

So yeah...

Pets taking damage matters in game designs like WoW where incoming damage and outgoing agro is less scripted and who is taking damage in the party and how much is more volatile, warranting the pet's HP bar (And in some cases their agro grabbing tools) as an extra resource that you manage.

In XIV, that doesn't happen so it mostly would be annoying and clunky and force you to manually drag your pet out of AOEs all the time.

Honestly, I could redesign SMN right now and have it revolve around the element wheel. The problem is it would be such a drastic change your better off making a new job.

When you step back and look at the actual problems with SMN (not SCH), the biggest flaw isn't its overload with mechanics but it's lacks the structure that 4.0 had. Namely a solid rotation and playstyle; Aetherflow Phase, Trance Phase, Demi Phase. They took the best things about 4.0 and tossed it with 5.0. You need a solid rotation plan or the job fails. This needs to happen in 6.0 or you'll just have more of the same issues.

1. Aetherflow/Egi phase with is a build up to Trance/Demi. Rather than have Aether stack be used for Fester/Painflare, make it the resource of Egi Assualts where four would charge up Trance. This will fix a number of issues from Ghosting to over all feel.

• Next you need to remove EA building Ruin IV. It just makes them feel cheap and worthless. Egi Assaults and Enkindle should be flashy and feel powerful, They should have different styles of DPS and maybe support; remember it is a DPS job after all.

• Pet Potency needs to be address and make sense. It's heartbreaking when a 150 Ruin does more damage than a 250 Egi Assault. This feeds into the idea of pets being weak and unimportant.

• To help with ghosting and working around the overall FFXIV build code you need to change how EAs work. You can't just have player try and cram 4 EA and enkindle into the pets Queue, it's not going to work. First you continue Energy Drain as the overall mechanic of Aetherflow but make it 10s cooldown and 20s recast with 2 stacks. EA would be the 2.5s cast with a 5s cooldown, but add 2 more EA for a total of 4 different abilities. EDrain > EAssault > EAssualt > EDrain > EAssualt > EAssualt > Trance Phase. As for new EAssault; melee would get a gap closer, an attack, a 30s DoT, and Support (3 to 5 yalm DPS buff). Range EAssualt would be 21s Ground AoE, AoE attack, 18s AoE DoT, and Support(Tank Damage Reflect Buff. Make Enkindle just a straight DPS attack with no DoTs or ground effect, Melee 500 Potency Single Target, Range 350 potency AoE.

1. Next is the Trance/Demi Phase. I think Firebird/Phoenix work good as is with no changes. Though there has been a lot of discussion, I believe the best path forward is to combine DWT and Bahamut with some minor changes. Ruin III would be upgraded to Ruin IV and OutBurst to Painflare. Bahamut would just cast Wyrmwave every 2s but spells have a __% chance to upgrade Wyrmwave to Akh Morn. His Enkindle would become TeraFlare because it's his "iconic attack". Both Phoenix and Bahamut would not move during combat, already have 100y range. This is to help with ghosting caused by movement.

1. DoTs are DoTs and the SMN job is to try and keep them up. Keep Tri-D the same but change to hard recast of 60s no traits. Change Fester to were it still deals damage but also extends current DoTs on the target by 10s. Honestly don't even know if this would work with game engine, just a idea to help with DoT management but still have it engaging.

1. New Summon, Tempus Odin or Alexander. So currently we have a Egi/Buildup Phase and Trance/Demi Phase but what about the pay off, what is new with 6.0. This comes from something we don't have yet, a charge up Summon. Basically once you perform 2 Trances (DWT and FWT) Tempus Odin (Single Target) or Tempus Alexander (Aoe) is available. Once activated, a build up timer starts with effects how powerful the attack is. Once the gauge is full or the SMN moves with "casting" the gauge stops and the summon will cast, do a powerful attack, then desummon. The goal is to stand still, build up the gauge, then summon a powerful one and done attack.

So in summary the rotation would be Buildup/Egi Phase > Trance/Demi Phase > Buildup/Egi > Trance/ Demi > Tempus Summon. That would make it 2 minute rotation with Tempus being 10s or 15s gauge.

Originally Posted by Dyvid

Honestly, I could redesign SMN right now and have it revolve around the element wheel. The problem is it would be such a drastic change your better off making a new job.

...Alright, I'ma swing at the bait. Sorry. Please look forward to it.

Originally Posted by Dyvid

When you step back and look at the actual problems with SMN (not SCH), the biggest flaw isn't its overload with mechanics but it's lacks the structure that 4.0 had. Namely a solid rotation and playstyle; Aetherflow Phase, Trance Phase, Demi Phase. They took the best things about 4.0 and tossed it with 5.0. You need a solid rotation plan or the job fails. This needs to happen in 6.0 or you'll just have more of the same issues.

First off, Stormblood was the worst iteration of the job by far, and its was explicitly BECAUSE of those 'Phases' you're referring to, which were just a shoddy attempt to lock players out of a well optimized and mostly fluid rotation that was put together in Heavensward, in direct contrast to what the developers wanted. The only problems with the Heavensward iteration of Summoner were holdovers from ARR (Staggered DoTs, Contagion, Buff Bloat), some necessary Hardclipping in DWT for Festers, and the Aethertrail Timer. Stormblood did fix those, but at a major cost to the fluidity of the actual rotation. Every major cooldown collided poorly with one another and forced people who understood Summoner's Player-optimized HW rotation perfectly to completely unlearn habits that are normally expected of ANY DPS in an MMO. Cooldown Stacking is obviously beneficial. That's why we blew through DWT asap and held Aetherflow actions and Addle for Bahamut once we were able to (and that is by far the worst example of pet AI the game has ever seen. I'll fight anyone on that).


Secondly, Shadowbringers Summoner does not lack structure in its rotation. It lacks depth. You want to know what the structure of its rotation is? Here you go.


You can find direct analogues between aspects of Summoner's part of the toolkit and the portion taken up by their pets just by looking at the numbers and flow of the overall rotation. The way I often describe it is they're a Machine Gun Mage. Lots of little damage pieces adding up to a complimentary DPS engine. The problem is the pets and Summoner rarely meaningfully interact or build on eachother. That is to say, it lacks explicit synergy (Repertoire on Bard is an example of this, though not the route I'd go with on Summoner). And that is largely why Summoner feels flat every expansion. I don't think that it is impossible to add, but I will note that absolutely none of your suggestions in your entire post accomplish this. Zero. Zip. Nada.

Originally Posted by Dyvid

Aetherflow/Egi phase with is a build up to Trance/Demi. Rather than have Aether stack be used for Fester/Painflare, make it the resource of Egi Assualts where four would charge up Trance. This will fix a number of issues from Ghosting to over all feel.

All this is really doing for me is triggering my Triple Caster Omega PTSD where I had to micromanage 11WW Bahamut while acting as the ranged DPS of the group. Shadowbringers fixed a ton of issues with Stormblood Summoner, but the major ones were removing those shoddy lockouts and limiting Wyrmwave to only triggering on spells. I can say with confidence that restoring Stormblood Summoner's lockouts would piss off roughly 60% of the mains of the class, and I know that because I'm the guy who literally made the thread and poll asking them to be removed at Stormblood's launch.

Originally Posted by Dyvid

- Next you need to remove EA building Ruin IV. It just makes them feel cheap and worthless. Egi Assaults and Enkindle should be flashy and feel powerful, They should have different styles of DPS and maybe support; remember it is a DPS job after all.

- Pet Potency needs to be address and make sense. It's heartbreaking when a 150 Ruin does more damage than a 250 Egi Assault. This feeds into the idea of pets being weak and unimportant.

I agree that these are issues. That said, your math on pet potency is wrong. Egi Assaults are equal to Ruin III in value. That's why they're so good for movement. They cost absolutely nothing. With Further Ruin procs they're functionally a potency gain too, whether we like it or not. This isn't worth worrying about for reasons I'll get to.

Originally Posted by Dyvid

Next is the Trance/Demi Phase. I think Firebird/Phoenix work good as is with no changes. Though there has been a lot of discussion, I believe the best path forward is to combine DWT and Bahamut with some minor changes. Ruin III would be upgraded to Ruin IV and OutBurst to Painflare. Bahamut would just cast Wyrmwave every 2s but spells have a __% chance to upgrade Wyrmwave to Akh Morn. His Enkindle would become TeraFlare because it's his "iconic attack". Both Phoenix and Bahamut would not move during combat, already have 100y range. This is to help with ghosting caused by movement.

It is a common suggestion from any Summoner player to simply merge Summon Bahamut and Dreadwyrm Trance to fix this issue in later parts of the fight, but doing so exacerbates the issues we are already having with Firebird Trance alignment, issues that would again be solved by returning Aetherflow back to the kit. Aetherflow previously set the tempo of this rotation and it's the only thing I and some other Summoners think should return from prior expansions, apart from maybe using Spur as an ARR version of Trance if they want to remove Enkindle and Deathflare via levelling up. That's it. As far as I'm concerned though, Akh Morn is his iconic attack. And we need more of them to live up to the spam potential.

Originally Posted by Dyvid

To help with ghosting and working around the overall FFXIV build code you need to change how EAs work. You can't just have player try and cram 4 EA and enkindle into the pets Queue, it's not going to work. First you continue Energy Drain as the overall mechanic of Aetherflow but make it 10s cooldown and 20s recast with 2 stacks. EA would be the 2.5s cast with a 5s cooldown, but add 2 more EA for a total of 4 different abilities. EDrain > EAssault > EAssualt > EDrain > EAssualt > EAssualt > Trance Phase. As for new EAssault; melee would get a gap closer, an attack, a 30s DoT, and Support (3 to 5 yalm DPS buff). Range EAssualt would be 21s Ground AoE, AoE attack, 18s AoE DoT, and Support(Tank Damage Reflect Buff. Make Enkindle just a straight DPS attack with no DoTs or ground effect, Melee 500 Potency Single Target, Range 350 potency AoE.

Egi Assaults and Devotion/Enkindle are fine as long as you late weave everything properly. I've done it with Egi Assaults into Demis without losing GCD uptime or Further Ruin Stacks. It's the same problem as double-weaving EAs back when they were oGCD at launch. The pet queue has enough time to resolve everything cleanly if you space everything out at least one and a half seconds apart, and in fact will do so as long as you watch what it's doing. I've adapted the Akh Morning opener to suit my raid's needs by delaying Bahamut a GCD to apply Addle at an ideal time (doesn't cost anything as we don't have a NIN) and it solves the occasional EA hiccup issue you can have sometimes. Funnily enough you kinda stumble on some numbers I had for making EAs relevant with an Enkindle Gauge but all you'd really accomplish here is making the same opener we have now mandatory every cycle with zero ways to move inbetween while adding even more weaving nonsense for no rhyme or reason at all. In other words, it's a step backwards.

Speaking of Ghosting, it often happens on Bahamut and Phoenix if you early-weave their Summon and Trance respectively. Bahamut specifically requires you manage your hard and instant casts to avoid dropping a Wyrmwave while Phoenix requires delaying Fountain of Fire a tiny bit to allow Everlasting Flight to resolve, which allows for a tripleweave to fix the issue. In general their durations can fall off at inconvenient times if you're the kind of player to rush things, but it is night and day compared to Stormblood. All of these problems are entirely avoidable, but also not difficult to solve without even touching Pet AI. SE could give the Demis the Bunshin stack treatment with a mild duration increase, then give Egi charges on their auto attack and let them cancel it into another action immediately, and suddenly everything's peachy.

Originally Posted by Dyvid

DoTs are DoTs and the SMN job is to try and keep them up. Keep Tri-D the same but change to hard recast of 60s no traits. Change Fester to were it still deals damage but also extends current DoTs on the target by 10s. Honestly don't even know if this would work with game engine, just a idea to help with DoT management but still have it engaging.

Some Summoners are married to Tri-Disaster. I for one am not, but I do not think reverting it back to its HW iteration is the right choice.

I've mentioned this multiple times throughout the expansion, even in this thread at one point, but I'll restate it again to make it clear. The only problems with Shadowbringers Summoner are:
- Tri-Disaster not getting Charges to REPLACE the reset Mechanic.
- Devotion being locked out of Demi-Summons.
- A Terminal Case of Mutually Exclusive and Superflously Similar Buttons due for a trimming. (Trances and Summon Bahamut, Enkindles, Aetherflow Actions)
- Removing Aetherflow had some undesirable knock on effects. (Have to use Trance as a bridge. Mandatory use of Energy Siphon and bloating of Aetherflow Actions)
- Lack of Clarity on Pet potency, AI State, or behaviour.

Other issues arise out of how you handle their button trim, such as what to do with Ruin IV and Enkindle. These aren't unsolvable, but, frankly, we can't call what happens here.

Originally Posted by Dyvid

]New Summon, Tempus Odin or Alexander. So currently we have a Egi/Buildup Phase and Trance/Demi Phase but what about the pay off, what is new with 6.0. This comes from something we don't have yet, a charge up Summon. Basically once you perform 2 Trances (DWT and FWT) Tempus Odin (Single Target) or Tempus Alexander (Aoe) is available. Once activated, a build up timer starts with effects how powerful the attack is. Once the gauge is full or the SMN moves with "casting" the gauge stops and the summon will cast, do a powerful attack, then desummon. The goal is to stand still, build up the gauge, then summon a powerful one and done attack.

SE's primary reason for starting another rework is the concern that by adding more and more pets to the current rotation, whether as Demi or Egi, it would begin to bloat into a 6+ minute long piece of nonsense with nothing coherent going on in the filler aside from maybe vaguely gesturing at XI flavor for absolutely no gain whatsoever. They're right to be concerned by that, but I don't think it needs to be completely overhauled. Not on the demi-side, at least. To me the solution is to replace Demis and egi as you level and upgrade their sections in meaningful ways, while making old Demi into glamour. Facilitating this would require a standardization of egi animations across the board.

Regardless, there's no point in speculating on pets because we need to see how they change. I would say that the Demi are easier to tweak structurally and numerically right now but I think they have worse AI issues than the Egi. Either way it's pointless to speculate. None of the potential fixes SE could implement require the current rotation to change at all. In fact, I'm fairly comfortable saying they don't need to. All I'm expecting them to do is fix the underlying engine and AI issues that are currently plaguing Egi and Demi alike, and to -not add any new demi or egi summons till that's done-. Yoshi-P has basically affirmed this in Mr Happy's interview. He literally said they're putting glamour on hold. It's reasonable to assume that given there's no new glamour that they're not going to mess with pet assets either if they don't need to but I wouldn't be surprised if they give the Egi Primals a glow-up because it's a common complaint. Beyond that, it's pointless speculation. Temper your expectations. Alexander won't be coming, but Bahamut could use some extra oomph to distinguish him from Phoenix. Anything involving "different styles of DPS" within Egi Management is right out given SE's track record. And, honestly, play a different job if you want a different style of DPS. That's why we can level them all to cap. Casters are the most distinctive of the bunch. But for the love of all Carbuncles please leave Stormblood Summoner in the dumpster where it belongs.