Is Smn losing its AOE?

[Grimoire-M]

Hate it. Will play it if I can't heal next tier. Someone else has to get a ride on the Glamour DPS train.

[remiff]

The summoner does not lose his aoes,
Every demi-phases had huge aoe system .

[Kolsykol]

Dots for SMN always felt weird to me, especially since they were basically '' biological ''.
It makes sense for SCH with the nature theme with fairies etc but for SMN it was just wat.

[XmissionsX]

Personally gutted they replaced summoner by a different class they even joked about adding 3 new classes as I just finished leveling up I am very disappointed so apparently I am a mage in ew with flashy graphics which does not mean anything for me.

Aoe removal would be the dead of ew mage/smn so I doubt they also will remove that Rez will probably go sadly in some future patch.

[Dyvid]

Personally gutted they replaced summoner by a different class they even joked about adding 3 new classes as I just finished leveling up I am very disappointed so apparently I am a mage in ew with flashy graphics which does not mean anything for me.

Aoe removal would be the dead of ew mage/smn so I doubt they also will remove that Rez will probably go sadly in some future patch.

A scene that basically sums up my feeling while watching the Action Trailer in Live Letter

[SchrodingersWaffle]

Glad they added Geomancer to the game, just a shame they had to kill SMN to do it.

I'm not impressed by shiny things and SMN's changes only upset me.

*Removing DoTs is the first slap in the face. No more AoE DoTs to melt away large packs.
*Now SMN is a stance dancing job like Bard instead of it's own unique job.
*Not even sure if Egis are even useful anymore or just a place holder for Bahamut and Phoenix.
*Still doesn't fix the key issues like Demi ghosting abilities.
*Couldn't even be bother to add Leviathan, Shiva, or Ramuh stances.
*Remove all the shiny Primal animation, you basically switch stances to cast different elemental spells i.e. Geomancer.

It was never going to be FFXI SMN, the pet code is too spaghetti for that, and they have made multiple attempts to fix it. At some point you have to accept that it cannot be fixed with how things are right now, and move in the direction of something that still evokes the flavor of the class while changing it mechanically.

[Darksummoner]

I'm happy they removed the DOT since that just made me feel like Summoner was a wanna be warlock from WOW. Looking forward to trying out the new smn system and Finally being able to summon Primal's with this new stone system hopefully more stuff will be added to it over time and we will be able to control the primal summons more. It was nice seeing the attacks that you get to do after you summon Titan.

This here.

Last thing I need or want is for this game to be anything similar to Booty grabbing WoW. When I first came to this game, 4 months ago, I fell in love with summoner cause it was kinda similar to warlock (A class I played for 17 years). But warlock pumped on steroids and energy drinks all at the same time. I really LOVE the summoner class and I would love for it to have it's own distinctive look and feel from the WoW warlock. So I see these changes as positive and great. I know we feel worried about the AoE, but I think we will be just fine. FFXIV has several things better then Blizzard and that is making sure ALL classes (jobs) are fun and competitive.

[Grimoire-M]

This here.

Last thing I need or want is for this game to be anything similar to Booty grabbing WoW. When I first came to this game, 4 months ago, I fell in love with summoner cause it was kinda similar to warlock (A class I played for 17 years). But warlock pumped on steroids and energy drinks all at the same time. I really LOVE the summoner class and I would love for it to have it\\'s own distinctive look and feel from the WoW warlock. So I see these changes as positive and great. I know we feel worried about the AoE, but I think we will be just fine. FFXIV has several things better then Blizzard and that is making sure ALL classes (jobs) are fun and competitive.

As someone who has played a lot of Korean MMOs this feels distinctly worse than the mindset used there. Unique and flashy looking spells existed there with equally bizarre yet fun mechanics. Their idea of Balance was very similar to classic MMOs, but even the WoW clones of that subgenre kept their weird utility on older classes and simply let it accrete over time. XIV doesn’t hesitate to trim or dumb things down and if I were to use a WoW analogy it was like walking into BfA or WoD and seeing half your fun stuff just ripped out for no reason other than it wasn’t easy to manage for the devs.

[Dyvid]

It was never going to be FFXI SMN, the pet code is too spaghetti for that, and they have made multiple attempts to fix it. At some point you have to accept that it cannot be fixed with how things are right now, and move in the direction of something that still evokes the flavor of the class while changing it mechanically.

Never said I wanted FFXI SMN, that version was garbage. I liked what we had but 5.XX needed adjustments to make it play more smoothly. And as you quoted, based on what we saw none of the issue we have are being addressed. In fact by moving Egi Assault from pets to Summoner you increase the delay of the attack lol. My click to action is basically 1.5s to 2s. Regardless, even if you use Earth Stance as a strawman argument, you still have a global cooldown that equalized it.

[SchrodingersWaffle]

Never said I wanted FFXI SMN, that version was garbage. I liked what we had but 5.XX needed adjustments to make it play more smoothly. And as you quoted, based on what we saw none of the issue we have are being addressed. In fact by moving Egi Assault from pets to Summoner you increase the delay of the attack lol. My click to action is basically 1.5s to 2s. Regardless, even if you use Earth Stance as a strawman argument, you still have a global cooldown that equalized it.

Nah, see what you're asking for, and what they've been attempting, is much closer to FFXI SMN than literally any other FF. No other FF actually has the summons as pets, it's literally just XI. This version that we're getting now, while still needing some adjustments to make it deeper gameplay wise, is much closer to the traditional SMN, and I'm saying that as someone who absolutely adored StB SMN. The only thing it really even has in common with Geomancer is that is uses elemental attacks, which could be said about BLM and RDM as well, so that's really a false equivalency.

The bottom line is that the limiting factor for SMN and to a lesser extent SCH is the absolutely horrendous pet AI coding, combined with the baseline action lock delay. They've tried multiple times to fix it, and given that it hasn't really gotten that much better since the ARR beta, leads me to believe that the limiting factor on the AI isn't with the AI code itself but rather the base code and function for the game, and that changing that code or function will cause more problems than it will fix. Ergo, given that they are unwilling or unable to fix the limiting factor of SMN as it stands right now, which is a coding function, I'd rather they move to something where those inherent coding/function problems aren't an issue.

Now that's not to say that they couldn't have solved these problems. They could've had the summons all use ranged attacks with unlimited range, and just had Bahamut and Phoenix stay where they're summoned, but I'll say that the system they've come up with has far more potential than what they've been working with and works far better as a baseline they can build upon than what they've had so far.