Smn Rework Suggestions After LL

[ssunny2008]

If you do not consider 6.0’s summoner a real summoner then there is really nothing left to say.

Yes every job is a string of animations, but it´s still a difference how it´s been made. From MNK i expect to be a fast hitting melee only class. SAM should be that hardhitting finisher class. Black magic is a symbol for destruction and so is BLM. White magic on the other hand has always been like something "positive" and of course it´s WHM is a healer. WAR is diverse, i would call someone with an axe a berserk, but since it´s a tank and not a burst-dps, being WAR seems fine.

I could go on with the list, but anyway i can´t see the current nor the new SMN as a real summoner. Yes you summon things, but next to carbuncle, bahamut and pheonix in their strict rotation, you just summon animations as you did in other FF games with Esper, GF, primal crystals. All of them don´t have coop or combo skills and there are not even real commands you can use. You don´t really interact with them, you don´t even have a carbuncle as mount, no you need to buy it in the shop.

Imagine you would be a real summoner, maybe someone who can have like 2 of 4 egis at once, maybe 2 finisher egis on top. (Just brainstorming)

- Let´s take Ifrit as core-egi, which gives you some fire commands. If your second egi is Garuda, Dot-skills getting expanded in their time, while aoe skills has a bigger range.
- Or if you´ve Shiva as second egi, you can combine fire and ice skills to set a water debuff on the enemy. The boss will get 10% more damage from lightning effects then, so of course Ramuh is a 3rd Egi you can summon for 10s, while the other 2 will be permanent.
- You could even combine Ifrit and Leviathan to create some fog-clouds and all players in there are getting buffed in evasion or maybe get a higher critical hit chance. Maybe NIN could use this fog to perform trickattack without mudra / his own stealth? Would be a nice class combo.
- At last Titan could be the other 10s Egi. Let him spawn 4 stones, where the group or a tank could take cover behind at several damage incomes. Maybe even Ifrit would be able to melt them, so they leave a hart hitting lava-aoe similar to Dotun.

Then you could take Shiva as prime-egi, which grants you more ice abilities and CC and you combine it the same or other ways with the rest. Garuda which grants more movement speed, more range, a windwall... Levi which could cleanse yourself or others, man so many possibilities...

You would interact with your egis, combine their elements and even in the raidparty it would spice things up. Being able to spawn stones or clouds the raid can interact with is much more than "press a button to shield or buff the whole raid in range". It´s interactive gameplay.
Sadly it would probably to complex for the most ppl and such stuff will surely never be implemented, but this is something i would call a summoner and not just a string of animations. Call me a dreamer, but 6.0 SMN is wasted effort for me and a pure lack of creativity.

And again, i would still vote for skilltrees too. It´s not hard to balance them. Give summoner an egi skilltree and a dot skilltree. Give MNK a positional-heavy tree and a blitz depended tree. Give Tanks the possibility to tank or to DPS, same with healers. Man there are so many ways to cater pretty much everyone on any class with stuff like a skilltree instead of static homogenized subclasses with roleskills. All those dumb discussions could end so easily with more possibilities on our side.

Or maybe it somehow matches together because a lot of thought was put into it?...

If i look at the story and lore, then no... neither if we look at older games and not even if we take FF14´s own lore / story. It matches together yes, but deeper thoughts are not really placed or easy "solutions" got placed. Just some examples:

- The Nanamo got poisened storyline... like yeah...
- Different races / classes... Why i´m able to become a dragoon without visiting ishgard? Why is GNB a tankclass, when Squall was a DPS-monster with sick limit breaks? Since when was Cloud a DRK? (Greatsword?)
Of course, we´re warrior of lights and can do everything easily. But we haven´t been able to switch classes easily in solo games, on the other hand we were able to be much more than "just that one class" per fight. (Casting, fighting, summoning, healing...)
Or Viera got introduced in the first splitterworld only, why does 1000 players run around as Viera here? Or Hrothgar which came suddenly out of nowhere? Raktika is the perfect Viera lore, but everything which affects us players, is none. As next we´re going to get male-viera caused by the community wish. It´s just a thing, because this is a MMORPG and far away from their lore, isn´t it?

There is a lot of more stuff like this, if we take a deeper look at it. SE did easy in this way by calling us the WoL and placing new areas. It got combined tricky in the story, but it doesn´t match lore-wise so well together / the lore is getting ignored to cater the players experiences and wishes.
This means, that arguments like "it has been in FF game X so or so" are not a real thing. As i´ve said, it´s an MMORPG in it´s first case and stuff is getting finetuned on that fact.