New summoner is unacceptable

[BalanceDXR]

Hey there,


New player here, I began to play FFXIV a few months ago, inspired by AnnieFuchsia & Asmongold, yeah the recent waves of WOW refugees.

I dont consider myself very hardcore, neither in WOW PvP nor here. I play at my own pace, enjoy the story and the character progression of each Scion and other main chars a lot. Love the gameplay, love the way you can decide what you want to play, cause its so fun.

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That being said, after a few days of Endwalker, I felt I have to make a forum account here to post a feedback about the new summoner.

At first, it looks great, in the preview videos. Flashy effects, big summons (which you get at max lvl 90, not right now, oh bummer)

BUT

I hate how everything is made so simple, and if I may use the word, a brain-dead playstyle.
Basically:

• Decide if a) single-target b) multi-target
• 1 button for one of the 2 bigger summons, spam a) or b) till timer is over
• 1 button for 3 lesser summons, spam a) or b)
• Occasionally add ruins 3 or ruins 4 as remnants of the older skills.

I mean sure, it looks flashy, a bit too flashy for my part when Tri-Disaster is casted. So I considered to turn effects lower, just to realize nearly no effect is shown anymore.
Why different buttons for the single-target or multi-target spell for summoner himself or the lesser summons? Its the same anyway, no shields or diversity whatsoever.


I missed the old, more planing, more challenging, but at the same time more rewarding playstyle.

• It felt very satisfying to be able to nuke 2 times with Bahamut or Phoenix.
• It felt very satisfying to prepare 3 or 4 ruinIV for Bahamut to maximize dmg output.
• It felt very satisfying to AOE dot everybody to max dmg.
• It felt very satisfying to use the AOE dot, then renew it asap to use it on the next crowd of mobs.
• It felt very satisfying to use the renew skills(didnt remember the names, sorry for this) and to cast fast enough to insta ruin3 6 times instead of 5 times. And get the nuke in the end before timer went out.
• It felt very satisfying to swap between the lesser summons, for example if more AOE is needed or a shield is needed.
• It felt very statisfying to decide whether to wait for the DOT to use the instant abilities for more dmg or to do lesser dmg with no DOT on, but faster nuking the mob down.

[BalanceDXR]

I miss all these points mentioned above. And though story progression is great, and I love every single detail the devs put into work, from word design to a little break and banter between the scions. But playing a braindead class is neither fun nor feels it rewarding for me.
Seriously considering to switch to a class, but since I read many of you said Red Mage and many other classes are tuned down to braindead anyway already. Can someone of you recommend a class for me to play which is diverse and complex as the old summoner please? Thank you very much in advance!

And if some of the devs happens to read this. Please bring at least some of the old complexity of the summoner back. I know not everybody is build to manage the "complex" points mentioned above. But for these of us who likes to dive deeper and feel rewarded to use the right combination of spells, it's a challenge and makes each fight much more fun during the entire playing time.


Thank you.


A fresh new player at the beginning of his journey in FFXIV.

[BalanceDXR]

Oh, and about the "mighty" summons you can do for now.
They arent even summon beings you can control. They dont accompany you. They appear, do 1 attack animation, then disappear.
With the old summoner system, you could direct your summoned egi to attack something else, to finish it off, to aoe a group of lesser strong mob down, while you are focussing your dmg on the main target for example. New one: nope. Just 1st button - aoe aoe - 2nd button - aoe aoe aoe - 3rd button - aoe aoe aoe aoe, and repeat.

So flashy effects besides, its like pressing a button to charge yourself up, to be able to do 2-4 times single-target-attack or aoe-attack, then charge yourself up again, then repeat this 3 times.
Only with different buttons each times. And different modern flashy shining effects, yay.


Hell its so boring I dont even know how to say it in English the best way, since English is not my mother tongue and its beyond my imagination how a dev team could gut a class and makes it so simple to play a 6 year old could master it within 15 minutes.

[hazelmoon]

As a newer player (mostly playing summoner at the moment, level 56), I was worried I had missed some of the class quests so made sure to catch up completely on them...

Aaaand... I didn't miss anything. Ruin spam really seems to be it, in between the very long summon cooldown spam.

I think I'm going to try Dancer in a few levels, as my only other 2 classes currently at the same level are healers (just want a break from healing). Not really sure what to play at the moment. Drowning in content (in a good but slightly overwhelmed way) but sadly not happy with my current class decision.

[Ralts]

I'm now lv86 with my summoner and i'm loving it! Every summoned egi gets you an additional spell, which adds to the complexity of the job. Great change for the class and I hope they don't revert it in the next expansion.
I understand the complaints, but i'd rather complain if you're still unhappy at max level.

[Dyvid]

So I got level 86 today and can say it does change the job from mundane to somewhat engaging, mainly because it because a very fast paced and spammy job.

Ifrit Phase if you slowest with longer cast time and some odd dash that I don't care. Would like for the second part of that combo to be a dash back.

Garuda Phase is dropping the ground AoE DoT that last for 15s, then spam 1.5s attacks 4 times.

Titan Phase becomes weaving a oGCD and GCD together 4 times.

Bahamut and Phoenix are still the same; Enkindle, spam 1 or 2, and weave ED/Fester in between.

Elemental Mastery is something that needs to come sooner rather than later, levels 60 or 70.

I'm still disappointed in the direction the job went and wondering why on some of the design choices. For one, after almost 7 years now why couldn't they have added Shiva, Ramuh, and Leviathan? The mechanics are now in play; Aethercharges adds 3 primal elements. DWT could have added the umbral element Ramuh, Titan, and Leviathan while FWT could have added the Astral elements of Ifrit, Shiva, and Garuda. I know some say maybe next xpac but it's been a very long time coming and what better time then when you do a complete overhaul.

Another is why remove pets outright but keep them for the most annoying thing. For years players have asked for Devotion to be moved from pet to players because pet disappeared during Demi Phase. Now you can't used Shield or Devotion when Egi or Demi is summoned only compounding the problems. Further more would it have been such an issue to just have Carby and Egi auto attack for a little added damage but let alone retain a shred of old identity?

Aetherflow is something that just feels like it's on life support now and ED should just be tossed with Fester and Painflare going to charges.

[Remnar]

I've been playing SMN for a long time. I've seen it's changes through the ex-packs and the ShadowBringer version, to me, was the best. Yes it was complicated (even more so before ShadowBringers); but once you learn each of the phases, then it was easy to understand. It took me a long time to master SMN, practicing at Stone-Sky-Sea, etc.. It has become ingrained into me, even still required most of my attention (which is why I didn't like playing it in raids). SMN was my favorite dps class. Even so, my criticism of it that it lacked real summons, that it needed ones like Shiva, etc for certain debuffs and effects, even if you had to choose a set of them because there's no way you're gunna want to memorize each of their phases lol. Now we have a very stripped down version. I thought I had to spend time relearning SMN again. I figured it out in less than 30 minutes and got a rotation working, even tried it out in Matoyas dungeon. It really does need a few adjustments. But in the end, I prefer the previous incarnation much better.

[Shougun]

I'll mark your points bit by bit where I can, ok?

NO! GOD, NO!!.... yeh oki ^-^

Ifrit's general attacks being longer than what your innate Global Cool Down is, throwing it off compared to using your regular own casts.
Slipstream is the same issue. If they would either make it so that it would have either; 1) Ifrit's GCD affects your own or 2) Ifrit follows your GCD in terms of cast and recast timer. That would smooth things over somewhat.
Sadly, as a person I am incredibly susceptible to when things don't feel right in terms of gameplay and notice it right away.

One thing to note with Reaper was the butter smooth blink, something I felt dancer (maybe just me) didn't have. Anyway I brought it up because certainly when things happen as your brain thinks they should, that feels really good. Ghosting for example when we were more pet focused, was quite annoying. Or when you use Paladin's Hollowed Ground but it fails to work because it didn't trigger while the cooldown did- super annoying. I suppose in games where animations are consistently more 'matter' the brain accepts these realities (like dark souls and animations), but some stuff is butter and some stuff is not and I get that not feeling right. It's, like I said, something akin to using dash on dancer- is it useful? Yes, is it nice to be able to dash super fast forward.. yes. Does it, imo, feel smooth... No actually lol. But I used Reaper's dash and that feels quite good, imo.

So just for clarification it's not entirely based on the cast time stuff, but the feel beyond that.

I would prefer to keep Ruin 3/4, it's a nice unsaspected spell that never really got tied to an FF job. Plus I really love the animation of casting it. Though the part that I'm going to italicize is the one I'll adress in this part. The issue is, with the normal primals is that it feels extremely awkward to use and fit in. There is no down time and no way to utilise the lessened cast time (but not lessened global cool down) on Ruin 3. It is not the hyper aggressiveness that I want, it's that I want to feel like I have a bit of space to think, not rapidly press the glowing buttons of the three primals. Not to mention the awkwardness of the Demi summoning, we essentially waste time waiting for the global cool down to be up again while the timer ticks down. Yes, it's nice to... *checks list* press 2 buttons.

It also feels bad to spam ruin 3 and then see that while it had gotten off cool down, you can't press the summon button because you triggered a global cooldown. Having only pure Summoner stuff is also... frankly, very boring. Like it will take the wow factor away and make you overexposed, too used to it.

It's why I had started really disliking Bahamut, due to overexposure, and now I wish I never hated him that much as I generally miss his presence. It's weird what a few seconds can do to a person.

I wouldn't mind if it stayed Ruin 3/4, it's not an issue to me. But would you mind if it changed, so long as it was more interactive (and not obnoxiously intrusive)? The spell does indeed look cool. I did note that when you use Ruin 3 isn't initially intuitive and feels like you're just sort of holding it for a rainy day (sometimes).

As for the transition period, I wonder if there might be perhaps a carby spell (perhaps either Ruin or Ruin 3/4), that makes carby do something (which doesn't halt any other step of the job, if the game has a hiccup and carby is out while ifrit is out then so be it, then after that carby can vanish as is his existence now lol).

I do strongly disagree on the last part though, EVERYTHING could be primal related and imo that would be better. That doesn't mean everything has to be HUGE FREAKING SPELLS (though some absolutely should be, and luckily are ^_^). So I get if everything was huge spells it might ruin the magic of primals but I don't think everything should be, and so I just generally don't agree on that point.

Before with our previous summoner for example I believed the dots should get elemental aspected based on what was out, a minor touch but I felt would be far better than not. While summoner has been X + Y many times, white mage + summoners, black mage + summons, and so I think diversity is certainly fine to have in mechanics... when I think I'm going to play a job dedicated to summons.. I think.. not white magic. Not black magic. lol, but that is a personal bias. Like in the tactics game when you pick up summoner job, it focuses on just summons. It's not end of the world if there is some other stuff mixed in, the only thing that I think must be, like under no circumstance do you compromise, for a FF SMN is "summon grand beings to do grand things".

Good clarification on the whole chaotic spam thing, thank you.

I really do hope we can get as many people on board as possible, and I do think given that the slate, imo, seems so clean (straight forward) we could make some tweaks here and there to do so without causing huge disruptions. I'll add more later but my queue failed and so I'm going to step away from the computer lol. /tableflip XD

[TakumiHarada]

I don't mind much about it being streamlined, although I'd say until you get the lv86 skill, the job feels extremely slow because SMN, which used to be oGDC-heavy, has become extremely instant GCD-heavy. I think people want something to do between casts. For example, dancer is a more simplistic job, but frequently having fans to weave in between makes it feel engaging.

I have a few suggestions and hope the job can be improved in the short future:
- Remove gemshine/gembrilliance and merge them with ruin/tri-disaster. People won't (can't) use the latter during the 3-primal phase anyway because of how rigid the 1-minute rotation is. For gamepad players, having so many spammable GCD buttons is a nightmare.
- Fix carbuncle's positioning. Currently there is no point placing it because of how frequent primal summoning is. It comes back to you after merely several GCDs. What I have in mind is like SCH's Seraph.
- Reduce the cooldown of energy drain to 30s. Currently except the start of the 1-minute rotation there is almost nothing to weave in between. Having more oGCDs will make the job more engaging.

I understand that this job is completely revamped and could be rushef because of the delay, but I think the concept is good and it just needs more polishing. Thank you.

[Skiros]

The job really doesn't make much difference at Lv86. Nothing is different about Titan other than it probably having a higher potency/GCD which probably puts it above the other summons for bursting. Nothing is different about Ifrit other than having to gapclose. Nothing is different about Garuda other than having to do a long cast.