Will SMN really stay like it is rn?

[IdowhatIwant]

In short, yes. SE never makes any major mechanic changes during a expansion cycle.

Not true. There is usually one maybe two major mechanic changes during an expansion cycle.
Read your patch notes.

[meowmaou]

W̶h̶i̶c̶h̶ ̶i̶s̶ ̶t̶o̶ ̶s̶a̶y̶ ̶n̶o̶,̶ ̶a̶n̶d̶ ̶t̶o̶ ̶p̶u̶t̶ ̶i̶t̶ ̶i̶n̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶w̶o̶r̶d̶s̶ ̶o̶f̶ ̶y̶o̶s̶h̶i̶-̶P̶,̶ ̶"̶I̶f̶ ̶y̶o̶u̶ ̶w̶a̶n̶t̶e̶d̶ ̶m̶o̶r̶e̶ ̶c̶o̶m̶p̶l̶e̶x̶ ̶c̶l̶a̶s̶s̶e̶s̶ ̶a̶k̶i̶n̶ ̶t̶o̶ ̶w̶h̶a̶t̶ ̶w̶e̶ ̶h̶a̶d̶ ̶i̶n̶ ̶H̶W̶,̶ ̶f̶u̶c̶k̶ ̶o̶f̶f̶.̶"̶

A bit off-topic, but I'd like to know what jobs people currently consider to be the more complex and engaging ones as of EW. As an ex MNK main thanks to the EW changes. The itch I used to be able to scratch is currently unscratchable.

[SkyCake]

smn really ruinedmy day

Heh, Summoner puns...

[Warlyx]

U can make pets small too

[Sequora]

They basically designed a third job for the first the expansion. Anyone who thinks they’re going to revert it back to 5.0 SMN is crazy.

[CKNovel]

They basically designed a third job for the first the expansion. Anyone who thinks they’re going to revert it back to 5.0 SMN is crazy.

Okay but who said that? No one thinks it's ever going to be reverted, everyone agrees that the job was hard for the wrong reasons.
People complains because they feel like playing with legos, that the job is designed for journalists.

[Grimoire-M]

Okay but who said that? No one thinks it's ever going to be reverted, everyone agrees that the job was hard for the wrong reasons.
People complains because they feel like playing with legos, that the job is designed for journalists.

If you think 5.0 SMN was hard by any definition I'd hate to remind you of literally every iteration before it.

2.0: Actual DoT management with five different ones to juggle, each with staggered potency per tick and duration, Booksmacking melee/caster hybrid gameplay thanks to Ruin II being as good as Ruin, Garuda Contagion optimization, buff alignment. Pet abilities were extremely prone to not firing at all.

3.0: Much of the same as ARR, but layer on clipping Ruin III, Trance alignment and MP Management for Ruin I/II and III based on what your Bard was doing for your static. Bane was at its strongest this expansion as well and there were multiple fights that took advantage of it.

4.0: DoTs got consolidated, Ruin III had all the MP in the world to work with and then got its cost and potency nerfed, most buffs got scaled back, but now you had to contend with two different beasts, namely Bahamut Wyrmwave management and the Aetherflow lockouts. Downtime and movement during Bahamut would screw up your rotation badly and DWT was effectively made into a movement cooldown. Rouse, Devotion, and the Contagion/Radiant Shield split presented their own issues as well. Tri-Disaster gained its baffling reset mechanic here and Shadowflare was made into an oGCD, making DoTs way too brainless.

5.0: Lockouts were removed, oGCD Wyrmwaves were gone, and pet actions were forced to work on the player's GCD/weave space instead of getting to mash them constantly while hardcasting. Egi Assault and Ruin IV management was the most you had to think about, but Ghosting issues did present themselves here, which was mostly solved by not weaving EAs near the Demi-Summon phase. Occasionally you might bank Aetherflow stacks for Buff windows thanks to the ED and CD changes. Most times it was better to fire and forget. Pets were much more stable, if slow, than prior iterations. I distinctly noticed that I needed less button mashing in practice.

6.0: DoTs gone, Aetherflow scaled back much more than prior iterations, Egi Autos removed, while Demi gained their automatic AI. Meanwhile pet actions across the board finally got the response time we had been waiting for (Test it out on Scholar if you don't believe me)...only for most of them to be removed entirely. Ghosting still exists but you have to force it to happen by using all of the carbuncle actions, all to lose Devotion or a shield. Instead of actually caring about our Summons, we instead have elemental phases. Pick one of three windows and manage the few hardcasts you still have left within them, as the majority of those went away entirely. Oh and Summons are GCDs now, for some inexplicable reason, presumably to make them feel like they do something, but practically speaking they drift out of sync with those button presses in the first place. Also, expect each Summon to take up roughly 6-8 seconds of time you could be using to apply a Carby shield to yourself. This is the only major form of friction left to the job, and it's the only one people wanted fixed to begin with. For what it's worth, that extra frequency is probably the only reason you might lose a Radiant Shield.


The job has been dumbed down a lot, and I don't consider 6.0 an accurate representation of the Fantasy of a Summoner mostly because it doesn't make you care about your pets as more than aesthetic baubles. And that bothers me when at least prior iterations were -trying- to integrate them directly into your core rotation. And of all those iterations, only ShB succeeded in a manner that made them actively interesting. And it had more room for scalability compared to the current iteration precisely because the 'filler' in 6.0 takes up -all- of the space available GCD wise. I don't consider that good for long-term management, graphics be damned.

[Kyron]

All I'm gonna say is Please don't change summoner. I'm loving how it is right now. By far my favourite job. In fact the only reason why I came back for the expansion was the summoner overhaul.

[SweetPete]

All I'm gonna say is Please don't change summoner. I'm loving how it is right now. By far my favourite job. In fact the only reason why I came back for the expansion was the summoner overhaul.

Don’t worry they not changing summoner. This is the route that they are taking the job and they are confident in this rework. It’s here to stay. Outside of some potency adjustments nothing else will change. Look at Astro cards. People yelled and screamed and cursed out SE for how they destroyed Astro cards and it’s still the same. They didn’t back down then and won’t back down now.

People have their right to their opinions and that’s fine but it won’t change anything.

[Sequora]

If you think 5.0 SMN was hard by any definition I'd hate to remind you of literally every iteration before it.

The job has been dumbed down a lot, and I don't consider 6.0 an accurate representation of the Fantasy of a Summoner mostly because it doesn't make you care about your pets as more than aesthetic baubles. And that bothers me when at least prior iterations were -trying- to integrate them directly into your core rotation. And of all those iterations, only ShB succeeded in a manner that made them actively interesting. And it had more room for scalability compared to the current iteration precisely because the 'filler' in 6.0 takes up -all- of the space available GCD wise. I don't consider that good for long-term management, graphics be damned.

Summoners in previous iterations were basically just casters with fancier animations. You use a summon, it uses its ability and then it disappears. This was how it worked in every single game until FFX. FFX it replaces your party and you have full control over it. It wasn't until FFXI that it became a semi-pet class. There has never been an iteration where the summoner had a tiny little pet that followed it around and mostly just does auto attacks.

The 6.0 version of summoner is a combination of the older (FF3-FF9) and newer iterations (FFX, XI, XII, XIII). We have Garuda, Ifrit, Titan summons that appear, use their respective signature attack, and disappear, and then we have our demi summons, that are closer to summoner in the more recent games.

I think the bigger issue I've had with pre-endwalker summoner, is the poison aspect that we had. Why poisons? Is it because they based the job off of other MMO pet classes that were typically aligned with demons and disease? Why not have DoTs that match up with our summons? The summons felt like an afterthought. We were poison mages with a pet with really basic AI that were unresponsive.

While I do agree that this version is simpler, I hope that we build complexity from this version. 2.0-5.0 summoner was artificially complex. The complexity came from the jank. You were literally fighting with the job, hoping that when you pressed a button, that it responded.