Summoner Needs to be buffed

[Shurrikhan]

You cannot, in good conscious, say Summoner deserves to be incredibly weak due to its ease of play yet ignore that Reaper is both the best Melee DPS and arguably the best DPS overall in the entire game while also being among the easiest.

I haven't. I literally just said that Reaper is most likely the outlier in early design and deserves to be nerfed. Which then means there is no <the devs have everything tuned per their intent already despite this being the start of the expansion" warrant by which to insist Summoner must remain as low as it is.

If we're going to hold that over Summoner, then Reaper needs to be pulling less than Ninja.

I already agreed with this.

Once again, this is why balance around difficulty doesn't work and isn't something the dev team ever consistently follows.

No, that tuning is, at the very launch of an expansion, unfinished... in no way indicates that complexity cannot ever be a factor in how the devs tune jobs.

When was the last time Machinist was a top-tier rDPS? When it was complex.
When was Summoner a top-tier rDPS? When it was complex.

... you might want to reread what I said because that wasn't my logic in the slightest. The whole crux was to illustrate why the difficulty argument is flawed.

You used Reaper an example (of equally early tuning) to indicate that it must be indicative of the dev's balancing logic --insisting that Reaper must be ranked where it is because the devs meant it to be ranked where it is-- even while complaining that Summoner, equally an example of early tuning, must not deserve to be ranked where it is.

Neither should be where they are. Reaper provides too much utility and too little complexity to deserve to have the highest or second highest rDPS. Summoner provides too little utility, even given its low complexity until being perfectly min-maxed, to be as low as it is.

[Shuuli]

Everyone saying simplicity warrants low dps... okay, so what about Reaper? I highly doubt its rocket science and puts out more dps then dps that actually needs to think before deciding to use aoe or single target.

[jadeblade]

Everyone saying simplicity warrants low dps... okay, so what about Reaper? I highly doubt its rocket science and puts out more dps then dps that actually needs to think before deciding to use aoe or single target.

I have good hunch that a nerf is coming Reaper way on the savage patch. All these Reaper bandwagon will be disappointed pretty soon.

[ThorneDynasty]

Everyone saying simplicity warrants low dps... okay, so what about Reaper? I highly doubt its rocket science and puts out more dps then dps that actually needs to think before deciding to use aoe or single target.

I think everyone is expecting a nerf for Reaper pretty soon. You are sure to see people going off about it if it won't be in the next patch.

[WlyemR]

Oh yeah, SMN needs a buff. That is not even up for debate. The actual discussion is what should be buffed. As it stands, going from 79 to 80 is straight up a DPS loss because of the tradeoff of Deathflare for Rekindle. The easiest solution would be to buff the Phoenix autos or their GCDs in some way. Other than that, some slight buffs to Gemshine and Precious Brilliance would be in order. Also need take Ruin IV off the GCD.

[Rika007]

Oh yeah, SMN needs a buff. That is not even up for debate. The actual discussion is what should be buffed. As it stands, going from 79 to 80 is straight up a DPS loss because of the tradeoff of Deathflare for Rekindle. The easiest solution would be to buff the Phoenix autos or their GCDs in some way. Other than that, some slight buffs to Gemshine and Precious Brilliance would be in order. Also need take Ruin IV off the GCD.

Personally I think putting Energy Drain back to the Shadowbringers level of 30 seconds and also making it so you can enkindle Bahamut and Pheonix twice again would do more then enough damage wise and also help the job feel better as well. If that would be enough (or too much) raw potency wise for SMN's Damage will have to obviously be looked at and potencies adjusted based on which way it goes, but I just feel like pushing ED to one minute and Enkindle to only once per trace were two of those changes the devs did not realize would have as big of an impact on the damage as it would.

[Anvaire]

Also need take Ruin IV off the GCD.

I think taking Ruin IV off the GCD would be detrimental. It is often the only viable instant cast i have to move during ifrit phase as the long cast times make Slidecasting impractical and often if i am moving, im moving away from the boss rather than towards it. If its shimmying around the boss i use charge & SMash or ifrit summon itself. So while moving it to GCD wouldnt seem like a lot, in practical terms it would mean either skipping part of ifrit so as to not delay the next Demi or delaying the demi which over the course of the fight would result in quite a bit of drift.

That said i do think summoner could do a low potency instant not tied to any summons that can be used for weaving and movement in downtime and perhaps some more OGCD's to break up all the instants. Overall though, I think he job is in a good spot design wise just has some kinks. I do expect that a lot of the old SMN mains who played for the complexity (I am an old SMN main from ARR beta, but i played for the Aesthetic) are going to find this rendition lacking, but its got a clear identity now rather than the hodgepodge it was before - a few tweaks and it will be a solid job to play.

[Wayfinder3]

I have been playing Red Mage and Summoner back to back using various ways to determine damage output and Summoner is pulling waaaaaay below Red Mage which offers far more raid utility. Summoner clearly needs to a buff or it will have no place in savage raiding, please make some potency adjustments.

To nitpick a bit. RDM doesn't offer far more utility than SMN, they actually have access to the same exact tools with the exception of magick barrier and Pheonix Regen. Now to be fair, RDM utility is better utilized than SMN and the primary utility we're all dancing around being verraise dualcast is definitely strong enough that SMN should be buffed to be at least 300 to 400 dps higher than where it is. However, we've seen before that verraise isn't strong enough to carry RDM against SMN from patch 4.1 if the DPS dispairty between them is too big. Eden's Promise had SMN about 500 rdps higher than RDM at the 99th percentile and both jobs felt considerably effective in that environment.

So lets aim for that specifically as opposed to asking for buffs to SMN that just leave RDM in the dust. As a main since stormblood, it's been a pretty rough relationship between them that took them until mid shadowbringers to really fix and this doesn't even factor BLM blowing both of them out of the water by a ridiculous margin at the start of shadowbringers. That said, I agree with SMN needing buffs, just don't look at RDM like it's dominating SMN at the moment when both of them are alot closer in utility than most really want to agree

[rewd]

Ironically enough, new SMN is more limited as far as movement is concerned because old SMN could have 100% uptime thanks to Ruin II. While new SMN has more instacasts, a bad timing on Ifrit phase can and will hurt your uptime because you simply don't have a safety net enough. This is already enough to distance SMN from phys ranged, who simply won't miss a GCD or interrupt anything.

It's also disingenous to think that SMN has so much mobility while the other casters don't. BLM and RDM were already very mobile in ShB and they got even more mobile in EW. Not to mention how tanks and melee have mobility tools and ranged attacks that don't break combos anymore.

It's mostly about how easily accessible said mobility is. A good example would be Reaper's free dash and backstep VS Samurai's that cost kenki.

[Killerwing]

As someone that played Summoner since HW, I agree with rewd and I would also like to mention a few other things.

Mainly that mobility has never been the main factor that affects the measurement of a job's personal DPS, but rather party utility.

Best example can be seen with Machinist, Bard and Dancer. Machinist has (generally, though I'm uncertain if it's true at the moment) the highest personal DPS of the three but not much party utility while Dancer has the lowest personal DPS, but a large amount of party utility.

It's the same deal with all types of DPS. Furthermore the simplicity of a job's rotation doesn't necessarily mean a job will do tons of damage. Look again at Dancer for that(which has a really basic DPS rotation). And conversely you have DPS like Ninja that are kinda complex, yet aren't among the highest in personal DPS.

If you want to compare personal DPS among the casters, it would mainly be between Red Mage and Summoner because Black Mage has no party utility(and it has huge personal DPS in return).
In case you were wondering, here's what the two casters have for utilities.

Red Mage's utility kit
- Vercure: Reliable healing spell that can be used in a pinch.
- Verraise: Battle rez which can be used very quickly thanks to Dualcast(though at major cost to RDM's MP and DPS)
- Embolden: Party-wide damage buff
- Magick Barrier: Party-wide damage resist+heal buff

Summoner's utility kit
- Resurrection: Battle rez
- Searing Light: Party-wide damage buff
- Everlasting Flight: Small party-wide HoT which can only be used every 2 minutes
- Rekindle: Single target heal which can only be used every 2 minutes

As you can see, Red Mages have 4 reliable utility spells that can be used whenever it's possible, or necessary to use them.
Summoner on the other hand only has 2 reliable utility spells. Yes, Demi-Phoenix does give them access to a HoT and a single-target healing spell...but you can only use Demi-Phoenix every 2 minutes in your rotation. It makes those spells highly unreliable for constant utility. Not to mention that if you die as SMN in a fight, you lose any progress you had on Demi-Phoenix, meaning the time to use those heals is delayed by 2 minutes, unlike RDM's Embolden and Magick Barrier.

I'm not counting the shield because it's a self-sustain/survivability tool rather than party utility.

There's one upside to this whole issue about SMN having perhaps not enough DPS right now. And it's the fact that their kit is good and stable right now, meaning that all Square-Enix will probably do is a simple increase in potencies on certain spells.

A really simple fix...unlike the whole issues SMN had back during the release of both Stormblood and Shadowbringers...
(You know there's a problem when a world first raider changed from SMN to BLM because it was painful on their hands.)