Summoner should keep it's utility.

[EdenElsewhere]

First off, hi everyone! This is my first post on the forum, and probably a controversial one. But my name is Eden! You may have seen me/played with me on Crystal. Sorry if you have died in my parties.

So anyways, to my post, with the reworking of SMN, the debates of RDM vs SMN in potencies and utility.

First off, I will admit this:

I am smooth brain. While I liked previous SMN, I was awful at it. All of my timers floated. Everything was never right, and I would stop in the middle of my bigger dps phases to rez if rezzes needed to happen.

So while I was useful and helpful in casual content, I was not an EX/Savage player level summoner.

But smooth brain Summoner? Makes me happen. Going right into burst phase? Makes me happy. Don't care about lack of complexity. I see my big bois. I happy.

But all the arguments over SMN's lack of single target attack power (which makes up most of the content in this game) and how RDM is still utility king, I'd figure I'd put in my input. Also, I REALLY hate the idea that YoshiP really wanted to take away the resurrection ability from SMN. As a SMN who actually uses it, it has a nice place on my hotbar, and it has seen many uses.

Please YoshiP, Summoners throughout the series have been strong healers to supplement the pure powers of their summons. Yuna, Garnet, and Eiko being important summoners who wield white magic alongside their powerful summons. As does Rydia, but she gives up her white magic in exchange for pure destructive force (and to not have three white magic users in one party). In FFXI, having White Mage as your subjob for Summoner was a popular combination.

This is my reasoning for the SMN to keep its utility.

I believe resurrection could be kept. There is very little reason to yeet this ability when the next caster we will get will be nearly as selfish as BLM and may be DoT based. And again, it lines up with with SMN identity.

Which is the one of the reasons we got the changes to the job.

So let's talk about Physick. The ongoing beaten horse of a joke.

Can we please just have it level with INT? That is literally all that needs to happen. It is the simplest fix, but we don't know why they haven't done them.

Okies. So we have went over Physick and Resurection.

Now to talk about juicy controversial stuff.

My first idea is to just give a few more Carbuncle buffs, as that is what Carby is famous for, a buffing summon.

My thoughts would be to change Radiant Aegis. We could go multiple ways with it.

Idea 1: Radiant Aegis can be applied to any party member and gives a heal and a shield.
Basically, we're stealing Adlo from the SCH's kit. However, it can't be spammed and wouldn't be as useful as adlo. But it would be more useful, and I wouldn't mind if like Physick was taken away for this to be changed.
Idea 2: Radiant Aegis gets a level... 70-90 buff where it spreads a smaller shield to all party members.
The SMN would keep the biggest shield. But the rest of the party gets smaller shields. Albeit this looks less great on paper now that I look at it. But mitigation is mitigation.

My other ideas for Carby are just rehashes on Carbuncle's uses in other games. Maybe we could have a heal with a regen like Aspected Helios, or just a self regen on a 120 sec cooldown. Again, these would be weaker than when healers cast them, but better than nothing.


(Continued in next post)

[EdenElsewhere]

Now here comes the controversial stuff.

Everything to do with Phoenix phase, Bahamut phase, and the Resurrection spell.

WHOO BOY.

As everyone will argue, Phoenix phase is, essentially a DPS loss purely due to the fact it does not have a secondary BIG BOOM attack like Bahamut phase. Which is true. There is no secondary big attack. Instead you get Not!Excog, and a HoT, both of which are useful, because from my timing, you are usually entering a Phoenix phase around raid wides. Hopefully.

But I understand utility, especially utility you only have access to every two minutes, is not utility.

But I have a few solutions to this.

1. Bahamut and Phoenix phases shorten Resurrection's cast time further.
At the current moment, and just honestly, in general, SMN can't possibly keep up with the way RDM raises people. Even with Phoenix or Bahamut out (which makes Resurrection the only hard cast spell we actually have available during phases, btw, as Ruin and Outburst go away during Baha and Phoenix) It still takes around 4 seconds to RDM's 2 to rez someone. So a RDM has this ability anytime, anywhere, while SMN only gets it in phases. So at least, I think, SMN's should have the Resurrection cast shortened even further when either Phoenix or Bahamut is out.

2. Resurrection is instacast when Phoenix is out.
This is probably a bit more controversial than the previous idea, but I think it fits more with the idea of Phoenix. And it would give incentive when all has gone to hell to enter Phoenix mode early so we can rez like a champ. Again, this would be broken, but we could only be able to do this once every two minutes.

3. Remove Demi-Phoenix from rotation and make it a separate SMN
I hate, hate, HATE this idea. But its mine and I have to give it a foothold. But the idea is to basically make Phoenix something you only summon when you have to, instead of making it a part of the rotation and essentially creating a DPS loss.


These are the current ideas in my head at the moment. I know making SMN even more utility is not where anyone would go, and the simplest fix is to just change the single target potencies. But the simplest fixes aren't the funnest.

So, what would you guys do with SMN? And I'm sorry my post is all jumbled. I didn't prewrite it or anything. I just wanted to get these ideas out of my head.

TL;DR A stupid SMN/SCH main gets the idea to balance SM is to give it MOAR utility instead of simple potency changes.

[dinnertime]

The Resurrection debate only happened because BLM players were upset that SMN was doing more damage than BLM back then, which was understandable but it doesn't mean it should be removed. They adjusted both jobs so BLM is at the top and SMN is right below due to its utility and they've been super quiet ever since. There's no good reason for them to remove Rez from SMN or else they'll just upset a lot of people.

[EdenElsewhere]

The Resurrection debate only happened because BLM players were upset that SMN was doing more damage than BLM back then, which was understandable but it doesn't mean it should be removed. They adjusted both jobs so BLM is at the top and SMN is right below due to its utility and they've been super quiet ever since. There's no good reason for them to remove Rez from SMN or else they'll just upset a lot of people.

Well that was then, this is now. And YoshiP literally said they almost yeeted Resurrection and Phoenix in the job live letter.

I'm more or less talking about now and balancing out the discrepancy between SMN and RDM.

[EdenElsewhere]

Derp. Phone. Autocorrect. Physick

[dinnertime]

Well, I mentioned it because that debate from back then definitely factored to why Yoshi-P thought of removing Rez from Summoner in the first place. Thankfully that didn't happen.

Anyway... With SMN and RDM now, they can go many directions. The most preferred from many people is to just buff SMN's potencies to be higher than RDM. Another is to just put them more on-par which also means increasing SMN's potencies because both RDM and SMN essentially have the same kind of utility but SMN is lower in damage. Also no SMN doesn't have more because the utility that comes from Phoenix is very unreliable to be considered useful imo.

Personally I'm in favor with just increasing SMN's potencies because of two things. SMN's new animations are too grand for it to warrant being the lowest caster DPS. The other one is that RDM has already been established as the support/utility-type caster DPS. If anything they should give more of that to RDM but that's just my opinion.

Now what I'm going to say next might be controversial, but I'm kind of tired of DPS having these healing and mitigation abilities when we're living a time where healers and tanks are just BLOATED with them already. It can still be useful and adds to the flavor yes, but SMN having faster Rez-casting to catch up with RDM is not really necessary? Most SMNs will not bother hard-casting Rez (unless both healers died and Swiftcast is on CD) and will be Swiftcasting it. Problem is, it's preferred to use Swiftcast on Ifrit's Phase. Also it's a bad idea to have Rez casts be shorter during Bahamut/Phoenix phases. Most SMNs won't bother with it in theory because doing anything but the Bahamut/Phoenix attacks is a massive DPS loss. Same with Radiant Aegis applying to other players is not really necessary, but this would actually put it on-par with RDM's Magick Barrier (with some adjustments).

Physick should be INT-based though if you don't trust your healers enough when you're about to die. Another thing they could do is just replace Physick with Rekindle when you summon Phoenix like a lot of people have mentioned, except you get to hold it outside of Phoenix.

EDIT: Added more stuff in grey text.