Arcanist and Summoner: a possible solution

[CecMiller]

Whilst I might not be entirely onboard with all the set of skills of the new arcanist "job", I do agree that one solution (its reception dependant on advertising to old SMN players) is to go this route and is arguably the one which would have the least pushback.

To be honest, I've been having similar thoughts but mine was more in the direction of "High Summoner". My favourite iteration of summoner was 4.1 SMN. It allowed immense resource pooling into well executed burst windows and favoured long-term (and somewhat complex) strategic play and was highly flexible. In short, it’s the direct opposite of Endwalker summoner.

However, Endwalker hit and I, too, was enamoured by the flair of Endwalkers Summoner. Upon playing it (and the honeymoon period wearing off), it became apparent that this job had the gameplay depth of a puddle in contrast to earlier iterations of summoner (I felt shadowbringers was a step down from Stormblood SMN too but that’s just an addendum). What came from this is the realisation that I really enjoyed the flashy look of the spells/new primals but craved the strategic play and interaction of the previous edition of summoner. The result is alienation where I like what I see, but the gameplay has me despairing of what I previously used to know and love. Whilst the removal of dots was disappointing, I would have been satisfied if there was something else to optimize instead or think about intertwined with simply doing the primal routine.

However, we clearly have no replacement.

We essentially have colourful ruin 3's (most instant), with egi actions in between an automatic machine gun bahamut/phoenix phase anre relics of a bygone era (Ruin 4/Aetherflow/Carbuncle). The job has become so streamlined that it does not feel engaging at all.

As a result, my thoughts drifted to a job concept: "High Summoner". Whilst I never really got down to nailing what I'd want from the job besides "cool summons and gameplay that was reminiscent of 4.1", your version of arcanist is a close mirror of what I would want.

What I liked from your post was the following:

• Retainment of Summon Exclusive effects e.g., Contagion - I did enjoy having a reason to pet swap i.e., Contagion and Radiant Shield (2% Phys damage buff). However, in light of consolidation of buffs to be universal damage buffs having 2 of the same buff with varying % and duration would be a bit pointless. I instead offer something else.
  
  1. Contagion - Extends dots by 15s (incentivising buff snapshotting). This would work if the summoner/arcanist knew the dots would run their full course and were the strongest they could be via snapshotting. Stronger than the below ability for "ruby" summon
     
  2. Radiant Shield - Should either be the buff or should be renamed to something like Radiant Aether which works like Plentiful Harvest for Reaper - It buffs your party members and after x seconds of absorbing their aether, it enables a powerful attack. This would be a burst ability where the user makes the conscious decision to use it over contagion as they believe that the dots would not run their full course.
     
  3. Yellow Carbuncle/Titan - Not sure what this one used to be if I'm completely honest, but my only suggestion here would be to be the "party wide shield" if the job needed defensive utility unique from other casters. Optional damage component or extra effect if the shield is broken similar to sage's "Panhaima".
  
  
• Dots* & bane (In spite of any other interesting subsystem, dots fill the void for me). I think dots and their interaction were good additions to SMNs kit and it shined in two+ target scenarios. However, I feel as though SE is moving away from dots as a whole..

Now for a list which of skills which I disagree with:

• Aetherflow/Energy drain - I'd rather this be 30/60s and require no target. The potency lost can be tacked onto another core rotation ability. This strengthens downtime resource pooling and allows for smarter resource usage with forward planning.
  
  
• Dots overreliance - I think the baseline of the design around 2 dots was fine, but specifically enhancing the dot gameplay means summoner would struggle in fight designs which had frequent intermissions e.g., Ultimate. This could also be me just not wanting to go too deep in the dot territory as preference.
  
  
• Lack of "Trances"/Big Payoff moves e.g., Burst - I think again this is just a stylistic difference between what we both enjoy. It’s clear that you envisioned this design to be around sustained damage, but I would enjoy a job that could unleash powerful burst e.g., death flare/bahamut windows, but in order to truly maximize this, they would have to correctly utilize their aetherflow stacks and personal buffs. The person buffs in this case would be e.g., Trances boosting personal damage through the window by 10%.
  
  Furthermore, I think Aetherflow would also enhance the big payoff summons uniquely e.g., Bahamut where painflare is simply flare breath (with some sort of heavy burn debuff for 6s) and fester is upgraded to outside of its regular potency damage, to "channel the aether from its target into bahamut" to enhance the next akhmorn into morn afah which does substantially higher single target damage. The idea would be 2 aetherflow stacks for up to 12s of burn or upgrade 2 akhmorns into 2 Morn Afahs.
  
  But this is just me dreaming.
  
  
• Retainment of Resurrection - This is contentious for me. I can see the link from arcanist to this new job of arcanist, but resurrection needs to be dealt with for the last time by becoming a role action and/or a duty action with set amount of revives in a duty. I am not against it being used outside of duties. I think it’s important to allow healers to make (fatal) mistakes and not bear the heavy burden of becoming the sole role which cannot be allowed to die (in the absence of another healer and even with another healer).

Obviously all the moves and abilities I've listed would have to be renamed/summons changed so as to not clash with normal summoner (but this has no chance of happening anyway so let me dream).

In short, I do like your rework, and you've put a lot of thought into it, and I think it’s a credible solution and the likelihood of it happening is several magnitudes higher than my idea of essentially making 2 versions of the same job. It’s clear though that I envision a different type of playstyle (and lets face it, I miss 4.1 SMN bad). Regardless of this, I feel that FF is moving away from dots for one reason or another (be it strain on the servers or general dislike or what not) and I think the best we can hope for (if that’s the case) is some other form of management system. The only alternative I can think of at this moment would be some sort of "buff" management system where we would be maintaining several different buffs on ourselves which influences our abilities.


Since this is becoming too long, my secret hope is that when 7.0 rolls, we don't just get one caster, but 2! One would be an arcanist rework (similar to some of the ideas envisioned here) and the other would be some entirely new concept of caster.

Either way, I do hope that regardless of some sort of new job appearing that this current iteration of summoner has more systems introduced for it to manage/play with/optimize. Right now, its bereft of thought.

[Dyvid]

[I]That is precisely why the objective of this thread, as I've said multiple times, [U]is NOT to force this choice but to remove it at its root by separating Arcanist and Summoner into TWO Jobs.

I think this is the core problem however. You shouldn't try to removed SMN from ACN but embrace it. I see your joined the forums in 2022 but I don't know how long you have actually played. I will say however that before ShB, SMN had access to most ACN stuff including Aetherflow with had 3 charges that could be spent on Energy Drain, Fester, Painflare, Bane, etc..

The key here is they should have used the old model and combined it with the new model.

-Aetherflow would have been the perfect ability to charge up 3 gems and using all three should have charged up the Demi.
-Primals should have stayed on the field using some kind of attack while the Summoner casted the Egi Assault Skills.
-The whole system should have been Trance based rather then charge. You could have had 15s per Trance to cast not only attunement skills but other spells as well opening up more flexible gameplay.
-Each Primal Trance should have offered different damage type; One Combo based, One long cast based, and One DoT based.
-Should have kept the pet bar for all summons to include Demi so you can command pet one what to attack. They should have also changed it to select either Single Target or AoE stance for the pet.
-Should have had summon like animation spells. Not all cast need to be pet based. No reason to not have a flashy Carbuncle Animation when using Searing Light.

[Dahlinea]

1) Extremely rigid and inflexible "rotation" (lol).
Some people have recently advocated to bring the Elemental Mastery Trait to lower levels, but I believe it doesn't really solve the problem of EW Summoner and actually ends up making it more apparent much earlier while leveling. The issue with lvl. 90 SMN currently is that the rotation is 100% inflexible since you only have 2 filler spell slots (Ruin III + Ruin IV) while the rest is literally "hardcoded", which makes delaying, holding or anticipating anything feel really terrible. If you bring Elemental Mastery to, say, the 50-60 range, you end up locking your rotation even earlier — at lvl. 80, as soon as you unlock Phoenix. The problem is that, with SMN as it currently is, you gradually move from having infinite segments of filler "standard" Ruin spam to zero segments of it at lvl. cap.
The only positive aspect of bringing this Trait at around 50-60 is to make SMN "slightly more enjoyable" at lower levels but it does not offer any chance of improving the Job as you'll still end up with auto-pilot 2 button spam rotation. I feel like what's needed is some breathing room, so you have more control of WHEN to use stuff (provided you don't lose uses in the fight) and you have room to actually add complexity and not merely another recolor of Ruin.

The flexibility of old SMN was mainly on how you managed the Ruin spells in the 'preparation phase' for Bahamut/Phoenix. Before we had 3 types of Ruin spells: Ruin III (our main spell with cast time), Ruin II (insta cast but lower potency, used for movement 'oh shit' moments) and Ruin IV (upgraded from Ruin II with stacks of Further Ruin; the prefered one for movement). The main SMN game during the preparation phase was to cast as much Ruin III as possible and bank enough Further Ruin stacks from Egi-Assaults to spend during Bahamut which didn't had an exclusive spell for his phase like Phoenix have.
The Ruin spells management gave SMN some decision making during fights because you would have a surplus of Further Ruin stacks that you had to use or would be a dps loss. On the other hand, using a lot of it would hurt our burst phase during Bahamut.
So you had 4 charges of Egi-assaults that granted Further Ruin stacks which in turn had to be managed efficiently to serve both 'preparation phase' and Bahamut phase optimally. We also had more Aetherflow stacks before because Energy Drain was 30 seconds CD, which gave us more oGCDs to press.

Current SMN doesn't have nowhere near this level of flexibility. Right now, SMN is just "pick a summon to go with and use the obligatory two spells till Bahamut/Phoenix timer is up". There's no more 'preparation phase', it's just 'waiting phase' now and one pretty shallow at it.

[5trange]

-snip-

I actually joined FFXIV as my very first MMO during Eden's Verse and the reason I joined the game in the first place was because I fell in love with Momo Sama's Scholar videos from Stormblood — little did I know at the time the game had changed A LOT and the Job I had grown to love had been butchered. The Summoner I'm familiar with is thus from Shadowbringers. Still, I'm the kind of guy who will research the story of patch notes and read/listen to old guides of a Job he likes so even though I wouldn't say I know the Job 100%, I have pretty precise info from ARR to EW.
I agree with you that they shouldn't have outright abandoned the old framework of Summoner, but when I started this topic I basically assumed that with Endwalker SE had meant to put an end forever to that kind of thing. I'll be honest with you: the chance of them ever separating ACN and SMN is basically nonexistent but, for some reason, the chance of them going back to a pet+DoT+Demi Summoner sadly feels even more impossible — thus my proposal to at least salvage the old kit as a separate entity instead of discarding it.

-snup-

As I said, I know how ShB Summoner worked and I myself stated that the EW Summoner has no build-up, no decision-making and no flexibility. My point was mostly directed towards those who say "oh, just bring Elemental Mastery down to the low levels" without realizing that this wouldn't change anything because the GCD frame of the Summoner rotation between Bahamut and Phoenix would still only allow for Ruin III + Ruin IV as fillers. As you said very well, the good part about ShB Summoner "filler phase" was to actually build and juggle resources for the Demi-Summon phases so even as a filler it had a deeper purpose. The point is: how do we give the new Summoner some decision making — besides solving its many other problems?
I feel like Ibbers' idea of attaching a passive effect to the Primal Summons could be an interesting start. If we imagine it like an Everlasting Flight kinda thing (i.e. party-wide effect), it could be for example:
• Titan, when summoned, provides a party-wide damage reduction;
• Garuda, when summoned, provides a party-wide haste buff (like old Fey Wind from Selene);
• Ifrit, when summoned, provides uh... a low dmg. buff? Idk man...
These are just (very bad) examples but they serve the purpose of making the act of pushing a "Summon" button have more consequences than just 3 flashy bursts lasting 2 seconds.

[Dahlinea]

The point is: how do we give the new Summoner some decision making — besides solving its many other problems?

Being realistic about current SMN, what we need is freedom with Gemshine spells and summon abilities and that those summons produce some kind of effect. I have my ideas of changes. For example:

1) Merge Fester and Painflare into a single ability with fall off damage. Move them from spending Aetherflow stacks to an ability with 2 charges, each charge taking 15 seconds to recharge.
2) Delete Energy Drain/Syphoon.
3) Delete that useless Gem gauge.
4) G, I, T still can only be summoned after Bahamut/Phoenix phases.
5) Every time you summon G, I or T you get an Aetherflow stack. Aetherflow gauge have a max of 3 stacks, which is the max number of times you can summon in each Bahamut/Phoenix cycle.
6) Add two variations of Gemshine spells to each summon. One with cast time and the other insta cast but lower potency. If no summon is out, those become Ruin III and Ruin II respectively with lower potency than their elemental variations.
7) Ruin IV becomes the upgrade of Outburst instead of Tri-disaster. The elemental AoE versions will replace this one.
8) You stay attuned to each element for a certain period of time (i.e. you can only use elemental gemshine spells for this period)
9) You can summon another primal anytime to change elements or just resummon the same one.
10) Having at least 1 stack of Aetherflow enables a new ability (Tri-disaster) that does AoE damage. The potency of the ability's damage depends on the number of Aetherflow stacks.
11) Make the summon's abilities more specialized. For example: Ifrit's better for single target; Titan's for direct AoE damage and Garuda's for ground-effect DoT damage.
12) Make it possible to choose between Bahamut or Phoenix to summon at end of the rotation.
13) Return Bahamut's Ahk Morn and Phoenix's Revelation to be 2 shots per phase instead of just one.
14) For each stack of Aetherflow available, Astral Impulse/Flare and Fountain of Fire/Brand of Purgatory will have their potencies increased by a certain amount.
15) When Bahamut/Phoenix phase ends, Aetherflow gauge resets and we can summon G, I, T again restarting the rotation.

[5trange]

1) Merge Fester and Painflare into a single ability with fall off damage. Move them from spending Aetherflow stacks to an ability with 2 charges, each charge taking 15 seconds to recharge.

I agree with this, except I would also change the flavor of the skill so it looks like it could belong on EW Summoner.

2) Delete Energy Drain/Syphoon.

I've said so myself plenty of times, so I agree.

13) Return Bahamut's Ahk Morn and Phoenix's Revelation to be 2 shots per phase instead of just one.

Once again: I said it myself, so I agree x')

As far as the rest is concerned, I feel like forcing the Ruin III vs. Ruin II dynamic on every Primal summon might not be the best idea. I understand you are putting it there to replicate the "damage vs. mobility" situation, but this once again feels like porting onto the new SMN things that worked with the old one. I would rather see this choice (damage vs. mobility) moved to the standard cast of each Primal Summon itself, which would add a layer of true decision-making to the process of summoning and reduce the ph. ranged syndrome. Right now, the number of easy-to-access instant Spells is insane: 3 hard casts over a 60s cycle (Ruin III barely qualifies as hard cast with its 1.5s cast, especially since you only use it once)? With the option to Swiftcast one if needed? Ridiculous. 90% of the time the "order of the Gems" which is brought up so often offers only an illusion of choice — even if you "mess up" the order you barely get punished because you still have so many options to cover your "mistake". Instead, let's make only one Primal have instants, so you actually have to plan when to use it for movement. For example the mere act of adding a 1.5s cast time to Topaz Rite and leaving only Garuda with instants would go such a long way.

I also think that making the Primal summons specialized for "specific situations" is a troublesome option as well. In situations where 1 Primal is significantly better than the others, you end up only using that because it's the most efficient. This may have been ok when the Pet was actually a Pet, when he stuck around and had actions of its own to juggle, but imagine having to spam Summon Ifrit over and over and over again because "it's optimal for DPS" — feels like it leans on the special healer-type repetitiveness from which SMN already suffers way too much.

The thing I feel needs to be addressed first and foremost with EW Summoner, is the necessity to create free GCD space in the 60s rotation. This can be accomplished by fixing the overall number of casts plus the recast timer of actions above 2.5s. I would propose the following:

• Make Ruby Rite have a 2.5s cast and 2.5s recast.

• Make Emerald Rites only have 3 casts instead of 4.

• Make all Primal Astral Flow Abilities oGCD actually cast by the Summon and not the Summoner (seriously, I HATE the melee dash+book bonk — since this argument gets thrown around a lot: is this a traditional FF Summoner?). Incidentally, just replace Crimson Cyclone + Strike with a single oGCD you can weave with the "Summon Ifrit II" instant cast, since Ruby Rites don't allow weaves.

• Outright remove the Ruin IV "mechanic", as it can't even be called that in the context of this new toolkit.

With this we have gained a total of 1s (0.5*2 from Ruby Rites) + 1.5s (-1 use of Emerald Rite) + 5s (2.5*2 from Ifrit Combo) + 3.5s (Slipstream) + 2.5s (Ruin IV) = 13.5s. Which equates roughly to 5 extra uses of your filler Spell at lvl. 90 — 6 in total, considering the one you were already forced to cast.

This achieves two main things:

1) Allows you to move about the timing of Primal summons. This in itself is a good thing — but it's even more important if we build on the value of each individual Summon itself, which makes using them at specific times more important (see my points in the previous posts);

2) It creates room for a filler phase (which I won't call "Ruin-filler" cause I'd like to see Ruin/Outburst removed from Summoner and Gemshine/Precious Brilliance be its filler Spells), which, aside from granting more flexibility to the Summon timings: a) is characterized by Spells with a cast-time, further removing the ph. ranged feeling; b) assuming a 1.5s cast-time, allows for weaving possible new/original oGCDs that hopefully interact with the rest of the kit; c) can be enriched with an extra mechanic of its own.

This is the very rough outline of a beginning. I'm not saying it will all suddenly come together but it could be a start. Needless to say, in my humble opinion, other changes to the way the Primals work are also required to make a significant difference.

[Dahlinea]

As far as the rest is concerned, I feel like forcing the Ruin III vs. Ruin II dynamic on every Primal summon might not be the best idea. I understand you are putting it there to replicate the "damage vs. mobility" situation, but this once again feels like porting onto the new SMN things that worked with the old one.

That's not my reason to "force it" into new SMN. My thing is that I absolutely hate the idea that I'm restricted to use casted spell a certain number of times and then have to move to next summon and that one will have the boring insta cast one. You see? We don't have freedom over our spells like before. That's what I absolutely hate about this new SMN. Why am I forced to change from casted spell to a insta cast spell when it's not needed? And since we're forced into this cycle of limited number of spells per summon without casted or insta cast alternatives they probably decided to give to 2/3 summons only insta cast spells to "alleviate the pressure", which resulted into what it is now. That's the only reason I put that line of changes for Gemshine spells.
Another thing that I don't agree with in new SMN is the summons not producing any effect that would benefit SMN somehow, like you used to get Further Ruin stacks to increase damage during Bahamut. That's why I proposed the Aetherflow change.

The rest I agree. Summon skills definitely needs to come from the summons and not the summoner.

[5trange]

x

Ah, I see now what you were trying to say about Ruin II/III and understand your point. I'm still unsure about it though. I mean, yeah it might be beneficial to have that kind of option on every Primal summon, but at that point you should find even more ways to differentiate them, since everyone would have both a cast and an instant Spell option available 100% of the time. What I had in mind was forcing some decision-making by having the player plan when to use a Summon for movement by considering it a sort of limited resource, not unlike BLM's Triplecast which is often but not always available.
At the end of the day, I feel like both approaches have pros and cons and — though in different measure — both would still require a big big expansion of the Primal summons effects and interactions.

It seems like we agree that summons should stick around after being called out, but at that point it becomes necessary to solve a problem of time. If we assume every Primal stays out for 15s like the current Demi-Summons, we end up filling a whole 60s per cycle and once again there would be no room to move things about. A possible solution would be to make the Recast time of Summon Bahamut/Phoenix 90s (preferable but unlikely, since SE seems obtusely obsessed with the 2-minutes burst window) or 120s.
Assuming therefore one Demi-Summon every 2 minutes, it's possible to increase the duration of each summon to 20s — like it was in ShB — which makes it easier to have things like double use of Akh Morn/Revelation (with 10s recast). We'd then have:

• Demi-Summon: 20s
• Primal 1: 20s
• Primal 2: 20s
• Primal 3: 20s
• "Filler": 40s

A 40s filler might seem slightly too long, but it's still only half the time you spend in the "summoning-phases" (80s vs. 40s). It should also be noted that those 40s wouldn't necessarily need to come all together, since the point of the filler is to allow you to spread apart the timing of Primal summons if needed.

Now, let us assume your solution of keeping a Ruin II/III option on every Primal. Let's also suppose that Aetherflow is gone and a new mechanic is added to the Filler-phase which allows you to build a resource you can use to weave/move during the Primal phases without losing DPS (sort of like a Primal-themed Ruin IV)... I think it's already starting to be more interesting overall if we also add the things you and I have suggest before (new damage oGCD with 2 charges and a short recharge timer; passive effects on every Primal; Astral Flow coming from the Primal; an extra "Enkindle primal" button which is used twice; old ShB combo on Pheonix).
Do you think that could be any good?

On a side note: I've edited my first post to cut out a bunch of unnecessary sentences and to reflect my improved stance on the Arcanist Job, as I still fully believe that separating the two is the most plausible option and would be the best to please the highest number of people. I don't know, maybe I've just become too obsessed with Heavensward Summoner... I really want something like that to be back but at the same time I don't want to rob the people who like EW Summoner of their Job ç__ç

[tearagion]

snip, but I like what you're saying

EW SMN seems to be the most obvious symptom of misguided design from the devs atm. They *seem* to completely blind themselves with the idea that everything must operate on a pristine 2 minute cycle. Frankly the easiest way to make SMN feel like you have substantial choice is to have more summons than are possible to summon in that cycle, with negligible potency differences between them, but preferable use-cases and varied durations. Not every summon needs to be a giant (not)Primal either, people love Carbuncles and already wish that the one SMN has now did more. Maybe it's just my opinion, but constant giant summons just cheapens them and I would prefer some more modest summons to choose from for a given filler period. The contrast between Egis and Demis before helped to emphasize the spectacle of Bahamut especially.

If the next caster, whether it's a separated arcanist or not, doesn't fill the void preEW SMN left behind then it had better be the greatest caster they've ever put together. Anything else would be extremely disappointing.