Given current game design, would it help SMN if lesser summons refreshed on use?

[Renathras]

This is just a formative thought, but right now, SMN has a real problem in that Ruin 3 spam is a massive DPS loss for them, so they have to keep cycling through their Summons and Demis. But, in fights where the party has to delay their 2 min/burst (e.g. Carbuncle going on a rampage at 4 mins into the fight), the SMN has to go ahead and use Bahamut and get in some hits. But the downside is, they (and the party) have to delay their burst CDs.

This causes SMN to desync from the rest of the party, where it remains off-kilter from burst for the rest of the fight. And there are other fights that are even worse about this.

While I hope as well as probably most of you that we move away from the 2 min window in 7.0, what might be a solution in the mean time?

So here's my suggestion:

What if, after using your three Primal gems, they refresh? That is, instead of their refresh being based on using a Demi, they auto-refresh after all three have been used?

In practice, SMN would still largely play as it does today, since the Demis do massive damage, you WANT to use them on CD if possible. But this would allow for SMN players to scoot their rotation a bit if a fight demands it. Instead of waisting Bahamut and then Bahamut/Phoenix being out of burst for the rest of fights, you could simply cycle back around and use Garuda or Ifrit instead, then the boss goes untargetable, then when it returns, roll into your burst like everyone else.

Would this be a decent band-aid fix to the Job to tide us over until 7.0? (When hopefully they actually fix things...)

[MagiusNecros]

Better idea. What if after you use Ifrit, Titan and Garuda they become Ramuh, Leviathan and Shiva. Similar to how Bahamut and Phoenix rotate.

It would probably be better if you always have something to summon instead of having to hold Dragon or Bird.

[Renathras]

Better idea. What if after you use Ifrit, Titan and Garuda they become Ramuh, Leviathan and Shiva. Similar to how Bahamut and Phoenix rotate.

It would probably be better if you always have something to summon instead of having to hold Dragon or Bird.

I mean, I don't mind that, but it's more or less the same thing, isn't it?

The point is allowing the SMN player the flexibility to push their Demi if they need to without being punished with Ruinspam.

I feel like Ramuh,, Levi, and Shiva are going to be added in 7.0 and there aren't assets ready for them yet. But I feel like they COULD make the refresh easily with a few lines of code to tide us over to 7.0 when they can make them cycle.

[Aikaal]

Better idea. What if after you use Ifrit, Titan and Garuda they become Ramuh, Leviathan and Shiva. Similar to how Bahamut and Phoenix rotate.

It would probably be better if you always have something to summon instead of having to hold Dragon or Bird.

That wouldn't fix anything. Maybe in 7.0? But that wouldn't fix anything. That'd just be fanbase and offers no real solution to the flow of battle.

You need some freedom where delaying wouldn't hurt as much. Speaking of primals, Carbuncle is a Summon so I really have no idea why Carbuncle is being discarded like he's worthless. There's a missing opportunity there.

The fact elemental gems are linked to Demi-Bahamut/Phoenix is an issue. If you're "filler" was Titan/Ifrit/Garuda, it would be MUCH better yeah.

[MagiusNecros]

You need some freedom

Freedom from worrying about party buffs yeah.

If you notice in PvP Carbuncle isn't even required and you have a unique animation where you just put a shield up over yourself.

With the changes Carbuncle really has no place. It's just kinda there for damage shield mitigation on yourself. And because the job quests require it to exist. Carbuncle would be more beneficial I feel if Carbuncle did a party wide 20% HP damage shield for everyone.

It might be more apt to have 3 repertoires of different summon beasts. Damage, Mitigation, Healing.

And that you can freely use those summons depending on what you need at the time.

Plus I think each summon needs some unique effects beyond your Ruin 3 looking different.

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To answer the core question. There is no solution. SMN is among the jobs that is just going to fall out of alignment so I wouldn't worry about raid buffs. I'd just throw out Searing Light when your party throws out their buffs and just do your own thing.

[Ggwppino]

as a temporary fix it could be fine, even if the fact of the desynchronization is due more to the fact that the others are wrong (also because they will inevitably produce less raid dps) and not the smn that is desynchronized. In 7.0 I expect to have the other 3 minor summons shiva, rhamu and leviatan as in ffxi to use during the 45 seconds of the legos as well as ifrit, garuda and titan. this will make, if these evocations are well done on the game design side, the smn to be much more versatile, varied and complicated.

However, I would like to underline one thing: the fix you propose cannot be left to itself, but must be considered and balanced. Let me explain: if the summons are reloaded every time they run out, a player could easily spam summons with 700 potency (clearly it would break the job), so in reality designers would have to completely review the math of the job to take into account this eventuality. Instead, if we put the case of wanting to limit the reloads anyway, why should a player choose garuda or ifrit when most likely he will reuse titan? Also in this case the designer will have to find a way to mathematically fix the job so as not to break it.
In the end I don't think they will ever make this fix, too much effort. Especially since if people agreed on when to use buffs in everyone's interest, there wouldn't even be a problem. However I expect the balancing work they will do for 7.0 if they introduce the new summons

[Aikaal]

To answer the core question. There is no solution. SMN is among the jobs that is just going to fall out of alignment so I wouldn't worry about raid buffs. I'd just throw out Searing Light when your party throws out their buffs and just do your own thing.

If they have a 45s recast then they should be fine right? You'd essentially be able to Titan+Ifrit+Garuda in loop. The problem, by itself, is in order to use them. You need to cast Bahamut or Phoenix first. As long none of them are used, the only attacking spell you have is Ruin III and 1 Ruin IV every minute.

That way, you could have really interesting and creativity on opener. Shorten Garuda opener with some thiung like Ruin III opener > Searing Light > Garuda > Energy Drain + Swift > Ruin IV > Pot > Bahamut.

That wouldn't fix the caveats of Phoenix healing.

The current PPS (Potency per Second) of all summons are as followed;
Bahamut 307.6 PPS
Phoenix 313.3 PPS
Titan 211.3 PPS
Ifrit 198.5 PPS
Garuda 186.6 PPS
Fillers 149.2 PPS

It isn't like allowing us to redo Titan/Ifrit/Garuda would cause any issue. Baha/Phoenix are still top summons to use but you won't get punished from holding them for rebuff windows.

This is a solution. Is it the best? Prolly not, I don't have the arrogance to know how to fix Summoner but it's definitely a change some Summoners would appreciate. The ones that like smooth brain gameplay wouldn't even notice anything.

It might be more apt to have 3 repertoires of different summon beasts. Damage, Mitigation, Healing.

And that you can freely use those summons depending on what you need at the time.

Plus I think each summon needs some unique effects beyond your Ruin 3 looking different.

The issue I see with this and don't get me wrong, I do think glamour is nice. However, extra summons like Leviathan, Ramuh and Shiva won't bring anything. Extra visual effects based on primals won't give anything except looking cool. Summoner currently looks very cool and they gave all the complexity and what made Summoner who they were for that cool factor. I do not believe it was a good trade.

Before we get more, can we have a job that isn't broken in the sense it is unplayable in most fights?

[Renathras]

Quote

More or less my thinking as well.

The Demis hit harder than the Primals overall. So using if a fight, say, had an untargetable phase at the 2:10 mark, most Jobs will push their overall burst until the boss comes back to the arena. SMN's option is Bahamut, trio, Phoenix, trio then either a Bahamut that will be clipped (and then the SMN be desynced from raid buffs the rest of the fight) OR 10 seconds/4 casts of Ruin 3 spam. Neither of which feels great.

If the Trio were no longer tied to the Demis, the player could then choose Garuda/Ifrit/Titan here instead and continue dealing decent damage instead, then use Bahamut and Searing Light in the reopener along with the rest of the raid.

I'm not saying it's a permanent solution, but I feel like it's probably a decent band-aid to hold the line until 7.0, since right now, some fights people are actively dropping SMNs because of this issue. Losing a Bahamut over the course of the fight is a bigger DPS loss than being desynced, but resorting to Ruin 3 spam is also abjectly terrible, so SMNs feel forced to go ahead and blow the Bahamut, whereas this would allow them to kind of try and thread that needle better. Not to mention people are always noting SMN has little room for skill expression and this would kind of allow that.

Ex1 (Zod) has a similar case where your Demis tend to come up going into his add phase and also some of the meteor phases. Being able to push the rotation slightly to the right would really help in a lot of these fights where the Devs seem to enjoy putting an untargetable portion right at or JUUUST after 2/4 mins into the fights, completely screwing SMN's rotation.

[Ggwppino]

I'm not saying it's a permanent solution, but I feel like it's probably a decent band-aid to hold the line until 7.0, since right now, some fights people are actively dropping SMNs because of this issue

I agree that smn is a rigid stake and with the next expansion it has to achieve a lot to be freer. But consider that it seems strange to me that the designers, who pushed the dps to have buff windows of 2 minutes, do not allow buff sync during fights. So actually it actually has a desync problem on smn? Or are people lazy and prefer to play badly? I would check (ok that sucks third party sites and blablabla) fflogs and look at the logs of the currently strongest smn, look at the scores of his party mates and especially his timeline. Well you look at it and all the buffs are in sync. Is it black magic? no, they preferred to play well and experimented rather than be listless. In the first week I proposed on the balance discord channel to move buffs to odd minutes and they took me for crazy, saying it's better to use buffs when deciding melee. But if you do your math, losing nearly 4k of pure potency under buff (the delta between burst under buff and the best lego phase under buff) * nbuff is not worth anyone. It's all loss for smn and it's all loss for other players. Having said that, in this case I would not point the finger on the designers (who have other faults), but I would do an examination of conscience.

[MagiusNecros]

Summons have to have different effects to not feel the same and if the problem is running out of summons to hit on CD then stack spell speed to decrease the CD on B/P. Once B/P leave the field they only have a 38 second CD with my current SpS(1989).

Whenever I get a couple pieces of tome gear and with food you can reach around 2200 and can probably get the CD down to 35 seconds probably.

If you don't really stack spellspeed the base CD on Demi summons is 45 seconds roughly.

Lvl 90 content it's very rare for Ruin 3 to be used in any situation for me.

Only time I'd consider Ruin 3 is maybe during Titan for a 1-2-3 of R3 > Topaz > Mountain Buster.

If I want to forego Slipstream for any reason I could see Ruin 3 > Emerald Rite spam too.