Summoner Issues & Player Feedback

[Nakira]

I am EXTREMELY disappointed in what they've done to smn. We did not need a new random imposter Bahamut. And I don't buy it if the excuse is 'we wanted something super big and flashy for the 100 skill!' You know what would have stunned and and shocked and excited smn players? The 3 new egis we've been asking for for a decade. The new Bahamut does absolutely nothing other than just extend a 2 min cycle of 'summon demi Bahamut 1 and demi Bahamut reskinned' to a 4 min version of the same cycle, but it forces us to continue to cast the exact same basic, bland rotation we've had since the rework. And assuming this new flavor of Bahamut doesn't have a heal, which I believe is the case since it's intended to be the new burst demi, it means smn has also lost some of it's already limited utility it had with Phoenix, since it's now only available once every 4 min instead of every 2. Yeah, Phoenix didn't do a whole lot but it did have its uses. They also had so many choices for a new demi from among the primals/entities that already exist in the lore, and they went with something they pulled out of their asses.

I like the current smn, don't get me wrong. But I always thought it to be way too simple and basic, and always believed the intent was to expand on it in the next expansion once they had time to see how it did and balance it. But no, they are literally doing nothing but adding another Bahamut copy that looks to be the exact same mechanics that the current 2 have, and we're still stuck with the most basic egi rotation in between (adding filler spells to fester/searing light does not make it more engaging.) It just made so much more sense to me personally to leave the 2 min rotation smn has now as it is and add the new egis, which would make it much more interesting than just spamming the same 3 egis all the time. But even so, I'd have been ok with a new demi, if they had used something that was already in game, not 'Solar Bahamut'. I could sit here and tell myself they'll add the new egis in 8.0 but with how this went I just now both doubt it and no longer care. I will try smn and get it to 100, but I currently severely doubt I'll stick with playing it, which is a shame because it's one of my favorite jobs, not just in XIV, but across all the FF's I've played.

The biggest slap in the face though is their continual insistence that they 'listen to feedback' when it's very clear that they've ignored all the feedback smn players have given them over the course of the game.

I think half the problem stems from the "-egi"'s basically looking nothing like a summon we expect (ye ol "titan chicken nugget"), so what would Ramuh , Shiva, and Leviathan look like? Ramuh and Shiva end up looking like recolored Ifrit-egi's , and for lore reasons, logically we can not summon the actual primal. Players would probably re-glam them to carbuncle just so they occupy less space on the screen.

So maybe what is called for here is to make the primal-egi's at least be able to be glammed to the minion appearances. It's not like the game doesn't have those assets.



But maybe people like the existing ones. Another path to go is to take a page from "World of Final Fantasy" (Basically a game that you collect final fantasy monsters) and have alternate transfigurations of Ramuh (Ramewl), Shiva(Shivalry), and, Ifrit (Ifreeta), it's not like we didn't see an allusion to this in the first during the Eden's Gate raids. They made entirely alternate versions of each Primal.

There are plenty of other things Yoshi-P can let the summoner summon, and ways of customizing/glamor'ing them to suit the players taste.

They've retconned so much of the lore already that it would just be easier (and likely mainly accepted overall by players) to just slap the actual primals in, regardless of the lore stating it's not possible. With how much they butchered Ast, as an example, it wouldn't be really all that wild for them to just put the primals in. And they would not even have to worry about designing egis, since smn's 90 trait upgrades them to the primal forms.