SMN: why developers hate SMN so much?

[Sugarboo]

To me it’s actually crazy how much job has changed. From being top 3 dps in Shadowbringers to being the worst dps in Dawntrail.
In 6.0 we got full rework (we never asked for) that made it worst caster but easy caster (we never asked for). I understand developers wanted to have easy job for new people and stuff but why did they decided to ruin one of the best dps.
I played SMN all through Endwalker hoping that they would buff it or change it. But it never happened. Now in Dawntrail this job is worse than ever. I would never imagine before that phys dps would be better than a caster.
The last thing was when on media tour they give us great potency numbers and I thought it’s finally better future for SMN but on release of course it was nerfed to the ground again…
So now I’m realizing that I will have to play the worst dps for 2 years again? I know someone would say I can play another dps. But why would I? I played this job for so long, and I played this job when it was the best job and I still have a hope for it to be better.

So please before 7.05 consider this job carefully.
Thanks!

[elioaiko]

Bc this is what the devs want SMN to be. The smn we used to have prior to EW was a mess by their standards and didn't "feel" true to a SMN from FF history.

But also they spent an entire expansion (ShB) nerfing it because of how broken strong it was. I suppose it's a nightmare to balance in their eyes.

They likely wanted a fresh canva.

[Tunda]

balance team lazy.. they have every excuse to dumb jobs.. if raise is bad for the job.. just remove it

or make it if u use raise you will get debuff if u don't use it you will keep your damage as other DPS

[Ggwppino]

To me it’s actually crazy how much job has changed. From being top 3 dps in Shadowbringers to being the worst dps in Dawntrail.
In 6.0 we got full rework (we never asked for) that made it worst caster but easy caster (we never asked for). I understand developers wanted to have easy job for new people and stuff but why did they decided to ruin one of the best dps.
I played SMN all through Endwalker hoping that they would buff it or change it. But it never happened. Now in Dawntrail this job is worse than ever. I would never imagine before that phys dps would be better than a caster.
The last thing was when on media tour they give us great potency numbers and I thought it’s finally better future for SMN but on release of course it was nerfed to the ground again…
So now I’m realizing that I will have to play the worst dps for 2 years again? I know someone would say I can play another dps. But why would I? I played this job for so long, and I played this job when it was the best job and I still have a hope for it to be better.

So please before 7.05 consider this job carefully.
Thanks!

Last expansion, I was really angry and disappointed.
Both because I had high expectations of the new smn (which I expected to be consistent with the optimization that the old one required), and because when it arrived and how much it sucked, there was no longer any valid alternative.
In this expansion they brought out the PCT, which in terms of imagination you may or may not like, but in feeling it is the one that comes closest to what I imagined the new SMN would be.
I'm still angry, because we didn't get the smn we deserved, the long-time smn players got their asses kicked by the designers and devs, but the pct is giving me hope that maybe, if they work hard, they can pull something good out.

I would like to add that that's right that it sucks a lot in dps output. As far as I'm concerned it shouldn't even be able to be brought into hard contents, in its current state.

[Taranok]

Summoner has a history of broken design. It got thunder 1 removed from cross class skills, completely broke their statistics with heavensward buff stacking. Stormblood is a masterclass in how not to design a class while also being the first time we saw the potential for a real summoner class. No, really, they took Dragoon's dragon sight tether and literally gave it to the pet, except it leashed onto the nearest ally which could be a tank, a healer, or the lowest DPS person on your team. But not yourself, and you had no real control over it. Then there's the whole 11 wyrmwaves rotation where you could cast addle to get more wyrmwaves when you were intended to explicitly get only 8 of them.

Endwalker took their pet action queue system and made it extremely easy to accidentally break it. Running the same rotation you could have the pet finish all queued actions over 5 GCDs apart. As in a rotation that ended on the 7th GCD into the fight could finish all pet actions on the 8th GCD or the 12th GCD and you had little actual control over it.

At this point players were split into 2 camps. Those who loved its warlock-esque playstyle from the early game, which didn't work well as seen with HW summoner and snapshot abuse. And those that saw the demi-summons and went: "Can this just be the class please?" The class at this point outside of pet jank was mostly a class of texture differences. How it played in DWT and DB had a different texture to post-DB, where FBT/DP had a very different feel due to rotation, and the back half also rolled differently.

The devs then took the texturing of the old rotation but simplified it a tiny bit more, most notably with FBT no longer being a 1-2-1-2-1-2-1-2 rotation and now just 1-1-1-1-1-1, took feedback of: "We like the instant casts of summoner," but forgot that summoner was still more a turret caster than a mobile caster and basically pivoted it from turret caster into rphys with some casts, and then started designing every fight like cast bars didn't exist.

A combination of all these changes led to summoner being absurdly popular. As in, I don't think any class was more popular save maybe WHM or WAR, and it dominated all of EW as the most popular class outright, and you can see why the devs are hesitant to change it. This ignores any contributing factors like casters in general being suffering in EW and the overall war being waged by encounter designers on the turret caster playstyle itself, but seeing as the devs are continuing to wage war on turret casters, there's no desire to change smn because it was the most popular DPS class outright. And it wasn't even close.

This is an extremely brief history of SMN and glosses over a lot, but we got here because of bad design decisions compounding until they hit a breaking point, and then the devs messed up when listening to feedback and also messed up encounter design. So summoner is likely the future of all casters.

[anna-steele]

i like the newer SMN depite the old rotation being fun also, but issue with SMN is they want to be a support role now it seems, ok fine, but the supporting we do now is weird, feel much lesser than bard or dancer. so my question to the dev is, what is summoner?

[Rithy255]

New summoner cannot be doing Picto/Black mage damage quite frankly, New summoner is designed to be a very forgiving entry job with a lot of uptime without having to worry about casts for the most part, also having rez & great healing utility compared to its counterparts, Even red mage who brings veraise/duel cast, struggles a lot more at positioning around harder fights.

If summoner wants to see higher potencies they need to make it actually cast more and not have raise, It's genuinely not fair on the other casters if Summoner could do the same damage as others casters which is the issue with designing a high movement job in the caster category.

I think the job personally needs another rework or at least some changes and added casts. (also rez should be a caster role action that is locked behind a long timer).

[Sequora]

I honestly think this is partially because of the pandemic. I think they decided they were doing a full rework for EW, and wanted something that was akin to “traditional summoner”. But they also wanted to keep the mobility of the preEW days.

I think they ran out of time and resources and so we ended up with the EW iteration. They said it was a base, but truthfully I can’t really see how they can build on it other than maybe adding Ramuh, Shiva, and Leviathan, and having them be slightly different than Garuda, Ifrit, and Titan.

My guess is there will be another fairly major rework for 8.0.

[Ramiee]

i like the newer SMN depite the old rotation being fun also, but issue with SMN is they want to be a support role now it seems, ok fine, but the supporting we do now is weird, feel much lesser than bard or dancer. so my question to the dev is, what is summoner?

It doesn't really read as a Support job. Seeing its animations especially as another player you see it as a DPS even if a lot of its moves have support options, RDM reads far better as the support caster because of the big shield vercure and mass res also the damage buff is more noticeable. Personally I don't think its a good way to go for SMN to become a support, RDM will always be superior to it. Genuinely think this version of SMN is compatible with a dot system, maybe not like damage dots but weakness dots like RPR's weakness dot but make SMN have mutiple that relate to buffing the summon's damage and convert some of the spells during summon phase as commands/abilities. But yeah I don't think the support option works, I think something akin to a Demonology Warlock from wow would work better for new SMN.

[Mapleine]

I just wanna know why they spent the effort to rebuild the job to a classic FF image just to completely botch the vibe on it the next expansion. A lot of people bailed off of it due to that.

Of all the history of summons and how they fit into this game, from Shvia to Leviathan to Ramuh to maybe Alexander for the FF9 theme going on in DT.

But no, lets do Bahamut yet again and lets do the worst take on Bahamut in FF history. The only thing that would drive more people off of SMN is if Smile played when you Summoned the new Bahamut.