About DAWNTRAIL SMN and future

[Stasya]

current smn has no future, doesn't matter how many pointless bahamut reskins you can add

[Khryseis_Astra]

Should Levi, Ramuh, and Shiva be added, what would their gems be? Aquamarine, Amethyst, Sapphire?

Also what could their Gem Shine and Astral Flow moves be?

I like Aquamarine, Amethyst and Sapphire… I’ve seen some suggest Diamond for Shiva, and I get it, but her color is always blue, whether it’s her dress or even her skin tone. Most of the spells have a blue color tint to them as well. But blue is my favorite color and I really want a Sapphire Carby, so I might be biased! lol Aquamarine and Amethyst are just kind of a given for the other two.

Some ideas for spells just going off of skills used in the Extreme trials… they would need some modification to be player attacks instead of boss attacks, but it could definitely be done. I’m just throwing out ideas, and trying to avoid skills already given to BLU if memory serves.

Levi - Grand Fall or Whirlpool (could be a DOT puddle similar to Slipstream), maybe Scale Darts for the instant casts
Shiva - Icicle Impact for instant casts and of course, have to have Diamond Dust (maybe granting Dreams of Ice as a personal or party damage up buff!)
Ramuh - Lightning Orbs for instant casts and Judgement Bolt

In my wish list version, since you’d be able to choose which team you start out with, I’d have the potencies of each team roughly equivalent, making the choice of one team over another being mainly what kind of mechanics you’ll be dealing with at any given point of a fight. So it still has a basic, easily accessible rotation, but offers a little more micro-management and planning complexity for those who enjoy that.

[Khryseis_Astra]

I like the "different batches of summons depending on which big summon just got used" idea in post 10. I get why Ifrit, Titan, and Garuda got grouped together, but that doesn't match the astral/umbral divide that's part of what defines 14's elements. You'd need to group Ifrit, Shiva, and Ramuh together with one summon and Garuda, Leviathan, and Titan together with the other to match that. And good luck getting that to make sense to someone still doing the pre-50 job quests.

Honestly I wonder if this is why they’ve avoided it all this time. It can be done, and they’ve done similar before (remember old AST cards anyone? lol), but I’m sure it’s probably a pain to have to revise the earlier levels and possibly job quests. I’m sure most of us would be fine with the gems getting rearranged if we could finally have more of them! They’ve created a good base rotation of demi, 3 gems, repeat, but they need to give us more gem summons instead of just adding demis and keeping the gem rotation exactly the same the whole way through.

In a perfect world, you'd have a minor summon for most every primal and mythical creature we fight in this game and we'd pick and choose which ones to bring to a particular fight as if they were Pokemon, based on what happens in the fight and what movement is (or isn't) required during any given section. But the problem with that is that the playerbase would very quickly math out what combination of summons was the highest DPS and post it on the Balance. And like magic, using literally any other summons at all becomes grounds for getting kicked and blacklisted from PF until you use "the correct" summons.

Yeah that’s why I’d keep them in the teams of three gems, and have each team roughly equivalent in terms of damage output, but make the skills themselves be the deciding factor in which team you want to use at any given time.

[Connor]

It’s funny that despite being pretty much unchanged from Endwalker, Summoner somehow still manages to feel worse to play lol. I guess because it was still kinda ‘newish’ in Endwalker, but by now it’s like ‘why are we still stuck with a job that feels like it just born?’

It’s been a whole expansion and the best they could come up with for future Summoners was… another Bahamut . (Insert skull emoji)

The saddest thing is I like Solar Bahamut’s design in a vacuum. I could’ve totally got behind it as an upgrade to Bahamut or something. But as an entirely separate summon? Ew, not the right move at all SE lol.

And tacking on a random, unnecessary party heal to a goddamn Bahamut, King of Dragons summon is hilariously stupid. Oh, and you can only use it within 30 seconds of summoning Solar Bahamut, because screw you I guess.

Additional thoughts for Summoner in future:
- FIX PHYSICK lol. Fix/rework/delete/whatever lol.
- Let us use Radiant Aegis on allies at half potency
- Decouple Solar Bahamut and Lux Solaris. Either make Lux Solaris its own cool-down, make it a single target upgrade to Physick, or maybe tie to a shorter cool-down ability like Radiant Aegis or something and adjust potency accordingly. Let us decide when to use it, not the game.
- As much as I love Ifrit, Garuda, and Titan, we desperately need more summons to diversify the gameplay and make Summoner feel less robotic/fixed. Hell I’d accept a straight copy paste of Subtractive Pallet (Sumtractive Pallet? Subtractive Summon? lol) if it meant we could get more iconic summons like Ramuh, Shiva, Leviathan, possibly Odin and Alexander.
- Ruin IV feels like a relic from previous expansions that barely adds anything to the job anymore. I’d like to see a chance for it to proc when using primal skills and stack up to 4 like it used to, with the caveat that Summoner would have far more frequent cast phases to compensate.
- Similarly the Aetherflow system feels like a relic from previous expansions that barely adds anything to the job anymore. Necrotise got a visual upgrade but that didn’t really help it less disjointed from the overall skill set lol. Maybe they could maybe Necrotize and Painflare change into different abilities depending on which summon is active? They could remove Aetherflow itself, move the MP elsewhere (maybe Ruin IV to justify its existence lol), and have the Aetherflow be refreshed each time a new summon is performed?

[catbuncle]

Honestly though, I’d be ecstatic if we just got Levi, Shiva and Ramuh as gem summons, even without any fancy astral/umbral mechanics. Give me my full cast of elements, rainbow of gems and rainbow of Carby colors!

A full rainbow of Carby colors... This is what I want. I'd also like to be able to fully glamour over ALL versions of the egis into the carbuncles. Yes including the max-level 100 versions into the carbuncles too.


The one thing that's really frustrating to me about carbuncle coloration is that if you look at the elemental crystal colors we have, the current "emerald carbuncle" we got as original default carbuncle really is closer to the light blue that the ice aether crystal is and should be for ice... and wind aether crystals should be a true green shade that we just don't have for carbuncles yet. I'd love to get that green as an option, and we could call it another gemstone like idk, jade, peridot, malachite. The advent of the new base "carbuncle" in Endwalker that's a deeper blue helps out, but that needs to be the water-aether colored one?


Represent levin with a purple carbuncle, call it Amethyst or Iolite (we have gemstone jewelry called that in-game). There's a diamond carbuncle model in-game already and Shiva uses diamond dust as an attack, give us that for ice. Use the new deeper blue base carbuncle as the water one, call it sapphire or lapis.


And then just to make sure we have all kinds of colors, I'd like to have an orange, a pink, and maybe we can borrow Alphinaud's obsidian and moonstone? Maybe he gave those two's summoning focus stones to us (y'know, like the crystals we used as ACN for our original carbies) to us when he went SGE?


Also Perrrrrrsonally I think Solar Bahamut is ugly as heck and it was uninspired to have another Bahamut. So hear me out, I would LOVE to be able to glamour the Bahamut / Phoenix / Solar B. to be ... well, carbuncles! Or other summon types as well. I want to replace Solar B. with Proto-Carbuncle.

[Valence]

Modern SMN is a joke of a job and the shining example of what they think jobs should be about (an afterthough) to make way for full DDR encounter design.