I MISS THE OLD SUMMONER!

[Carighan]

The prevalent idea of adding more minor summons isnt going to make this a good framework. Adding more drills hasnt made MCH a good framework.

Not if they'd be carbon copies, my idea would be to make Summoner a highly randomized class where the payoff is in handling whatever the game tosses at you without the usual "I can know down to each GCD what I'll do when exactly for a specific fight", as everything else is a static choreographed pre-learned exercise (even Dancer, despite being proc-based).

This is something FFXIV lacks in general, procs and randomness. It's no wonder all classes feel boring and samey, as they only use a single out of the four basic design types for RPG-y classes (static rotation / proc-based / dynamic branching / resource-based)

[Griphyt]

Suggestions for Summoner Design:
Carbuncle should remain as the default summon that keeps attacking while the other abilities are on cooldown.
For example, give Carbuncle its own combo rotation.
Allow for combo interactions with the other summons — for instance, if you summon Ifrit, you could trigger his own combo sequence and build up a mega attack gauge.
Do the same for all summons, giving each one their own unique combo and area-of-effect potential for multiple enemies.
That would be amazing and add a lot of depth to the job.
The basic book auto-attack and the Ruin spell should be removed.
This would give more importance and focus to the summons themselves

[Taranok]

Suggestions for Summoner Design:
Carbuncle should remain as the default summon that keeps attacking while the other abilities are on cooldown.
For example, give Carbuncle its own combo rotation.
Allow for combo interactions with the other summons — for instance, if you summon Ifrit, you could trigger his own combo sequence and build up a mega attack gauge.
Do the same for all summons, giving each one their own unique combo and area-of-effect potential for multiple enemies.
That would be amazing and add a lot of depth to the job.
The basic book auto-attack and the Ruin spell should be removed.
This would give more importance and focus to the summons themselves

There's some fundamental game limitation that prevents them from having more than 2 pets out at a time. And of those, the player can only truly have 1. The other pet is the companion, that is the chocobo. They obviously can't use the companion in dungeons because it means it'd break in the overworld. The pet system is used for a number of things, including reaper's ghosty boi and MCH's automaton queen, which is part of why it always shows up. This is also why they have to desummon the carbuncle in order to summon the demis. Likewise, issues with ShB SMN's design were caused directly by this, because they have to destroy the old entity to summon the new one, which killed pet-queued actions. Hell, 99% of SMN's actual difficulty was literally trying to optimize the pet queue to prevent it from ghosting things. And from some openers I used, I had a -2 to +6 GCD on the pet queue from start to finish because of how garbage the system was.

That's ultimately why I still think new summoner is better designed as I brought up earlier, but I really need SMN to be a caster again.

For every good idea there is to save summoner by doing something interesting with the pets, at the end of the day the class should be designed around the demi summons being temporary summons as that is the core summoner identity from almost literally every FF game. If they want a class that does stuff exclusively through the pets like a DAoC Necromancer, then they should make a new class for it. And I'm all in favor of it because I still think ShB SMN had some fun pet design, it just meshed poorly with the demis. I would like to iterate that the devs can't have 2 pets out, so it instantly becomes a non starter to try to have both doing things.

As for the rest, people will figure out the best combo and we'll be right back where we started. That said, I do want more overall job complexity, just only if it's in a fun and done in a way as to not trap players or break the class.

[Carighan]

It's what I thought the reason behind making them not-pets was, to make them able to have multiple at once as they're not actually pets any more, they are just some graphics your client renders for an effect that otherwise works the same as it would on any non-"pet" class.

[seolhyun]

i wish they just make it like yuna in psp dissidia. your skills just call the diff summons to come out and attack. no need for spamming red green and yellow ruins.