I MISS THE OLD SUMMONER!

[Carighan]

One thing I want to throw into the mix is that if we're being honest, a pet class is not a pet class functionally so long as all it's pet does is the following thing:

* Have an external model.
* Autoattack a target or a group of targets.
* Use abilities either on CD or on command.

Because, at no loss of gameplay or output, this can be replaced with a stronger autoattack from the player + making the player use the abilities directly. In fact you could pretend either way, just based on who you assign as the originator of the damage on the server.

Two really really really important parts that have to happen to truly elicit a "pet class"-feel are:

* The pet must be vulnerable. It is your obligation as the pet controller to care for it / heal it / move it around danger / replace it as needed (specifics depend on class and game).
* The pet must be a significant portion of your total power, or ideally the majority. This means having your pet be healthy + attacking is far more important than you doing so. As a result the previous point gets priority, and since you provide a smaller portion of the output, you are "free" to do this, and focus mental time into it.

So at a very basic level, pets need to not be immune to AoEs, and in particular ground AoEs and effects. Moving them around these has to be a constant effort on the part of the controlling character. They also must be perceptible to full room AoEs (minor mitigation is alright, but not major one, or do it like in WoW where for a long time the Felhunter was the only pet with significant resistances) and the controller must have a way to invest time + resources into healing the pet and as per point #2 above, this is a damage gain to do compared to losing the pet.

That is to say, a pet controller's gameplay must be, well, "controlling the pet" for it to feel like a pet class. If the pet just exists on top of playing like any other caster there is, factually, no reason to have it in the first place. It's just window dressing, a DoT with an external model, might as well, well... neuter it. Which is what ~all MMORPGs do, as evolutions in both player class and boss encounter design gets too restricted by the nature of pet classes. However, I will say FFXIV is unique suited to complex pet classes compared to other games.
We already had/have jobs suited to being the DPS and healer pet classes (they never truly were as per the above, but eh, doable), and we know from previous work with the combat potato that tank pet classes can work in a combat system as slow and methodical as FFXIV. Even boss positioning could work!

[Grimr]

I agree with this also - When the Summoner rework first came in 6.0, I was initially all for it because I was enthralled by the new visuals and full Primal summons. However after playing it for two expansions now those pretty visuals are simply not enough!...I've grown bored of them and now wanting something more from the job that it no longer brings! - At least with the older Summoner we had that in the form of pet management and DoT upkeep. It was fun to play and kept me engaged because we had to actually do stuff and pay attention!...Now with the current Summoner it's just, sit back and press one or two buttons and watch the pretty visuals play on a loop...That's it, literally nothing more!...

I agree the old Summoner would have difficulty with current fight mechanic trends - However, I think this method of trying to make content more engaging is a lazy attempt on SE's part...Boss fights now have essentially become a form of bullet hell game, where you have to be constantly on the move and dodging none stop, otherwise you die....It's literally to the point now where in order to successfully dodge a mechanic we have to move before the telegraph even appears!...Which defies the entire point of a telegraph!!...It also means players who are new to a fight are essentially being punished simply for being new and not knowing a telegraph would appear before it appears!!...This design is beyond moronic!!...It would be fine for the odd battle, but not as a foundation to the games combat as a whole!...It just doesn't work in an MMO or RPG setting because in order for jobs to have any kind of identity or unique gameplay, they need a slower form of gameplay in order to achieve that!...There's literally no other way! - So until that happens all the jobs will continue to be homogenized and continue to lose there unique identities...

THIS!! it is all dodge dodge dodge then cast if we can before dodging again. And I too miss the old summoner.

[Carighan]

Yeah the new Summoner is a damn awesome framework actually, it's just annoying they didn't do anything with it since implementing it. We don't need more major summons, we need sets of 3 minor summons being added, one each expansion, and pull them randomly with minor differences that are consistent between each set so the gameplay is about adapting on-the-spot to whatever set you got.

Examples:

* The current set becomes the "mobility" set, the first one you get.
* One new one is all casted. No exceptions. No ways around it except that one Swiftcast. Ramuh/Shiva/Leviathan maybe. "Caster set". Highest possible damage.
* Dawntrail adds one which has too few casts, fast casts but 2.5s GCD so good but not perfect mobility. This is the "delay" set. What happens here is that these 3 minors are weak, but each of their casts gives you a stack of some modifier that applies to the next Ruin or Tri-Disaster you cast, and one is removed for each Ruin/Tri used. Hence having "too few charges", you need time to cast Ruin in the second half of this set. This is a bit of a gamble set, damage/utility is high in the second half, but very low in the first half, depending on what the fight is like at the time this is either good or bad.
* Next expansion could add a "utility set", PBAoE heals, group runspeed buff, stuns, etc. This one could even disable in raids to not clog up the invocation queue.

[Manamaru]

If we want any jobs to bring back the pet type mechanics, I believe we'll have better luck with Beast Master being the limited job to go whole hog, while Puppeteer would just be one entity to manage while doing your other stuff. Maybe they could have the weapon or secondary weapon change the puppet's appearance?

But some people complained about summoner not being thematically "flashy" like in other FF games, and this is the result we got. No now I can only hope that YoshiP will actually add other primals as summon options. FF14 devs, you already have a mode via subtractive pallet for being able to condense and create "modes" for what 3~5 summons you'll go through in a rotation.

[unjourneyed]

I miss old summoner as well, but I've gotten most likely over it. At this point, after playing this job for years, I really don't believe adding more primals will make any difference in how it functions. The rework needed to go beyond Summoner and more into Arcanist, but it would have been super unlikely seeing how reworked Summoner ended up. So much was removed from the job to point where the job just works adequately enough where the risk of failure is very low and people loved that. Do I have a problem with that? Nope, but I do have a problem with how that feedback was taken as the job did not have problems with it, so the only thing ever mentioned about the job is whether or not Resurrection stays on Arcanist for the next expansion that was DT.

What I mean, by problems, is that the current rework has a quirk in its rotation where if, any point, the job is unable to continue its rotation when you have a demi-summon available, it throws the entire rotation off an encounter (it can realign at times, but you're still playing around it). The job lags behind if it is unable to have its demi-summon within its own and party's raid buffs ... and usually if you're ready to use your demi-summon, you should not have any primal summons available, which creates another problem because using your demi-summon is what gives you your primal summons to move your rotation along. Yes, you still have Ruin/Tri-disaster, but considering those are your weakest spells with cast times, it is to your detriment to actually have to use them more than you need to be.
The point is, why is the job being actively punished for being played as the rotation intended just because of the encounter and what can be done to help Summoner avoid this issue? One suggestion is to allow the job to attain primal summons outside of demi-summons, be it an ability or spell. Another suggestion is to add an effect to a pre-existing trait that increases the potencies of Ruin 3/Tri-disaster temporarily by a certain amount (and/or reduce their cast times) when all primal summons have been used, rewarding the player for taking advantage of their main job resource instead of playing around it. Anyway, it would be remiss to say these are solutions so I won't. I just want feedback to be fairly considered, that's all.

[Taranok]

Yeah the new Summoner is a damn awesome framework actually, it's just annoying they didn't do anything with it since implementing it. We don't need more major summons, we need sets of 3 minor summons being added, one each expansion, and pull them randomly with minor differences that are consistent between each set so the gameplay is about adapting on-the-spot to whatever set you got.

They also used it as a vehicle to help justify the destruction of caster DPS as a role.

To me, the reworked summoner has exactly 2 things making it awful compared to ShB summoner. 1, it has no cast bars. The cast bars it does have are so long that it doesn't fit in modern fight design, and it only has ~10 seconds of them if it doesn't swiftcast one of those.

2, there is no tangible difference between demi-phoenix, demi-bahamut, and demi-nothamut. It was such a minor thing, but having a 1-2-1-2-1-2-1-2 on DP versus an ideal 1-1-1-1-2-2-2-2 on demi bahamut did a lot to emphasize the one thing that made summoner interesting. The class had 4 distinct phases. DWT+DB, front half rest, DP, back half rest. All 4 phases played differently because you were optimizing slightly differently. From ruin 4 building to eventually spend during DB if you could spare it to ruin 3 spam and casting bio/miasma literally once each every 2 minutes while trying to recover ruin 4s to use on DB and spend old ruin 4s from the rest of the rotation that are excess.

This isn't that much removed from ordering ifrit, garuda, and titan in any optimized rotation, and the feel between them is rather fun.

I do like the idea of having the pets be randomized in summon time, and have suggested as such in the past, though not a lot on the forums. My only issue with it is that the devs need to make each variation of any pet both similar (only red crayons have a lot of casting, green has limited, yellow has none) and literally identical length. The entire rotation needs to cleanly loop or it fundamentally breaks down. And that is a huge issue unto itself. One that Bard can offer a lot of feedback on.

Unfortunately, the removal of cast bars is the bigger issue. The beauty of the modern summoner design at an archetypical level is completely lost when the class is no longer a caster. Hell, at this point, it's more fair to say there isn't a single caster left in the game. The devs want movement more than they want gameplay and job variety. Turning casters into rphys is one of the worst decisions the devs have ever made, esp. when paired with lag-sensitive fight design. "Oh, you have to sit still and cast some. By the way you also have less time to dodge things than designed or intended because we in Japan don't understand netcode or pings above 10 while designing a game that exposes how little we understand netcode or pings above 10."

[Sunhwapark]

I miss it, most specifically the parts that let summons take aggro and tank damage for the summoner, It reminded me a little bit of the Spiritmaster class in Aion. Anyway, as soon as they changed it going into Shb with all that streamlining, I dropped it like a hot plate. I would write more but it's a waste of energy since I know it won't go back due to it devolving over 3 expansions now, I'm just grateful that I got to play it in the former state.

[brinn12]

Summoner's new design is just abysmal. We already know CBU3 loves easy jobs, so they wouldn't discard it based on difficulty. The rotation, though, is way too strict and could get completely destroyed by downtime, which happened in FRU. Should have been vetoed before they started writing its code.

[Noviside]

Old SMN sucked. New SMN also sucks. Wish they'd just rework it again.

[Mecia]

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.