Summoner Health Check

[LanceSummers]

The problem with unbalanced jobs is they just get locked out of PF. Look at MCH it was locked out of FRU PF, early cruiserweight PF ect. People will always pick the meta and those who aren't don't get to play.

Honestly Square Enix should balance for casual play and figure out alternate methods to make things fair for harder content instead of balancing for harder content first and thinking about casual content later.

[Daralii]

Summoner being a pet job was actually a unique detail of the MMO Final Fantasy titles, as the only one where it's a proper "per job" is FFXI.

The version we have now, casting summons as giant nuclear blasting spells, sometimes with secondary party effects, is a much closer recreation of the classic FF job. Even giving summoner some healing spells reflects many past summoner characters, as it was commonly paired to white mage.

In short, the devs were looking at Final Fantasy for design ideas; you guys are looking at WoW.

That era effectively ended as soon as mainline games started releasing on the PS2. From X and on, there's been a heavy focus on the summon and Summoner working in tandem with each using their own skills. The current design is a weird hybrid of the III-IX concept and XVI, so it ultimately still doesn't know what it wants to be, is still clunky, and has next to nothing to it mechanically even after 5 1/2 years.

[RedLolly]

That era effectively ended as soon as mainline games started releasing on the PS2. From X and on, there's been a heavy focus on the summon and Summoner working in tandem with each using their own skills. The current design is a weird hybrid of the III-IX concept and XVI, so it ultimately still doesn't know what it wants to be, is still clunky, and has next to nothing to it mechanically even after 5 1/2 years.

Yuna sends the party away and controls the summon in FFX as a solo creature in battle. This is the closest equivalent to Beast Master, and the only solo mainline that treats summons as a unique unit, but Yuna is just set dressing at that point in actual gameplay. Which no one wants for a pet job.

A similar system to that was in place in FFXIII which each party member having a unique summon that acts more akin to their limit break in practice.

FFXV has Summons as mostly random nuke spells or otherwise are built into the story as bosses or cinematic moments. The fact you can summon freely was a chief complaint regarding how FFXV implemented them.

FFXVI, you are the summon. Clive is literally Ifrit and his battle style of switching modes/channeling other summon to access unique skills and spells the same concept as FFXIV, put into an action RPG, but with unique kaiju fights between himself and the others like him.

Early FFXIV Summoner was far more of a DoT mage than pet based job.


I'm not saying we shouldn't have a pet job. I'm just forever confused why people demand Summoner become when it's not how they work in other games and it always preferred that our classic FF jobs feel more authentic.

But I'm also biased in that I like the current Summoner.




What about MCH turrets and the Queen being "pets." I love that job but it's way overdue a total redo.

[Azurarok]

Early FFXIV Summoner was far more of a DoT mage than pet based job.

I can't say I fully believe that when the ARR arcanist and summoner quests still have fights that imply you were supposed to fight alongside your carbuncle/egis. Also since they had to nerf Titan Egi to the ground because it replaced tanks in an extreme.

What about MCH turrets and the Queen being "pets." I love that job but it's way overdue a total redo.

MCH also ended up in its weird state, both in terms of gameplay and meta, when they tried to make it closer to its classic FFVI counterpart.
I even enjoy current MCH enough to consider it my main but I'm also not selfish enough to say the people who loved it for what it was needed to lose it for the sake of being a better reference to past games.

[FuturePastNow]

I'm happy with Summoner. You can hate me for saying it. It's ok. But I need me an easy DPS to play.

[RedLolly]

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I need to preface this with the fact that the pet jobs had more things working against them than anything else seen then or now. They were shockingly janky, and I theorize that's why Beast Master is a limited job.


SMN had most of their DPS come from their many DOTs that simply don't exist anymore. Off the top of my head, they had Bio 1, Bio 2, Miasma, and a ground AoE one called Shadowflare. You also had a different version of the Fester skill, an aetherflow with a long recast, that was specifically more powerful the more DoTs an enemy had. I think cross-classing Thunder was a thing to have Fester hit harder, but that may have been something I assumed because tooltips were worse.

The three Egi were all different beasts. For starters, they had HP bars. They could die and would need a lot more positional management in difficult content, and some regular healer spells would hit them just like they still do for Chocobo. You had a skill that was just a regen for your Egi.

Titan was designed entirely for solo play as a tank, high defense, a mitigation skill, builds aggro, does trash damage. Players did some hilarious things with Titans, as you mention.

Garuda was a caster. She would be backline consistently flinging spells, but her attacks were weaker than Ifrit's, who was a melee. The big arguments were always about Ifrit being in constant danger, needing to move into range, but hitting very hard, while Garuda was far easier to keep alive and consistent. Both also had a unique skill, but for the life of me I can't recall which was which because they were negligible in all but Coils. I think is was another DoT for Garuda and a DPS buff for Ifrit.

Essentially, the whole idea was that the player would be rolling out their DoT skills for constant, passive damage while the pet AI would be attacking, while you also maintained their health. Dreadwyrm trance fixed the issue of SMN lacking a substantial burst, and it was what current SMN really grew from in gameplay.


The problems were; pet AI sucked, the reaction time for a player to command a specific thing took an entire real life second or two for the pet respond and were clunky, the pets were made of tissue paper, and enemies had a hard upper limit on how many DoTs it would have, so in FATES or other larger scale fights, most of your kit just didn't function.

These issues also applied to Scholar, who probably had it worse. Eos was ALWAYS preferable do to her having Whispering Dawn, while Selene had an interrupt. It almost never worked in time and the other fairy having an AoE heal was just no contest.

It was insanely important to manually place the fairy as she only cast anything if perfectly still. This, most importantly, included Embrace. She would otherwise stay directly next to you and trying to would usually prevent her casts as she would interrupt herself to stay within player range.

And Scholar had those flipping DoTs, too!

[Azurarok]

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don't threaten me with a good time

[Rein_eon_Osborne]

I don't think you can compare summoners from its predecessor titles proper to FFXIV's. Summoners in those single player games have you not playing -just- the summoner. You're also controlling 2-3 other party members that belongs to other job archetype. That's just not the case in FFXIV case where you pick a job and stick to it until an encounter ends.

Today's SMN needs more, and unironically the way PCT works made me think "I think this is how SMNs should've felt like" when I first gave it a try in 7.0. lol.

[SyferU]

Since this is also a bit of Beastmaster related talk, why not make it an action instead of a Limited job.
Let us capture Beasts in the Wild and give them orders, call it beastmastering and allow us to use the Beasts along our main job as long as we are in the open world.

I don't know why this had to be a job.

[TeresaFortell]

Since this is also a bit of Beastmaster related talk, why not make it an action instead of a Limited job.
Let us capture Beasts in the Wild and give them orders, call it beastmastering and allow us to use the Beasts along our main job as long as we are in the open world.

I don't know why this had to be a job.

The job was a major selling point for DT, and so a lot of people were looking forward to it. Although, I did not expect them to release the job, with so much restriction attached, at the very end of the expansion.