Evolved Summoner speculation

[Carighan]

Since evolved brd is so close to the current smn design, i'm really praying for the job to go back to being a pet class with summons staying around long term and having interesting interactions.

Sadly one of a handful of very few actually consistent rules for MMORPG design is that as they age, they either remove or neuter their pet classes. It always happens. Even DAoC removed even their Necromancer as it used to be and re-implemented it, and that class had conceptually solved the pet-class problem by making you the pet.

[Roda]

Sadly one of a handful of very few actually consistent rules for MMORPG design is that as MMORPGs are, they either remove or neuter their pet classes. It always happens. Even DAoC removed even their Necromancer as it werre and re-implemented it, and that class had conceptually solved the pet-class problem by making you the pet.

Listen, I'm gonna SB!SMNcope until I die.

[Supersnow845]

Sadly one of a handful of very few actually consistent rules for MMORPG design is that as they age, they either remove or neuter their pet classes. It always happens. Even DAoC removed even their Necromancer as it used to be and re-implemented it, and that class had conceptually solved the pet-class problem by making you the pet.

RuneScape added a pet class at 25 years old so it’s not impossible

[Minali]

RuneScape added a pet class at 25 years old so it’s not impossible

May I ask how RuneScape's general design for their pet class is? I've never played that game but would be interested how they managed it and if it might serve as inspiration.

[Supersnow845]

May I ask how RuneScape's general design for their pet class is? I've never played that game but would be interested how they managed it and if it might serve as inspiration.

RuneScape’s pet class is a hilarious take on a necromancer, basically it functions where there is three core “branches” of necromancy

-summons
-offensive magic
-support magic

You have 4 pets you can summon, a skeleton attacker, a phantom guardian, a ghost that heals you and a zombie that blows up. However at extremely high levels you get a skill that basically lets you summon all of them at once. You can control each of them to do a limited set of actions but they will also just do their core actions alone (the fact you can summon all of them is balanced by needing an expendable resource to keep them on the field which works with RuneScape but doesn’t work in 14). Meanwhile you as the necromancer have offensive and support magic. Offensive magic works quite similarly to WOW’s basic Freeform rotations. Support magic includes both field magic (teleports and the like) and other combat useful magic like the ability to reduce damage by 20%, the ability to turn a heal into a reflection damage skill, give you access to defensives via a pseudo shield or augment your summons

RuneScape btw doesn’t have a trinity, it has a combat triangle so of course this class is DPS, healer and tank in one but overall it’s a really well designed class

[Minali]

- snip for length -

Thanks for the explanation! This sounds quite fascinating. Having more than one on a field... Now that's an interesting angle. Not sure how well this would work for FFXIV though (not to mention other stuff sort of contradicting the trinity ofc). Imagining an Alliance Raid with a lot of summoners all having the 2 Bahamuts and 1 Phoenix on the field for the lulz is a hilarious thing I would love to see exactly once. But I'd have trouble dodging attacks that way for sure, when I don't see anything anymore. xD


Jokes aside though, some brainstorming:

Summoning them and then having them do their core thing is kind of what we had in Shadowbringers, and afaik some version prior to this, which even had hit bars for them. Can't talk about pre-Shadowbringers though, I wasn't around at that time. One issue was movement, Ifrit had to float to the enemy first etc. and there was an issue with the big ones I forgot. Having them spawn right next to the boss might have helped but I suppose if it would be that easy instead of giving us commands for this, they would have tried that already. And there was of course the issue that some of them simply were more helpful than others depending on content. Why summon Titan with his fancy shields into an arena when you have one to two healers with you who can do this while you DPS more? So I'm not sure "throw multiple on the field and forget about them" or so would be a thing the devs would try again.

I wonder if some kind of synergy between the summons would be interesting? Not in a "you need to have all three to summon a demi" kind of way or so, not a dependency like this. Whatever forces you to summon all things to activate a big thing makes any kind of variety in the single things redundant and would be not much different than what we have now, or what they demonstrated for Bard (and isn't really good there either, but that's a different discussion in a different forum thread.) That would remove the point of having summons for different situations because in most fights it would be completely irrelevant, as it is already.

I'm more thinking of, idk, Ifrit making single target fire, Garuda making a wind AOE, but if summoned together they make a big fire AOE or whatever. Which could be limited with cooldowns, or making the big combined attack would unsummon both or so. (That kind of magic is surely taxing for our little friends!) Then you would have to decide if you want continued attack from either Ifrit or either Garuda, or if you'd rather have the big bang and then switch to a different summon...?

Tbh I'm not really sure where I'm going with this here, not entirely convinced of this, just randomly throwing ideas out of the open. And if there would be such a big attack, there would be of course the point that you could also just make this a Shiva coded ice attack as oGCD with a long cooldown (pun half intended). Combining two already existing summons would reduce the need for bringing in new summons.
(Also it sounds kind of like my idea with combining the same buttons differently for different summons, just with a more fancy animation and maybe some independent action of an egi.)

[Carighan]

Also they were just the small stuff. I'd really be more in favor of akin to FF7, we summon a big one, then it is around / does minor attacks, then we do stuff to fill a bar, it does its big stuff or an even bigger thing if we fill that in time. Which summon we get is either random or semi-random (i.e.: Pull a random 2 options out of a hat of 12+).