(Un)Official Arcanist/Summmoner Feedback Thread

[Vishmaw]

For me the issue with them is primarily one of flavor, they simply do not feel like Final Fantasy summoners, they feel almost exactly like Warlocks from World of Warcraft. I would have much rather seen a class whose damage primarily came form the pets with the summoners personal spells being about debuffs and supporting the pet/party. Summoner in its current implementation feels functional but a touch on the weak side, I ended up switching to black mage after getting to 31, a decision I have not regretted. DPS wise I think the two classes are fairly equal, but the summoners lack of burst can be a seriously liability when there are adds that need to go down in short order especially since they do not have access to sleep. I feel much more useful to the group as a Black Mage overall.

[Xilium]

(1 of 2)

1) Something needs to be done about pets slowing way down when you get aggro'd while on a mount and they're in Steady mode. It's pretty much guaranteed they will be unsummoned due to you being too far away from them unless you stop and wait for them, which would lead to you having to fight the mob chasing you.

2) The Obey command should be a toggle command similar to Guard. It somewhat works that way now but it seems unnecessary to have two different attack commands. You should just be able to toggle on/off their special skill AI and have the Sic command just be the general attack command.

3) When pet skills are on the player's hotbar, they shouldn't be bound by your global cooldown. You should also be capable of using pet skills while you're casting.

[Xilium]

(2 of 2)

4) I really don't mind the focus on DoTs as opposed to pets but our traits should probably reflect that. I'm assuming this is because ACN branches off into a healing class as well but there are no traits that specifically enhance any of the DoT abilities, only general damage increases from Enhanced Intelligence and Maim & Mend.

5) There really needs to be a greater difference between Carbuncles and Egis. Not necessarily in terms of greater damage but they should have skills that are different than those used by the Carbuncles in more than just name. Since summoner is meant to be a DoT class, Garuda and Ifrit at least should probably have a DoT/debuff of their own. Also, Enkindle is pretty lackluster for how long the cooldown is.

6) We either need a separate skill that removes debuffs from pets and have Sustain/Rouse do it. As it stands now, when fighting a boss that relies heavily on debuffs, Summoner pets basically become useless (Aurum Vale bosses come to mind).

[Spellbinder]

There seems to be a lot of summoner discussion going on as of late, so I'll shamelessly bump this while trying to get the ball rolling again.

There seems to be a lot of dissatisfaction stemming from the lack of utility the Egi have. Aside from Contagion from Garuda-Egi (Shining Emerald on Emerald Carbuncle), they're more or less set and forget to add on a bit to your overall DPS.

Referring back to my original post, does anyone think changes to the utility of Egi skills would make them more worthwhile? For example:

Ifrit-Egi

Crimson Cyclone - attack with 105 potency (stun)
Burning Strike - attack with 120 potency
Radiant Shield - reflect damage (50 potency dealt when hit)
Flaming Crush - aoe attack with 105 potency

What if these skills were changed or adjusted to be worth using?

Crimson Cyclone - attack with 105 potency (stun)
Burning Strike - attack with 120 potency
Flash Fire - frontal cone attack with 110 potency; additional effect: physical defense down for 10 seconds
Flaming Crush - aoe attack with 105 potency; additional effect: fire damage over time

It would also help if their cooldowns were all 10 ~ 30 seconds (with the standard attack still at 3).

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Also, going on a slight tangent, I noticed something with Ifrit-Egi a few minutes ago while backtracking to complete my hunting log. Perhaps a number cruncher could explain what I'm experiencing.

Burning Strike is supposed to be an attack with 120 potency. What this attack scales with and how its damage is calculated, I do not know. However, using a level 36 Ifrit-Egi against a level 27 Amalj'aa Ranger, it does roughly 50 damage.

If I were to attack the same Amalj'aa Ranger using Energy Drain, which has a potency of 150, I do roughly 115 damage.

Despite there being only a difference of 30 potency, my Energy Drain is doing a little over double the damage of Burning Strike. Any thoughts on why there's such a large gap in damage?

[Sacerdos]

From what I can tell, the potency on Ifrit/Garuda pet attacks is really around 80, its about the same or just a little higher than Ruin.

Pets can just be considered a ~80-90 potency DoT that has an HP bar.

[Spellbinder]

From what I can tell, the potency on Ifrit/Garuda pet attacks is really around 80, its about the same or just a little higher than Ruin.

Pets can just be considered a ~80-90 potency DoT that has an HP bar.

Unfortunately that does seem to be the case a majority of the time. I think with a few adjustments to the Egi skills, however, it could add incentive to use their skills with more frequency in conjunction with our own.

In my opinion, the biggest problem with the Egi (as mentioned in my original post) is that there is no distinction between Emerald Carbuncle, Topaz Carbuncle, and their Egi equivalents. Changing some of their skills or at least adding additional effects to the Egi would at least make them more worthwhile, especially considering we have to clear the main scenario just to undertake the quests.

[ApexPred]

Ive been playing Final Fantasy games since I was very young and I remember the "epicness" of the summons in FF8 where Ifrit would drop down from the sky and your playstation controller would vibrate, really gave you a sense of how powerful summons were. In FFX Yuna and Seymour summoned huge creatures practically 10 times their size, on Yuna's Ifrit aeon she could sit on his shoulder, really gave you a feel for how big and how powerful your character had to be to tame such a creature. In FFXI I remember summoning titan and other summons and they were at least 3-4 times bigger than your character which was great, I felt like a summoner. Here we are in FFXIV and I feel as if my character went out in the backyard and put a leash and collar on a squirrel.

I don't care if my pet doesn't do a huge burst of damage, but for the love of god make it look menacing. I hate walking around with Jiminy Cricket (Garuda), a piece of buttered up popcorn (Titan), and Impfrit.
My 2 cents.

[abesut]

It feels like they copypasted warlock/necromancer from GW/WoW and just slapped the summoner name on it and said: there ya go!

[Korvaene]

These pictures say it all. First is the Ifrit summon from FFXI, a game with a much older graphics engine. Second is Ifrit from FFXIV. Wonder what their excuse is for the poor artwork?




Edit: Forgot to mention, since you can't tell by the pictures, but the first Ifrit is larger than the player character. The second Ifrit is a third of the size of the player character.

[Miew]

The thing is they aren't going to allow players to summon primals as that would break the story lore and all that stuff.
Endgame wise the SMN can be great against raid bosses if the user knows how to do their DoT right the problem is most don't.

The only boost I think SMN should get is a better stronger ruin since its basically their bread and butter after DoTs