Summoner Thoughts

[Crescent_Dusk]

OK, I've been playing Summoner all the way to 50 and at endgame now so I've had some time to give the mechanics a chance to settle to see what happens with our kit.

The kit has its' problems:

- The 2.5 sec GCD triggering for DoT's increases our ramp up time, which is already too high. It takes 7.5 seconds to start doing your full DPS. This is not the case for the other classes. DoT's and instant spells should be on a separate 0.5 sec cd or off the GCD entirely.

- The pet's command set, while good potentially, is hampered by the GCD as you cannot command while casting or under the GCD. This is pretty important as some instantkill spells are somehow affecting pets, yet we can't command the pet to move in time.

- The lack of burst really hurts in most content as there are phases where you NEED immediate damage to not risk a wipe. Fester and Enkindle were supposed to be our burst buttons, but the first requires 7.5 seconds of DoT application to deal the potential burst damage, while the other is a whopping 5 minute cooldown to do about only 20% more damage than a Fester, which is on a much lesser CD.

The solution is to revamp Fester and make it apply the full damage bonus if ANY dot is on the target.

- Debuffs affecting the pet. Sustain should apply a periodic condition removal on top of increasing the effectiveness of the heal. Asking healers to take the additional burden of cleansing the pet hurts this class as the other classes don't place these burdens on the healers when they do their job.


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Now, I want to touch on spells that need outright work:

- Ruin is too weak. Even with the combination of the pet auto it falls behind the bread and butter of the other classes. Ruin II is problematic as well because the Paladin himself already applies Blind, making the incentive of using this spell outside the purpose of squeezing instant damage weak. Ruin II could afford a cooldown of like 3 seconds and see its damage increased.

- Tri-Disaster is a horrible spell. 3 second cast for an aoe bind as the damage is pitiful just doesn't work well. It's sorely disappointing and overshadowed by the BLM's sleep.

- Miasma II does way too little damage.

- Sustain needs a healthy buff in healing done. Additionally, it should remove one debuff off the pet per periodic tick.

- Enkindle should be a 15-20 second cooldown for what it actually does. With Rouse and Spur both up, an Ifrit egi enkindle is hitting for a pitiful 440-500 damage. This is what a black mage with astral fire does on his spammable nuke at 50.

To think that a 400 damage skill is on a whopping 5 minute cd is horrendous. Hell, building a lv1 limit break is faster and does more damage than it!

I also think the cast times on some of the summoner spells are a bit high, namely Shadowflare and Tri-Disaster. The DoT's should be 1.5-2 second casts, as should Ruin. This would greatly help with reducing the silly ramp-up to damage.

On the Tonberry King I had to slap 2 dots and a Ruin II on an add to chop off 60-70% of its HP in a sequence. The neighboring Blackmage had to press at most 2 buttons with no cast times and the add was immediately dead.

If you're going to design many fights with DPS checks and burst necessities, then the Summoner needs to be tweaked or it will be replaced in favor of other classes. The summoner has good sustained damage, but not something that the BLM or other classes aren't matching, and those classes have burst to boot.

[Rover1983]

I think tri disaster is a disaster of a spell. Needs an increase in damage. I don't mind my personal damage being low but that's if our pets damage is significantly more. Right now out dps pets are a joke and need some serious tweaking.

[Jibril]

The SMN job is showing how little play testing was done. One thing I noticed also is the distance of Bane is incredibly small and really often times not even worth casting. For the cost of our laughable burst we can spread our 3 main dots, but only if the other targets are literally piggy backing the main target.

To fix Bane I suggest increase spread range by 5 yards to allow for minimal enemy movement. Take the requirement of Aetherflow away and add a 15 second cooldown to the ability to allow for more uses of Fester giving the SMN more options to burst. Also take away the 15% chance to reset either Bio, Bio II or Miasma and give it to Fester since Fester actually costs a Cooldown.

I agree on your Ruin points also. I wouldnt expect Ruin II to do as much damage as Ruin I, but they both do the same damage but Ruin II cost just a little under double the cost of Ruin I.

[Jibril]

To fix this I suggest Ruin I have a 2.5 cast time and deal 150 unaspected damage and have Ruin II keep its instant cast and deal 90 unaspected damage and blind the enemy for 10 seconds with a 4 second cooldown.

The pet issue is almost crippling the SMN class. Locking the pet bar to our own is preventing many SMN from controller their pet effectively while trying to keep up with the other Damage Dealers. Enable the SMN to sic or heel the pet no matter what the SMN is doing themselves and also allow the SMN to turn off certain abilities that the pets have. AoE is not needed for every fight but yet no matter what all the summons have an aoe and use them off cooldown.

Increase Fester Damage 125 point per Bio, Bio II, and Miasma to compensate having to activate Aetherflow to use it and the time to apply all 3 dots. Increase the chance to reset Dot timers to 20% (taken from Bane and increased 5%).

[Atticus]

i will give you guys right on every thing that you have said so far. the problem i got with the pet is that you can see if is obey or not and that you have to target a target to make obey work.
and also like that you can't control it when you cast a spell and when in fates when the fate is done the pet runs after the mob you have to press stay to get it back.

[Shamirah]

All those changes are great. But they should just make it so that the pet can't be target by boss mechanic (targeted spell) and making them immune to aoe ability. I mean come on... we have already so much to do. Keep our dots up while dodging all of the aoe in the game.

AND the two pet damage buff should be usable instantly. Like : i press on them both at the same time and they go off at the same time.

[Brucelee28]

I just want better pet models. Im not saying we need huge models like some of FFXI, but come on, these are pathetic. Im a summoner, like a spirit whisperer. These models we are currently stuck with are a slap in the face to summoners of past FF players. They could be bigger and actually have legs and arms.

[Divine_Ultima]

I agree with every single thing Crescent_Dusk and Jibril said.

[Ryuko]

If you pay attention to the lore of the main quest and the summoner quest, you will understand why our egis have the appearance that they do. I'm okay with this because it fits in with the lore of the world. They are pretty small, but this is okay because we are only summoning but a small fraction of the power. That has nothing to do with the 'functionality' of the class.

Our damage is really reliable, especially in situations where we have to move a lot. As long as we manage to keep our DoTs up, at least we have SOME damage rolling while we are running around avoiding all of the many abilities we need to avoid. The one problem with this is that the other mage caster, BLM, has instants that rival our DoT abilities. They can cast these on the fly, while moving. This is okay on a single-target boss where you are only kill that ONE target, but not when you have to down adds really fast. Summoners just can't compete with the instant output of a BLM. Even Fester (a great instant) takes time to 'build up' because we need to apply three DoTs to use it.

I'm okay with excelling at single-target DPS, but only if I'm actually doing BETTER at it. A black mage can keep up with us on single target DPS AND kill adds quickly and reliably. We simply can't do that. If a BLM was better at killing adds while we were better at single-targets, we'd both have our 'roles' in raids and both be needed. Right now, we simply do not. Perhaps, to alleviate the fact that we don't have any bursts that don't really rely on DoTs... our pets should get a burst that isn't once every 300 seconds. It will solidify our role as a 'pet class DD' rather than a 'DoT class that has a pet for a little extra damage'.

The pet mechanics need to be reworked. If I have to worry about constantly moving to avoid AoEs like I have to, I should be able to issue commands immediately, even while casting or waiting on GCD. It wouldn't be OP if I could tell my pet to 'follow' me or move to a certain spot the second I see the mob charging up an AoE. In my experience, healers ignore pets because they just have so much to do, and with sustain as weak as it is, I have to just recast my pet whenever it dies unless I have time to heal it. I don't like that pets automatically go back to 'guard' whenever an encounter ends. I'd like if "Obey" was a toggle ability instead of a command.

I will say, my survivability is supreme. If I'm not lagging (and getting hit by AoEs), I'm usually the last to fall during a wipe. I can also instant-raise healers and be a 'backup healer' if it's needed, which is very nice. If I do get hit by something unavoidable, I'll instantly heal myself back up so the healer doesn't have to worry about it and because I won't go oom, but the healer might. Summoners are versatile but we don't excel at any one thing. I fear that, for the time being, hardcore raiders are going to want classes that fit a niche very well.

[HyperCarry]

If you pay attention to the lore of the main quest and the summoner quest, you will understand why our egis have the appearance that they do.

Dunno, pets look like they were suppose to be collector minions, but instead the devs made them slightly larger and used them as the SMN pet models.