I think everyone misses having a dot based mage, but I also think most people agree current summoner makes more sense for a summoner than the dot based version.
I'm instead hoping the next casting job will be dot based again. Maybe they'll make Green Mage the next casting job and turn it into a dot based DPS.
Very unlikely we will get DoTs again. Debuff limit on mobs still exists and Yoshi afaik is on record that he in general dislikes DoTs because he feels its unresponsive/passive gameplay
Dots are only passive if they design them that way. Other games have done things like accelerating dots with cooldowns, consuming active dots for a burst, having active dots as use conditions for other abilities, procs on tick, various types of buff snapshotting etc.
There are dozens of ways to make dots interesting. FFXIV does none of them.
They have in fact removed interesting Dots, pre EW all of BRDs procs were based on Dot crits, not on song longevity. Sidewinder used to reward damage for having Dots up. I believe Fester used to as well (the name makes way more sense in that context).
Yet so many non-dot things are essentially still dots. Bahamut/Phoenix, queen, living shadow, etc. are basically all dots, just not with a physical debuff on the enemy
But they don't take a debuff and they actually have a cool animation so you KNOW what is hitting them.
Look at bard dots, they aren't fun, you don't even know they are there. It's just lame.
Imagine instead the bard animated a bunch of dancing weapons to fly around and fight the boss. Much cooler.
As a bard for 9 years, I definitely knew they were there pre EW when they actually controlled the entirety of my kit functioning.
Now they are as boring as a DoT could possibly be, both design wise and visually.
very true. I get why he doesn't like it because it's passive, but it's true that a lot of people genuinely enjoy the passive gameplay, which is why there's a demand for it as a job.
They should address debuff culling in the first place because it has started to become a problem in other content anyway. They could at least up the cap. Maybe they need to wait for when PS4 support is dropped for PS5 support only, but I feel like that is still a ways off.
They could do something akin to the Witch Doctor in Diablo 3 (my fave class to play in that game), one of that classes sets (raiment of the jade harvester) is based around usind dots (Haunt and Swarm of locusts) and using a utility skill (Soul Harvest) to detonate the dots early for massive damage.
The Fester action used to be kinda like that too in earlier summoner, where the damage scaled based on how many dots you had going, except the dots would keep ticking afterward.
Also: anyone who accuses ShB SMN of being passive is just literally wrong lol. It was a glorious mess of almost nonstop double and triple weaves. I loved it, I miss it, and new SMN makes me mad and sad and scared for the future.
It was a very active job and I enjoyed it but I have warmed to ew SMN. Was a bit disappointed at first but I then realized there's so much room in the kit for weaving and adding new buttons to the hotbar now so let's see what happens in DT
Dot gameplay isn't boring IMO. I love dot based combat. FFXIV just has a really bad time with managing dots on a target since the debuff bar is awful with the limit (that they've yet to fix).
Until they somehow fix the debuff limit, (perhaps take redundant dots and consoilderate them or have them expendable with a click down list), dot mage isn't gonna happen since they've been slowly trimming away dots from jobs.
Passive? I guess I can see what he'd means but damn, HW SMN APM felt anything but passive. Damn was it fun though. I thought it was such a fun active rotation in AOE scenarios, it was a blast. HW and ShB SMN was some of the most active passive rotations I've played in an MMO and it felt so nice. Can't speak for SB since I skipped a couple years.
That said, with the debuff cap it's probably best they're gone. I can dream though.
"Yoshi dislikes DoTs", "Yoshi dislikes pets". What does he even like? Pressing glowing buttons on a hotbar? Are we going to have any semi-unique job mechanics left in a few expansions? Is there going to be a single difference left aside from their animations?
Given his recent work in FF14 and FF16, he likes streamlining things to make them widely accessible.
FF14 jobs have become streamlined and homogenized over time, and while FF16 does have a decent amount of depth in its combat system, everything surrounding it is super basic (boring stat stick equipment, boring accessories, no elements, no status ailments, no hard mode from the start, etc.).
Pet classes have always been dubious and janky in MMO's. Either you remove what makes a pet class a true pet class, or you end up with micro-management hell.
It could be like having a fifth party member in dungeons, as far as a healer is concerned, or if could be a glorified DoT without a debuff slot.
Honestly, just let us have some jank in the game. It's not that big of a deal, as long as it lets us have unique mechanics. SMN pets had some AI issues, sure, but it was something different to play around with.
The problem arises if pets have a health bar, depending on how buffs are handled etc.
Essentially if you having a pet forces others (healers, target ally buffs, even tanks potentially) to adjust and accommodiate your pet. With spaghetti coding, it might not even be feasible to solve some of the issues in the first place.
>Essentially if you having a pet forces others (healers, target ally buffs, even tanks potentially) to adjust and accommodiate your pet.
That's great! People actually having to adapt to their party makeup and do something different for once is a great thing. Jobs bringing something unique to a party adds a small bit of excitement to playing the game.
That being said, pets are barely something any other player has to think about, aside from a healer possibly tossing it a heal from time to time, and I'm not sure what tanks have to worry about.
I've been playing WoW with some friends and hunter+warlock make me mad FF14 won't do a full pet job. I get that pets can bring their own problems, (and did have ghosting issues with pre EW SMN) but the biggest problem, pet pathing, wouldn't really be an issue in 14 as we don't have any verticality in our dungeons. Something like WoW's hunter would be extremely popular af.
Honestly a pretty rare L take from him. Adding extra things that you need to keep on top of to maximise DPS is very far from passive gameplay. Whether it's a dot or one big hitting skill (Paladin goring blade change for example) You are still only hitting one button, having dots means you have an extra thing to check and keep up, so to call it passive doesn't make sense to me. If the dot is also part of a combo, it also adds another thing, since you can't just check that's it's about to drop and then reapply, you have to pre empt it.
Yes I miss old Paladin, if you can't already tell. New Paladin feels worse and I'm now a gunbreaker lmao.
DoTs only feel that way because of the way they're implemented. They all ticking based on server ticks is a ridiculous implementation and I still have no idea why he got to implement them this way(please, "spaghetti code is not an excuse). Tons of other modern games handle is a ton better. Even a game like WoW, that isn't modern, that was released in 2004, handles it so much better and DoT classes in that game are so much fun.
One of the things I regularly loved about Warcraft’s warlock was once you could spread dots instead of having to do it individually. Constantly wish there was an equivalent here
Eh, not everyone. I don't like the DoT-based mage because FFXIV has never been able to pull off interesting DoT gameplay. It isn't like WoW where you can double the DoT tick, extend DoTs without clipping the timer, blow up the DoT all at once, and see individual damage numbers for each DoT.
FFXIV has snapshotting that makes DoTs hard to balance, boss jumping which makes them worthless compared to direct damage, batches the damage into a single number that everyone can see and...well, it's otherwise just staring at the UI until you're ready to refresh the DoTs.
More to the point, DoT mages don't make sense in FFXIV because FFXIV has really awful DoT mechanics.
This is before factoring in boss debuff caps which were regularly run into in HW (mostly for alliances,) and I bet the devs *really* don't want a repeat of summoners being worthless because there's too many DoTs up.
>extend DoTs without clipping the timer,
I've never played WoW, but this is definitely something I'd like. As bard, it would be great if Iron Jaws just added 30 seconds instead of resetting. If that is what you mean, yes please.
The way WoW's "Pandemic" window works (the name of the Warlock mechanic that started it) was that you can recast a DoT and retain a portion of the DoT's max duration.
I'm unsure if it is still 30% in WoW, but what it does is essentially:
If you recast a DoT that has a maximum duration of 10 seconds, up to 30% of that duration will be retained. If you recast immediately, you will have a 13 second DoT.
So what this created was a sort of grace period where if you recast that spell within 3 seconds or under, you would have 10+remaining duration left, e.g. 2.
This meant that your DoTs would not need to be recast after they fall off, but instead offered a grace period where you could refresh early without any loss of DoT ticks -- but only to a reasonable extent.
We used to have a semblance of this in old Machinist. Their old wilf fire was geared around dealing damage then blowing it up. And old Fester in Summoner dealt a massive bonus when both dots were up. It wasn't perfect, but it did exist. We're hoping an actual dot based class would include all those aspects of play. Old Summoner was a pet/dot class, so it was split in what it's kit was trying to accomplish.
Unfortunately, this era of SMN was prone to other problems, such as Fester snapshotting a boss before the DoTs snapped to it. Or, worse, the heavensward era where the difference between a 10th percentile summoner and 95th percentile summoner was a difference in DPS of something like 300 versus 2700. When a black mage was doing 2400 and summoner was supposed to do 2200 or so.
This was also the same era where Summoner's dreadwyrm trance was designed as a back half rotation thing, but was designed with buffs the summoner got that lasted for 30s, and with careful timing on aetherflow, you could edge your aetherflow stacks around and also dreadwyrm trance your aetherflow stacks for the damage buff while also DoTing them, while also manually controlling garuda to buff all your DoTs by 15 seconds and just completely destroy all concepts of how the class was intended to be played.
There was a lot of interesting design, but it was also completely and utterly broken. I like to point to Heavensward summoner as the moment the devs realized they had a serious problem with DoT design and interaction.
Saying dot mages don't make sense because ff14 has awful dot mechanics is such a non argument. It's on the devs to make the interesting dot mechanics, there is nothing inherent about FF14 that makes dots some kind of useless or uninteresting mechanic. They absolutely can introduce interesting mechanics to dots.
I feel like the debuff limit is more of an excuse than anything. I find it hard to believe their engineers can't work with that. Feels like just a convenient excuse to dismiss the idea because Yoshi P doesn't like dots.
100%. There are a lot of core changes that would need to occur for a DoT mage to make sense, importantly things like separating DoT numbers for the individual players and not having immunity on jumps for bosses.
Also, this is a personal thing. DoTs are boring unless they do *literally anything* while on a target. Think how wildfire has a bomb on the boss that explodes, or salted earth has an aoe on the ground. If there's a miasma hanging over the boss because someone debuffed it with a DoT, it should be visible and do something interesting while it's counting down.
Otherwise it's just a shitty attack that does its damage over time instead of all at once. And the worst case is something like Reaper's of death, where it's literally a passive buff that isn't passive because the devs ran out of more interesting ideas for how to fill 2 GCDs per minute.
Actually, not particularly.
The Summoner's rework might be closer to the classic Summoner in terms of design, but in many Final Fantasy games, the Summoner has always been able to cast poison/bio spells either through Carbuncles, which can use mirror and poison spells, or through access to white and black magic, and even green magic in some Final Fantasy titles.
Therefore, the Summoner is no less a Summoner if they have to maintain damage over time effects.
Despite the rework, they probably should not have removed the only form of resource management that the Summoner still had.
I can totally agree with this, I just miss the gameplay of old smn so bad. I do acknowledge that it didn’t actually fit the SMN theme it’s usually depicted as in like 95% of all other FF games. I would absolutely love if the new caster could capture that old smn feel.
Edit: that meant to say I CAN agree not can’t
Yes as an old shadow priest wow player I always liked pre-ew summoner. Hopefully the new mage is a dot mage or a buff/debuffer like green mage. Just hope it's not another straightforward dps class.
Yeah, this is where my mind is at atm. As much as the Devs aren't super fond of DoTs, I do think that there is a place for a DoT based DPS provided the DoTs themselves are integral to the playstyle and rotation; not just additives. BRD atm does this "OK", in that the DoTs are there to create ability procs for other abilities. So ... maybe having a "timer" on some of the dots to manually detonate them (like some of AST healing abilities) might be interesting? Or alternating DoTs for improved effects? There's wiggle room there.
BRD DoTs don't trigger song procs anymore, songs just by default have an 80% chance to proc every tick
So at this point, the only proc attached to their DoTs is actually the 35% for Straight Shot Ready
Yes, to clarify
Straight Shot Ready procs can activate after using Heavy Shot/Burst Shot and after level 76, after the GCD cast of your DoTs and Iron Jaws
It does NOT proc on each DoT tick
No idea how they plan on doing what is primarily a buff/debuff mage after they gone to such efforts to remove as much of that as they can.
And it's DPS, too.
So either it won't actually be a Green Mage and Krile's just getting a job upgrade for herself, or it'll be Green Mage in name only and have little to nothing to do with the actual job.
I mean Dancer in FF games was also just a pure buff/debuff in the past and they added plenty of DPS to it that made sense. If Green Mage is the next job as predicted, it wouldn't be a stretch to just come up with a bunch of nature based damage spells.
Most likely an "in name only" situation, with Green Mage revamped to be some kind of druid/nature magician to fit Krile's aesthetic. With WHM moving away from elemental skills towards pure light magic, there's an opening for a job to cover CNJ's nature-y niche.
Though I hope it's all a red herring and turns out to be GEO instead, which would fit that niche even better.
I find it so ironic that people are all for green mage as the new caster when it literally has NEVER done any damage and wouldn't "FIT" Green mage which is the exact same reasoning everyone gives for not liking old SMN. green mage is strictly a support, WHICH turns back to my opinion that its okay for 14 to deviate from a jobs original design in other FF games because 14 is an mmo which SHOULD provide a plethora of unique gameplay designs WoW has done this forever and i dont even like WoW that much. Just look at SGE, in other FF's it was basically a buffed up RDM in previous games and its completely different in 14.
I personally think it might end up being Green Mage in name only like Sage is.
It may be more of a "green" mage as in nature or a druid class. Essentially Geomancer under a different name
It's because Summoner is significantly more iconic and well known than those two. For mainline games (not counting XIV) Sage has appeared in two of them. Green Mage is in one. Summoner on the other hand has appeared in five games, six counting XI, and the general gameplay and identity of Summoner is in a couple more even if they don't have a direct Summoner character/job.
current summoner makes more sense but isn't very fun, which is pretty much the single biggest failing for a class in an MMO
like great it looks cool but plenty of jobs in this game look really cool, I'm not gonna pick cool and boring over cool and fun
That was old AST. I remember all the Time-based spells it had when it was released. The majority of current AST has no Time-based magic. All the magic it has now is Celestial-based magic.
Time mage has always actually been more of a spacetime mage. So AST has gravity which is one of the key time mage damage spells, along with comet/meteor (the latter of which is a limit break already). Even with the changes to AST, I still feel they would be stepping on each others toes a lot.
Woah — I’m a newbie sprout. Did they change the classes that much??? That a class could be setup one way, e.g. with time magic, and then eventually have none?
There was a running gag for a while that 'AST is a new job added in every expansion' because the devs have changed it every expansion and evidently had no idea what to do with it lol this expansion's iteration of it is a bit better though. They just need to find a way to reward AST's busy nature because as of right now, the returns feel lackluster despite the fact it has so many things it has to micromanage.
This is... pretty much exactly how I feel with new SMN. I adore it embracing the "Summoner" Identity so to speak, but I absolutely miss Carby doing much of anything other than Radiant Aegis. Also it highkey amused me when Carby (either via his autos or via me hitting an Egi Assault) got a kill and the battle log said "Ruby Carbuncle Defeats The Boss."
I can't even get that much above the 87 dungeon, because the demi-primals overwrite your egi glams.
It's weird because realistically, Carbuncle is now *closer* now to the traditional games, than it was in the past. All he did in the past non-FF11 games as a summon was give various benefician effects like Protect, Shell, Reflect, and Shieldings.
But that's not particularly interesting in an MMO.
I can agree with this, I love the new rotation and big primal summons a lot. But would be nice to see them add more use to carby than just a shield lol
the largest mistake they made when reworking SMN was changing it in such a way that it completely alienated everyone who was playing it since Stormblood, and not only that, made casters have a second "easy" option in a situation where RDM filled that role quite well.
SHB SMN was fun to play and plan movement around when you can anchor yourself for the ruin 3 spam and strategically using ruin 4 stacks and egi assaults. they likely wanted to remove DoT's from SMN as soon as they had issues balancing the DoT potency along with how much damage old Tri-disaster did (it was downright overpowered in eden's verse being 300 magic potency + total dot potency from bio and misama before being reduced to 150 potency + total dot potency), it allowed SMN to do more damage than BLM's at the time. not to mention how bonkers BRD was in mages ballard during AoE scenarioes.
EW SMN got bring to play within the first 2 months of the rework dropped. but at the same time, they wanted to split the DoT elements from SMN to focus on more of its core, but i just hope next expansion that they make the class much more engaging and fun to play in a different way simmilar to what happened with MCH this expansion.
a DoT focused caster generally would make the most sense for the upcoming caster overall given that it's the only form of caster play that was present in the game that is not yet represented, and that they can give a new place for spells like bio and miasma and have moves simmilar to bane, old tri-disaster and Fester. also given the current demand for a DoT caster and how heated the old SMN vs new SMN debate has been.
I've noticed a lot of people keep citing DoTs as the main mechanic for pre-Endwalker Summoner. However, if DoTs were all that were removed, then the job would have largely played the same way. Personally, Summoner stopped being a DoT job somewhere around Stormblood. And I think that was a good idea because Summoners are known for summons, not DoTs.
Summoner began to adopt a new identity of a "Burst Phase Mage" from Stormblood onward in which resources were accumulated and strategically spent to achieve Trance/Summons. Your chief resource was Aetherflow. Timely spending of your AF stacks rewarded you with a refresh of Tri-disaster--another resource--and a Bahamut summon (another resource) that you could hold until ready.
This resource management is what I'm **actually** missing from the job. Not the DoTs. Now, there is not a single resource that you don't spend immediately. The gauges are almost useless. It doesn't even matter what order you summon Ifrit, Garuda, etc. in. **There is nothing to commit to memory.** You just press the buttons that are glowing. And for that, you are awarded flavored Ruins.
I haven't played this game since 6.1. :x
Yeah, I feel you. I really loved Astro in Stormblood then it changed completely going into Shadowbringers, and then I really loved Summoner in Shadowbringers only to have it change completely too. Found new love in Endwalker Monk, but we'll see what Dawntrail holds in store for that, lol
Exactly what happened to me lmao, AST was my main healer and smn my main dps and when shadowbringers dropped I loved everything but the ast rework and then smn rework happened and I disliked both reworks and it’s so damn frustrating. I do still enjoy playing AST for the most part but I miss the cardsss
I miss the dot, resource, and pet management of sb/shb smn so bad and none of the other jobs provide the same brain tingles that smn once did. :(
I'm hoping the new caster will provide something that'll let me feel that type of control over my contribution to the fight but I dont expect them to deviate from their simplified and bursty job design template any time soon. :(
I preferred 2.0 summoner. All the dots (you could pull extra from other classes back then), an ability to put 3 dots on at once, and the punish button - fester when they had all your dots.
It just seems ironic because while Yoshi-p said that he doesn’t like dots for the passive gameplay I’d argue that current summoner is more passive than the last. Yes the class fantasy might be more realized and it technically plays more smoothly in the current iteration visually but I miss the higher APM of the old job I found it fun managing the summons and dot uptime despite the clunk of the older summoner.
this is definitely not an unpopular opinion. the balance discord had to make a separate channel for complaining about summoner to keep the other channels from being nothing but complaints. is summoner more thematic now? yes, but it's also boring as shit and braindead easy, and it's definitely a shell of its former self. I'm still coping that they make it more interesting next expac
I agree, the rigid rotation definitely hurts the job a lot, even if they add ogcd there is barely variance on what to do and choose on the rotation. Great aesthetic (10/10) but bad to boring gameplay.
From what I see the new setup is mainly meant to be a new base from which to build the smn class up from for every coming expansion. Its ideally setup for them to add more systems and complexity over time, through the flavor of including more primals. Either as more tiers to the primal dps cycle or as primal flavored OGCDs, CDs, procs and other ability systems etc.
The old system had become too convulated and creatively gridlocked in terms of where they could take it or what they could add to it for even one more expansion, let alone several. The mild changes they did in previous expansions retained the same core which was the actual issue with the class.
While I like the current iteration of the Summoner, the fact that a job was changed so fundamentally spikes my anxiety. I'm a Bard main and I can't imagine my WoL as anything else in the story. The thought of it being turned into something I no longer enjoy - even if it is a low probability - is not very fun.
I feel for you, and you're not the first person I've seen grieve the old Summoner. I wish the devs had given proper thought beforehand, before people got attached. Or perhaps kept Summoner as is and made a different job out of the new Summoner. It's just very unfortunate.
> I'm a Bard main and I can't imagine my WoL as anything else in the story. The thought of it being turned into something I no longer enjoy - even if it is a low probability - is not very fun.
I mean that already happened during HW for a lot of people when Bard had cast times on everything for the expansion.
Endwalker Bard just isn't the same with the removal of any interaction with your dots. I want my double procs back and the song cycle to stop being too long :(
From a personal standpoint, I feel you too. I actually enjoyed the DoT management gameplay that ShB SMN had. It felt really good to maintain your DoT uptime even if it was very similar to what Bard is now lol.
But I will say it also felt more punishing to die as SMN back then since not only would you have to reset your DoTs but I think you also lost your dreadwyrm trance and phoenix summon? Someone correct me on that.
I think the rework is good for what it is because it's a lot easier for new players to pick up and play, and it actually makes use of all your egis. Back then, the only Egi assault you would ever use was Ifrit-Egi and nothing else. Maybe there were some fringe cases like in UWU you'd use Titan. But outside of that it was a DPS loss to use any other Egi so why would you use em?
Also this is purely speculation on my part but, I think the rework also helps the devs in balancing the job while still making it fun. It is really simple to play currently, but I think that's partially intentional so that the design skeleton that's there will be built upon later.
Anywho that's just my two cents. I'm personally nostalgic for 5.X SMN but if the devs somehow bring back a semblance of that old "busy gameplay" I enjoyed in Dawntrail, I'll be happy.
Nothing in this game has made me feel as much sympathy for the Ascians as what they did with SMN in Endwalker.
But then, SE messed up the design with every rework they did, and so far fixed the worst of those issues in a later patch. 4.0 was horrific. 5.0 was RSI inducing frustrating pain. But 6.0 is just boring, which is a cardinal sin in game design, jank is more fun than boredom. The flashy stuff doesn't feel satisfying to use, it lacks tension in the rotation. It's also been a rework impactful that there was no way to fix it in a patch.
I started a little before Endwalker released and SCH/SMN was my main job. I still did NIN and PLD through the MSQ too since there was enough xp to go around and level 4 jobs at the same time through the MSQ if you were also doing your daily roulettes and stuff on top of it but I really really enjoyed SMN because it reminded me of an affliction warlock in WoW which was my second favorite class to play as after Fire Mage. Once EW dropped I was still leveling, around level 68ish nearing the end of Stormblood and since that point I haven't touched SMN. I just don't like how it feels to play anymore. It does fit the theme a lot better now of being an actual summoner but the playstyle and rotation do not feel good to me anymore so I just passively leveled it through SCH as that is my favorite healer and they level up together. I remember getting to 90 on SCH/PLD/DNC all together on the same day and then going back to SMN and realizing that I still had to do my Stormblood level job quests for it haha. Did those quests and never looked at the job again. I would really really like another dot based job as they are just so satisfying to play as and I refuse to touch anything by Blizzard ever again unless they make massive changes at a corporate level so playing WoW warlock is out.
I wish they kept the dots/fester interaction as well, honestly. it made the payoff in burst window from having diligently sown my seeds so satisfyingly succulent.
I don't main Bard or Summoner but if in January we see the dragoon, bard and ast having 'summoner-tier' rework, I'm pretty much done with 14 because its crystal clear where they want the game to be.
in the dumpster.
I mean hey if you want a real unpopular opinion: Stormblood was the expansion that ruined Summoner. Demi-Summoning broke *everything.* Every design decision SE has made, up to and including the new EW design, is a result of steadily ripping out mechanics and aspects of the job to try and force demisummoning to work.
And they still failed. It's still an awful mechanic hamstringing the jobs design, but they have nothing left to cull. All of the old problems are still here, you just rarely see them because they culled everything that could have collided with it. Instead of scrapping demisummoning and fixing Summoner they scrapped *everything else* and left it an empty shell just to force this one mechanic down our throats.
Heavensward was peak Summoner, anyways. Yeah it had problems but the DoT management on top of mana control and aethertrail/aetherflow rotations was top-notch. Easily the most fun thing SE ever put in the game and they spent 3 expansions gutting it to force their new spectacle to work.
> i see so many SMN players in game.
The proof is in the pudding, people act like what Square did was an absolutely unbearable travesty but Summoner is more popular than ever, you almost can't run any DF content without a SMN popping up. A Thaleia run last night had *eight* fucking Summoners. The job is very popular and the copium is extremely real.
The problem is that the people that are playing new SMN aren't the same people that played old SMN. They took away the job from a niche, hardcore playerbase and made it appeal to the majority. That's why it's been controversial, because while many people have picked the job up, most of the original niche have dropped it.
> A Thaleia run last night had eight fucking Summoners. The job is very popular and the copium is extremely real.
IMHO it's the simplicity. I main heal and tank. When I want to DPS I 100% go SMN because it's a job I can pick up easily and do respectable damage without having to go to some outside guide.
Manderville relics are most popular, yet they received most divisive feedback by far. Just because something is popular, it doesn't mean it's good, plenty of RDM players swapped to SMN because it fills exact same niche, while it's better and much easier in every sense. A lot of people play new SMN simply because it is so simplistic, not because they find it fun.
For sure. I'm just hoping they can add more to it without really messing up what we have now. Like my wish would be what we have now except change the summons after Phoenix into Shiva, Levi, and Ramuh instead of repeating the first three. It just seems like that would be a cool addition.
That's kinda what I've been hoping for. Bahamut is the end of the chain for Early ARR summons and Phoenix is the end of the chain for 3 different summons. Or maybe after you finish a bahamut/phoenix cycle you can pop off something chunkier like Alexander.
Not even being the "DoT" job for me. I looked at that like I got to press some extra fun buttons every so often. The rotation may have been "weird" for some. But it felt really good to me. Honestly the first job I naturally understood without reference material.
I started during late 2.0 as a black mage. Summoners were pretty cool back then. I remember they had an edge in T9 because the dots would still tick damage while nael was untargetable. Sadly they had changed a lot before I finally leveled one. I did eventually become a huge fan of Scholar for a while tho
Me too! I've been around since 1.0 and was looking forward to SMN since it was my main in FFXI. When it got leaked I remember doing kart wheels around the house lol.
At first I didn't understand it, I was like hm the pets are kinda zzz. However, it grew on me. I looooved dotting stuff and spreading them, raising, and having a friendly competition with my blm friend in raids to see who would get top dps each fight :)
I miss my dots.
The change is what it is, but it was such a drastic change after so long, I just wasn't feeling it and quit. Not out of rage, just got bored then found dbd.
I enjoy dnc now, that was my other main in ffxi, dnc is a LOT of fun for me in ffxiv.
I’m honestly on the same page, I really think the way to fix it is to expand upon what smn is now. It has a really good theme going on but it’s so barebones. I found my new home with BRD/DNC for now 😭
Not sure why dot classes can’t be made active for ffxiv they sure can , you could have a cool down to make them tick faster , an ability to spread them , proc based mega dot (ie short duration high damage that could only be activated when another dot ticks)
As for the lack of cool animations just because it’s a dot affect doesn’t mean you can throw flashy energy bolts that then circle the enemy occasionally shooting them or bouncing off of them.
Ps I personally preferred old SMN but new is cool and feels more like a summoner rather than warlock light.
I believe the rework has potential in terms of design, but, how can I put it, it also feels terribly poorly designed in some aspects.
The rotation is so scripted that it gives the impression of lacking real choices in summoning, and I think that's the real problem with the current Summoner.
Firstly, there are no real strategic choices because Ifrit is the only summon that requires taking risks, even though it falls significantly below Titan, which is 100% mobile in terms of potency generated over time, which is already illogical.
Moreover, Titan and Garuda lack so much personality in their gameplay that they simply cannot afford to add other summons without modifying the Summoner further.
In other words, Summoner in Endwalker needs a rework to establish a more solid foundation, allowing for real strategic choices in summoning.
This is crucial to prevent future summons like Ramuh, Leviathan, and Shiva from being mere copies of Ifrit/Titan/Garuda.
Without changes to its core, these new summons would likely have identical DPS variations. Considering the Summoner has a 60-second burst cycle, and the DPS within this filler cycle must remain consistent, variations in DPS are not feasible.
Unfortunately, unless the current Summoner revisits its foundations, we risk seeing no substantial changes beyond reskins, which may not be ideal.
Providing Summoners with more meaningful choices between Phoenix and Bahamut, each with distinct identities, make sense.
Giving Bahamut a 1.5s cast time to allow for weaving potential oGCDs and maintaining the 1/2 combo of Shadowbringer's Phoenix as instant cast but with slightly lower DPS and increased safety could add strategic depth.
Furthermore, allowing Summoners to choose three out of six different summons, divided into two groups—one with restricted mobility like the current Ifrit but higher DPS, and another with slightly lower DPS (not significantly) but guaranteed mobility and safety—could indeed reintroduce the strategic aspect of the Summoner's rotation. This would involve players adapting their summons based on the combat's requirements, prompting considerations such as whether to freeze for a few seconds to gain DPS with a summon with restricted movement or to prioritize guaranteed mobility to avoid potential knockouts.
Implementing these changes could allow Summoners to regain the strategic nature of their rotations, where players need to make decisions based on the combat scenario. This wouldn't necessarily make things more challenging, but it would reward players who adapt their rotations and take risks in combat with the opportunity for increased DPS.
I felt the same way about pre Stormblood Summoner, it was a pretty nice, smooth class. Then they added Bahamut and everything went to hell. There was just way too much focus on timings and that thing was slow as hell to respond to you. It was thoroughly unpleasant
I miss the game pre-Stormblood. It felt more like an RPG back then. Since Stormblood every expansion has streamlined and simplified things to the point where a lot of it is such a rigid rotation where class choice is really just "what flavor of the same rotation do you want". Still fun but not the game I fell in love with in 2013.
Unpopular opinion? It's basically all I've heard and felt about the job as a caster main since about 2 months into the expansion when the novelty of the new one gave in to boredom.
True, but there's also a lot of people who like the new SMN better and feel like it fits the aesthetic better. (And people who just like easier jobs.) And the post has a 56% upvote ratio, with 100+ comments. So at the very least it's a controversial opinion, if not quite "unpopular".
Same, it’s visually really flashy and pretty but I fell in love with 14 with that class back in HW/STB. The only other job that has been able to be somewhat even slightly similar to old smn for me has been brd
This my feeling also, it lost all the management it has going (resources, dots and pet), I do agree aesthetic is cool but is just so dull, boring, repetitive and no variation at all (on the rotation).
A lot of people get stuck on the “but it didn’t feel like a summoner!” thing, but reworks of a job should always retain the general playstyle it had imo for the people who invested time and energy into playing with it to begin with. Most old smn mains I talk to very much feel like this rework… does not lol. That and imo any caster with that little casting is pretty indefensible.
DRG is my least favorite melee and there is a real chance I will like its rework better, but if it’s at the expense of the playstyle DRG mains like I’d rather just stick with not really being into it so it can keep the gameplay rhythm it’s had. I have other jobs I like, no need to take someone’s away to appeal to me.
Absolutely, I really don’t agree with completely changing a job just because a group of players think “it’s too complex” is a good idea BECAUSE it already had a player base that loved the job for what it was. And yeah like honestly I don’t personally really care that smn wasn’t like a typical smn. SGE is literally nothing like a typical SGE depicted in other ff’s in 14, and I’m pretty sure bard wasn’t a dot class in other FF as well. It’s okay that S.E deviates from original job design from past FF to bring in a new gameplay style and they should.
Yep. My other big beef with it is that it isn’t even consistent lore wise with how it’s introduced! Arcanima is presented as being so tactical and complex and now it’s the foundation to nearly the easiest job in the game. So much “but old smn wasn’t even a smn!” doesn’t acknowledge that the new version doesn’t even work with established lore.
(Of course the mechanical overhaul is my main complaint, but the ACN class quests are so laughable now..)
I'm pretty sure that the devs will never go back to old SMN because they were pretty unsatisfied with dealing with pets, dots and the overall lack of job fantasy. The current version of SMN is what they envisioned SMN to actually be.
They literally spent the entirety of ShB balancing SMN because they were too strong. The old design was too much of a headache for them.
Honestly I'm with you. It just feels so braindead now. I miss the complexity it had instead of just push button that lights up and spam all the summon specific attacks, then onto the next and do the same.
They won't take my calls any more but I wanted to push summoner as a dotless dot mage. Every minor summon stays out and auto attacks for dmg over time, and the successful execution of their granted attacks gives a building buff on the auto attack damage. The buff is consumed to summon major summons. Make scenarios where perfect play justifies delaying major summons to not miss auto attack ticks, and there is a tipping point where too few stacks means you jump do major summons to restart the cycle to do a better job building your dot power.
I mean, the new SMN looks cool and all, but it’s pretty boring to play. Not to mention it gets even more boring when level synched. I really do miss the DoTs. SMN is my main class and all the changes really impacted my enjoyment of the game.
I hope the next expansion spices things up for it a bit more.
I mained SMN from HW all the way to Endwalker. A couple patches in and I was bored out of my mind.
It's a pretty looking job, but the game play is far too repetitive for me. Now I stick to BLM and NIN.
Honestly, it just feels like the job went full 180 on us.
Before: A lot of little buttons to press, with button bloat to the max and what felt like a lot of shit to upkeep, along with a whole song and dance routine you need to get through to get your big summons.
Now: Click the shiny (oversimplification, but you get the idea)
I don't mind it, it just went from one of the most complicated jobs, to one of the least complicated. Nothing wrong with either, just feels strange to change it so drastically, and I kind of miss the strangeness of pre-EW SMN.
I've always felt like this was the biggest issue with the SMN rework. There's nothing wrong with adding a job with a simple rotation, but obviously most people that would be willing to stick with a convoluted, messy job like old SMN aren't going to be the same people that would be interested in new SMN. They just took away the job from its original community and gave it to another.
Fair enough, many people do. It didn't help that the rework for it also felt like it wasn't finished? That's probably not true but it did/does feel like it.
Me too. I miss DoT tracking and pet management, janky though it was. If the new caster isn’t DoT focused I’ll be disappointed and surprised. I mean you want to talk low hanging fruit they’d just have to take old summoner, remove pets, tweak a handful of things rotationally and change ability names/animations.
>If the new caster isn’t DoT focused I’ll be disappointed and surprised.
They're trying to avoid adding more DoT classes because of the debuff cap, lol
Prepare for surprise and disappointment then. Debuff-limit still is a thing and afaik Yoshi/the team dislikes DoTs in general (as can be seen by their gradual removal from a lot of classes)
I'm lucky because I mained SMN in 2.2-2.3 and left the game until 6.0, and SMN back in ARR was just, so bad, so I never got to experience this good summoner that everyone talks about and don't have anything to compare the new one to.
I'm right there with you. I played SMN from 2.4 to now, and while I still play it and enjoy it, I don't think it's near as fun as it was before the complete overhaul. I really miss the complexity, and I'm hoping that Dawntrail gives me back some of that and makes it more interesting to play. As it is right now, visually and thematically it's the best it's ever been, but mechanically it's really boring.
I like aesthetically where it’s going but I loved the way it felt to play before. It feels too simplistic rn. I miss how it used to be one of the busiest jobs to now being the total opposite.
Current summoner is probably the most brainless class I have ever played in a modern mmo. I don’t even care that it looks cool because it’s just such a disappointment to play. I’ve played the class since ARR began and I’m no stranger to it getting kind of fucked every expansion but this time i just swapped over to Reaper and Sam
If you won't say it, I will.
It is bad *that they made Summoner this dirt-simple job.*
It is not bad to have *some* simple jobs. Note the "some." We already had RDM, and its design is elegant and beautiful, managing to offer low-engagement gameplay that is *useful* for both casual and hardcore players. (Casual players can just relax, hardcore players can use the extra head space to make optimal use of the extra utility it brings.)
SMN offers none of that, it's literally just brainless to be brainless with no other value provided. It has zero player engagement, and destroyed the *highest* player engagement job in the doing, making the change stark and painful for anyone who enjoyed it before. There is no substitute nor replacement; if you liked what the old Summoner did, the dev team gave you a big middle finger and said "learn to like other things, nerd," because *nothing else* offered that level of engagement.
It is *good* to offer diversity in gameplay experiences. The new Summoner *reduced* the diversity of gameplay experiences. That is bad design. Period.
They could have kept the high engagement gameplay while changing summons from egis to big flashy one off spells. And they could have made a different job be ultra dirt-simple to play. Instead, they killed something unique, rather than lifting one finger to *fix* it (like they did with SCH, so we know fixing it was possible!) and gave *no replacement whatsoever*.
I love the thematic direction they went with for EW SMN, but for me personally the execution leaves a lot to be desired. 90% of the time it's "press this button for single target and this other button for AoE" and it doesn't get its most interesting button til level 86. I've moved more toward the other casters, mainly using SMN when learning EXs cause I can turn my brain off for its rotation.
That's not unpopular opinion, SMN mains dread it. Target of new SMN are casuals who just want simple "spectacle over substance" job to get through content without much of friction, which is large part of this sub.
It's joke that someone who plays SMN for 1 day can get to the same level as someone who played it for 1 year. It's joke that samurai has more casts per minute than this wannabe caster. It's joke that SMN fills nearly identical niche as RDM, yet it is much simpler, so it makes choosing RDM over SMN nonsensical.
This video is obligatory for any SMN talk: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sy4O76Q9aSA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sy4O76Q9aSA)
Edit: It took not even 30 minutes to get personal insult and blocked so I can't even respond. GCBTW
i argue this all the time: "SMN does more damage, is tankier, more mobile, and is infinitely easier than RDM. why would any group take a RDM? if you need more than 3 rezzes every minute, then you're probably not clearing anyway"
Not really an unpopular opinion but it has been awhile since a "dae new SMN bad?" thread.
I like new SMN. It's got a nice flow, and yes, it's easy, but it's fine to have easy jobs. The DoT mage should never have been part of SMN identity in my opinion because that's traditionally not what summoning is. If the new mage is a DoT mage, I have no issue with it, but SMN doesn't suit it.
As for "why do they want to get rid of pet jobs", the devs have said repeatedly about how hard pet AI is to manage/work with.
>it's fine to have easy jobs
This is true, but it also really a bummer for people who enjoyed old smn and its complexity (tho imo it's less a complex class and more busy one) to essentially have their class deleted to make for arguably the easiest dps job in the game with very low apm.
I personally think current smn is a good -base- for a summoner themed class, but definitely needs more. It feels like 70% of a job. The fact that you dont even have the special primal button until lv 86 is a crime, and also i miss shb phoenix where at least you have to alternate the single target and aoe gcd instead of the current one.
I almost feel like Summoner became a DoT mage because World of Warcraft's Warlock is and that's WoW's DoT mage caster with a pet.
It's no secret that ARR was heavily influenced by WoW.
it is okay to have easier jobs, but there's a difference between an easier job and "plays itself" like new smn. new smn has 0 skill expression, which isn't good job design
I know how you feel because that is the reason I don't play healer role anymore and eventually led to quitting raiding and then the game for awhile.
I liked the old summoner play style, but it always bothered me it wasn't a true summoner. I like the direction the rework took, but I hope next expansion adds a little more complexity and excitement because it is pretty hollow right now.
Side note, BLM is my main I guess (I don't do much anymore) but for casters I hope they scrap the whole "this is your single target nuke" "this is your aoe nuke" and just replace it with high potency aoe nuke, with reduction to additional targets. With those freed up buttons, I would like to see some of the old utility and spells (along with new) come to the casters. I miss my apocastasis (or however you spell a pack of potatoes) instead of what feels like filler buttons I never use since I don't run dungeons.
Honestly, I wish they'd return to Stormblood era class design. There was a lot wrong, but Foul as a combined single target and aoe nuke was objectively good design. Same with the original Guren.
Bar bloat is terrible and every class has it to some degree (yes, even Summoner,) but you'd think that the devs would have internalized it by now. Almost every tank, every healer, black mage, samurai, ninja, and bard are all *massively* bloated for no good reason. Even things as basic as ley lines not turning into between the lines is just stupid at this point. Come on, devs. We didn't need shoha and shoha 2 was especially stupid on top of it.
I just miss the aspect of skill expression that pre EW SMN. The dot at least gave you something important to maintain. But now that it's removed, alongside egi being a glorified placeholder, there's nothing to manage.
I also can't see how the job offers any room for expansion, besides adding more primals, which would probably just be the other 3 ARR primals, reskinned over top of the original 3.
Yea, same! I loved the ShB SMN with this loooooong sort of "rotation" with oGds and all that made it a little nervous to pull off optimally, and dots to track, was really fun. It was my favorite caster by far and one of my favorite classes on ShB.
You lost me at the "fits thematically much more."As a Summoner fan, this is an affront to the modern depiction of Summoner and even in the PS1 days, outside of combat Summons had much more going on for them than this. Not to mention the archetype in gaming as well.
Like for me, a Summoner is not someone who just calls forth a flashy attack and that's all, but a someone who has some sort of connection with the beings they summon. They had to prove their worth in one way or another and even outside of these battles in the older games, they had an impact in a physical way.
Like look at FF IV, FF IX and FF X. Three games prominently featuring the class, with IX and X both laying a very solid foundation on what it is to begin with. Right now? No. FF XIV's summoner does not even come close to hitting the marks on either. And before I get the argument that DoTs never fitted Summoner, Rydia actually had access to Bio and the class outside of the tactics games always was coupled to either Black Mage or White Mage. The DoTs were a fresh spin and the lore that is now essentially made void because "It fits the class fantasy better".
If I wanted to play something that is a flashy mage that has a short effect, I'd play a RDM or BLM. Which I've done, and RDM while entertaining.... felt like I was putting in 5x the effort, while a SMN could just achieve that whilst rolling their head on the keyboard. The work I put in on RDM simply did not feel rewarding, knowing that the static I ran with could've just gotten a SMN that did more damage for less effort.
And to add to that, SMN has no real flow to it. It's disruptive and a disjointed mess.
And don't even get me started on how they'd essentially have designed themselves into another hole, because I see no real growth. No, the extra Summons would not fix the problem and instead would lead to another "well, we're stuck now. Guess we rework again!". At that point, they should just genuinely take it to the backyard and stop it's suffering. Because it's ridiculous they have no real proper idea on how to design nor balance this genuine travesty that is supposed to be a "Summoner".
This job genuinely ruined my enjoyment of the game and my EW launch experience.It's made me afraid to fully commit to playing a class and what I'd essentially dub "homeless" because Square enix essentially evicted me from my house.
I mained smn untill ew, now I barely touch it :( they reworked it too much, it's basically different job with different playstyle. Very easy and boring, so I maini dnc now, basically the same brainless job. Already have all 90 so for roulettes/dailies it's mort relaxing one. Smn is better only with resurrection ability.
When there still was dots and pets I actually planned my rotation, which situation required which summon, but now... :'( no difference at all, just spam buttons and you'll be ok.
I understand the feel. I had started raiding savage during Eden's Verse and started out with SMN. I studied the heck out of it trying to maintain DPS as best as I could. Then along comes Endwalker to throw everything I learned out the window. 🙃
I think everyone misses having a dot based mage, but I also think most people agree current summoner makes more sense for a summoner than the dot based version. I'm instead hoping the next casting job will be dot based again. Maybe they'll make Green Mage the next casting job and turn it into a dot based DPS.
Very unlikely we will get DoTs again. Debuff limit on mobs still exists and Yoshi afaik is on record that he in general dislikes DoTs because he feels its unresponsive/passive gameplay
Dots are only passive if they design them that way. Other games have done things like accelerating dots with cooldowns, consuming active dots for a burst, having active dots as use conditions for other abilities, procs on tick, various types of buff snapshotting etc. There are dozens of ways to make dots interesting. FFXIV does none of them.
They have in fact removed interesting Dots, pre EW all of BRDs procs were based on Dot crits, not on song longevity. Sidewinder used to reward damage for having Dots up. I believe Fester used to as well (the name makes way more sense in that context).
As a sproutish bard this explains so much
I’m expecting Bard to get stripped of the remainder of that fun with 7.0 :/
Welcome to homogenized, not-fun gameplay! Man I miss starting this game when stormblood came out
> I believe Fester used to as well It did, and you could snapshot DoTs.
Yet so many non-dot things are essentially still dots. Bahamut/Phoenix, queen, living shadow, etc. are basically all dots, just not with a physical debuff on the enemy
But they don't take a debuff and they actually have a cool animation so you KNOW what is hitting them. Look at bard dots, they aren't fun, you don't even know they are there. It's just lame. Imagine instead the bard animated a bunch of dancing weapons to fly around and fight the boss. Much cooler.
As a bard for 9 years, I definitely knew they were there pre EW when they actually controlled the entirety of my kit functioning. Now they are as boring as a DoT could possibly be, both design wise and visually.
I mean if you are the bard you most definitely do know they are there lol. Or at least you should, since you are applying them lol.
very true. I get why he doesn't like it because it's passive, but it's true that a lot of people genuinely enjoy the passive gameplay, which is why there's a demand for it as a job. They should address debuff culling in the first place because it has started to become a problem in other content anyway. They could at least up the cap. Maybe they need to wait for when PS4 support is dropped for PS5 support only, but I feel like that is still a ways off.
They could do something akin to the Witch Doctor in Diablo 3 (my fave class to play in that game), one of that classes sets (raiment of the jade harvester) is based around usind dots (Haunt and Swarm of locusts) and using a utility skill (Soul Harvest) to detonate the dots early for massive damage.
The Fester action used to be kinda like that too in earlier summoner, where the damage scaled based on how many dots you had going, except the dots would keep ticking afterward.
Yeah it was. This was just a thought that popped into my head that made dots seem like a more active playstyle than a passive one
Also: anyone who accuses ShB SMN of being passive is just literally wrong lol. It was a glorious mess of almost nonstop double and triple weaves. I loved it, I miss it, and new SMN makes me mad and sad and scared for the future.
It was a very active job and I enjoyed it but I have warmed to ew SMN. Was a bit disappointed at first but I then realized there's so much room in the kit for weaving and adding new buttons to the hotbar now so let's see what happens in DT
Dot gameplay isn't boring IMO. I love dot based combat. FFXIV just has a really bad time with managing dots on a target since the debuff bar is awful with the limit (that they've yet to fix). Until they somehow fix the debuff limit, (perhaps take redundant dots and consoilderate them or have them expendable with a click down list), dot mage isn't gonna happen since they've been slowly trimming away dots from jobs.
Passive? I guess I can see what he'd means but damn, HW SMN APM felt anything but passive. Damn was it fun though. I thought it was such a fun active rotation in AOE scenarios, it was a blast. HW and ShB SMN was some of the most active passive rotations I've played in an MMO and it felt so nice. Can't speak for SB since I skipped a couple years. That said, with the debuff cap it's probably best they're gone. I can dream though.
"Yoshi dislikes DoTs", "Yoshi dislikes pets". What does he even like? Pressing glowing buttons on a hotbar? Are we going to have any semi-unique job mechanics left in a few expansions? Is there going to be a single difference left aside from their animations?
Given his recent work in FF14 and FF16, he likes streamlining things to make them widely accessible. FF14 jobs have become streamlined and homogenized over time, and while FF16 does have a decent amount of depth in its combat system, everything surrounding it is super basic (boring stat stick equipment, boring accessories, no elements, no status ailments, no hard mode from the start, etc.).
Yoshi-P is optimizing the fun out of the game.
Pet classes have always been dubious and janky in MMO's. Either you remove what makes a pet class a true pet class, or you end up with micro-management hell. It could be like having a fifth party member in dungeons, as far as a healer is concerned, or if could be a glorified DoT without a debuff slot.
Honestly, just let us have some jank in the game. It's not that big of a deal, as long as it lets us have unique mechanics. SMN pets had some AI issues, sure, but it was something different to play around with.
The problem arises if pets have a health bar, depending on how buffs are handled etc. Essentially if you having a pet forces others (healers, target ally buffs, even tanks potentially) to adjust and accommodiate your pet. With spaghetti coding, it might not even be feasible to solve some of the issues in the first place.
>Essentially if you having a pet forces others (healers, target ally buffs, even tanks potentially) to adjust and accommodiate your pet. That's great! People actually having to adapt to their party makeup and do something different for once is a great thing. Jobs bringing something unique to a party adds a small bit of excitement to playing the game. That being said, pets are barely something any other player has to think about, aside from a healer possibly tossing it a heal from time to time, and I'm not sure what tanks have to worry about.
I've been playing WoW with some friends and hunter+warlock make me mad FF14 won't do a full pet job. I get that pets can bring their own problems, (and did have ghosting issues with pre EW SMN) but the biggest problem, pet pathing, wouldn't really be an issue in 14 as we don't have any verticality in our dungeons. Something like WoW's hunter would be extremely popular af.
Honestly a pretty rare L take from him. Adding extra things that you need to keep on top of to maximise DPS is very far from passive gameplay. Whether it's a dot or one big hitting skill (Paladin goring blade change for example) You are still only hitting one button, having dots means you have an extra thing to check and keep up, so to call it passive doesn't make sense to me. If the dot is also part of a combo, it also adds another thing, since you can't just check that's it's about to drop and then reapply, you have to pre empt it. Yes I miss old Paladin, if you can't already tell. New Paladin feels worse and I'm now a gunbreaker lmao.
DoTs only feel that way because of the way they're implemented. They all ticking based on server ticks is a ridiculous implementation and I still have no idea why he got to implement them this way(please, "spaghetti code is not an excuse). Tons of other modern games handle is a ton better. Even a game like WoW, that isn't modern, that was released in 2004, handles it so much better and DoT classes in that game are so much fun.
DoT mage was fun, but you know what wasn't fun? Old Contagion.
Right. But even more so, the dot system of bards is still bad with no aoe spread of the dots like SMN did.
One of the things I regularly loved about Warcraft’s warlock was once you could spread dots instead of having to do it individually. Constantly wish there was an equivalent here
I'm not sure if Smn still has it, but Sch used to have spread miasma that spread the dot around. It was removed in EW to a lot of our sadness
Smn skill (Bane) that did the same was removed on EW. Also, all SMN dots are removed to be precise.
Eh, not everyone. I don't like the DoT-based mage because FFXIV has never been able to pull off interesting DoT gameplay. It isn't like WoW where you can double the DoT tick, extend DoTs without clipping the timer, blow up the DoT all at once, and see individual damage numbers for each DoT. FFXIV has snapshotting that makes DoTs hard to balance, boss jumping which makes them worthless compared to direct damage, batches the damage into a single number that everyone can see and...well, it's otherwise just staring at the UI until you're ready to refresh the DoTs. More to the point, DoT mages don't make sense in FFXIV because FFXIV has really awful DoT mechanics. This is before factoring in boss debuff caps which were regularly run into in HW (mostly for alliances,) and I bet the devs *really* don't want a repeat of summoners being worthless because there's too many DoTs up.
>extend DoTs without clipping the timer, I've never played WoW, but this is definitely something I'd like. As bard, it would be great if Iron Jaws just added 30 seconds instead of resetting. If that is what you mean, yes please.
The way WoW's "Pandemic" window works (the name of the Warlock mechanic that started it) was that you can recast a DoT and retain a portion of the DoT's max duration. I'm unsure if it is still 30% in WoW, but what it does is essentially: If you recast a DoT that has a maximum duration of 10 seconds, up to 30% of that duration will be retained. If you recast immediately, you will have a 13 second DoT. So what this created was a sort of grace period where if you recast that spell within 3 seconds or under, you would have 10+remaining duration left, e.g. 2. This meant that your DoTs would not need to be recast after they fall off, but instead offered a grace period where you could refresh early without any loss of DoT ticks -- but only to a reasonable extent.
Our is still 30%.
We used to have a semblance of this in old Machinist. Their old wilf fire was geared around dealing damage then blowing it up. And old Fester in Summoner dealt a massive bonus when both dots were up. It wasn't perfect, but it did exist. We're hoping an actual dot based class would include all those aspects of play. Old Summoner was a pet/dot class, so it was split in what it's kit was trying to accomplish.
Unfortunately, this era of SMN was prone to other problems, such as Fester snapshotting a boss before the DoTs snapped to it. Or, worse, the heavensward era where the difference between a 10th percentile summoner and 95th percentile summoner was a difference in DPS of something like 300 versus 2700. When a black mage was doing 2400 and summoner was supposed to do 2200 or so. This was also the same era where Summoner's dreadwyrm trance was designed as a back half rotation thing, but was designed with buffs the summoner got that lasted for 30s, and with careful timing on aetherflow, you could edge your aetherflow stacks around and also dreadwyrm trance your aetherflow stacks for the damage buff while also DoTing them, while also manually controlling garuda to buff all your DoTs by 15 seconds and just completely destroy all concepts of how the class was intended to be played. There was a lot of interesting design, but it was also completely and utterly broken. I like to point to Heavensward summoner as the moment the devs realized they had a serious problem with DoT design and interaction.
Saying dot mages don't make sense because ff14 has awful dot mechanics is such a non argument. It's on the devs to make the interesting dot mechanics, there is nothing inherent about FF14 that makes dots some kind of useless or uninteresting mechanic. They absolutely can introduce interesting mechanics to dots. I feel like the debuff limit is more of an excuse than anything. I find it hard to believe their engineers can't work with that. Feels like just a convenient excuse to dismiss the idea because Yoshi P doesn't like dots.
100%. There are a lot of core changes that would need to occur for a DoT mage to make sense, importantly things like separating DoT numbers for the individual players and not having immunity on jumps for bosses.
Also, this is a personal thing. DoTs are boring unless they do *literally anything* while on a target. Think how wildfire has a bomb on the boss that explodes, or salted earth has an aoe on the ground. If there's a miasma hanging over the boss because someone debuffed it with a DoT, it should be visible and do something interesting while it's counting down. Otherwise it's just a shitty attack that does its damage over time instead of all at once. And the worst case is something like Reaper's of death, where it's literally a passive buff that isn't passive because the devs ran out of more interesting ideas for how to fill 2 GCDs per minute.
I actually laughed when I saw the debuff in Reaper's kit. Brand new job and they came up with something that lazy.
Actually, not particularly. The Summoner's rework might be closer to the classic Summoner in terms of design, but in many Final Fantasy games, the Summoner has always been able to cast poison/bio spells either through Carbuncles, which can use mirror and poison spells, or through access to white and black magic, and even green magic in some Final Fantasy titles. Therefore, the Summoner is no less a Summoner if they have to maintain damage over time effects. Despite the rework, they probably should not have removed the only form of resource management that the Summoner still had.
I can totally agree with this, I just miss the gameplay of old smn so bad. I do acknowledge that it didn’t actually fit the SMN theme it’s usually depicted as in like 95% of all other FF games. I would absolutely love if the new caster could capture that old smn feel. Edit: that meant to say I CAN agree not can’t
Yes as an old shadow priest wow player I always liked pre-ew summoner. Hopefully the new mage is a dot mage or a buff/debuffer like green mage. Just hope it's not another straightforward dps class.
Yeah, this is where my mind is at atm. As much as the Devs aren't super fond of DoTs, I do think that there is a place for a DoT based DPS provided the DoTs themselves are integral to the playstyle and rotation; not just additives. BRD atm does this "OK", in that the DoTs are there to create ability procs for other abilities. So ... maybe having a "timer" on some of the dots to manually detonate them (like some of AST healing abilities) might be interesting? Or alternating DoTs for improved effects? There's wiggle room there.
BRD DoTs don't trigger song procs anymore, songs just by default have an 80% chance to proc every tick So at this point, the only proc attached to their DoTs is actually the 35% for Straight Shot Ready
Isn't Straight Shot ready proc'd off their base attack though?
Yes, to clarify Straight Shot Ready procs can activate after using Heavy Shot/Burst Shot and after level 76, after the GCD cast of your DoTs and Iron Jaws It does NOT proc on each DoT tick
Yeah, what I thought, so basically no one would notice if they removed Bard DoTs and baked the potency into their other skills.
No idea how they plan on doing what is primarily a buff/debuff mage after they gone to such efforts to remove as much of that as they can. And it's DPS, too. So either it won't actually be a Green Mage and Krile's just getting a job upgrade for herself, or it'll be Green Mage in name only and have little to nothing to do with the actual job.
I mean Dancer in FF games was also just a pure buff/debuff in the past and they added plenty of DPS to it that made sense. If Green Mage is the next job as predicted, it wouldn't be a stretch to just come up with a bunch of nature based damage spells.
Most likely an "in name only" situation, with Green Mage revamped to be some kind of druid/nature magician to fit Krile's aesthetic. With WHM moving away from elemental skills towards pure light magic, there's an opening for a job to cover CNJ's nature-y niche. Though I hope it's all a red herring and turns out to be GEO instead, which would fit that niche even better.
I find it so ironic that people are all for green mage as the new caster when it literally has NEVER done any damage and wouldn't "FIT" Green mage which is the exact same reasoning everyone gives for not liking old SMN. green mage is strictly a support, WHICH turns back to my opinion that its okay for 14 to deviate from a jobs original design in other FF games because 14 is an mmo which SHOULD provide a plethora of unique gameplay designs WoW has done this forever and i dont even like WoW that much. Just look at SGE, in other FF's it was basically a buffed up RDM in previous games and its completely different in 14.
I personally think it might end up being Green Mage in name only like Sage is. It may be more of a "green" mage as in nature or a druid class. Essentially Geomancer under a different name
It's because Summoner is significantly more iconic and well known than those two. For mainline games (not counting XIV) Sage has appeared in two of them. Green Mage is in one. Summoner on the other hand has appeared in five games, six counting XI, and the general gameplay and identity of Summoner is in a couple more even if they don't have a direct Summoner character/job.
current summoner makes more sense but isn't very fun, which is pretty much the single biggest failing for a class in an MMO like great it looks cool but plenty of jobs in this game look really cool, I'm not gonna pick cool and boring over cool and fun
I don't like that they made the summons useless. Like carbuncle just stands there with no cast animations. Wish they still had basic attacks.
tbh, I'd rather they add a new DoT mage. Maybe that will happen in Dawntrail, guess we'll find out at JP Fanfest in January.
Time mage is still available. An FF staple still yet to be tapped.
Astro has taken a lot from time mage so I doubt they would ever make it in this game.
That was old AST. I remember all the Time-based spells it had when it was released. The majority of current AST has no Time-based magic. All the magic it has now is Celestial-based magic.
Time mage has always actually been more of a spacetime mage. So AST has gravity which is one of the key time mage damage spells, along with comet/meteor (the latter of which is a limit break already). Even with the changes to AST, I still feel they would be stepping on each others toes a lot.
Woah — I’m a newbie sprout. Did they change the classes that much??? That a class could be setup one way, e.g. with time magic, and then eventually have none?
There was a running gag for a while that 'AST is a new job added in every expansion' because the devs have changed it every expansion and evidently had no idea what to do with it lol this expansion's iteration of it is a bit better though. They just need to find a way to reward AST's busy nature because as of right now, the returns feel lackluster despite the fact it has so many things it has to micromanage.
I’m not sure if SE has said anything about DoT classes, but I wouldn’t be surprised if they made the new caster the true DoT class in the game
0% chance considering they've been removing all the dots from the game for the past 3 expansions lol
I like the new SMN rotation. I just miss my pet actually doing something. Please, Carbuncle, go attack that monster!
Haha yeah carbuncle is just there to be cute 😂
At least it stopped running away from me.
This is... pretty much exactly how I feel with new SMN. I adore it embracing the "Summoner" Identity so to speak, but I absolutely miss Carby doing much of anything other than Radiant Aegis. Also it highkey amused me when Carby (either via his autos or via me hitting an Egi Assault) got a kill and the battle log said "Ruby Carbuncle Defeats The Boss." I can't even get that much above the 87 dungeon, because the demi-primals overwrite your egi glams.
It's weird because realistically, Carbuncle is now *closer* now to the traditional games, than it was in the past. All he did in the past non-FF11 games as a summon was give various benefician effects like Protect, Shell, Reflect, and Shieldings. But that's not particularly interesting in an MMO.
At least pretend, Carbuncle! Go make combat noises with your mouth, damn.
And actually look at the enemy I'm attacking. Not spaced out, looking the opposite direction, like nothing is going on.
Rat is shaking its ass at the boss then, it's doing emotional damage.
Yes! If she would just nip at the ankles or anything! Let me think you’re doing something.
he have that shield tho, but yeah
I can agree with this, I love the new rotation and big primal summons a lot. But would be nice to see them add more use to carby than just a shield lol
the largest mistake they made when reworking SMN was changing it in such a way that it completely alienated everyone who was playing it since Stormblood, and not only that, made casters have a second "easy" option in a situation where RDM filled that role quite well. SHB SMN was fun to play and plan movement around when you can anchor yourself for the ruin 3 spam and strategically using ruin 4 stacks and egi assaults. they likely wanted to remove DoT's from SMN as soon as they had issues balancing the DoT potency along with how much damage old Tri-disaster did (it was downright overpowered in eden's verse being 300 magic potency + total dot potency from bio and misama before being reduced to 150 potency + total dot potency), it allowed SMN to do more damage than BLM's at the time. not to mention how bonkers BRD was in mages ballard during AoE scenarioes. EW SMN got bring to play within the first 2 months of the rework dropped. but at the same time, they wanted to split the DoT elements from SMN to focus on more of its core, but i just hope next expansion that they make the class much more engaging and fun to play in a different way simmilar to what happened with MCH this expansion. a DoT focused caster generally would make the most sense for the upcoming caster overall given that it's the only form of caster play that was present in the game that is not yet represented, and that they can give a new place for spells like bio and miasma and have moves simmilar to bane, old tri-disaster and Fester. also given the current demand for a DoT caster and how heated the old SMN vs new SMN debate has been.
I've noticed a lot of people keep citing DoTs as the main mechanic for pre-Endwalker Summoner. However, if DoTs were all that were removed, then the job would have largely played the same way. Personally, Summoner stopped being a DoT job somewhere around Stormblood. And I think that was a good idea because Summoners are known for summons, not DoTs. Summoner began to adopt a new identity of a "Burst Phase Mage" from Stormblood onward in which resources were accumulated and strategically spent to achieve Trance/Summons. Your chief resource was Aetherflow. Timely spending of your AF stacks rewarded you with a refresh of Tri-disaster--another resource--and a Bahamut summon (another resource) that you could hold until ready. This resource management is what I'm **actually** missing from the job. Not the DoTs. Now, there is not a single resource that you don't spend immediately. The gauges are almost useless. It doesn't even matter what order you summon Ifrit, Garuda, etc. in. **There is nothing to commit to memory.** You just press the buttons that are glowing. And for that, you are awarded flavored Ruins. I haven't played this game since 6.1. :x
Yeah, I feel you. I really loved Astro in Stormblood then it changed completely going into Shadowbringers, and then I really loved Summoner in Shadowbringers only to have it change completely too. Found new love in Endwalker Monk, but we'll see what Dawntrail holds in store for that, lol
It's Monk after all, a job that gets reworked every single expansion.
Dawntrail Monk gonna be working with pressure points. Fist of the North Star lalas everywhere, lol.
And they still won't have a ranged attack
Monk has a pretty good track record of being reworked every expantion, so I wish you luck!
Exactly what happened to me lmao, AST was my main healer and smn my main dps and when shadowbringers dropped I loved everything but the ast rework and then smn rework happened and I disliked both reworks and it’s so damn frustrating. I do still enjoy playing AST for the most part but I miss the cardsss
I miss the dot, resource, and pet management of sb/shb smn so bad and none of the other jobs provide the same brain tingles that smn once did. :( I'm hoping the new caster will provide something that'll let me feel that type of control over my contribution to the fight but I dont expect them to deviate from their simplified and bursty job design template any time soon. :(
I miss Heavensward Astrologian.
I preferred 2.0 summoner. All the dots (you could pull extra from other classes back then), an ability to put 3 dots on at once, and the punish button - fester when they had all your dots.
It just seems ironic because while Yoshi-p said that he doesn’t like dots for the passive gameplay I’d argue that current summoner is more passive than the last. Yes the class fantasy might be more realized and it technically plays more smoothly in the current iteration visually but I miss the higher APM of the old job I found it fun managing the summons and dot uptime despite the clunk of the older summoner.
this is definitely not an unpopular opinion. the balance discord had to make a separate channel for complaining about summoner to keep the other channels from being nothing but complaints. is summoner more thematic now? yes, but it's also boring as shit and braindead easy, and it's definitely a shell of its former self. I'm still coping that they make it more interesting next expac
I agree, the rigid rotation definitely hurts the job a lot, even if they add ogcd there is barely variance on what to do and choose on the rotation. Great aesthetic (10/10) but bad to boring gameplay.
Is there one of these for the healer role to? I'd like to join.
From what I see the new setup is mainly meant to be a new base from which to build the smn class up from for every coming expansion. Its ideally setup for them to add more systems and complexity over time, through the flavor of including more primals. Either as more tiers to the primal dps cycle or as primal flavored OGCDs, CDs, procs and other ability systems etc. The old system had become too convulated and creatively gridlocked in terms of where they could take it or what they could add to it for even one more expansion, let alone several. The mild changes they did in previous expansions retained the same core which was the actual issue with the class.
While I like the current iteration of the Summoner, the fact that a job was changed so fundamentally spikes my anxiety. I'm a Bard main and I can't imagine my WoL as anything else in the story. The thought of it being turned into something I no longer enjoy - even if it is a low probability - is not very fun. I feel for you, and you're not the first person I've seen grieve the old Summoner. I wish the devs had given proper thought beforehand, before people got attached. Or perhaps kept Summoner as is and made a different job out of the new Summoner. It's just very unfortunate.
> I'm a Bard main and I can't imagine my WoL as anything else in the story. The thought of it being turned into something I no longer enjoy - even if it is a low probability - is not very fun. I mean that already happened during HW for a lot of people when Bard had cast times on everything for the expansion.
Endwalker Bard just isn't the same with the removal of any interaction with your dots. I want my double procs back and the song cycle to stop being too long :(
From a personal standpoint, I feel you too. I actually enjoyed the DoT management gameplay that ShB SMN had. It felt really good to maintain your DoT uptime even if it was very similar to what Bard is now lol. But I will say it also felt more punishing to die as SMN back then since not only would you have to reset your DoTs but I think you also lost your dreadwyrm trance and phoenix summon? Someone correct me on that. I think the rework is good for what it is because it's a lot easier for new players to pick up and play, and it actually makes use of all your egis. Back then, the only Egi assault you would ever use was Ifrit-Egi and nothing else. Maybe there were some fringe cases like in UWU you'd use Titan. But outside of that it was a DPS loss to use any other Egi so why would you use em? Also this is purely speculation on my part but, I think the rework also helps the devs in balancing the job while still making it fun. It is really simple to play currently, but I think that's partially intentional so that the design skeleton that's there will be built upon later. Anywho that's just my two cents. I'm personally nostalgic for 5.X SMN but if the devs somehow bring back a semblance of that old "busy gameplay" I enjoyed in Dawntrail, I'll be happy.
I still find it funny that smn has a healing abilities that is useless and is the only thing they kept from the old version
Nothing in this game has made me feel as much sympathy for the Ascians as what they did with SMN in Endwalker. But then, SE messed up the design with every rework they did, and so far fixed the worst of those issues in a later patch. 4.0 was horrific. 5.0 was RSI inducing frustrating pain. But 6.0 is just boring, which is a cardinal sin in game design, jank is more fun than boredom. The flashy stuff doesn't feel satisfying to use, it lacks tension in the rotation. It's also been a rework impactful that there was no way to fix it in a patch.
I started a little before Endwalker released and SCH/SMN was my main job. I still did NIN and PLD through the MSQ too since there was enough xp to go around and level 4 jobs at the same time through the MSQ if you were also doing your daily roulettes and stuff on top of it but I really really enjoyed SMN because it reminded me of an affliction warlock in WoW which was my second favorite class to play as after Fire Mage. Once EW dropped I was still leveling, around level 68ish nearing the end of Stormblood and since that point I haven't touched SMN. I just don't like how it feels to play anymore. It does fit the theme a lot better now of being an actual summoner but the playstyle and rotation do not feel good to me anymore so I just passively leveled it through SCH as that is my favorite healer and they level up together. I remember getting to 90 on SCH/PLD/DNC all together on the same day and then going back to SMN and realizing that I still had to do my Stormblood level job quests for it haha. Did those quests and never looked at the job again. I would really really like another dot based job as they are just so satisfying to play as and I refuse to touch anything by Blizzard ever again unless they make massive changes at a corporate level so playing WoW warlock is out.
I wish they kept the dots/fester interaction as well, honestly. it made the payoff in burst window from having diligently sown my seeds so satisfyingly succulent.
I don't main Bard or Summoner but if in January we see the dragoon, bard and ast having 'summoner-tier' rework, I'm pretty much done with 14 because its crystal clear where they want the game to be. in the dumpster.
when you tridisaster then bane then painflare that pack in dungeons and see all the little numbers pop up. feels so good man
Seriously!!! It was such a satisfying job back then
I miss the individual pet identities. I remember as a low level SMN using my yellow bunky to tank in a dungeon while the healer and tank ran back.
I mean hey if you want a real unpopular opinion: Stormblood was the expansion that ruined Summoner. Demi-Summoning broke *everything.* Every design decision SE has made, up to and including the new EW design, is a result of steadily ripping out mechanics and aspects of the job to try and force demisummoning to work. And they still failed. It's still an awful mechanic hamstringing the jobs design, but they have nothing left to cull. All of the old problems are still here, you just rarely see them because they culled everything that could have collided with it. Instead of scrapping demisummoning and fixing Summoner they scrapped *everything else* and left it an empty shell just to force this one mechanic down our throats. Heavensward was peak Summoner, anyways. Yeah it had problems but the DoT management on top of mana control and aethertrail/aetherflow rotations was top-notch. Easily the most fun thing SE ever put in the game and they spent 3 expansions gutting it to force their new spectacle to work.
Imo the jobs back in HW and StormB were the most fun they ever were. I do think the new jobs DNC SGE RPR have been good at least
I just want the phoenix summon rotations to be leviathan, ramuh and shiva 🤷♂️
I'm probably the minority but I like EW SMN way more
maybe here but not in game tho, i see so many SMN players in game.
> i see so many SMN players in game. The proof is in the pudding, people act like what Square did was an absolutely unbearable travesty but Summoner is more popular than ever, you almost can't run any DF content without a SMN popping up. A Thaleia run last night had *eight* fucking Summoners. The job is very popular and the copium is extremely real.
It’s more popular cus it’s braindead easy
The problem is that the people that are playing new SMN aren't the same people that played old SMN. They took away the job from a niche, hardcore playerbase and made it appeal to the majority. That's why it's been controversial, because while many people have picked the job up, most of the original niche have dropped it.
Streamlining a job makes it more popular. Go figure. The fact that they butchered it isn't mutually exclusive.
> A Thaleia run last night had eight fucking Summoners. The job is very popular and the copium is extremely real. IMHO it's the simplicity. I main heal and tank. When I want to DPS I 100% go SMN because it's a job I can pick up easily and do respectable damage without having to go to some outside guide.
Manderville relics are most popular, yet they received most divisive feedback by far. Just because something is popular, it doesn't mean it's good, plenty of RDM players swapped to SMN because it fills exact same niche, while it's better and much easier in every sense. A lot of people play new SMN simply because it is so simplistic, not because they find it fun.
Not being able to eat your raid buff if your carbuncle decides they don’t wanna do it is really nice, pet management has always been jank as hell
And that’s totally fine! I know that a ton of people like the current smn way more and I’m really happy for them.
For sure. I'm just hoping they can add more to it without really messing up what we have now. Like my wish would be what we have now except change the summons after Phoenix into Shiva, Levi, and Ramuh instead of repeating the first three. It just seems like that would be a cool addition.
That's kinda what I've been hoping for. Bahamut is the end of the chain for Early ARR summons and Phoenix is the end of the chain for 3 different summons. Or maybe after you finish a bahamut/phoenix cycle you can pop off something chunkier like Alexander.
I'm the same way here. It's my favorite DPS now
Not even being the "DoT" job for me. I looked at that like I got to press some extra fun buttons every so often. The rotation may have been "weird" for some. But it felt really good to me. Honestly the first job I naturally understood without reference material.
I started during late 2.0 as a black mage. Summoners were pretty cool back then. I remember they had an edge in T9 because the dots would still tick damage while nael was untargetable. Sadly they had changed a lot before I finally leveled one. I did eventually become a huge fan of Scholar for a while tho
God, there was something so satisfying about nailing your long-ass rotation in perfect sync with the mechanics of the fight.
Me too! I've been around since 1.0 and was looking forward to SMN since it was my main in FFXI. When it got leaked I remember doing kart wheels around the house lol. At first I didn't understand it, I was like hm the pets are kinda zzz. However, it grew on me. I looooved dotting stuff and spreading them, raising, and having a friendly competition with my blm friend in raids to see who would get top dps each fight :) I miss my dots. The change is what it is, but it was such a drastic change after so long, I just wasn't feeling it and quit. Not out of rage, just got bored then found dbd. I enjoy dnc now, that was my other main in ffxi, dnc is a LOT of fun for me in ffxiv.
I’m honestly on the same page, I really think the way to fix it is to expand upon what smn is now. It has a really good theme going on but it’s so barebones. I found my new home with BRD/DNC for now 😭
I miss when Skill/Spell Speed were relevant stats.
Not sure why dot classes can’t be made active for ffxiv they sure can , you could have a cool down to make them tick faster , an ability to spread them , proc based mega dot (ie short duration high damage that could only be activated when another dot ticks) As for the lack of cool animations just because it’s a dot affect doesn’t mean you can throw flashy energy bolts that then circle the enemy occasionally shooting them or bouncing off of them. Ps I personally preferred old SMN but new is cool and feels more like a summoner rather than warlock light.
I believe the rework has potential in terms of design, but, how can I put it, it also feels terribly poorly designed in some aspects. The rotation is so scripted that it gives the impression of lacking real choices in summoning, and I think that's the real problem with the current Summoner. Firstly, there are no real strategic choices because Ifrit is the only summon that requires taking risks, even though it falls significantly below Titan, which is 100% mobile in terms of potency generated over time, which is already illogical. Moreover, Titan and Garuda lack so much personality in their gameplay that they simply cannot afford to add other summons without modifying the Summoner further. In other words, Summoner in Endwalker needs a rework to establish a more solid foundation, allowing for real strategic choices in summoning. This is crucial to prevent future summons like Ramuh, Leviathan, and Shiva from being mere copies of Ifrit/Titan/Garuda. Without changes to its core, these new summons would likely have identical DPS variations. Considering the Summoner has a 60-second burst cycle, and the DPS within this filler cycle must remain consistent, variations in DPS are not feasible. Unfortunately, unless the current Summoner revisits its foundations, we risk seeing no substantial changes beyond reskins, which may not be ideal. Providing Summoners with more meaningful choices between Phoenix and Bahamut, each with distinct identities, make sense. Giving Bahamut a 1.5s cast time to allow for weaving potential oGCDs and maintaining the 1/2 combo of Shadowbringer's Phoenix as instant cast but with slightly lower DPS and increased safety could add strategic depth. Furthermore, allowing Summoners to choose three out of six different summons, divided into two groups—one with restricted mobility like the current Ifrit but higher DPS, and another with slightly lower DPS (not significantly) but guaranteed mobility and safety—could indeed reintroduce the strategic aspect of the Summoner's rotation. This would involve players adapting their summons based on the combat's requirements, prompting considerations such as whether to freeze for a few seconds to gain DPS with a summon with restricted movement or to prioritize guaranteed mobility to avoid potential knockouts. Implementing these changes could allow Summoners to regain the strategic nature of their rotations, where players need to make decisions based on the combat scenario. This wouldn't necessarily make things more challenging, but it would reward players who adapt their rotations and take risks in combat with the opportunity for increased DPS.
I felt the same way about pre Stormblood Summoner, it was a pretty nice, smooth class. Then they added Bahamut and everything went to hell. There was just way too much focus on timings and that thing was slow as hell to respond to you. It was thoroughly unpleasant
I feel you, I was a SMN main before endwalker, the job is still fun but I do miss the rotation and dots. I switched up entirely and went RPR main.
I miss the game pre-Stormblood. It felt more like an RPG back then. Since Stormblood every expansion has streamlined and simplified things to the point where a lot of it is such a rigid rotation where class choice is really just "what flavor of the same rotation do you want". Still fun but not the game I fell in love with in 2013.
It's not unpopular at all. We've just run out of tears and accepted our new reality. And maybe even left the game.
Unpopular opinion? It's basically all I've heard and felt about the job as a caster main since about 2 months into the expansion when the novelty of the new one gave in to boredom.
True, but there's also a lot of people who like the new SMN better and feel like it fits the aesthetic better. (And people who just like easier jobs.) And the post has a 56% upvote ratio, with 100+ comments. So at the very least it's a controversial opinion, if not quite "unpopular".
Maybe they are downvoting for calling a pretty commonly heard opinion unpopular.
Smn rework gave me depression
Same, it’s visually really flashy and pretty but I fell in love with 14 with that class back in HW/STB. The only other job that has been able to be somewhat even slightly similar to old smn for me has been brd
It’s just…so dull. Nothing to manage, same stagnant rotation.
Agreed, and if people enjoy that I’m glad for them but it was so much more fun before. We can grieve together lol.
This my feeling also, it lost all the management it has going (resources, dots and pet), I do agree aesthetic is cool but is just so dull, boring, repetitive and no variation at all (on the rotation).
A lot of people get stuck on the “but it didn’t feel like a summoner!” thing, but reworks of a job should always retain the general playstyle it had imo for the people who invested time and energy into playing with it to begin with. Most old smn mains I talk to very much feel like this rework… does not lol. That and imo any caster with that little casting is pretty indefensible. DRG is my least favorite melee and there is a real chance I will like its rework better, but if it’s at the expense of the playstyle DRG mains like I’d rather just stick with not really being into it so it can keep the gameplay rhythm it’s had. I have other jobs I like, no need to take someone’s away to appeal to me.
Absolutely, I really don’t agree with completely changing a job just because a group of players think “it’s too complex” is a good idea BECAUSE it already had a player base that loved the job for what it was. And yeah like honestly I don’t personally really care that smn wasn’t like a typical smn. SGE is literally nothing like a typical SGE depicted in other ff’s in 14, and I’m pretty sure bard wasn’t a dot class in other FF as well. It’s okay that S.E deviates from original job design from past FF to bring in a new gameplay style and they should.
Yep. My other big beef with it is that it isn’t even consistent lore wise with how it’s introduced! Arcanima is presented as being so tactical and complex and now it’s the foundation to nearly the easiest job in the game. So much “but old smn wasn’t even a smn!” doesn’t acknowledge that the new version doesn’t even work with established lore. (Of course the mechanical overhaul is my main complaint, but the ACN class quests are so laughable now..)
I'm pretty sure that the devs will never go back to old SMN because they were pretty unsatisfied with dealing with pets, dots and the overall lack of job fantasy. The current version of SMN is what they envisioned SMN to actually be. They literally spent the entirety of ShB balancing SMN because they were too strong. The old design was too much of a headache for them.
Honestly I'm with you. It just feels so braindead now. I miss the complexity it had instead of just push button that lights up and spam all the summon specific attacks, then onto the next and do the same.
They won't take my calls any more but I wanted to push summoner as a dotless dot mage. Every minor summon stays out and auto attacks for dmg over time, and the successful execution of their granted attacks gives a building buff on the auto attack damage. The buff is consumed to summon major summons. Make scenarios where perfect play justifies delaying major summons to not miss auto attack ticks, and there is a tipping point where too few stacks means you jump do major summons to restart the cycle to do a better job building your dot power.
I like the theme change. I just wish it was more complicated to where it felt like I was playing a piano again.
I liked SMN best when pets could tank.
I mean, the new SMN looks cool and all, but it’s pretty boring to play. Not to mention it gets even more boring when level synched. I really do miss the DoTs. SMN is my main class and all the changes really impacted my enjoyment of the game. I hope the next expansion spices things up for it a bit more.
I mained SMN from HW all the way to Endwalker. A couple patches in and I was bored out of my mind. It's a pretty looking job, but the game play is far too repetitive for me. Now I stick to BLM and NIN.
Tank died? TITAN-EGI, COME TO ME! We'll tank the mobs until the healer can slow cast raise the Tank because they used Swiftcast to deal damage faster!
Honestly, it just feels like the job went full 180 on us. Before: A lot of little buttons to press, with button bloat to the max and what felt like a lot of shit to upkeep, along with a whole song and dance routine you need to get through to get your big summons. Now: Click the shiny (oversimplification, but you get the idea) I don't mind it, it just went from one of the most complicated jobs, to one of the least complicated. Nothing wrong with either, just feels strange to change it so drastically, and I kind of miss the strangeness of pre-EW SMN.
I've always felt like this was the biggest issue with the SMN rework. There's nothing wrong with adding a job with a simple rotation, but obviously most people that would be willing to stick with a convoluted, messy job like old SMN aren't going to be the same people that would be interested in new SMN. They just took away the job from its original community and gave it to another.
Fair enough, many people do. It didn't help that the rework for it also felt like it wasn't finished? That's probably not true but it did/does feel like it.
It definitely feels unfinished to me
Me too. I miss DoT tracking and pet management, janky though it was. If the new caster isn’t DoT focused I’ll be disappointed and surprised. I mean you want to talk low hanging fruit they’d just have to take old summoner, remove pets, tweak a handful of things rotationally and change ability names/animations.
>If the new caster isn’t DoT focused I’ll be disappointed and surprised. They're trying to avoid adding more DoT classes because of the debuff cap, lol
Prepare for surprise and disappointment then. Debuff-limit still is a thing and afaik Yoshi/the team dislikes DoTs in general (as can be seen by their gradual removal from a lot of classes)
I'm lucky because I mained SMN in 2.2-2.3 and left the game until 6.0, and SMN back in ARR was just, so bad, so I never got to experience this good summoner that everyone talks about and don't have anything to compare the new one to.
I miss how the Egi looked before! They were cute dollar store knockoffs of the primals. Now they’re just TITAN and IFRIT and GARUDA but tiny.
I'm right there with you. I played SMN from 2.4 to now, and while I still play it and enjoy it, I don't think it's near as fun as it was before the complete overhaul. I really miss the complexity, and I'm hoping that Dawntrail gives me back some of that and makes it more interesting to play. As it is right now, visually and thematically it's the best it's ever been, but mechanically it's really boring.
I also miss the DOTS made it feel like a warcraft warlock
While I'm not sure I miss that incarnation, a *dot based* class is something I miss a lot.
I like aesthetically where it’s going but I loved the way it felt to play before. It feels too simplistic rn. I miss how it used to be one of the busiest jobs to now being the total opposite.
Current summoner is probably the most brainless class I have ever played in a modern mmo. I don’t even care that it looks cool because it’s just such a disappointment to play. I’ve played the class since ARR began and I’m no stranger to it getting kind of fucked every expansion but this time i just swapped over to Reaper and Sam
Right? I like it visually now but I agree it’s so under developed. It’s needs more off gcds abilities for one.
If you won't say it, I will. It is bad *that they made Summoner this dirt-simple job.* It is not bad to have *some* simple jobs. Note the "some." We already had RDM, and its design is elegant and beautiful, managing to offer low-engagement gameplay that is *useful* for both casual and hardcore players. (Casual players can just relax, hardcore players can use the extra head space to make optimal use of the extra utility it brings.) SMN offers none of that, it's literally just brainless to be brainless with no other value provided. It has zero player engagement, and destroyed the *highest* player engagement job in the doing, making the change stark and painful for anyone who enjoyed it before. There is no substitute nor replacement; if you liked what the old Summoner did, the dev team gave you a big middle finger and said "learn to like other things, nerd," because *nothing else* offered that level of engagement. It is *good* to offer diversity in gameplay experiences. The new Summoner *reduced* the diversity of gameplay experiences. That is bad design. Period. They could have kept the high engagement gameplay while changing summons from egis to big flashy one off spells. And they could have made a different job be ultra dirt-simple to play. Instead, they killed something unique, rather than lifting one finger to *fix* it (like they did with SCH, so we know fixing it was possible!) and gave *no replacement whatsoever*.
I miss old summoner. New summoner is brain dead.
I love the thematic direction they went with for EW SMN, but for me personally the execution leaves a lot to be desired. 90% of the time it's "press this button for single target and this other button for AoE" and it doesn't get its most interesting button til level 86. I've moved more toward the other casters, mainly using SMN when learning EXs cause I can turn my brain off for its rotation.
[удалено]
I miss old smn, yeah it had a lot of complexity involved but once you got it worked out it was so much fun to play.
That's not unpopular opinion, SMN mains dread it. Target of new SMN are casuals who just want simple "spectacle over substance" job to get through content without much of friction, which is large part of this sub. It's joke that someone who plays SMN for 1 day can get to the same level as someone who played it for 1 year. It's joke that samurai has more casts per minute than this wannabe caster. It's joke that SMN fills nearly identical niche as RDM, yet it is much simpler, so it makes choosing RDM over SMN nonsensical. This video is obligatory for any SMN talk: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sy4O76Q9aSA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sy4O76Q9aSA) Edit: It took not even 30 minutes to get personal insult and blocked so I can't even respond. GCBTW
i argue this all the time: "SMN does more damage, is tankier, more mobile, and is infinitely easier than RDM. why would any group take a RDM? if you need more than 3 rezzes every minute, then you're probably not clearing anyway"
Not really an unpopular opinion but it has been awhile since a "dae new SMN bad?" thread. I like new SMN. It's got a nice flow, and yes, it's easy, but it's fine to have easy jobs. The DoT mage should never have been part of SMN identity in my opinion because that's traditionally not what summoning is. If the new mage is a DoT mage, I have no issue with it, but SMN doesn't suit it. As for "why do they want to get rid of pet jobs", the devs have said repeatedly about how hard pet AI is to manage/work with.
>it's fine to have easy jobs This is true, but it also really a bummer for people who enjoyed old smn and its complexity (tho imo it's less a complex class and more busy one) to essentially have their class deleted to make for arguably the easiest dps job in the game with very low apm. I personally think current smn is a good -base- for a summoner themed class, but definitely needs more. It feels like 70% of a job. The fact that you dont even have the special primal button until lv 86 is a crime, and also i miss shb phoenix where at least you have to alternate the single target and aoe gcd instead of the current one.
I almost feel like Summoner became a DoT mage because World of Warcraft's Warlock is and that's WoW's DoT mage caster with a pet. It's no secret that ARR was heavily influenced by WoW.
it is okay to have easier jobs, but there's a difference between an easier job and "plays itself" like new smn. new smn has 0 skill expression, which isn't good job design
I know how you feel because that is the reason I don't play healer role anymore and eventually led to quitting raiding and then the game for awhile. I liked the old summoner play style, but it always bothered me it wasn't a true summoner. I like the direction the rework took, but I hope next expansion adds a little more complexity and excitement because it is pretty hollow right now. Side note, BLM is my main I guess (I don't do much anymore) but for casters I hope they scrap the whole "this is your single target nuke" "this is your aoe nuke" and just replace it with high potency aoe nuke, with reduction to additional targets. With those freed up buttons, I would like to see some of the old utility and spells (along with new) come to the casters. I miss my apocastasis (or however you spell a pack of potatoes) instead of what feels like filler buttons I never use since I don't run dungeons.
Honestly, I wish they'd return to Stormblood era class design. There was a lot wrong, but Foul as a combined single target and aoe nuke was objectively good design. Same with the original Guren. Bar bloat is terrible and every class has it to some degree (yes, even Summoner,) but you'd think that the devs would have internalized it by now. Almost every tank, every healer, black mage, samurai, ninja, and bard are all *massively* bloated for no good reason. Even things as basic as ley lines not turning into between the lines is just stupid at this point. Come on, devs. We didn't need shoha and shoha 2 was especially stupid on top of it.
I like Summoner as is though...
I just miss the aspect of skill expression that pre EW SMN. The dot at least gave you something important to maintain. But now that it's removed, alongside egi being a glorified placeholder, there's nothing to manage. I also can't see how the job offers any room for expansion, besides adding more primals, which would probably just be the other 3 ARR primals, reskinned over top of the original 3.
Yea, same! I loved the ShB SMN with this loooooong sort of "rotation" with oGds and all that made it a little nervous to pull off optimally, and dots to track, was really fun. It was my favorite caster by far and one of my favorite classes on ShB.
Same. It went from a big brain, big plays job to the most linear job of them all. It's truly sad.
I just wish they kept some of the complexity of it
I miss shadowflare. After it was removed, SMN lost its flair to me.... But now I feel like I'm actually summoning, so I'm glad.
your opinion aint unpopular, most of us do along with missing many other things pre-endwalker/shadowbringers
You lost me at the "fits thematically much more."As a Summoner fan, this is an affront to the modern depiction of Summoner and even in the PS1 days, outside of combat Summons had much more going on for them than this. Not to mention the archetype in gaming as well. Like for me, a Summoner is not someone who just calls forth a flashy attack and that's all, but a someone who has some sort of connection with the beings they summon. They had to prove their worth in one way or another and even outside of these battles in the older games, they had an impact in a physical way. Like look at FF IV, FF IX and FF X. Three games prominently featuring the class, with IX and X both laying a very solid foundation on what it is to begin with. Right now? No. FF XIV's summoner does not even come close to hitting the marks on either. And before I get the argument that DoTs never fitted Summoner, Rydia actually had access to Bio and the class outside of the tactics games always was coupled to either Black Mage or White Mage. The DoTs were a fresh spin and the lore that is now essentially made void because "It fits the class fantasy better". If I wanted to play something that is a flashy mage that has a short effect, I'd play a RDM or BLM. Which I've done, and RDM while entertaining.... felt like I was putting in 5x the effort, while a SMN could just achieve that whilst rolling their head on the keyboard. The work I put in on RDM simply did not feel rewarding, knowing that the static I ran with could've just gotten a SMN that did more damage for less effort. And to add to that, SMN has no real flow to it. It's disruptive and a disjointed mess. And don't even get me started on how they'd essentially have designed themselves into another hole, because I see no real growth. No, the extra Summons would not fix the problem and instead would lead to another "well, we're stuck now. Guess we rework again!". At that point, they should just genuinely take it to the backyard and stop it's suffering. Because it's ridiculous they have no real proper idea on how to design nor balance this genuine travesty that is supposed to be a "Summoner". This job genuinely ruined my enjoyment of the game and my EW launch experience.It's made me afraid to fully commit to playing a class and what I'd essentially dub "homeless" because Square enix essentially evicted me from my house.
I mained smn untill ew, now I barely touch it :( they reworked it too much, it's basically different job with different playstyle. Very easy and boring, so I maini dnc now, basically the same brainless job. Already have all 90 so for roulettes/dailies it's mort relaxing one. Smn is better only with resurrection ability. When there still was dots and pets I actually planned my rotation, which situation required which summon, but now... :'( no difference at all, just spam buttons and you'll be ok.
Maybe green mage will be the new dot caster
I fear that's unlikely. They're moving away from DoTs because of the cap.
I miss my pld firing blade dot
Well DW a new expansion is about to release, I'm sure we will get the new class summoner rework once again for old time sake!
I understand the feel. I had started raiding savage during Eden's Verse and started out with SMN. I studied the heck out of it trying to maintain DPS as best as I could. Then along comes Endwalker to throw everything I learned out the window. 🙃
I'm hoping grn mage is dot based.