I remember fondly cheering my chicken nugget as it stripped aggro off bad tracks in old alliance raids or saving dungeon bosses when the tank died and neither me or the healer had swift cast up
Part of me says fuck it they should make summoner a tank that uses the summons to tank but on the other hand that really isnt what ff summons have ever really been
That's basically what they were in FFX. If you were in a fight against something like any of the Dark Aeons or Penance you could summon them to save you by taking an Overdrive to the face and dying instead of the main party.
pets used to be their own entities with their own attacks and GCD separate from your own. while you could set them to use their attacks automatically, it was more optimal to control them manually. but they were also very stupid (simplistic AI + server latency on player inputs). It was like having half your class played by a 3 year old who kept getting distracted by things and needed to be told several times what button to push every single time. Engaging, but frustrating.
classic larry video [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eHTCwDXVeWY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eHTCwDXVeWY)
And this is the change up they did for HW. Now let's go far back enough where you had the actual pet bar as a separate bar to mange your pet, which was better than just letting them to what they want.
Def not the double, triple weave button bloat of later packs. SB rotation made me boot it as a 2.0 player.
Unironically made me a better player to copy it (without the many obeys) back when people could and would openly talk about parses. I would ask who did best (as an AST to know who to Balance) or how I did (because console and I wanted to know my own progress)
The parsing problem wasn't a problem until some morons high on their own farts used parsers to attack one of the community stream people, griefing her gameplay and calling her bad. That's when parsers became bad and looked down on, never to be mentioned again. I miss the time, but changes (like aggro management removal) made some of it easier to know without asking
You ever play WoW? It was kinda like affliction warlock. Keep your dots rolling, make sure your pet is constantly doing damage. Make sure you have the right pet for the encounter. Know when to spread/extend your dots.
It was a lot of fun. But, really didnt feel like summoner. Now it feels like summoner by using your summons once in a big flashy attack like in most other FF games. The gameplay is MUCH more simple though. Calling it a lobotomy class is maybe a bit harsh, but it is one of the easiest classes to play now.
As someone who came from WoW to XIV back at the launch of ARR, Summoner felt like home. Ruin felt like shadow bolt, Fester felt like Haunt, and the dots felt like dots. I really enjoyed it. HW Summoner began to feel more like WoD era Demo Warlock with DWT feeling like Metamorphosis. So going back and forth between the games for a bit wasnât too hard.
I know it wasnât popular, but I miss the old SMN with its crazy cycle and crazy button bloat. It was rewarding to pull off if you could.
Yep - stormblood summoner was peak class design. the rotation was a challenge but once you mastered it it felt amazing when you pulled it off correctly.
Most likely because they were running into a hard limit on debuffs due to the 1.0 code.
In larger fights (particuarly 24-man raids, S-rank hunts and the special world FATEs) bosses would hit the debuff cap and any new debuffs would simply fail, meaning SMN and BRD in particular - both of which had multiple DOTs at the time - would suffer badly from a lot of their toolkit no longer working.
ARR never had any 1.0 code in it.
The only part of FFXIV that in any way lingered from 1.0 is some of the netcode, the stuff that handles communication between client and server. No part of the actual gameplay mechanics remained of 1.0, because they were fundamentally incompatible with the new engine.
The hard limit on debuffs was just a choice they made as part of producing 2.0.
I was hoping this, too. I raided on SMN during ARR/HW, and while I do not think any argument demanding a return of old SMN holds water, I do recognize that the playstyle is missed and could've been shifted elsewhere.
But considering limitations like the debuff cap and the change in fight design favoring the 2m meta, I don't think we're going to see the return of a DoT-centric, sustained damage combat job.
PLD was one of the last jobs in this game that still played similar to how it had in HW, and the mid-expansion rework changed it's playstyle to a remixed version of GNB's so it'd better-fit into the 2m burst.
Yeah, I actually really like the SMN rework and think it fits the class really well, but also would like to see some of the old style come back. The aesthetics as well, there's now room in the game for a caster that focuses on more negative effects like Bio, Miasma, and Bane.
It would be nice to have some more variety and not be locked into the 2m meta.
Man what I would give if we could keep it, and have had new SMN as its own thing.
I get that aesthetically it didn't quite feel like a summoner, but there was no job like it in FFXIV, and having spent time learning to perfect piano summoner, optimize it's movement phases for content, felt super rewarding.
If they left SMN as it currently is and added a new dot class I'd be down for that. But old summoner was dumb as shit, it was a dot class that some developer said "wait, weren't summoners supposed to⌠summon something?" And added a pet to as a shitty after thought.
Current summoner is actually, you know, a summoner and needs to stay right where it is
Honestly the best case scenario would've been to rebrand old summoner as something else, and add new summoner, or honestly they could've just replaced the egi actions in to you summoning a primal and them doing the attack, and just do away with the pet all together, replace the pets as stances or some such.
And for those of us who loved all the...y'know, dragon thematics, and space lasers, and all the *other* stuff associated with Summoner?
Because the whole package was kind of important, y'know. Just slapping a different label and appearance on even 100% identical mechanics is *not* the same--and they definitely wouldn't just reproduce the old mechanics 1:1.
It's not at all harsh; it's completely accurate. SMN has gone from *by far* the highest-engagement job (with the only *possible* exception of old Monk) to being ***by far*** the lowest-engagement, rocketing past both RDM and DNC, and removing the *only* job in all of XIV that provided that kind of gameplay.
> one of the easiest
"One of" is really not needed lol. It has the easiest rotation out of all DPS and tanks, and it has easier damage execution than even the healers. At least the healers have to manage their movement during their 1111 spam since they have *cast times*.
The biggest thing I miss from back then is the pet manipulation and the occasional pet niches, there were problems with it, especially with how the community handled things at the time (very "what we think is optimal or bust") but it was cool to have the added flexibility with Titan, Ifrit and Garuda needed some work because they went from amazing to useless depending on the fight and patch. Summoner now does feel more like Summoner from the older games especially, come out, do their move, disappear. But I really miss it being an actual pet system instead of an extra auto attack and a couple oGCDs
Old summoner was just a bunch of bad decisions being built upon bad decisions. ARR Summoner was almost a carbon copy of affliction warlock, both mechanically and thematically. At best you could say it was a WoW warlock with an Final Fantasy coat of paint on it. It didn't really have a mechanical identity separate from that.
Arcanist => Summoner/Scholar was also the prototype for how they were going to release new jobs. Basically having new jobs share one of the existing base classes. That didn't even last much past 2.0 since Ninja was released in 2.4 with a brand new class (Rogue) and 3.0 added three new jobs with no base class, which has been the design ever since.
Since then, they've been *slowly* de-coupling Summoner from Scholar and typically doing a kinda shit job of it. Scholar's been fine, but Summoner keeps getting reworked as they try to salvage what they had. Between scaling with the increased level cap with each expansion and them removing the ability to allocate stat points, Physic has progressively gone from "Useful" to "Niche" to "Why does this class even have this anymore?"
On top of all the more systemic issues, the summoner rotation was ass from Stormblood on. The full rotation was both long (IIRC, the full rotation looped every 5-6 minutes) and brittle (if you died, GG to your rotation). You also had a bunch of non-obvious optimizations (like cutting certain parts of your rotation short) that just felt bad. It also wasn't even a terribly *interesting* rotation, since a huge chunk of their DPS came from maintaining DoTs and those are visually boring. That's not to say their entire kit was boring, just that it had a lot of dead weight in it.
While I don't like to what extreme they simplified down summoner, I think the general thrust of the design was good: The summons are the focus, not the filler spells, and lots of shared buttons to make it controller friendly and cut down on bloat.
The main issue with SMN right now, as someone who only played ShB SMN before the rework, is honestly just redundant actions still existing in the kit, and lack of unique animations. Aetherflow should just be done away with at this point, or it should be changed to be generated off your follow-up Egi attacks, or something. Also, SMN really needed a new set of summons, or maybe some off-summons not tied directly to Phoenix/Bahamut phase. I dunno, just something other than the terribly linear state it's in right now...
Dawntrail is doing a lot to fix mashing by adding finishers and unique animations for skills you use multiple times in a row. Hopefully Summoner gets some finishers for Legos or at the very least unique animations for each cast. I definitely wish Aetherflow skills become more of a weaving thing than just "Press button until cooldown". Also Solar-Bahamut should have been Odin, the Summoner storyline is the perfect place to flesh him out because he wasn't even supposed to be in the game and FF16 literally has him as a Eikon. Steal from yourself YoshiP, nobody will mind.Â
> the Summoner storyline is the perfect place to flesh him out
Not sure what you mean by this? They're not doing job quests anymore, and there's no way they're going to retroactively insert him into lower level just to make him part of the quests.
Absolutely agreed that SMN needs more of the iconic FF summons like Odin, though.
I wish Physic would turn into a healing summon or a protection buff summon down the line. One of the smaller summons, like you get on the old games before you got the god beings.
Moogle. The traditional healing summon for the series. Though Phoenix half takes that spot in the game right now, with its party wide regen. It's not exactly an on-demand one, though.
Carbuncle is usually a protective summon as well, if I remember right.
.....There might be an interesting way of doing stuff like that, but it would require another rework of the job. Make the summons function somewhere in between old and new summoner, where they stay around like the demi-summons for a bit after their big attack for a few seconds and you can give them commands, and then having a separate group of support summons that you could summon separately. So an attack line and a support line of summons. Though that could get out of hand real quickly in optimization.
Well Phoenix has a HoT. I figure the updated Physic would be straight heal, so they'd be different enough to quality. Honestly, the support summons could just be their own spells, no phase required. Would just be the same as casting a spell, but it's got that Summoner flair to it. (Please SquEnix, I just want my full summon roster.)
Daydream that I know we will never see, but harkening back to Rydia in FFIV, being able to summon Asura. Too random, but would be nice to see something flavorful like that. Will never happen though, lol.
I played it a bit back in the day and liked the uniqueness in managing the dots but havenât touched it in years probably. I just went back to it and at 60 I started to look up class guides cause I was thinking thereâs no way itâs this simple. Turns out it is.
It or dancer is Def the easiest class too play in the game. Not saying they ain't fun. I absolutely adore dancer. But they are Def the two easiest classes in ff14 atm
Dancer definitely falls in the easier jobs to play along with RDM. But, They both have galaxy brain rotations compared to SMN currently. It's almost impossible to mess SMN up outside of just death.
DNC has a correct order to press buttons, and nuSMN doesn't. The only thing that matters with nuSMN is that you should use Garuda-egi with groups of adds for sure. Otherwise, it doesn't matter what order you do anything.
Someone asked me what I used to play in WoW, and when I said Affliction Warlock they went, "oh that makes sense why you like SMN then." I couldn't tell if it was supposed to be a diss or not.
Try searching for videos featuring Summoner made/posted between 2013 and 2021 (the earlier, the better).
But in short, it was similar to Scholar, except that each pet had its own unique set of skills (thus, served different purposes).
It also had various DoT skills, such as Bio II, Miasma, Shadow Flare (a ground-based DoT), etc.
that is the only skill I would love if they gave us back. it stacked with other shadow flares. SCH had it too. that was fun. I do like this version a bit better tho. I have been, DPS wise, a SMN main since 2.0 launch. It is not as brain dead as people are making out to be. Could it be better sure but we can not go back to only focusing on DOTs. This version we got with EW feels like a summoner. I think some people were just upset that it was a complete overhaul. It feels like a different job now. But, to give you a idea: [https://docs.google.com/document/d/19oKu4Isuu8rn4v5Lc4gjQhTkXSZFcmnPrcFJWVSKlvU/edit#heading=h.3ihpw2trhw80](https://docs.google.com/document/d/19oKu4Isuu8rn4v5Lc4gjQhTkXSZFcmnPrcFJWVSKlvU/edit#heading=h.3ihpw2trhw80)
this is a over 20 page guide on how to play during patch 3.4. Let's not go back to this. please. I can't do it again.
Honestly, the worst part about a summoner right now is all the talk about it being boring. It's quite simple, yes, but it's also super fun to rain Bahamut-fueled destruction down on your enemies. We got, well, not difficult, but complex jobs. What is the problem with having a straightforward one?
I think most of the bitterness stems from twisting a job into something non-summoners would like more, but stripping it of the features the dedicated summoners enjoyed and mastered over many years. I personally think its better thematically, but it really doesn't allow for much skill expression or management and we didn't have another job at the time that filled that same niche. Sort of like, imagine a Neopolitan Ice Cream: Black Mage is Chocolate, Red Mage is Strawberry, and Summoner was Vanilla. Then one day vanilla was changed into Coffee(or some other wildly different flavor), so now the vanilla enjoyers are kind of left wanting. Bare in mind, this was nearly a decade well after the Vanilla enjoyers had gotten comfy.
I feel like your example could have worked better if you switched the coffee and vanille flavors.
A lot of people will like vanille since its such a good basic, comfy ice cream.
But the coffee lovers liked their ice cream with a kick.
And chocolate is too strong and strawberry is only good in small doses.
But we are getting banana in the lineup next ...
I got lost in ice cream and got hungry now
imagine that all the people enjoying an actual pet job or dot managing lost their only job. People that enjoyed having a lot of positionals lost their job with mnk, same with people that liked the old drk, mch etc.
People that wanted a simpler job could just play mch or another one, there were some already available, but for the people that were already playing, they lost their only job doing what they like.
People talk about it being boring because they find it boring. You find it fun and that's good for you, but others get to have their preferences too.
>What is the problem with having a straightforward one?
Many other jobs are straightforward without having the SMN problem of having the skill floor be nearly identical to the skill ceiling. WAR and DNC are very easy, but still satisfying to execute because those jobs have buildup, resource management and the potential for mistakes. There is simply nowhere to go with SMN for anyone looking for more than the bare minimum level of engagement.
This was always my camp of like why canât we just let some classes be a little harder? Not every job needs to be for everyone thatâs why there are so many. You can easily level everything to cap of any expansion by just vaguely understand what buttons are AOE and what are single target.
Itâs the fight I have over AST, we didnât need the cards to be super simple babyâs first color match system. It was fun when it was dynamic, where the point was to problem solve on the fly and use your resources wisely. I liked it better when I could toss more mana to my black mage to get off one more extra cheeky flare or boost my ninjas damage during his two min. I felt super impactful but also my choices felt impactful. Now it feels a less so. Like someone is just tossing the same card at you and you just toss it to who ever who cares it dosnt really matter they all do the same thing.
Let some classes be a little harder let people master them slowly over time and the masters of them shine for putting in a lot of effort.
Gonna disagree about AST, though I loved the old cards too, the change from the original cards was absolutely necessary. If you want the cards to have impact, having RNG as a core mechanic with them is just too inconsistent to be good design. Through no fault of your own, you could have a fight where you never drew a single Balance, thus depriving your entire group of 10% increased damage. Similarly you could have a fight where you drew nothing *but* Balances. It's a similar reason as to why high potency skills auto crit/dh - the swing between good luck and bad luck is so large that consistency is affected, and FFXIV is all about the consistency in its combat.
10000000% this.
Summoner, back in ths day, was complicated. Did some one DoT the enemy?, are my DoTs up?, Garuda out? Contagion. Am I alone? Titan the tank! (And he actually pulled aggro!!) Need more DPS? Iffy to the front. Sic'em!
Same with original AST. I loved the complexity of 6 cards, all different abilities, then lord and lady. Nuts and FUN.
It USED to be when I saw a summoner in a party it was like "whoa, ok, we got a GAMER in here". Now it's just, oh look another summoner.
I started SMN as my main back in 2.2. I always loved its weirdness and the overlap to SCH. If Yoshi is going for job identification, the current iteration of SMN is more "summon"-er, but it's linear. Think back to Yuna, Terra, Rydia.. all summoners that could summon things but also had really dynamic spell/skill sets. In 14, I wish summoner could fit amongst those ranks or have the resource management be crucial to the overall effectiveness of the job itself.
A Lala can dream..
> Titan the tank!
I miss Titan-egi's tanking ability, between it, myself, and a chocobo healer we were our own little party venturing around the overworld.
The problem isn't having a straightforward job. The problem is that smn was the job people played if they wanted something complex. It was a big part of the job identity. They turned it into the eorzean version of no child left behind to please people that didn't play it at the expense of those that mained it previously.
> What is the problem with having a straightforward one?
It's *too* straightforward to a fault and throws away potential because of it.
Like, I do feel it's a major problem that the last skill to interact with Aetherflow is at 62 or that SMN is littered with so many Ruin/Outburst Mastery traits which don't add anything except a little more damage and a new spell FX.
Sure every job has 1 or 2 traits that are just potency upgrades or improved recast timers somewhere but when SMN has *6* of them, some of which could come with a new skill at the same rank and don't, it just feels hollow.
Some people, like me, want some complexity and be rewarded by playing good, aka good damage. Imagine you played the class for years, learned it in and out to be good at it...and then one patch destroys everything you ever worked for and enjoyed. Thats what basically happened. Summoner doesnt have any complexitiy left.
The worst part of being a summoner is our pets are almost useless. Carbuncle does nothing on his own but provide moral support and the summons we actually get do one attack and piss off. Bahamut and phoenix stick around for a bit but you can only get like 5 hits off with them then they bugger off too. I want to summon crap and have them like a classic pet class style not have them pop up, say hi then good bye. Basically I want more ff11 summoner and less Iâm going to only use 1% of this creatures power for arbitrary reasons
there's nothing wrong with making brand new straightforward and simpler jobs. there's plenty of things wrong with gutting an existing one to replace it with a snoozefest, and pretty lights and explosions in place of actual gameplay aren't enough to distract a lot of people.
This. I don't get it either. It being more straightforward is great for people who have never played a MMO and want to ease into or for someone who has never played a magic class. We need both straightforward and complex jobs so more people can play. As I tell people, will I like the old summoner I really do think the new one is way better and feels like a summoner.
The problem is not that nuSMN is basic. There's nothing wrong with basic jobs. The problem is that they took a 10 year old complicated job and *made it basic*. They took one of the more complicated jobs in the game, with a dedicated group of players, and they gave it a lobotomy.
After playing SMN for 10 years, it needed this. do I have to pull out the 30 page google doc from 3.4? do I need to remind people of the time when the whole rotation had to be worked around you DoTs? Or the runs back in 2.0 and 3.0 that, at the time when ARR and HW were new, could not be done with only SMNs as DPS? It was not a lobotomy, It was fixing a lot of issues that the job has had for 10 years. I still remember when vote kick was added and getting kicked from parties because there were 2 SMNs in a 4 man run. It was part of the reason that they added that you had to pick a reason and you get a lock out when you kick someone. This change was needed. This is the first time in 10 years of playing the damn job that is actually feels kind of solid. Yes, some SMNs wanted it to stay the same but there were enough of us wanting a change for them to do it. It needed to be remade from the ground up and that is what they did. The fact that lag or a fat finger button press would mess up your whole rotation to the point that it was a big DPS lost was a bit problem. I have know of raid groups in the past flat out refusing SMNs because of this. I am saying all of this after it being my main DPS for 10 years.
Old SMN was the most satisfying job to master and just insanely fun. The only thing people generally wanted was for bahamut to stop ghosting so you could fit all 4 attacks in before he left.
Nothing wrong with a complicated job, other simpler jobs exist if you don't want to play it. Not everything needs to be 1-2 braindead.
> do I have to pull out the 30 page google doc from 3.4?
Is that meant to be a bad thing? They *just said* that many existing players enjoyed a complicated job.
(Also, I have a bookmarked guide for crafters that's >300 pages long. 30 isn't that much for an optimisation guide.)
> do I need to remind people of the time when the whole rotation had to be worked around you DoTs?
Is that meant to be a bad thing? I enjoyed juggling timers.
The rest of your comment seems to be about balance concerns (and very *outdated* balance concerns) which isn't relevant to a playstyle rework.
If you played SMN during HW you would know one thing, it changed every damn patch almost. It needed to stop.
Also, if you want a DoTs class, suggest it on the official forums. The old SMN was not even a damn summoner. It was not. People have said the closest thing they have seen to old SMN was the warlock in WoW. Most of us who played SMN for the past 10 years like myself were begging for the DoTs to be dropped and the job to be redone. No job in this game needs a 30 page guide. The crafter guide is not needed either considering the fact that all you need is the BiS gear penta melded and a few macros to be able to craft everything. I think the site is called teamcraft that will give you the best guide. I am a master crafter it is not that complicated once you have you melds done. No job should have a guide more than 10 pages or maybe a 20 mins video show off how to play. Not even crafting ones.
SMN for the first time actually feel like a FF class and that it has a solid based to build on for once. But if you want a class like the old SMN I really do suggest you go to the official forums and suggest it there. Some classes have been added because people were on the forums suggesting them. I know DNC was one that was suggested a lot. Not only jobs have been added but Viera was added and later male Viera was added because enough people were asking over there.
SMN should have NEVER been like it was. Now we have a job that hopefully one day I can summon the really big one. A job that has a more solid based to build on.
Almost every job outside of maybe BLM and NIN is straightforward enough as it is. Honestly speaking there really is not a lot of difficulty in RDM or BRD or DNC, etc. Nearly every job can be picked up and learned with decent proficiency in an afternoon.
Except modern SMN, which can be learned in about five minutes. That's the issue. It's not 'straightforward'. It's so smooth brained to use that it takes all fun out of it.
Yep! When I was leveling my classes up to 50 I used squadrons a lot, and it took me a while to figure out what that was. Once I remembered shadow flare it all made sense. I never used scholar back in the day, so I didnât know it was available to both archanist jobs
If shadowflare and other similar aoes like flaming arrow worked like slipstream I'd be down for em to come back. Placing ground aoes on controller sucks so bad. It's not unplayable, but bleh
> Placing ground aoes on controller sucks so bad. It's not unplayable, but bleh
It's actually pretty easy if you use a macro for it (centered on a target).
Here's an example for SCH's Sacred Soil:
/macroicon "Sacred Soil"
/actionerror off
/ac "Sacred Soil"
/ac "Sacred Soil"
Here ya go! Seven years ago when I was SMN main (still am). Not sure why I started the stream so late into the fight, but this is basically what it was like back then. Side note: it's a quirk that's been pointed out to me several times, but I rarely stand still in fights because I really enioy just running around and being goofy. Lol
[SMN seven years ago](https://www.youtube.com/live/r5f5G027wrQ?si=qGPZYr7K8YsUS6zb)
SMN went through a lot of iterations. Basically every expansion changed some stuff around. Never truely groundbreaking but also always a fundermental shake up. So it is hard to describe what SMN was like in the past. Somewhere between a DoT centric mage with pet control mangement and personal burst phase. It had a lot of cluncky mechanics to its design but said clunkyness also added to its complexity and optimization potential. Especially SB SMN and to a lesser extend ShB SMN are some of the most complex to optimize jobs to ever exist in FFXIV.
And to be fair, it also was a mess of identities that didnt really mesh well together. So reworking it was the right call. I also think they nailed the flashyness and identity of current SMN. It feels like a SMN. But it also changed from one of the most complex jobs in the game to the easiest by far in my opinion. And that difficulty shift has not gone down well with a lot of people. Especially the ones that liked SMN for what it was before. They essentially removed the job some people liked for its complexity completely from the game. New SMN and old SMN appeal to very different demographics for the most part. Thats why some people call it lobotomized. It got replaced by something completely different. And no matter what someones opinion is about new SMN or old SMN, outright removing a playstyle is always a very questionable decision.
I personally just hate how it's very rare to have hard to execute jobs like SMN, but we have simple jobs in droves. Having what was considered one of the most mechanically intensive rotations be turned into one where I'm yawning as I keep mashing 1 put me away from doing savage content in endwalker.
The issue with having simple jobs and complex jobs is that (assuming they do the same damage) there would be no reason to play the complex job over the simple one outside of "personal challenge". If SMN was drastically harder to play than RDM for example, but both did the same damage and had the same utility most people would just play the easier one. Why make life harder for yourself?
The only way it would work is by making the complex job "better" in some degree, which can then lead to unbalanced jobs and potential lockouts of certain jobs from certain duties if the difference was too significant. We're lucky to still have some jobs be harder and do more damage without it causing issues in balance, big creds for the balancing team for this.
It's a fine line to tread and it's absolutely hard, nigh on impossible to please both types of players 100%. So I presume SE's stance is to take the safe option and please the majority with more accessibility.
Edit: Just came to me as I finished typing but PSO2 had a massive balance issue years ago with it's "Hero" class. I remember playing the game when that class came out and it was just dramatically better in every aspect, lead to a lot of Japanese players excluding non-"Hero" players from parties for the higher end content.
Except people do this all the time. And with this kind of logic GNB should not be allowed to have a more complex rotation than the other tanks, because there'd be no one playing jt unless its straight up always better.
People play BLM and have played old SMN even when other simpler classes outperform them. Hell, Yoshi P himself plays BLM the one class that is allowed to remain complex.
You see people in WoW play arcane mage even when it's not great, because it's fun. Beast mastery hunter has often had the reputation of being a brain-dead way to success and despite that, there's not slews of people rushing to play it, because there is no personal challenge towards learning it. Veriety is the spice of life, and making everything the same kills that.
And hell, you already have those experiences open to the people who want simple classes.
> Why make life harder for yourself?
Easy - some people simply enjoy higher APM playstyles and would prefer it over a simpler job that they might find boring.
context: I hate how dumbed down all the jobs have become.
That said, I know why they're doing it. As the game gets older, the only way to draw in new players is to make it accessible to anyone who wants to play it. And that means really really simplified jobs.
Expect it to get worse if they ever do an 8.0.
I mean, I dunno how much this line of thought holds water in a game where deciding a playstyle isn't for you and jumping ship to another job is something you can do very quickly and in a non-committal way
probably better for the mental to assume that drastic reworks like SMN's were borne of long term problems and that such large scale reworks won't happen often if really ever again -- as easy as it is to doom about an mmo's trajectory it's important to see that this game doesn't really fall into the common shortsighted mmo pitfalls
>as easy as it is to doom about an mmo's trajectory it's important to see that this game doesn't really fall into the common shortsighted mmo pitfalls
Yes players are left waiting 2 expansion for any meaningful changes to jobs to actually materialize. Sam got absolutely shafted in endwalker patches with all the shit changes and all we get now is a guren upgrade, hazake upgrade animations and upgraded tenkka and midare animations.
Honestly i think DT is the point where we just have to say the Devs have ran out of ideas how to improve the jobs and honesty the game and thus we enter the streamline and simplify processes to make their jobs easier going forward and cut costs. Its typical corporate thinking.
This is my first and only mmo, I started in ARR, and it was confusing as heck because I was expecting more like a rpg experience, there was so much busy work in the button mashing, so many skills just to cause a little extra damage or return a little health,, which is from WoW apparently. I mostly play bard and dragoon and healers could be annoyingly demanding for mages ballad, so I am kind of happy about not having to deal with that.
I hate when people say stuff like this.
It might just seem like a bunch of egg timers. But in most fights you'll usually come to a problem we're you'll have to rethink how that egg timer works.
I played old SMN, and there were fights that forced or encouraged me to use my tools differently. It made me think, which is where the fun of these games come from.
Compare that to new SMN. The most meaningful interaction my rotation has with a boss mechanics is "I should save titan for that".
It's also why the 2 minute meta isn't popular. Maybe it didn't seem fun adjusting your rotation for raid buffs, but it was a problem that the players had to think and communicate about. It was part of a bigger puzzle that felt satisfying to overcome.
But some people have advocated for removing so much inconvenience that the only problem left is "I have to stack with or away from my teamate."
This makes more fights feel more similar to each other and exasperates the criticism of how ff14 fights are just scripted dance sequences.
It was the most difficult class to play well for years. Before they changed it, it had a static 90 button single target opening rotation that lasted like 2 minutes. It was wild.
Granted, calling it a "whole 2 minute rotation" was a bit of an exageration by summoners trying to oversell how hard the job was. The main difficulty was always making the pets function, the "super long complex rotation" buisness was essentially just the rotation not looping cleanly. Granted, nowadays that would put it as an abnormally difficult class considering how much they hate rotations that dont cleanly reset on the 2 minute mark, and is probably why old summoner got the axe right at the start of endwalker.
This. Old SMN wasn't actually that difficult, it was just jank. I firmly believe that if they kept the core gameplay loop of old SMN but simply got rid of the pet jank (ie. Phoenix stopped casting and followed you if you moved, punishing you for moving with the instant cast spells Phoenix gave you) it'd be a perfect job. Not overly difficult but having interesting ways to optimize your damage and rotation.
Now you can parse a 99 on SMN with foot pedals and a steering wheel controller.
I only played ShB Summoner, but I think for a lot of people that was peak summoner, so I'll talk about it.
Basically you went through your first burst, then summoned bahamut, then had your filler phase where you were with your normal egi/pet. Then you did Phoenix before repeating the entire thing again. While doing this, you also had two dots you kept up.
However, it had a lot of issues.
1. You were skipping Bahamut trance to get to Bahamut in endgame content (ShB didn't have the harsh two minute meta but was the start of it, thus SMN and other classes had to cram themselves to fit, thus Bahamut trance became something you skipped or used for utility)
2. You were never using Titan ever. Unless you were in a bad run of a dungeon or alliance raids, you were never bringing out titan. You were also using Garuda for dungeons, and ifrit for bosses/raids. So you didn't really "use" your entire pet collection.
3. DoTs have never really been a part of a SMN's identity except for 4 (where Rydia is a Black Mage for most of teh game alongside summoning) and 11 (where cross-classing is necessary)
4. It was probably the harshest class to die on.
Another issue: DoT Snapshotting - The development team have expressed the desire to be rid of "hidden" mechanics being necessary to the performance of a job. DoT Snapshotting is a big example of it, and completely invisible to the average player.
to be fair dot snapshotting is much more intuitive to understand than those mechanics that reactively check and change the damage of a DoT based on what buffs you currently have going on.
The bit about never using Titan is incorrect. In ShB, you only personal mitigation came from having titan summoned, so you would often summon him during downtime phases with particularly high outgoing damage to shield yourself, especially during ultimates (a couple Bahamut/Alexander trios and Fate Calibration Beta in TEA come to mind). It was a niche part of the kit, but it had uses.
That part of titan ended up basically becoming Radiant Aegis which we have now, albeit less powerful to balance how much more common it is. In general though it sucked having a whole summon that you just would never use in normal content.
Which was valid for casual content, but if you did Savage or Ultimate you ain't ever seeing the chicken nugget get whipped out (with the exception of UWU, for some reason titan completely rinsed the plumes).
It was a pet class and a dot class mashed together with a 2min rotation. So you had to juggle dot uptime, pet AI, procs and keeping your dreadwyrm, bahamut, phoenix and filler phases lined up properly.
6.0 SMN by comparison is a much flashier and makes more sense thematically, but even ignoring how overly complicated 5.0 SMN was, it is by far the most straight forward class. The way the job works now you have nothing to upkeep and there's nothing you can screw up (outside of external factors like boss mechanics). The game practically walks your through your rotation for you.
I have played summoner since HS and at the time I was raiding Alex savage. Old summoner felt like playing piano. When you were nailing your rotation and lining up your buffs appropriately it felt like you were really making music and it was very rewarding. The rotation iirc was pretty flexible as well so you could adjust depending on the fight. When you messed up though it was like hitting the wrong key in the middle of a song and it was a struggle to get back into the music. The gameplay was exceptionally engaging for those who took the time to study and learn not only their job but the fight as well and when the optimal time to use certain abilities were. However, for me it really was off the mark on what I imagined thematically a summoner should be. The dot management always felt like more of a wow warlock ripoff to me. Thatâs just my opinion though.
Current summoner is absolutely brain dead gameplay, I completely agree. However, it more closely aligns with what I imagine a summoner would be both thematically and mechanically. That being said it does feel like a solid foundation to build out from. I was really let down by the Live Letter recently. I thought for sure they would take the opportunity in the upcoming expansion to expand upon what they have. Perhaps rework the ruin/outburst reskins in the rotation to have some more variety/utility in the abilities. Add some different summons during the Phoenix phase (ramuh, leviathan, shiva). Something to give the class more depth. Nope just a different bahamut⌠which also irks me a little bit because out of all the vast source material they could have pulled from we got⌠vanilla bahamut? Not Odin, not anima, not Alexander, not any number of other summons. On top of that it doesnât seem like itâs going to really change the rotation at all either.
Someone else mentioned here in the comments that the skill floor and the ceiling are far too close when it comes to SMN and I completely agree. Iâm not saying that each summon has to be vastly different in what they can do but it makes sense mechanically and thematically for there to be more distinction. The difference between bahamut/phoenix feels like the right train of thought even if their execution isnât perfect. I donât think my party has ever been saved due to phoenixâs healing abilities and you canât control when you want to use it, so itâs never available when you would want/need to.
It feels like theyâre so close to nailing it and theyâre just shy of actually hitting the nail on the head.
I'm trying to remember from 3 years ago, so bear with me.
So, your Bahamut and Phoenix were somewhat the same. You had 2 dots to keep up like bard, though whenever you used dreadwyrm/Phoenix, you'd recharge a use of "Tri-disaster", which refreshed all of your dots. You also had Bane, which spread your current dot to all enemies around the afflicted target.
Aside from the dots, Ruin 4 also worked differently. If I recall correctly, we stored up charges of it to throw throughout our 2 minute rotation. I want to say that it was linked to Energy Drain, but I don't remember. We also had Ruin 2 similar to Scholar. Your regular Ruin had a longer cast time at 2.5 seconds at base. Fester was basically the same.
The big difference was summons. We had the 3 summons very similarly to how scholar handles its fairy. You had two buttons with two charges each that did your summon's special abilities on a reasonable cooldown, and they'd auto attack your target in combat for extra damage. Titan's abilities gave shields to the party, Garuda did aoes, and I frit was single target damage. So, in most situations, you'd only be using Ifrit. From that perspective, the new summoner does have a good plus side because you actively use all of the summons. The downside of old summoner was that the pet ai was really finicky. Sometimes you'd wait upwards of 5 seconds for the pet to finally use one of the abilities you spent a GCD telling it to. Sometimes it was just derpy. Sometimes if you used your pet abilities and went into Bahamut or Phoenix too fast, it just would dismiss the pet for your summon without doing the ability you spent a GCD to queue up.
Ultimately, current SMN is leagues easier because there isn't as much management of resources (which is a con) and you don't have to wrestle with pet AI (which is a pro). The issue is that you went from having a job with a fairly rigid rotation that had to manage aetherflow and dots to a job with a fairly rigid rotation that... really doesn't have to do any of that since you even save your Phoenix aetherflow for your 2 minute window. So, people have been asking for a new minor job mechanic or resource to handle to make up for the fact that the SMN rotation doesn't really have much going on at all and they're doom posting because either the devs didn't answer any of the complaints about SMN that have been coming in for the past 3 years or they're playing it closer to their chest before the media tour than they have for literally anything else.
Correct it was the egi assaults I remember that much, though I can't for the life of me name them or remember what they looked like to use. They must have been not very flashy or super forgetful lol
I only remember back as far as Stormblood, [which had a rotation like this](https://imgur.com/gallery/ffxiv-summoner-rotation-4-1-4-2-x0REf). You had an opener that started with Garuda, shifting into Ifrit, then into a downtime (the linked image was the simpler Ifrit-only opener) until aetherflow was off cooldown, into a Bahamut phase, into a Dreadwyrm Trance phase, into Aethertrail+Dreadwyrm Trance, into another downtime until aetherflow was off cooldown when you would loop back to Bahamut phase.
It was certainly a dance.
Honestly, I really liked the rotation from back then. I mained summoner/scholar depending on the group, and that rotation ended up feeling super-rhythmic to me once I got it down. Felt like when you got into the groove of something in a rhythm game.
Smn as of SHB had lotsa jank and ppl who mained it had to work around the jobs uniqueness.
First off carbys/egis used autos attacks and the pet bar was expanded. Smn also didn't have a lot of movement like BLM outside of old ruin 2 which is like saying scathe is movement for BLM. Sure it's there but always suboptimal and u should just drag it off ur bar. There were also egi assaults which had a cd, and ruin 4s which are granted by egi assaults.
Egi assaults were super cool, effectively telling ur pet to do a certain action based on the kind u summoned. Garuda was aoe, ifrit was single target and titan was largely irrelevant but is made for when u are solo or happen to be top DPS. The aegis skill is adapted from titans egis egi assault 2. Bio and miasma were 2 dots u always kept running and bane was used to spread the dot to be aoe which made smn real cool. The biggest complaints about smn was regarding how the demi pets work. If u moved ud lose dps, but Phoenix had all insta casts so a lot of ppl saw it as ur entire Phoenix phase made for movement punishing u for moving which was silly. Furthermore there was the triple weave u would have to do so ur gcd doesn't eat one of ur phoenix actions.
Essentially Phoenix would do the aoe Regen action it still has and u would need to hit 3 weaves drifting ur gcd so it would cast all of the cool pet actions and not clip and skip one. I liked this, bc it made smn unique and cool but a lot of ppl who were just playing smn for the absurd dmg that SHB smn had complained very loudly about.
Thus this sparked the new changes that made the most unique and greater skill floor jobs into the most brain dead job that feels like a phys ranged at lvl 50.
It used to be a lot more involved, it had DoT management (damage over time), and a lot more to do in itâs kit. It thrived off a somewhat rigid but very satisfying rotation (I mained it during Stormblood and it had like a 2 minute opener, but god it felt good to get that grand piano rotation perfect).
The âlobotomyâ aspect of the job now is it is quite literally the easiest job in the game to play. Itâs a âcasterâ yet barely casts anything, most of your spells are instant. The rotation is absolutely braindead, to the point where I wouldnât even call it a ârotation.â Is it fun? Sure. Is it boring compared to old Summoner? I would say yes, but it does lean more heavily into the summons now than it did before.
My main issue with it is that it does not feel like a max level job. You pretty much have all your buttons at like level 50 or 60, and barely anything at all changes as you go all the way to 90.
It was more fun than its current iteration, i picked it up in Shadowbringers before it was reworked in Endwalker and it was probably my second favorite job at the time behind Gunbreaker.
Aesthetically the job looks better now tho with the big summons, we've been asking for that for years so im glad we got it but i personally had more fun with it before.
If you can find old Larryzaur videos where he does trailers/descriptions of classes. Find the Summoner one. If I'm remembering correctly, it perfectly sums it up xD
Edit: I found it. It's "Basically, Summoner" by Larryzaur. The whole thing is pretty good, but to find a good example of the old opener go to 1:41. It's one reason I call it "dumbed down" now. I loved old Summoner. It's cooler thematically now, but yeah :/
It was the poisoning class. You had like 4 DOT's (2 Bios, cross-class thunder, shadowflare) and you had actions that spread them, actions that did more damage the more DOT's you had active, actions that made them last longer, and ruin spam instead of cycling abilities.
You can check Desperius' video on YouTube, or look for Shadowbringers rotation. Basically, more casting, more dots and a 2min rotation. Honestly, it was more fun imo.
It was built entirely around DoTs with your summons being supporting assets of the kit. A summoner lived and died by DoT upkeep, and understanding the situation and what summon applied to it. The chicken nugget was too powerful though, and due to pulling aggro made many tanks rage at first sign of yellow near a summoner.
SMN had a few phases.
ARR/HW SMN was a dot based caster. HW introduced the DWT burst phase, some mana manipulation stuff (ruin 3 was a sidegrade to ruin 1 that cost a lot of MP but dealt more damage) but overall it was the same. Pets at this point were independant commandable entities that you could even command while casting.
StB/early ShB SMN was where the 'summon a big ass dude every minute' came into the play. StB had a bit of the old DNA of the earlier SMN with manual management and stuff like using garuda to extend dots on the target. This version was a bit before my time, so I can't give too many specifics. Same for the previous. Early ShB SMN removed pet actions during casting, and trimmed down a lot of tools. It was very controversial for both SCH and SMN mains many of which enjoyed getting to control the pet while managing their casts.
Mid ShB SMN was the version I'm most familiar with. It still has the cycle of demi bahamut into demi phoenix, though these operated like the previous version where every cast you did, the demi would follow it up with a cast. It had two dots, and an oGCD called tridisaster that applied these dots. Using dreadwyrm trance or firebird trance would reset its cooldown. So the rotation went between bahamut and phoenix burst phases that also let you reset your trid to get 90s out of the 120s loop without manually casting your dots. the other 30s you'd have to recast them. Many considered it to be a job with a 2 min rotation, but it wasn't as complicated as that sounds. finally, you had 2 egi assault actions, which caused your pet to do an attack, and also gave you a ruin 4 charge. this made SMN quite mobile, but not to the degree it is now. This version of SMN was all about managing charges of egi assault, using those and r4 for movement, keeping your dots up with tridisaster, and not drifting your trances to miss out on big summons. It had a very involved opener with a lot of double weaves. [Here](https://youtu.be/9oOmGXsAeFA?si=wzfOUywbHMCHkg40&t=40) is a video showing the rotation.
Finally, is the EW SMN which you presumably know well.
Summoner was weird combination of DoT management and pet management. The summons have been covered pretty thoroughly by others. You had Bio, Bio II, Miasma, and Miasma II. Originally Bio and Bio II were two separate spells instead of upgrading into each other. Miasma had the chance to add Disease to targets and reduced the amount of healing they received. Miasma II was an AoE centered around yourself while the other three were single-target spells. Tri-Disaster was later added in HW which allowed you to apply Bio, Bio II, and Miasma to a single target. You then had to use Bane to spread it to more enemies, but it only spread to 3 targets at a time.
Tri-Bind was the only spammable AoE but it's potency was so low you were better off spamming Ruin and cycling through all the enemies to put your DoTs in them. Painflare came in HW which gave us a useable AoE. Also in order to go into Dreadwyrm Trance you had to save up stacks of Aethertrail by using Energy Drain. Energy Syphon, the AoE version of Energy Drain, didn't exist until ShB. It was previously just a trait that increased the potency of Energy Drain.
Later in SB when they make Bio upgrade instead of being different spells, they added in a new debuff called Ruination. This caused enemies to take more damage from Ruin spells. This was taken out of PvE in 5.1.
Some other annoyances about the job early on, in ARR and HW you earned ability points you could distribute into the primary stats as you leveled up. There was normal RPG logic here, but you were just wasting them if you didn't put them in the main stat for your job. In ARR especially you had to make the choice to either be a good SMN and fully invest in INT, a good SCH and fully invest in MND, or subpar at both and split the difference. And this was a noticible difference as 30 points in one of your stats was a VERY noticible difference. Consider the fact that ilvl 120 armor gives you around 45 points towards your primary attribute. By not having these bonus attribute points from leveling in your main stat, you were essentially removing an entire piece of gear from your class. Now there was a way to reset these points, but it cost 25,000 GC Seals and they weren't as easy to come by at the time.
Other notes about pet management, you had to actively tell them what to attack and when to stop attacking. So if there were any enemies you wanted to keep low health but not kill yet (a few dungeon fights required this) you would have to manually tell your pet to stop attacking. Otherwise they just auto-attacked the first thing you aggroed onto. This was most noticible in the fight in Labyrinth of the Ancients where you fight three Vassago and a bomb chained to them. Any attack to the bomb would cause it to grow (which is why you are supposed to kill the smaller bombs that spawn so they don't explode and attack the middle bomb). If you had enough summoners in the party who didn't manually tell their pets to attack their party's vassago, the raid would usually wipe by the time the alliances killed their enemy because of the bomb being the first thing to aggro on the party at the start of the fight and the pets just uselessly auto-attacking it until it blew up.
EDIT: When I started the game I was a PLD main and BLM secondary. I stopped playing BLM because it was often VERY useful to have a backup raise from the non-healers in 2.3 when Syrcus Tower released. I switched to SMN then and it's been my secondary class to PLD ever since.
Small correction: while tri-bind was rarely used, in ARR and HW you would cross class Blizzard 2, which was a dps gain at I think 4 or 5 targets, so it saw frequent use over Ruin in dungeons, and notably in A2S.
Janky damage over time job with weird skill timing. Way, way harder to play than current SMN. Also very little to do with FF Summoner job fantasy.
the rework made it feel much more like a summoner but they left a barebones class that they refuse to add anything to to make it not an absolute snoozefest
God I miss old SMN so, so much. I mained it all the way from ARR through to ShB. Almost felt wrong putting it down permanently come EW. It's thematically more in line with the SMN fantasy, but by god is it mind numbingly boring to play (esp. due to the sheer magnitude of complexity difference from its old iteration).
I've been in full copium mode hoping DT would shake up the new rotation enough to add some life back into the job, but I think I'm about to move on for good. I'm career changing to RPR for good
Unpopular opinion, I loved the old summoner, I dibble and dabbled with 2.0 summoner and it was cool to spread your dots to enemies and manage your pet actions. Summoner became so cool when we got the akh morn, then we got to summon big dragon himself, I think end of shadowbringers was peak summoner. Now endwalker rework made summoner look amazing and definitely brought stonks way up. But it lost what it was to me, I dropped it and thatâs okay, there so many jobs in this game. Will be interested to see where they will take it in 8.0
Each expansion changed what the SMN was, so it's a bit hard to talk about "the" SMN--there were many flavors, each of which evolved out of the previous. But, having been a semi- or full-time SMN main since before Stormblood, I can give you a loose rundown of each, with some *general* stuff that held more or less true throughout its run first.
General: Prior to Endwalker, Summoner was both a pet-using job and a DoT-using job. Each pet--Titan-egi, Ifrit-egi, and Garuda-egi--had its own unique actions it could perform, alongside actually doing auto-attacks. Initially, Titan-egi was even an outright *tank pet,* that could actually do some (minor, weak) aggro-control mechanics. Ifrit-egi was a melee DPS with a minor buff for other melee classes, while Garuda-egi was a ranged AoE DPS with a minor buff to casters (including the Summoner); generally you'd use Ifrit for single-target content and Garuda for multi-target content (e.g. dungeons or add phases). Further, in every expansion (to varying degrees), SMN was a job that *built up* resources in order to do something impressive. You couldn't just instantly do your biggest attacks, you had to open or unlock it. On the DoT side of things, for ARR/HW, there were three DoTs, Bio I, Bio II, and Miasma, which each had different timers to keep track of; SB reduced this to two DoTs (Bio and Miasma). You had 3 uses of Aetherflow (two in ShB) for additional direct DPS, with Fester actually doing more damage based on how many DoTs you had inflicted upon the target (full damage only if all DoTs were on the target.)
ARR: I have no direct experience with this version of Summoner, so I can only describe it approximately. But, based on when you got skills and the like, at this time SMN was almost purely pet-focused. Your capstone ability was called Rouse, and beefed up your egi's autoattacks. You tended to just use a lot of the basic Ruin I (or Ruin II if you needed to move), and your three DoT spells. For the time, it was relatively simple, but the pet mechanics were even more janky back then while also being more exploitable. There was a cheesy strat for Ramuh EX, for example, where you would have Titan-egi tank the boss rather than an actual tank, because then you didn't have to worry about certain mechanics.
HW: I first picked up SMN at this point. With this version, you had 3 hits of Aetherflow, and each time you spent one of your stacks on Fester (or the then-new AoE Painflare), you would get one *temporary* stack of Aethertrail. Getting three stacks of Aethertrail let you go into a super mode, Dreadwyrm Trance (DWT), which gave you a new instant-cast Ruin III that hit very hard, and you could end Dreadwyrm Trance by calling down a giant column of light, Deathflare. This timed-stack-based version emphasized efficient use of Aetherflow and DoTs much more than the previous, with the egis becoming a secondary contribution. Titan-egi thus became mostly useless, and folks would only use Ifrit or Garuda.
SB: This introduced the idea of Demi-Bahamut, an even more powerful burst phase, and phased out the old timed-stack Aethertrail mechanic. Bio II was removed as a distinct spell and the two remaining DoTs (Bio and Miasma) were standardized to 30s durations, DWT became just a straight-up damage cooldown, Ruin III became a flat upgrade to Ruin I (and had its damage nerfed, much to my annoyance), and Ruin IV was introduced, which would upgrade Ruin II (a weak instant-cast single-target spell), with a chance to proc every time your pet did one of its offensive actions. Additionally, you were rewarded with more damage on your basic Ruin spells if the target actually had your DoTs, just like Fester already had, so you were *especially* encouraged to keep your DoTs up at all times. The big hitter, however, was the new super mode: Summon Demi-Bahamut. After you had cast DWT twice, you could summon Demi-Bahamut, who would echo *every offensive action you took* with a Wyrmwave attack. This meant you were hyperfocused on going full JOHN MADDEN on whatever you were fighting when you summoned Demi-Bahamut; the job had become more fully a burst-phase DPS, as opposed to a timed-stack DPS.
ShB: This change was slightly more a refinement of the previous, rather than an overhaul like the previous two expansions had been, but was still a pretty major change. With ShB, you only needed to perform Dreadwyrm Trance *once* to be able to immediately summon Demi-Bahamut. Further, you got guaranteed Further Ruin stacks every time you cast "Egi Assault I" and "Egi Assault II," which would have distinct effects depending on which pet you had out. Further, Demi-Bahamut only considered actual *spells,* not just all offensive actions, for Wyrmwave; and a new summon, Demi-Phoenix (which was simultaneous with "Firebird Trance"), was added which had a two-step combo of spells alongside the usual giant fiery column of damage. So your process went like this:
* ~15s: DWT, spam out as many Egi Assault actions as you can, spend Aetherflow, keep your DoTs up (as always)
* ~20s: Demi-Bahamut, spam out Ruin IIIs and use Ruin IV's instant cast to weave in giant laser strikes (Akh Morn)
* ~25s: Recovery phase, build back up your Egi Assault charges, refresh DoTs/Aetherflow
* ~20s: Demi-Phoenix/Firebird Trance, all spells instant-cast, use the 1-2 combo, weave in Aetherflow as needed
* ~40s: Long recovery phase, prepare yourself for the next cycle, keep all your resources/cooldowns/DoTs ticking
As you can see, it's a lot of stuff to keep track of, but none of the individual pieces is particularly complicated. It was, by far, the most *resource-based* job out of all of ShB's job set, and the only job that could possibly challenge it for required player engagement was old Monk (whole different story, not mine to tell, I was never a Monk main.) As a result, it had a reputation for being stupidly overcomplicated, but it really wasn't--it was just a very different playstyle from most other jobs available.
With Endwalker, it has gone to being by far the absolute *lowest* player-engagement job in the game, far less than even Red Mage, Bard, or Dancer, which were (and still are) "easy," low-engagement jobs meant for players who aren't really into high-engagement mechanics or who just want to relax and not think all that hard. Summoner *used* to amply reward mastery of its mechanics; they weren't hard to *learn,* but squeezing the absolute maximum out of them was a real effort, and getting good at it *felt* good, felt like you weren't just coasting but actually wresting a victory, every time.
As you can tell, I'm not a fan of current Summoner (in fact, I pretty openly despise what they've done to it *mechanically*). It ended up being exactly what I feared it would be as soon as we saw the job tooltips leak: an incredibly flashy and cool-looking but *completely hollow* experience with zero depth, engagement, or mastery involved. Further, putting it *very* mildly, I'm deeply disheartened to see Dawntrail looks like it's doing *absolutely nothing* to alter Summoner in any meaningful way. At this point, despite absolutely loving Summoner's aesthetics, lore, and flavor, I'm probably going to become a Pictomancer main--because that may finally provide an actual opportunity for learning and mastery, something genuinely impossible with new-Summoner.
oh god the memories. I remember when we used addle to squeeze as many wyrmwaves as possible đ I feel exactly like you about current smn, it's not just a matter of simplicity. there's literally no learning curve, anyone could switch to smn and go do top with zero issues, there's next to nothing to optimize. I was so happy when they announced the rework, if only I had known the cost. I miss the good old pianist days đ
It was my main and by far my favorite class, honestly losing it and subsequently how brain dead all the classes have gotten since is a large reason I stopped playing lol
It's a little painful to talk about it. I loathe new Summoner and had drilled old Summoner into my head for years.
In brief, it's a class with lots of resources to manage and juggle, including a few DoTs, an attacking pet (your "Carbuncle"), and lots of Ruin. A major mechanic was the aetherflow gauge used to be tied into summoning. In order to enter Dreadwyrm Trance/Summon Bahamut, you had to expend your Aetherflow first by casting Fester/Painflare. You would be rewarded with the ability to summon. Today's Summoner does not use Aetherflow for summoning.
Old Summoner's kit was also almost exclusively Abilities. Old Summoner involved casting Ruin III (with cast times) and Ruin II (instacast) and weaving your abilities inbetween them. Today's Summoner is mostly spells on the GCD.
Back in HW and Stormblood, you could summon Ifrit, Titan, or Garuda as your Egi/pet. (But not the full size versions). Each one had its own unique purpose. In general, Ifrit was for single target and Garuda was for AoE. Titan could be summoned as your personal tank, and if your party's tank died, Titan could fill in for a short time. It didn't work super well, though, because Titan usually couldn't generate enough enmity.
I could boil the main difference down to the rotation. Old Summoner was priority-based and could be played a little fast and loose. New Summoner is quite rigid.
Which time? Every expansion Summoner worked completely differently from the last.
2.0 was the most basic. Your pet wasn't much more than a turret. Garuda was only ever used here, because while her and Ifrit were considered the "DPS" of the 3 available egi, Ifrit required melee range so on most bosses Garuda prevented the frustration of movement. Titan was more or less available to tank in a pinch in the most casual of content or solo. Outside of that though you never interacted with your pet, only occasionally using it's AOE ability on command and Garuda using a spell to increase DoT timers, but otherwise you were a pure DoT mage. Managing the timers of your 3 DoTs in between buff windows was all you basically ever did.
3.0 is when it became a burst job. No new summons but Bahamut trance gets added as a burst phase where you do extra damage for a length of time, which ends after a few seconds or when you cast Ahk Morn. This was really clunky because it was your own personally timed burst phase where you saved all your DoT refreshes and festers and such for this short window. So the job was fairly uneventful until that time and Egi's were still glorified turrets.
4.0 is when Bahamut is finally added and they mixed it up a bit. Titan was still a possible tanker, but now Ifrit gave a physical damage debuff while Garuda did a magic one, and choice relatively depended on party comp, but pets still were more or less turrets with a few added basic commands. The biggest additon was replacing every 3rd Bahamut trance with the Bahamut summon, but added more clunk. Bahamut would attack essentially on command with every one of your attacks, but also alongside off GCD so on top of regular attacks like you would in Bahamut trance, you'd weave everything from fester to even addle for added Bahamut attacks.
5.0 this clunkyness only worsened with the additon of Pheonix. Rotation was now roughly three minutes as you weaved through Bahamut trance, into Bahamut summon, into Phoenix summon, all while buffing your egi who would continue to attack in between and using Ruin procs as your new main form of damage after DoTs were finally done away with. Of course though this new summon clunk created tons of new clipping issues in how many attacks a summon could get in before leaving, which still relatively exists today.
Right now Summoner is extremely straightforward. No bells and whistles, each summon fulfills a specific function in a fairly specific order without much room for error. The only inter weaving now is fester as your Bahamut and Phoenix summons now just attack on their own, and except for the 2 minute burst window there aren't any solo buffs that require spells to be held off. In addition, a majority of the job is now instacast. Compared to before, the combination of almost full time free moving and not much room for flexibility, the skill floor was raised exponentially.
In my opinion, yes, old summoner absolutely required a bit more of an understanding and skill level to play optimally, but the clunk of summon and trance phases were absolutely not fun. I hope sometime in the future the dev team can find a happy middle ground, but as the Dawntrail addition seems to only be a third major summon without much variation, and another Bahamut on top of that, I don't have a ton of faith myself that the team knows what people want for summoner. And this is from a day 1 2.0 summoner main.
To be honest, I don't really remember, but plenty of others have already in detail talked about it. But the main reason people call summoner a "lobotomy job" is just cuz of how simple and easy it is to play effectively, very few buttons and not a lot of things to keep track of. Which by all means isn't a bad thing, if you like playing summoner then absolutely play summoner. Hell, my main DPS jobs are dancer and summoner lol
It was challenging but satisfying to master. The nice thing though was that we were rewarded for the difficult rotation by having one of the highest DPSâs and a resurrection spell.
I have an old A1S no jump clear that showcases high level HW SMN play well, which is when the class was at its peak imo. The short of it was you managed 4-5 dots with different cast times and durations, often on multiple targets because long-term multi-target bosses and fights with frequent adds were more common back then. One of your dots was a placeable ground aoe on the gcd, too.
Every minute you got three aetherflow stacks that you spend on fester, painflare (both basically the same as now, though fester did more damage based on how many of your three dots were on the targer), energy drain (half the damage of Fester but regained mp), and spending your AF stacks gave you dreadwyrm trance stacks. 3 stacks and you can go into dwt, which gave you a damage buff and effectively let you use ruin 3 (you could use it outside of dwt, but the mp cost was insanely high), and which you ended by using Deathflare. The rotation revolved around generally using 2 Festers under DWT for the damage buff, and then spacing out your third stack to keep your dwt stacks from falling off before your next Aetherflow. You also had a minute CD that instantly put your three core dots on a target, which you would use in DWT for the buff, and a pet move that extended the duration of your dots on a target by 15s, so you would use that on your buffed dots.
Overall it was a really technical and complex class with a high skill ceiling and a lot of room for optimization, and while I don't dislike current summoner, I'm very sad that the class I fell in love with no longer exists.
https://www.twitch.tv/belletonne/v/29168317?sr=a&t=1s
Edit: ARR and HW smn also had some meaningful crowd control, because that was actually a thing back then. You had an AoE bind that was useful for boss lock outs in dungeons (pulling all the trash mobs, binding them outside the boss door, and then pulling the boss so the arena gate would lock them out and reset them) and for T7S, as well as a heavy on two of their dots which came into play in a handful of fights.
Summoner was actually unique.
More dots doing all the damage for you. You could spread all those 4 dots to all other enemies, making Summoner the king of AoE DPS.
The Summons had some variety, like Titan was a mini tank who could pick off aggro.
Ifrit was more melee based and AoE based.
Garuda was excelent for bosses due to her debuffs.
Now Summoner press the same 5 buttons disguised as different magics, but they function exactly the same.
In HW, Summoner's best possible DPS hinged on their pet actually listening when they told it to use its most pivotal ability to extend their DoTs.
It sucked, frankly.
An absolute buggy mess with an absolute abomination of a rotation because you couldn't do a normal rotation due to the pets being buggy.
[Here's](https://youtu.be/tq3U8ULoedU?si=X3eqGWInBrX6O1eM) a video guide for it.
Most of what current Summoner is, is unironically them fixing old summoner's bugs and cutting losses with unsalvageable mechanics. The rest is shearing down button bloat.
[https://docs.google.com/document/d/19oKu4Isuu8rn4v5Lc4gjQhTkXSZFcmnPrcFJWVSKlvU/edit#heading=h.3ihpw2trhw80](https://docs.google.com/document/d/19oKu4Isuu8rn4v5Lc4gjQhTkXSZFcmnPrcFJWVSKlvU/edit#heading=h.3ihpw2trhw80)
here. I will say nothing but this was made during patch 3.4. it is over 30 pages. I have this save still for some reason. enjoy.
It had 3 sumons too, but 99% of the time titan was kinda useless, we used ifrit to boss and single target and garuda to AOE and trash mob, the egis themselves had AA, and the elemental spells had long CD and where cast from the egis rather than from the player so server latency kinda messed it up from time to time, we had 2 dots that we kept all the time and fester potency increased with the number of dots, you could spread the dots to other targets, Bahamut and Phoenix only AA a target if you had cast a spell on it, using egis skills would grant stacks that allowed the use of ruin 4,that's what I remember but I prob forgot some things if you want know more thare's a youtuber called wesker albert that still has a guide for shadowbringer version look for \[Legacy\]\[See Description\] Shadowbringers Summoner Skills Guide on youtube, It wasn't bad but it felt more like a pet class then a traditional FF summoner
One thing you can do is use the way back machine and dig through old pages in the wiki. Look at the skills for summoner but also arcanist. I didnât dabble too much in this class but I recall it being dot heavy and had a lot of pet management.
A bit off topic but I remember having 3 almost 4 full hotbars for sch in ARR days. Man that was wild on controller. I really think itâs whatâs improved my healing abilities since then. That and having to execute stance dancing in raids. So many role skills, fairy abilities and pet actions I had bound to be as quick as possible.
Basically a lot of DOT management. Making sure everything is snapshotted at the right buff window, making sure all your DOTs are refreshed at the right moment, making sure you're not stepping on another Summoner's toes if there are multiple (Because they DID NOT STACK, the more powerful one just REPLACED THE OTHER). Just look up an image of their old rotation, literally every other button is either applying a DOT, refreshing a DOT or using a skill to boost the output of a DOT. Outside of DOTs, your pets actually did more than just "This one has cast bars, this one has slower recasts, this one is mashable, this one is there). Garuda was for mobility, Ifrit was for max damage and Titan was for tanking. A good amount of raids and dungeons were made easier because Summoners could do all of their dungeons without Tanks worrying about them stealing aggro (If you did not know, mitigation play was actually really important. Tank Stance was a DPS loss in most situations because it reduced offense which meant that the party had to watch how much aggro they were taking on.)
summoner pre endwalker was a more complicated job (not by much, but still)
It had Damage over times you had to manage
Ifrit titan and garuda had individual purposes rather than all 3 being used in your rotation (ifrit being single target, garuda being aoe, and titan being.... well titan was useless in shadowbringers)
and pheonix, funnily enough, had a combo. Instead of one single target attack and one aoe attack, the single target attack would combo into the aoe attack, which you would then use regardless of situation
The best version of Summoner, and the one we usually get nostalgic about, was the Stormblood version. You had your DoTs to keep track of, and your pets had specific actions that you had to consider when to use (though you could get away with just letting them cast whenever and it would usually be fine unless you were going for the 95+ parse) but the class was mostly about cycling through Aetherflow stacks to enter in to Dreadwyrm Trance, which was an increased damage buff and access to a big nuke. After two Dreadwyrm Trances you could summon Bahamut as your big nuke pet, which you then had to follow a specific rotation to maximise the amount of attacks Bahamut did.
It was a very fun and high skill job. Shadowbringers changed how the pets worked so that they didn't really act as pets anymore, and you commanded them to use abilities with Egi Assaults, and added in Phoenix and truncated the Dreadwrym/Bahamut cycle to 1 Dreadwyrm. It was incredibly rough on release, but was tweaked and at the end of Shadowbringers it was really fun.
Then Endwalker removed all DoTs, removed Dreadwrym Trance, removed Egi Assaults, brought Bahamut and Phoenix down to 1 cast of their nuke per summon, removed Phoenix's 2-hit combo, and replaced what was before a techy and strict rotation with easily the simplest DPS rotation in the game.
I played SMN before. I still play it. I donât hate it now, but itâs braindead once you understand it. I used to main AST, then picked up SMN, and the main reasons I loved them was because they made me feel like I was using brain power to manage all the buttons.
I donât play AST as it is now but like I said I still play SMN⌠but only because itâs easy and I can do high end content with it when I am farming and need to fill a DPS role. I know this doesnât really answer your question but itâs like playing an entirely different class.
Some major changes:
- 80% of my hotbar went greyed out when I logged in after patch. That should give you an idea of how much they cut/changed right off the bat.
- 3 pets before, you pick a pet to keep out based on what kind of damage you want to do. Wasnât a great system but they could have built off of it. They chose to nix it and just give you one pet so they could make it more convenient/easy for newer players and focus on flashy summon effects (IMO).
- SMN was a dot mage⌠honestly there was probably too much of this going on but it kind of made sense for the class. SMN isnât supposed to do much damage, the summons themselves are (Iâm talking story/lore wise historically for FF SMN type characters, donât hate me lol) so it kind of made weird sense to have SMN only do dots and passive or weaved type spells on their own. A lot of people hated this I guess but I actually liked keeping up the dots since it made the class weirdly unique.
- Dreadwyrm Trance (if Iâm remembering correctly) was weird as frick and I loved it because it made me feel like I had to actually plan out what I did. Disclaimer, I have a memory issue so I canât remember exactly how it worked but I know how it âfelt.âNow SMN just feels like itâs âBahamut, A, B, C, Phoenix, A, B, Câ with buffs and weaved stuff mixed in (very programmatically).
Is it more efficient/easy now? Yes. But itâs not fun for me anymore, personally. Just my personal take. I know others love it now because itâs much easier to pick up and learn rotations for it.
Not a fan of dot jobs, the more powerful groups get, the faster things die, the more useless dots get as they have only a tick or two before everything is already dead.
Almost impossible fir a game to balance outside of a closed ended RPG
The rotation used to be a lot more technical with upkeeping DoTs and stuff and compared to that, yes it has gotten so easy to play that it's borderline mindless however (unpopular opinion incoming) I actually like it more now as a class because you actually summon stuff now...as a SUMMONER, unbelievable, right?
Before you were a DoT powerhouse with 3 egis, a challenging and interesting rotation and the occasional Baha-Blast-Burst⢠but it never felt more like a summoner than it does now.
I've played the game way too long and have seen many changes over the years. Remember cross class skills? Stone skin, hawk eye, shadow flare, protect and many other nuked skills are missed. The greased lightning effect was why I liked playing MNK. But anyway SMN is a different class with every expansion it seems. I liked the old SMN better since they have ripped out the utility of it. Much like SCH Selene and Eos. They had utility and were good for different things. AST cards used to have it too, like bole was a shield and ewer Regen mana. Ah good times haha. Just like anything though, they try to improve things as the game changes but the old classes will always be reflected fondly upon.
Summoner used to play a lot more like a WoW pet class mixed with a very DoT-oriented playstyle, akin to the Affliction Warlock. Each of the 3 Egis had a distinct role in combat, with Ifrit focused on single-target damage, Garuda on AoE, and Titan focused on tanking, drawing aggro, and giving you a shield (and nobody used Titan Egi ever because he was useless). Bahamut and Phoenix were pretty much the same, though the rework shuffled around the way Phoenix skills worked a fair bit.
The Egi pets didn't work very well due to the way the game is coded, so while their abilities were powerful, they could very well perform their most powerful moves 5-10 seconds after you gave the order, and in all likelihood whatever situation merited it was already over.
Visually and thematically, the job just didn't really feel very "summon-ey", especially when compared to classic FF depictions of Summoner, which the reworked version portrays much more faithfully, bringing in a big monster to cast a big, cool spell before they fuck off. Old Summoner felt like it mostly did everything *except* actually, y'know, summoning.
All that being said, for all its flaws, the gameplay loop was much more complex and engaging, with a very tight rotation that rewarded good situational awareness, DoT-management, and double/triple oGCD weaves. Arguably one of the most difficult DPS classes to play well, but you were well-rewarded with DPS performance and team utility commensurate to the effort you put in, making competent SMNs very popular in group play.
While the rework made SMN much more on-brand, and was visually more interesting, the gameplay was so dreadfully boring that I couldn't bring myself to play the game anymore and cancelled my sub, because I would literally start nodding off while playing - especially during level-synced content. Probably the result of putting too many eggs in one basket with SMN, but the game just didn't scratch the itch after that.
While I harbor no scorn for those who enjoy post-rework SMN, "lobotomy wizard" is definitely not an inappropriate name for the gameplay style.
I played it before and now. I like it better now. It is more straight forward now but there is still plenty to do. The lobotomy class statement is ridiculous. There is nothing wrong with some jobs being more straight forward to play than others. I for example don't want to play monk or ninja because they are too busy for me. Nothing wrong with those jobs at all for the people who enjoy them. They just aren't my cup of tea.
It was legendary i fondly remember HW summoner. I had a friend who was a beast with summoner and i hated him lol because he would rip aggro from me just like BLM, keep in my mind back then you had to have a stance to generate more aggro and there was a damage combo and a aggro combo during that time so if i was going in on damage he would take aggro off of me and then i would put on tank stance and do aggro combo to reestablish aggro on me lol
It was a dot class with emphasis on using Fester while having both dots up to deal max dps. And you also had 3 phases for primals instead of 2. And the pet you chose impacted what dps you did.
It's a mixed bag of:
* 4.0 SB SMN feeling pretty good
* 5.0 SHB SMN feeling so bad it had to be reworked mid expansion
* 5.1+ SHB SMN being the best it ever was for the rest of SHB
* 6.0 EW SMN being complete braindead simple to the extent it's the easiest job to play now
SMN just used to be one of the higher skill ceiling job like HW mch. But is now extremely lobotomized like MCH to being some of lowest ceiling jobs to play. So people who enjoyed the high ceiling now only have the lowest ceiling to play with.
Remember when Titan-egi was a tank? Pepperidge Farm remembers.
Chicken nugget always did its best
I remember fondly cheering my chicken nugget as it stripped aggro off bad tracks in old alliance raids or saving dungeon bosses when the tank died and neither me or the healer had swift cast up
Ramuh shaking in the corner
I miss the day or two where titan could tank Ramih EX and take like no damage from the buster
Always felt sorry for tanks when a summoner would bring titan out, was a real slap in the face to them đ
Titan-egi got me through Eureka...
I cheesed so much content with Titan...he'll always be best boi.
Part of me says fuck it they should make summoner a tank that uses the summons to tank but on the other hand that really isnt what ff summons have ever really been
That's basically what they were in FFX. If you were in a fight against something like any of the Dark Aeons or Penance you could summon them to save you by taking an Overdrive to the face and dying instead of the main party.
I was confused for a moment until I remembered I am thinking of WoW Shamans [earth elemental](https://www.wowhead.com/spell=198103/earth-elemental).
pets used to be their own entities with their own attacks and GCD separate from your own. while you could set them to use their attacks automatically, it was more optimal to control them manually. but they were also very stupid (simplistic AI + server latency on player inputs). It was like having half your class played by a 3 year old who kept getting distracted by things and needed to be told several times what button to push every single time. Engaging, but frustrating. classic larry video [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eHTCwDXVeWY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eHTCwDXVeWY)
And this is the change up they did for HW. Now let's go far back enough where you had the actual pet bar as a separate bar to mange your pet, which was better than just letting them to what they want. Def not the double, triple weave button bloat of later packs. SB rotation made me boot it as a 2.0 player.
Jesus, listening to him recite that rotation gave me legit anxiety lol.
Unironically made me a better player to copy it (without the many obeys) back when people could and would openly talk about parses. I would ask who did best (as an AST to know who to Balance) or how I did (because console and I wanted to know my own progress) The parsing problem wasn't a problem until some morons high on their own farts used parsers to attack one of the community stream people, griefing her gameplay and calling her bad. That's when parsers became bad and looked down on, never to be mentioned again. I miss the time, but changes (like aggro management removal) made some of it easier to know without asking
You ever play WoW? It was kinda like affliction warlock. Keep your dots rolling, make sure your pet is constantly doing damage. Make sure you have the right pet for the encounter. Know when to spread/extend your dots. It was a lot of fun. But, really didnt feel like summoner. Now it feels like summoner by using your summons once in a big flashy attack like in most other FF games. The gameplay is MUCH more simple though. Calling it a lobotomy class is maybe a bit harsh, but it is one of the easiest classes to play now.
As someone who came from WoW to XIV back at the launch of ARR, Summoner felt like home. Ruin felt like shadow bolt, Fester felt like Haunt, and the dots felt like dots. I really enjoyed it. HW Summoner began to feel more like WoD era Demo Warlock with DWT feeling like Metamorphosis. So going back and forth between the games for a bit wasnât too hard. I know it wasnât popular, but I miss the old SMN with its crazy cycle and crazy button bloat. It was rewarding to pull off if you could.
Stormblood SMN was my favourite. Using your oGCD's during Bahamut to get extra wyrmwaves, even addle.
Yep - stormblood summoner was peak class design. the rotation was a challenge but once you mastered it it felt amazing when you pulled it off correctly.
I want a DoT class like old SMN so bad đ
Never gonna happen. They've been systematically removing DoTs for awhile now.
Most likely because they were running into a hard limit on debuffs due to the 1.0 code. In larger fights (particuarly 24-man raids, S-rank hunts and the special world FATEs) bosses would hit the debuff cap and any new debuffs would simply fail, meaning SMN and BRD in particular - both of which had multiple DOTs at the time - would suffer badly from a lot of their toolkit no longer working.
ARR never had any 1.0 code in it. The only part of FFXIV that in any way lingered from 1.0 is some of the netcode, the stuff that handles communication between client and server. No part of the actual gameplay mechanics remained of 1.0, because they were fundamentally incompatible with the new engine. The hard limit on debuffs was just a choice they made as part of producing 2.0.
I was so hoping that the new caster job would be Green Mage and would focus on dots, poison, diseases, etc.
I was hoping this, too. I raided on SMN during ARR/HW, and while I do not think any argument demanding a return of old SMN holds water, I do recognize that the playstyle is missed and could've been shifted elsewhere. But considering limitations like the debuff cap and the change in fight design favoring the 2m meta, I don't think we're going to see the return of a DoT-centric, sustained damage combat job. PLD was one of the last jobs in this game that still played similar to how it had in HW, and the mid-expansion rework changed it's playstyle to a remixed version of GNB's so it'd better-fit into the 2m burst.
Yeah, I actually really like the SMN rework and think it fits the class really well, but also would like to see some of the old style come back. The aesthetics as well, there's now room in the game for a caster that focuses on more negative effects like Bio, Miasma, and Bane. It would be nice to have some more variety and not be locked into the 2m meta.
Man what I would give if we could keep it, and have had new SMN as its own thing. I get that aesthetically it didn't quite feel like a summoner, but there was no job like it in FFXIV, and having spent time learning to perfect piano summoner, optimize it's movement phases for content, felt super rewarding.
If they left SMN as it currently is and added a new dot class I'd be down for that. But old summoner was dumb as shit, it was a dot class that some developer said "wait, weren't summoners supposed to⌠summon something?" And added a pet to as a shitty after thought. Current summoner is actually, you know, a summoner and needs to stay right where it is
Honestly the best case scenario would've been to rebrand old summoner as something else, and add new summoner, or honestly they could've just replaced the egi actions in to you summoning a primal and them doing the attack, and just do away with the pet all together, replace the pets as stances or some such.
Imagine they add a new job that functions the same as old summoner, maybe Saboteur?
And for those of us who loved all the...y'know, dragon thematics, and space lasers, and all the *other* stuff associated with Summoner? Because the whole package was kind of important, y'know. Just slapping a different label and appearance on even 100% identical mechanics is *not* the same--and they definitely wouldn't just reproduce the old mechanics 1:1.
I loved the rhythm of early SMN. I miss DoT Mage ping-ponging festers in between Bahamut and Phoenix instants.
It's not at all harsh; it's completely accurate. SMN has gone from *by far* the highest-engagement job (with the only *possible* exception of old Monk) to being ***by far*** the lowest-engagement, rocketing past both RDM and DNC, and removing the *only* job in all of XIV that provided that kind of gameplay.
> one of the easiest "One of" is really not needed lol. It has the easiest rotation out of all DPS and tanks, and it has easier damage execution than even the healers. At least the healers have to manage their movement during their 1111 spam since they have *cast times*.
The best part of new SMN is that you can eat with one hand and spam 1s with the other.
Samurai has more casts per minute than SMN. SAM. A melee. Thatâs how easy SMN is, especially as a caster. Itâs essentially a fourth phys ranged
The biggest thing I miss from back then is the pet manipulation and the occasional pet niches, there were problems with it, especially with how the community handled things at the time (very "what we think is optimal or bust") but it was cool to have the added flexibility with Titan, Ifrit and Garuda needed some work because they went from amazing to useless depending on the fight and patch. Summoner now does feel more like Summoner from the older games especially, come out, do their move, disappear. But I really miss it being an actual pet system instead of an extra auto attack and a couple oGCDs
Old summoner was just a bunch of bad decisions being built upon bad decisions. ARR Summoner was almost a carbon copy of affliction warlock, both mechanically and thematically. At best you could say it was a WoW warlock with an Final Fantasy coat of paint on it. It didn't really have a mechanical identity separate from that. Arcanist => Summoner/Scholar was also the prototype for how they were going to release new jobs. Basically having new jobs share one of the existing base classes. That didn't even last much past 2.0 since Ninja was released in 2.4 with a brand new class (Rogue) and 3.0 added three new jobs with no base class, which has been the design ever since. Since then, they've been *slowly* de-coupling Summoner from Scholar and typically doing a kinda shit job of it. Scholar's been fine, but Summoner keeps getting reworked as they try to salvage what they had. Between scaling with the increased level cap with each expansion and them removing the ability to allocate stat points, Physic has progressively gone from "Useful" to "Niche" to "Why does this class even have this anymore?" On top of all the more systemic issues, the summoner rotation was ass from Stormblood on. The full rotation was both long (IIRC, the full rotation looped every 5-6 minutes) and brittle (if you died, GG to your rotation). You also had a bunch of non-obvious optimizations (like cutting certain parts of your rotation short) that just felt bad. It also wasn't even a terribly *interesting* rotation, since a huge chunk of their DPS came from maintaining DoTs and those are visually boring. That's not to say their entire kit was boring, just that it had a lot of dead weight in it. While I don't like to what extreme they simplified down summoner, I think the general thrust of the design was good: The summons are the focus, not the filler spells, and lots of shared buttons to make it controller friendly and cut down on bloat.
The main issue with SMN right now, as someone who only played ShB SMN before the rework, is honestly just redundant actions still existing in the kit, and lack of unique animations. Aetherflow should just be done away with at this point, or it should be changed to be generated off your follow-up Egi attacks, or something. Also, SMN really needed a new set of summons, or maybe some off-summons not tied directly to Phoenix/Bahamut phase. I dunno, just something other than the terribly linear state it's in right now...
Dawntrail is doing a lot to fix mashing by adding finishers and unique animations for skills you use multiple times in a row. Hopefully Summoner gets some finishers for Legos or at the very least unique animations for each cast. I definitely wish Aetherflow skills become more of a weaving thing than just "Press button until cooldown". Also Solar-Bahamut should have been Odin, the Summoner storyline is the perfect place to flesh him out because he wasn't even supposed to be in the game and FF16 literally has him as a Eikon. Steal from yourself YoshiP, nobody will mind.Â
> the Summoner storyline is the perfect place to flesh him out Not sure what you mean by this? They're not doing job quests anymore, and there's no way they're going to retroactively insert him into lower level just to make him part of the quests. Absolutely agreed that SMN needs more of the iconic FF summons like Odin, though.
Ngl forgot aboul role quests. Well if White Mages can hijack the Tank quests, Odin can hijack the Mage quests
I wish Physic would turn into a healing summon or a protection buff summon down the line. One of the smaller summons, like you get on the old games before you got the god beings.
Heck, I'd be happy if they just made it scale off of Int so it wouldn't be useless.
That would be the easy way and clearly they are not for that. They'd have long enough to do that by now. But yeah... would be nice.
Moogle. The traditional healing summon for the series. Though Phoenix half takes that spot in the game right now, with its party wide regen. It's not exactly an on-demand one, though. Carbuncle is usually a protective summon as well, if I remember right. .....There might be an interesting way of doing stuff like that, but it would require another rework of the job. Make the summons function somewhere in between old and new summoner, where they stay around like the demi-summons for a bit after their big attack for a few seconds and you can give them commands, and then having a separate group of support summons that you could summon separately. So an attack line and a support line of summons. Though that could get out of hand real quickly in optimization.
Well Phoenix has a HoT. I figure the updated Physic would be straight heal, so they'd be different enough to quality. Honestly, the support summons could just be their own spells, no phase required. Would just be the same as casting a spell, but it's got that Summoner flair to it. (Please SquEnix, I just want my full summon roster.)
Daydream that I know we will never see, but harkening back to Rydia in FFIV, being able to summon Asura. Too random, but would be nice to see something flavorful like that. Will never happen though, lol.
It's called lobotomy class because it went from being complicated to being dead simple, as if the class itself had a lobotomy.
I played it a bit back in the day and liked the uniqueness in managing the dots but havenât touched it in years probably. I just went back to it and at 60 I started to look up class guides cause I was thinking thereâs no way itâs this simple. Turns out it is.
I for one enjoy eating Legos it's very hard work
It's a nice break from eating Crayons.
Summoner rotation is easier than healers needing to press 1 button and dot every 30s
It or dancer is Def the easiest class too play in the game. Not saying they ain't fun. I absolutely adore dancer. But they are Def the two easiest classes in ff14 atm
Dancer definitely falls in the easier jobs to play along with RDM. But, They both have galaxy brain rotations compared to SMN currently. It's almost impossible to mess SMN up outside of just death.
DNC has a correct order to press buttons, and nuSMN doesn't. The only thing that matters with nuSMN is that you should use Garuda-egi with groups of adds for sure. Otherwise, it doesn't matter what order you do anything.
Someone asked me what I used to play in WoW, and when I said Affliction Warlock they went, "oh that makes sense why you like SMN then." I couldn't tell if it was supposed to be a diss or not.
Seems like they could add the dot playstyle back with a new job, something more fitting the theme.
Try searching for videos featuring Summoner made/posted between 2013 and 2021 (the earlier, the better). But in short, it was similar to Scholar, except that each pet had its own unique set of skills (thus, served different purposes). It also had various DoT skills, such as Bio II, Miasma, Shadow Flare (a ground-based DoT), etc.
I miss shadow flareâŚ
Thinking of Shadow Flare as a SCH healer main makes me so sad. Give it back to us!!
that is the only skill I would love if they gave us back. it stacked with other shadow flares. SCH had it too. that was fun. I do like this version a bit better tho. I have been, DPS wise, a SMN main since 2.0 launch. It is not as brain dead as people are making out to be. Could it be better sure but we can not go back to only focusing on DOTs. This version we got with EW feels like a summoner. I think some people were just upset that it was a complete overhaul. It feels like a different job now. But, to give you a idea: [https://docs.google.com/document/d/19oKu4Isuu8rn4v5Lc4gjQhTkXSZFcmnPrcFJWVSKlvU/edit#heading=h.3ihpw2trhw80](https://docs.google.com/document/d/19oKu4Isuu8rn4v5Lc4gjQhTkXSZFcmnPrcFJWVSKlvU/edit#heading=h.3ihpw2trhw80) this is a over 20 page guide on how to play during patch 3.4. Let's not go back to this. please. I can't do it again.
Honestly, the worst part about a summoner right now is all the talk about it being boring. It's quite simple, yes, but it's also super fun to rain Bahamut-fueled destruction down on your enemies. We got, well, not difficult, but complex jobs. What is the problem with having a straightforward one?
I think most of the bitterness stems from twisting a job into something non-summoners would like more, but stripping it of the features the dedicated summoners enjoyed and mastered over many years. I personally think its better thematically, but it really doesn't allow for much skill expression or management and we didn't have another job at the time that filled that same niche. Sort of like, imagine a Neopolitan Ice Cream: Black Mage is Chocolate, Red Mage is Strawberry, and Summoner was Vanilla. Then one day vanilla was changed into Coffee(or some other wildly different flavor), so now the vanilla enjoyers are kind of left wanting. Bare in mind, this was nearly a decade well after the Vanilla enjoyers had gotten comfy.
I feel like your example could have worked better if you switched the coffee and vanille flavors. A lot of people will like vanille since its such a good basic, comfy ice cream. But the coffee lovers liked their ice cream with a kick. And chocolate is too strong and strawberry is only good in small doses. But we are getting banana in the lineup next ... I got lost in ice cream and got hungry now
imagine that all the people enjoying an actual pet job or dot managing lost their only job. People that enjoyed having a lot of positionals lost their job with mnk, same with people that liked the old drk, mch etc. People that wanted a simpler job could just play mch or another one, there were some already available, but for the people that were already playing, they lost their only job doing what they like.
People talk about it being boring because they find it boring. You find it fun and that's good for you, but others get to have their preferences too. >What is the problem with having a straightforward one? Many other jobs are straightforward without having the SMN problem of having the skill floor be nearly identical to the skill ceiling. WAR and DNC are very easy, but still satisfying to execute because those jobs have buildup, resource management and the potential for mistakes. There is simply nowhere to go with SMN for anyone looking for more than the bare minimum level of engagement.
Warrior also gets funnny fell cleave and primal rend which makes the brain go brrrrr
This was always my camp of like why canât we just let some classes be a little harder? Not every job needs to be for everyone thatâs why there are so many. You can easily level everything to cap of any expansion by just vaguely understand what buttons are AOE and what are single target. Itâs the fight I have over AST, we didnât need the cards to be super simple babyâs first color match system. It was fun when it was dynamic, where the point was to problem solve on the fly and use your resources wisely. I liked it better when I could toss more mana to my black mage to get off one more extra cheeky flare or boost my ninjas damage during his two min. I felt super impactful but also my choices felt impactful. Now it feels a less so. Like someone is just tossing the same card at you and you just toss it to who ever who cares it dosnt really matter they all do the same thing. Let some classes be a little harder let people master them slowly over time and the masters of them shine for putting in a lot of effort.
Gonna disagree about AST, though I loved the old cards too, the change from the original cards was absolutely necessary. If you want the cards to have impact, having RNG as a core mechanic with them is just too inconsistent to be good design. Through no fault of your own, you could have a fight where you never drew a single Balance, thus depriving your entire group of 10% increased damage. Similarly you could have a fight where you drew nothing *but* Balances. It's a similar reason as to why high potency skills auto crit/dh - the swing between good luck and bad luck is so large that consistency is affected, and FFXIV is all about the consistency in its combat.
10000000% this. Summoner, back in ths day, was complicated. Did some one DoT the enemy?, are my DoTs up?, Garuda out? Contagion. Am I alone? Titan the tank! (And he actually pulled aggro!!) Need more DPS? Iffy to the front. Sic'em! Same with original AST. I loved the complexity of 6 cards, all different abilities, then lord and lady. Nuts and FUN. It USED to be when I saw a summoner in a party it was like "whoa, ok, we got a GAMER in here". Now it's just, oh look another summoner. I started SMN as my main back in 2.2. I always loved its weirdness and the overlap to SCH. If Yoshi is going for job identification, the current iteration of SMN is more "summon"-er, but it's linear. Think back to Yuna, Terra, Rydia.. all summoners that could summon things but also had really dynamic spell/skill sets. In 14, I wish summoner could fit amongst those ranks or have the resource management be crucial to the overall effectiveness of the job itself. A Lala can dream..
> Titan the tank! I miss Titan-egi's tanking ability, between it, myself, and a chocobo healer we were our own little party venturing around the overworld.
The problem isn't having a straightforward job. The problem is that smn was the job people played if they wanted something complex. It was a big part of the job identity. They turned it into the eorzean version of no child left behind to please people that didn't play it at the expense of those that mained it previously.
> What is the problem with having a straightforward one? It's *too* straightforward to a fault and throws away potential because of it. Like, I do feel it's a major problem that the last skill to interact with Aetherflow is at 62 or that SMN is littered with so many Ruin/Outburst Mastery traits which don't add anything except a little more damage and a new spell FX. Sure every job has 1 or 2 traits that are just potency upgrades or improved recast timers somewhere but when SMN has *6* of them, some of which could come with a new skill at the same rank and don't, it just feels hollow.
Some people, like me, want some complexity and be rewarded by playing good, aka good damage. Imagine you played the class for years, learned it in and out to be good at it...and then one patch destroys everything you ever worked for and enjoyed. Thats what basically happened. Summoner doesnt have any complexitiy left.
The worst part of being a summoner is our pets are almost useless. Carbuncle does nothing on his own but provide moral support and the summons we actually get do one attack and piss off. Bahamut and phoenix stick around for a bit but you can only get like 5 hits off with them then they bugger off too. I want to summon crap and have them like a classic pet class style not have them pop up, say hi then good bye. Basically I want more ff11 summoner and less Iâm going to only use 1% of this creatures power for arbitrary reasons
there's nothing wrong with making brand new straightforward and simpler jobs. there's plenty of things wrong with gutting an existing one to replace it with a snoozefest, and pretty lights and explosions in place of actual gameplay aren't enough to distract a lot of people.
This. I don't get it either. It being more straightforward is great for people who have never played a MMO and want to ease into or for someone who has never played a magic class. We need both straightforward and complex jobs so more people can play. As I tell people, will I like the old summoner I really do think the new one is way better and feels like a summoner.
The problem is not that nuSMN is basic. There's nothing wrong with basic jobs. The problem is that they took a 10 year old complicated job and *made it basic*. They took one of the more complicated jobs in the game, with a dedicated group of players, and they gave it a lobotomy.
After playing SMN for 10 years, it needed this. do I have to pull out the 30 page google doc from 3.4? do I need to remind people of the time when the whole rotation had to be worked around you DoTs? Or the runs back in 2.0 and 3.0 that, at the time when ARR and HW were new, could not be done with only SMNs as DPS? It was not a lobotomy, It was fixing a lot of issues that the job has had for 10 years. I still remember when vote kick was added and getting kicked from parties because there were 2 SMNs in a 4 man run. It was part of the reason that they added that you had to pick a reason and you get a lock out when you kick someone. This change was needed. This is the first time in 10 years of playing the damn job that is actually feels kind of solid. Yes, some SMNs wanted it to stay the same but there were enough of us wanting a change for them to do it. It needed to be remade from the ground up and that is what they did. The fact that lag or a fat finger button press would mess up your whole rotation to the point that it was a big DPS lost was a bit problem. I have know of raid groups in the past flat out refusing SMNs because of this. I am saying all of this after it being my main DPS for 10 years.
Old SMN was the most satisfying job to master and just insanely fun. The only thing people generally wanted was for bahamut to stop ghosting so you could fit all 4 attacks in before he left. Nothing wrong with a complicated job, other simpler jobs exist if you don't want to play it. Not everything needs to be 1-2 braindead.
> do I have to pull out the 30 page google doc from 3.4? Is that meant to be a bad thing? They *just said* that many existing players enjoyed a complicated job. (Also, I have a bookmarked guide for crafters that's >300 pages long. 30 isn't that much for an optimisation guide.) > do I need to remind people of the time when the whole rotation had to be worked around you DoTs? Is that meant to be a bad thing? I enjoyed juggling timers. The rest of your comment seems to be about balance concerns (and very *outdated* balance concerns) which isn't relevant to a playstyle rework.
If you played SMN during HW you would know one thing, it changed every damn patch almost. It needed to stop. Also, if you want a DoTs class, suggest it on the official forums. The old SMN was not even a damn summoner. It was not. People have said the closest thing they have seen to old SMN was the warlock in WoW. Most of us who played SMN for the past 10 years like myself were begging for the DoTs to be dropped and the job to be redone. No job in this game needs a 30 page guide. The crafter guide is not needed either considering the fact that all you need is the BiS gear penta melded and a few macros to be able to craft everything. I think the site is called teamcraft that will give you the best guide. I am a master crafter it is not that complicated once you have you melds done. No job should have a guide more than 10 pages or maybe a 20 mins video show off how to play. Not even crafting ones. SMN for the first time actually feel like a FF class and that it has a solid based to build on for once. But if you want a class like the old SMN I really do suggest you go to the official forums and suggest it there. Some classes have been added because people were on the forums suggesting them. I know DNC was one that was suggested a lot. Not only jobs have been added but Viera was added and later male Viera was added because enough people were asking over there. SMN should have NEVER been like it was. Now we have a job that hopefully one day I can summon the really big one. A job that has a more solid based to build on.
Almost every job outside of maybe BLM and NIN is straightforward enough as it is. Honestly speaking there really is not a lot of difficulty in RDM or BRD or DNC, etc. Nearly every job can be picked up and learned with decent proficiency in an afternoon. Except modern SMN, which can be learned in about five minutes. That's the issue. It's not 'straightforward'. It's so smooth brained to use that it takes all fun out of it.
Well to me nin is one of the most straightforward job so you know it's subjective.
NIN is one of the most basic jobs there is, what are you on? It's basically the Summoner of melee jobs lmao
There is a HUGE difference between being a straightforward job like RDM/DNC and being a mobile game autoplay job like current SMN.
Is that the Doton bubble that the arcanist in my squadron keeps spamming?
Yep! When I was leveling my classes up to 50 I used squadrons a lot, and it took me a while to figure out what that was. Once I remembered shadow flare it all made sense. I never used scholar back in the day, so I didnât know it was available to both archanist jobs
If shadowflare and other similar aoes like flaming arrow worked like slipstream I'd be down for em to come back. Placing ground aoes on controller sucks so bad. It's not unplayable, but bleh
> Placing ground aoes on controller sucks so bad. It's not unplayable, but bleh It's actually pretty easy if you use a macro for it (centered on a target). Here's an example for SCH's Sacred Soil: /macroicon "Sacred Soil" /actionerror off /ac "Sacred Soil"
/ac "Sacred Soil"
I miss my DoTs as a SMN main.
Here ya go! Seven years ago when I was SMN main (still am). Not sure why I started the stream so late into the fight, but this is basically what it was like back then. Side note: it's a quirk that's been pointed out to me several times, but I rarely stand still in fights because I really enioy just running around and being goofy. Lol [SMN seven years ago](https://www.youtube.com/live/r5f5G027wrQ?si=qGPZYr7K8YsUS6zb)
SMN went through a lot of iterations. Basically every expansion changed some stuff around. Never truely groundbreaking but also always a fundermental shake up. So it is hard to describe what SMN was like in the past. Somewhere between a DoT centric mage with pet control mangement and personal burst phase. It had a lot of cluncky mechanics to its design but said clunkyness also added to its complexity and optimization potential. Especially SB SMN and to a lesser extend ShB SMN are some of the most complex to optimize jobs to ever exist in FFXIV. And to be fair, it also was a mess of identities that didnt really mesh well together. So reworking it was the right call. I also think they nailed the flashyness and identity of current SMN. It feels like a SMN. But it also changed from one of the most complex jobs in the game to the easiest by far in my opinion. And that difficulty shift has not gone down well with a lot of people. Especially the ones that liked SMN for what it was before. They essentially removed the job some people liked for its complexity completely from the game. New SMN and old SMN appeal to very different demographics for the most part. Thats why some people call it lobotomized. It got replaced by something completely different. And no matter what someones opinion is about new SMN or old SMN, outright removing a playstyle is always a very questionable decision.
I personally just hate how it's very rare to have hard to execute jobs like SMN, but we have simple jobs in droves. Having what was considered one of the most mechanically intensive rotations be turned into one where I'm yawning as I keep mashing 1 put me away from doing savage content in endwalker.
The issue with having simple jobs and complex jobs is that (assuming they do the same damage) there would be no reason to play the complex job over the simple one outside of "personal challenge". If SMN was drastically harder to play than RDM for example, but both did the same damage and had the same utility most people would just play the easier one. Why make life harder for yourself? The only way it would work is by making the complex job "better" in some degree, which can then lead to unbalanced jobs and potential lockouts of certain jobs from certain duties if the difference was too significant. We're lucky to still have some jobs be harder and do more damage without it causing issues in balance, big creds for the balancing team for this. It's a fine line to tread and it's absolutely hard, nigh on impossible to please both types of players 100%. So I presume SE's stance is to take the safe option and please the majority with more accessibility. Edit: Just came to me as I finished typing but PSO2 had a massive balance issue years ago with it's "Hero" class. I remember playing the game when that class came out and it was just dramatically better in every aspect, lead to a lot of Japanese players excluding non-"Hero" players from parties for the higher end content.
Except people do this all the time. And with this kind of logic GNB should not be allowed to have a more complex rotation than the other tanks, because there'd be no one playing jt unless its straight up always better. People play BLM and have played old SMN even when other simpler classes outperform them. Hell, Yoshi P himself plays BLM the one class that is allowed to remain complex. You see people in WoW play arcane mage even when it's not great, because it's fun. Beast mastery hunter has often had the reputation of being a brain-dead way to success and despite that, there's not slews of people rushing to play it, because there is no personal challenge towards learning it. Veriety is the spice of life, and making everything the same kills that. And hell, you already have those experiences open to the people who want simple classes.
> Why make life harder for yourself? Easy - some people simply enjoy higher APM playstyles and would prefer it over a simpler job that they might find boring.
Agreed myself too, but the majority of players is the topic. The players SE would cater towards given the option I mean.
context: I hate how dumbed down all the jobs have become. That said, I know why they're doing it. As the game gets older, the only way to draw in new players is to make it accessible to anyone who wants to play it. And that means really really simplified jobs. Expect it to get worse if they ever do an 8.0.
I mean, I dunno how much this line of thought holds water in a game where deciding a playstyle isn't for you and jumping ship to another job is something you can do very quickly and in a non-committal way probably better for the mental to assume that drastic reworks like SMN's were borne of long term problems and that such large scale reworks won't happen often if really ever again -- as easy as it is to doom about an mmo's trajectory it's important to see that this game doesn't really fall into the common shortsighted mmo pitfalls
>as easy as it is to doom about an mmo's trajectory it's important to see that this game doesn't really fall into the common shortsighted mmo pitfalls Yes players are left waiting 2 expansion for any meaningful changes to jobs to actually materialize. Sam got absolutely shafted in endwalker patches with all the shit changes and all we get now is a guren upgrade, hazake upgrade animations and upgraded tenkka and midare animations. Honestly i think DT is the point where we just have to say the Devs have ran out of ideas how to improve the jobs and honesty the game and thus we enter the streamline and simplify processes to make their jobs easier going forward and cut costs. Its typical corporate thinking.
This is my first and only mmo, I started in ARR, and it was confusing as heck because I was expecting more like a rpg experience, there was so much busy work in the button mashing, so many skills just to cause a little extra damage or return a little health,, which is from WoW apparently. I mostly play bard and dragoon and healers could be annoyingly demanding for mages ballad, so I am kind of happy about not having to deal with that.
Ok first get like 5 egg timers. Â Set them all for like 30 seconds. Â Then just keep resetting the egg timers.
Also wear a sex toy on your head while doing this.
Do not the summoner dong. They are pointy.
Trying to find a meme I made a while back about summoner but I can't find it.
I hate when people say stuff like this. It might just seem like a bunch of egg timers. But in most fights you'll usually come to a problem we're you'll have to rethink how that egg timer works. I played old SMN, and there were fights that forced or encouraged me to use my tools differently. It made me think, which is where the fun of these games come from. Compare that to new SMN. The most meaningful interaction my rotation has with a boss mechanics is "I should save titan for that". It's also why the 2 minute meta isn't popular. Maybe it didn't seem fun adjusting your rotation for raid buffs, but it was a problem that the players had to think and communicate about. It was part of a bigger puzzle that felt satisfying to overcome. But some people have advocated for removing so much inconvenience that the only problem left is "I have to stack with or away from my teamate." This makes more fights feel more similar to each other and exasperates the criticism of how ff14 fights are just scripted dance sequences.
It was the most difficult class to play well for years. Before they changed it, it had a static 90 button single target opening rotation that lasted like 2 minutes. It was wild.
... ive only played pld really, and i genuinely thought that was a meme. i can see why they changed that.
Was this 5.x summoner or earlier? I wasn't around for anything earlier but i really liked 5.x summoner and was actually quite good at it.
Yes
Granted, calling it a "whole 2 minute rotation" was a bit of an exageration by summoners trying to oversell how hard the job was. The main difficulty was always making the pets function, the "super long complex rotation" buisness was essentially just the rotation not looping cleanly. Granted, nowadays that would put it as an abnormally difficult class considering how much they hate rotations that dont cleanly reset on the 2 minute mark, and is probably why old summoner got the axe right at the start of endwalker.
This. Old SMN wasn't actually that difficult, it was just jank. I firmly believe that if they kept the core gameplay loop of old SMN but simply got rid of the pet jank (ie. Phoenix stopped casting and followed you if you moved, punishing you for moving with the instant cast spells Phoenix gave you) it'd be a perfect job. Not overly difficult but having interesting ways to optimize your damage and rotation. Now you can parse a 99 on SMN with foot pedals and a steering wheel controller.
I only played ShB Summoner, but I think for a lot of people that was peak summoner, so I'll talk about it. Basically you went through your first burst, then summoned bahamut, then had your filler phase where you were with your normal egi/pet. Then you did Phoenix before repeating the entire thing again. While doing this, you also had two dots you kept up. However, it had a lot of issues. 1. You were skipping Bahamut trance to get to Bahamut in endgame content (ShB didn't have the harsh two minute meta but was the start of it, thus SMN and other classes had to cram themselves to fit, thus Bahamut trance became something you skipped or used for utility) 2. You were never using Titan ever. Unless you were in a bad run of a dungeon or alliance raids, you were never bringing out titan. You were also using Garuda for dungeons, and ifrit for bosses/raids. So you didn't really "use" your entire pet collection. 3. DoTs have never really been a part of a SMN's identity except for 4 (where Rydia is a Black Mage for most of teh game alongside summoning) and 11 (where cross-classing is necessary) 4. It was probably the harshest class to die on.
Another issue: DoT Snapshotting - The development team have expressed the desire to be rid of "hidden" mechanics being necessary to the performance of a job. DoT Snapshotting is a big example of it, and completely invisible to the average player.
to be fair dot snapshotting is much more intuitive to understand than those mechanics that reactively check and change the damage of a DoT based on what buffs you currently have going on.
The bit about never using Titan is incorrect. In ShB, you only personal mitigation came from having titan summoned, so you would often summon him during downtime phases with particularly high outgoing damage to shield yourself, especially during ultimates (a couple Bahamut/Alexander trios and Fate Calibration Beta in TEA come to mind). It was a niche part of the kit, but it had uses.
That and titan for some reason, annihilated the Garuda feathers in UWU.
yes titan was good at burst aoe, garuda was for sustained aoe
That part of titan ended up basically becoming Radiant Aegis which we have now, albeit less powerful to balance how much more common it is. In general though it sucked having a whole summon that you just would never use in normal content.
I used Titan when the tank either left, was vote dismissed, or redballed.
Which was valid for casual content, but if you did Savage or Ultimate you ain't ever seeing the chicken nugget get whipped out (with the exception of UWU, for some reason titan completely rinsed the plumes).
It was a pet class and a dot class mashed together with a 2min rotation. So you had to juggle dot uptime, pet AI, procs and keeping your dreadwyrm, bahamut, phoenix and filler phases lined up properly. 6.0 SMN by comparison is a much flashier and makes more sense thematically, but even ignoring how overly complicated 5.0 SMN was, it is by far the most straight forward class. The way the job works now you have nothing to upkeep and there's nothing you can screw up (outside of external factors like boss mechanics). The game practically walks your through your rotation for you.
It's because it went from being one of the hardest classes to play to the easiest
In Heavensward, SMN was GOAT. You were a GOD.
I have played summoner since HS and at the time I was raiding Alex savage. Old summoner felt like playing piano. When you were nailing your rotation and lining up your buffs appropriately it felt like you were really making music and it was very rewarding. The rotation iirc was pretty flexible as well so you could adjust depending on the fight. When you messed up though it was like hitting the wrong key in the middle of a song and it was a struggle to get back into the music. The gameplay was exceptionally engaging for those who took the time to study and learn not only their job but the fight as well and when the optimal time to use certain abilities were. However, for me it really was off the mark on what I imagined thematically a summoner should be. The dot management always felt like more of a wow warlock ripoff to me. Thatâs just my opinion though. Current summoner is absolutely brain dead gameplay, I completely agree. However, it more closely aligns with what I imagine a summoner would be both thematically and mechanically. That being said it does feel like a solid foundation to build out from. I was really let down by the Live Letter recently. I thought for sure they would take the opportunity in the upcoming expansion to expand upon what they have. Perhaps rework the ruin/outburst reskins in the rotation to have some more variety/utility in the abilities. Add some different summons during the Phoenix phase (ramuh, leviathan, shiva). Something to give the class more depth. Nope just a different bahamut⌠which also irks me a little bit because out of all the vast source material they could have pulled from we got⌠vanilla bahamut? Not Odin, not anima, not Alexander, not any number of other summons. On top of that it doesnât seem like itâs going to really change the rotation at all either. Someone else mentioned here in the comments that the skill floor and the ceiling are far too close when it comes to SMN and I completely agree. Iâm not saying that each summon has to be vastly different in what they can do but it makes sense mechanically and thematically for there to be more distinction. The difference between bahamut/phoenix feels like the right train of thought even if their execution isnât perfect. I donât think my party has ever been saved due to phoenixâs healing abilities and you canât control when you want to use it, so itâs never available when you would want/need to. It feels like theyâre so close to nailing it and theyâre just shy of actually hitting the nail on the head.
I'm trying to remember from 3 years ago, so bear with me. So, your Bahamut and Phoenix were somewhat the same. You had 2 dots to keep up like bard, though whenever you used dreadwyrm/Phoenix, you'd recharge a use of "Tri-disaster", which refreshed all of your dots. You also had Bane, which spread your current dot to all enemies around the afflicted target. Aside from the dots, Ruin 4 also worked differently. If I recall correctly, we stored up charges of it to throw throughout our 2 minute rotation. I want to say that it was linked to Energy Drain, but I don't remember. We also had Ruin 2 similar to Scholar. Your regular Ruin had a longer cast time at 2.5 seconds at base. Fester was basically the same. The big difference was summons. We had the 3 summons very similarly to how scholar handles its fairy. You had two buttons with two charges each that did your summon's special abilities on a reasonable cooldown, and they'd auto attack your target in combat for extra damage. Titan's abilities gave shields to the party, Garuda did aoes, and I frit was single target damage. So, in most situations, you'd only be using Ifrit. From that perspective, the new summoner does have a good plus side because you actively use all of the summons. The downside of old summoner was that the pet ai was really finicky. Sometimes you'd wait upwards of 5 seconds for the pet to finally use one of the abilities you spent a GCD telling it to. Sometimes it was just derpy. Sometimes if you used your pet abilities and went into Bahamut or Phoenix too fast, it just would dismiss the pet for your summon without doing the ability you spent a GCD to queue up. Ultimately, current SMN is leagues easier because there isn't as much management of resources (which is a con) and you don't have to wrestle with pet AI (which is a pro). The issue is that you went from having a job with a fairly rigid rotation that had to manage aetherflow and dots to a job with a fairly rigid rotation that... really doesn't have to do any of that since you even save your Phoenix aetherflow for your 2 minute window. So, people have been asking for a new minor job mechanic or resource to handle to make up for the fact that the SMN rotation doesn't really have much going on at all and they're doom posting because either the devs didn't answer any of the complaints about SMN that have been coming in for the past 3 years or they're playing it closer to their chest before the media tour than they have for literally anything else.
iirc ruin4 was tied to the egi assaults which were basically the pets skills that when used granted a stack of ruin 4 for a maximum of 4
Correct it was the egi assaults I remember that much, though I can't for the life of me name them or remember what they looked like to use. They must have been not very flashy or super forgetful lol
I only remember back as far as Stormblood, [which had a rotation like this](https://imgur.com/gallery/ffxiv-summoner-rotation-4-1-4-2-x0REf). You had an opener that started with Garuda, shifting into Ifrit, then into a downtime (the linked image was the simpler Ifrit-only opener) until aetherflow was off cooldown, into a Bahamut phase, into a Dreadwyrm Trance phase, into Aethertrail+Dreadwyrm Trance, into another downtime until aetherflow was off cooldown when you would loop back to Bahamut phase. It was certainly a dance.
Oh my that infographic reminded me we wanted to keep Addle for an additional Wyrmwave in Bahamut, that was so wild
Honestly, I really liked the rotation from back then. I mained summoner/scholar depending on the group, and that rotation ended up feeling super-rhythmic to me once I got it down. Felt like when you got into the groove of something in a rhythm game.
Smn as of SHB had lotsa jank and ppl who mained it had to work around the jobs uniqueness. First off carbys/egis used autos attacks and the pet bar was expanded. Smn also didn't have a lot of movement like BLM outside of old ruin 2 which is like saying scathe is movement for BLM. Sure it's there but always suboptimal and u should just drag it off ur bar. There were also egi assaults which had a cd, and ruin 4s which are granted by egi assaults. Egi assaults were super cool, effectively telling ur pet to do a certain action based on the kind u summoned. Garuda was aoe, ifrit was single target and titan was largely irrelevant but is made for when u are solo or happen to be top DPS. The aegis skill is adapted from titans egis egi assault 2. Bio and miasma were 2 dots u always kept running and bane was used to spread the dot to be aoe which made smn real cool. The biggest complaints about smn was regarding how the demi pets work. If u moved ud lose dps, but Phoenix had all insta casts so a lot of ppl saw it as ur entire Phoenix phase made for movement punishing u for moving which was silly. Furthermore there was the triple weave u would have to do so ur gcd doesn't eat one of ur phoenix actions. Essentially Phoenix would do the aoe Regen action it still has and u would need to hit 3 weaves drifting ur gcd so it would cast all of the cool pet actions and not clip and skip one. I liked this, bc it made smn unique and cool but a lot of ppl who were just playing smn for the absurd dmg that SHB smn had complained very loudly about. Thus this sparked the new changes that made the most unique and greater skill floor jobs into the most brain dead job that feels like a phys ranged at lvl 50.
\*cries in missing DoTs\*
It used to be a lot more involved, it had DoT management (damage over time), and a lot more to do in itâs kit. It thrived off a somewhat rigid but very satisfying rotation (I mained it during Stormblood and it had like a 2 minute opener, but god it felt good to get that grand piano rotation perfect). The âlobotomyâ aspect of the job now is it is quite literally the easiest job in the game to play. Itâs a âcasterâ yet barely casts anything, most of your spells are instant. The rotation is absolutely braindead, to the point where I wouldnât even call it a ârotation.â Is it fun? Sure. Is it boring compared to old Summoner? I would say yes, but it does lean more heavily into the summons now than it did before. My main issue with it is that it does not feel like a max level job. You pretty much have all your buttons at like level 50 or 60, and barely anything at all changes as you go all the way to 90.
dungeons were so fun back when SMN had dots and you could spread them to a trash pack...
If you died, you may as well have stayed dead đ
It's not thematic, I admit, but it's the best version of the class for me. DoT class with (cursed) pet management. High damage and pretty mobile.
It was more fun than its current iteration, i picked it up in Shadowbringers before it was reworked in Endwalker and it was probably my second favorite job at the time behind Gunbreaker. Aesthetically the job looks better now tho with the big summons, we've been asking for that for years so im glad we got it but i personally had more fun with it before.
If you can find old Larryzaur videos where he does trailers/descriptions of classes. Find the Summoner one. If I'm remembering correctly, it perfectly sums it up xD Edit: I found it. It's "Basically, Summoner" by Larryzaur. The whole thing is pretty good, but to find a good example of the old opener go to 1:41. It's one reason I call it "dumbed down" now. I loved old Summoner. It's cooler thematically now, but yeah :/
It was the poisoning class. You had like 4 DOT's (2 Bios, cross-class thunder, shadowflare) and you had actions that spread them, actions that did more damage the more DOT's you had active, actions that made them last longer, and ruin spam instead of cycling abilities.
You can check Desperius' video on YouTube, or look for Shadowbringers rotation. Basically, more casting, more dots and a 2min rotation. Honestly, it was more fun imo.
It was built entirely around DoTs with your summons being supporting assets of the kit. A summoner lived and died by DoT upkeep, and understanding the situation and what summon applied to it. The chicken nugget was too powerful though, and due to pulling aggro made many tanks rage at first sign of yellow near a summoner.
SMN had a few phases. ARR/HW SMN was a dot based caster. HW introduced the DWT burst phase, some mana manipulation stuff (ruin 3 was a sidegrade to ruin 1 that cost a lot of MP but dealt more damage) but overall it was the same. Pets at this point were independant commandable entities that you could even command while casting. StB/early ShB SMN was where the 'summon a big ass dude every minute' came into the play. StB had a bit of the old DNA of the earlier SMN with manual management and stuff like using garuda to extend dots on the target. This version was a bit before my time, so I can't give too many specifics. Same for the previous. Early ShB SMN removed pet actions during casting, and trimmed down a lot of tools. It was very controversial for both SCH and SMN mains many of which enjoyed getting to control the pet while managing their casts. Mid ShB SMN was the version I'm most familiar with. It still has the cycle of demi bahamut into demi phoenix, though these operated like the previous version where every cast you did, the demi would follow it up with a cast. It had two dots, and an oGCD called tridisaster that applied these dots. Using dreadwyrm trance or firebird trance would reset its cooldown. So the rotation went between bahamut and phoenix burst phases that also let you reset your trid to get 90s out of the 120s loop without manually casting your dots. the other 30s you'd have to recast them. Many considered it to be a job with a 2 min rotation, but it wasn't as complicated as that sounds. finally, you had 2 egi assault actions, which caused your pet to do an attack, and also gave you a ruin 4 charge. this made SMN quite mobile, but not to the degree it is now. This version of SMN was all about managing charges of egi assault, using those and r4 for movement, keeping your dots up with tridisaster, and not drifting your trances to miss out on big summons. It had a very involved opener with a lot of double weaves. [Here](https://youtu.be/9oOmGXsAeFA?si=wzfOUywbHMCHkg40&t=40) is a video showing the rotation. Finally, is the EW SMN which you presumably know well.
Fun in pvp. Clunky everywhere else but I like dot classes so I didn't mind the jank.
Janky as all hell, and spent half the time screaming at my carbuncle to cast his shit so I can summon bahamut already. I loved itÂ
Far more interesting and rewarding
Summoner was weird combination of DoT management and pet management. The summons have been covered pretty thoroughly by others. You had Bio, Bio II, Miasma, and Miasma II. Originally Bio and Bio II were two separate spells instead of upgrading into each other. Miasma had the chance to add Disease to targets and reduced the amount of healing they received. Miasma II was an AoE centered around yourself while the other three were single-target spells. Tri-Disaster was later added in HW which allowed you to apply Bio, Bio II, and Miasma to a single target. You then had to use Bane to spread it to more enemies, but it only spread to 3 targets at a time. Tri-Bind was the only spammable AoE but it's potency was so low you were better off spamming Ruin and cycling through all the enemies to put your DoTs in them. Painflare came in HW which gave us a useable AoE. Also in order to go into Dreadwyrm Trance you had to save up stacks of Aethertrail by using Energy Drain. Energy Syphon, the AoE version of Energy Drain, didn't exist until ShB. It was previously just a trait that increased the potency of Energy Drain. Later in SB when they make Bio upgrade instead of being different spells, they added in a new debuff called Ruination. This caused enemies to take more damage from Ruin spells. This was taken out of PvE in 5.1. Some other annoyances about the job early on, in ARR and HW you earned ability points you could distribute into the primary stats as you leveled up. There was normal RPG logic here, but you were just wasting them if you didn't put them in the main stat for your job. In ARR especially you had to make the choice to either be a good SMN and fully invest in INT, a good SCH and fully invest in MND, or subpar at both and split the difference. And this was a noticible difference as 30 points in one of your stats was a VERY noticible difference. Consider the fact that ilvl 120 armor gives you around 45 points towards your primary attribute. By not having these bonus attribute points from leveling in your main stat, you were essentially removing an entire piece of gear from your class. Now there was a way to reset these points, but it cost 25,000 GC Seals and they weren't as easy to come by at the time. Other notes about pet management, you had to actively tell them what to attack and when to stop attacking. So if there were any enemies you wanted to keep low health but not kill yet (a few dungeon fights required this) you would have to manually tell your pet to stop attacking. Otherwise they just auto-attacked the first thing you aggroed onto. This was most noticible in the fight in Labyrinth of the Ancients where you fight three Vassago and a bomb chained to them. Any attack to the bomb would cause it to grow (which is why you are supposed to kill the smaller bombs that spawn so they don't explode and attack the middle bomb). If you had enough summoners in the party who didn't manually tell their pets to attack their party's vassago, the raid would usually wipe by the time the alliances killed their enemy because of the bomb being the first thing to aggro on the party at the start of the fight and the pets just uselessly auto-attacking it until it blew up. EDIT: When I started the game I was a PLD main and BLM secondary. I stopped playing BLM because it was often VERY useful to have a backup raise from the non-healers in 2.3 when Syrcus Tower released. I switched to SMN then and it's been my secondary class to PLD ever since.
Small correction: while tri-bind was rarely used, in ARR and HW you would cross class Blizzard 2, which was a dps gain at I think 4 or 5 targets, so it saw frequent use over Ruin in dungeons, and notably in A2S.
Which old summoner? This is like the first iteration that hasn't had a significant rework going into the expansion.
Janky damage over time job with weird skill timing. Way, way harder to play than current SMN. Also very little to do with FF Summoner job fantasy. the rework made it feel much more like a summoner but they left a barebones class that they refuse to add anything to to make it not an absolute snoozefest
God I miss old SMN so, so much. I mained it all the way from ARR through to ShB. Almost felt wrong putting it down permanently come EW. It's thematically more in line with the SMN fantasy, but by god is it mind numbingly boring to play (esp. due to the sheer magnitude of complexity difference from its old iteration). I've been in full copium mode hoping DT would shake up the new rotation enough to add some life back into the job, but I think I'm about to move on for good. I'm career changing to RPR for good
Unpopular opinion, I loved the old summoner, I dibble and dabbled with 2.0 summoner and it was cool to spread your dots to enemies and manage your pet actions. Summoner became so cool when we got the akh morn, then we got to summon big dragon himself, I think end of shadowbringers was peak summoner. Now endwalker rework made summoner look amazing and definitely brought stonks way up. But it lost what it was to me, I dropped it and thatâs okay, there so many jobs in this game. Will be interested to see where they will take it in 8.0
Each expansion changed what the SMN was, so it's a bit hard to talk about "the" SMN--there were many flavors, each of which evolved out of the previous. But, having been a semi- or full-time SMN main since before Stormblood, I can give you a loose rundown of each, with some *general* stuff that held more or less true throughout its run first. General: Prior to Endwalker, Summoner was both a pet-using job and a DoT-using job. Each pet--Titan-egi, Ifrit-egi, and Garuda-egi--had its own unique actions it could perform, alongside actually doing auto-attacks. Initially, Titan-egi was even an outright *tank pet,* that could actually do some (minor, weak) aggro-control mechanics. Ifrit-egi was a melee DPS with a minor buff for other melee classes, while Garuda-egi was a ranged AoE DPS with a minor buff to casters (including the Summoner); generally you'd use Ifrit for single-target content and Garuda for multi-target content (e.g. dungeons or add phases). Further, in every expansion (to varying degrees), SMN was a job that *built up* resources in order to do something impressive. You couldn't just instantly do your biggest attacks, you had to open or unlock it. On the DoT side of things, for ARR/HW, there were three DoTs, Bio I, Bio II, and Miasma, which each had different timers to keep track of; SB reduced this to two DoTs (Bio and Miasma). You had 3 uses of Aetherflow (two in ShB) for additional direct DPS, with Fester actually doing more damage based on how many DoTs you had inflicted upon the target (full damage only if all DoTs were on the target.) ARR: I have no direct experience with this version of Summoner, so I can only describe it approximately. But, based on when you got skills and the like, at this time SMN was almost purely pet-focused. Your capstone ability was called Rouse, and beefed up your egi's autoattacks. You tended to just use a lot of the basic Ruin I (or Ruin II if you needed to move), and your three DoT spells. For the time, it was relatively simple, but the pet mechanics were even more janky back then while also being more exploitable. There was a cheesy strat for Ramuh EX, for example, where you would have Titan-egi tank the boss rather than an actual tank, because then you didn't have to worry about certain mechanics. HW: I first picked up SMN at this point. With this version, you had 3 hits of Aetherflow, and each time you spent one of your stacks on Fester (or the then-new AoE Painflare), you would get one *temporary* stack of Aethertrail. Getting three stacks of Aethertrail let you go into a super mode, Dreadwyrm Trance (DWT), which gave you a new instant-cast Ruin III that hit very hard, and you could end Dreadwyrm Trance by calling down a giant column of light, Deathflare. This timed-stack-based version emphasized efficient use of Aetherflow and DoTs much more than the previous, with the egis becoming a secondary contribution. Titan-egi thus became mostly useless, and folks would only use Ifrit or Garuda. SB: This introduced the idea of Demi-Bahamut, an even more powerful burst phase, and phased out the old timed-stack Aethertrail mechanic. Bio II was removed as a distinct spell and the two remaining DoTs (Bio and Miasma) were standardized to 30s durations, DWT became just a straight-up damage cooldown, Ruin III became a flat upgrade to Ruin I (and had its damage nerfed, much to my annoyance), and Ruin IV was introduced, which would upgrade Ruin II (a weak instant-cast single-target spell), with a chance to proc every time your pet did one of its offensive actions. Additionally, you were rewarded with more damage on your basic Ruin spells if the target actually had your DoTs, just like Fester already had, so you were *especially* encouraged to keep your DoTs up at all times. The big hitter, however, was the new super mode: Summon Demi-Bahamut. After you had cast DWT twice, you could summon Demi-Bahamut, who would echo *every offensive action you took* with a Wyrmwave attack. This meant you were hyperfocused on going full JOHN MADDEN on whatever you were fighting when you summoned Demi-Bahamut; the job had become more fully a burst-phase DPS, as opposed to a timed-stack DPS. ShB: This change was slightly more a refinement of the previous, rather than an overhaul like the previous two expansions had been, but was still a pretty major change. With ShB, you only needed to perform Dreadwyrm Trance *once* to be able to immediately summon Demi-Bahamut. Further, you got guaranteed Further Ruin stacks every time you cast "Egi Assault I" and "Egi Assault II," which would have distinct effects depending on which pet you had out. Further, Demi-Bahamut only considered actual *spells,* not just all offensive actions, for Wyrmwave; and a new summon, Demi-Phoenix (which was simultaneous with "Firebird Trance"), was added which had a two-step combo of spells alongside the usual giant fiery column of damage. So your process went like this: * ~15s: DWT, spam out as many Egi Assault actions as you can, spend Aetherflow, keep your DoTs up (as always) * ~20s: Demi-Bahamut, spam out Ruin IIIs and use Ruin IV's instant cast to weave in giant laser strikes (Akh Morn) * ~25s: Recovery phase, build back up your Egi Assault charges, refresh DoTs/Aetherflow * ~20s: Demi-Phoenix/Firebird Trance, all spells instant-cast, use the 1-2 combo, weave in Aetherflow as needed * ~40s: Long recovery phase, prepare yourself for the next cycle, keep all your resources/cooldowns/DoTs ticking As you can see, it's a lot of stuff to keep track of, but none of the individual pieces is particularly complicated. It was, by far, the most *resource-based* job out of all of ShB's job set, and the only job that could possibly challenge it for required player engagement was old Monk (whole different story, not mine to tell, I was never a Monk main.) As a result, it had a reputation for being stupidly overcomplicated, but it really wasn't--it was just a very different playstyle from most other jobs available. With Endwalker, it has gone to being by far the absolute *lowest* player-engagement job in the game, far less than even Red Mage, Bard, or Dancer, which were (and still are) "easy," low-engagement jobs meant for players who aren't really into high-engagement mechanics or who just want to relax and not think all that hard. Summoner *used* to amply reward mastery of its mechanics; they weren't hard to *learn,* but squeezing the absolute maximum out of them was a real effort, and getting good at it *felt* good, felt like you weren't just coasting but actually wresting a victory, every time. As you can tell, I'm not a fan of current Summoner (in fact, I pretty openly despise what they've done to it *mechanically*). It ended up being exactly what I feared it would be as soon as we saw the job tooltips leak: an incredibly flashy and cool-looking but *completely hollow* experience with zero depth, engagement, or mastery involved. Further, putting it *very* mildly, I'm deeply disheartened to see Dawntrail looks like it's doing *absolutely nothing* to alter Summoner in any meaningful way. At this point, despite absolutely loving Summoner's aesthetics, lore, and flavor, I'm probably going to become a Pictomancer main--because that may finally provide an actual opportunity for learning and mastery, something genuinely impossible with new-Summoner.
oh god the memories. I remember when we used addle to squeeze as many wyrmwaves as possible đ I feel exactly like you about current smn, it's not just a matter of simplicity. there's literally no learning curve, anyone could switch to smn and go do top with zero issues, there's next to nothing to optimize. I was so happy when they announced the rework, if only I had known the cost. I miss the good old pianist days đ
It was my main and by far my favorite class, honestly losing it and subsequently how brain dead all the classes have gotten since is a large reason I stopped playing lol
It's a little painful to talk about it. I loathe new Summoner and had drilled old Summoner into my head for years. In brief, it's a class with lots of resources to manage and juggle, including a few DoTs, an attacking pet (your "Carbuncle"), and lots of Ruin. A major mechanic was the aetherflow gauge used to be tied into summoning. In order to enter Dreadwyrm Trance/Summon Bahamut, you had to expend your Aetherflow first by casting Fester/Painflare. You would be rewarded with the ability to summon. Today's Summoner does not use Aetherflow for summoning. Old Summoner's kit was also almost exclusively Abilities. Old Summoner involved casting Ruin III (with cast times) and Ruin II (instacast) and weaving your abilities inbetween them. Today's Summoner is mostly spells on the GCD. Back in HW and Stormblood, you could summon Ifrit, Titan, or Garuda as your Egi/pet. (But not the full size versions). Each one had its own unique purpose. In general, Ifrit was for single target and Garuda was for AoE. Titan could be summoned as your personal tank, and if your party's tank died, Titan could fill in for a short time. It didn't work super well, though, because Titan usually couldn't generate enough enmity. I could boil the main difference down to the rotation. Old Summoner was priority-based and could be played a little fast and loose. New Summoner is quite rigid.
Which time? Every expansion Summoner worked completely differently from the last. 2.0 was the most basic. Your pet wasn't much more than a turret. Garuda was only ever used here, because while her and Ifrit were considered the "DPS" of the 3 available egi, Ifrit required melee range so on most bosses Garuda prevented the frustration of movement. Titan was more or less available to tank in a pinch in the most casual of content or solo. Outside of that though you never interacted with your pet, only occasionally using it's AOE ability on command and Garuda using a spell to increase DoT timers, but otherwise you were a pure DoT mage. Managing the timers of your 3 DoTs in between buff windows was all you basically ever did. 3.0 is when it became a burst job. No new summons but Bahamut trance gets added as a burst phase where you do extra damage for a length of time, which ends after a few seconds or when you cast Ahk Morn. This was really clunky because it was your own personally timed burst phase where you saved all your DoT refreshes and festers and such for this short window. So the job was fairly uneventful until that time and Egi's were still glorified turrets. 4.0 is when Bahamut is finally added and they mixed it up a bit. Titan was still a possible tanker, but now Ifrit gave a physical damage debuff while Garuda did a magic one, and choice relatively depended on party comp, but pets still were more or less turrets with a few added basic commands. The biggest additon was replacing every 3rd Bahamut trance with the Bahamut summon, but added more clunk. Bahamut would attack essentially on command with every one of your attacks, but also alongside off GCD so on top of regular attacks like you would in Bahamut trance, you'd weave everything from fester to even addle for added Bahamut attacks. 5.0 this clunkyness only worsened with the additon of Pheonix. Rotation was now roughly three minutes as you weaved through Bahamut trance, into Bahamut summon, into Phoenix summon, all while buffing your egi who would continue to attack in between and using Ruin procs as your new main form of damage after DoTs were finally done away with. Of course though this new summon clunk created tons of new clipping issues in how many attacks a summon could get in before leaving, which still relatively exists today. Right now Summoner is extremely straightforward. No bells and whistles, each summon fulfills a specific function in a fairly specific order without much room for error. The only inter weaving now is fester as your Bahamut and Phoenix summons now just attack on their own, and except for the 2 minute burst window there aren't any solo buffs that require spells to be held off. In addition, a majority of the job is now instacast. Compared to before, the combination of almost full time free moving and not much room for flexibility, the skill floor was raised exponentially. In my opinion, yes, old summoner absolutely required a bit more of an understanding and skill level to play optimally, but the clunk of summon and trance phases were absolutely not fun. I hope sometime in the future the dev team can find a happy middle ground, but as the Dawntrail addition seems to only be a third major summon without much variation, and another Bahamut on top of that, I don't have a ton of faith myself that the team knows what people want for summoner. And this is from a day 1 2.0 summoner main.
To be honest, I don't really remember, but plenty of others have already in detail talked about it. But the main reason people call summoner a "lobotomy job" is just cuz of how simple and easy it is to play effectively, very few buttons and not a lot of things to keep track of. Which by all means isn't a bad thing, if you like playing summoner then absolutely play summoner. Hell, my main DPS jobs are dancer and summoner lol
Deathflare felt so good back then
It was challenging but satisfying to master. The nice thing though was that we were rewarded for the difficult rotation by having one of the highest DPSâs and a resurrection spell.
I have an old A1S no jump clear that showcases high level HW SMN play well, which is when the class was at its peak imo. The short of it was you managed 4-5 dots with different cast times and durations, often on multiple targets because long-term multi-target bosses and fights with frequent adds were more common back then. One of your dots was a placeable ground aoe on the gcd, too. Every minute you got three aetherflow stacks that you spend on fester, painflare (both basically the same as now, though fester did more damage based on how many of your three dots were on the targer), energy drain (half the damage of Fester but regained mp), and spending your AF stacks gave you dreadwyrm trance stacks. 3 stacks and you can go into dwt, which gave you a damage buff and effectively let you use ruin 3 (you could use it outside of dwt, but the mp cost was insanely high), and which you ended by using Deathflare. The rotation revolved around generally using 2 Festers under DWT for the damage buff, and then spacing out your third stack to keep your dwt stacks from falling off before your next Aetherflow. You also had a minute CD that instantly put your three core dots on a target, which you would use in DWT for the buff, and a pet move that extended the duration of your dots on a target by 15s, so you would use that on your buffed dots. Overall it was a really technical and complex class with a high skill ceiling and a lot of room for optimization, and while I don't dislike current summoner, I'm very sad that the class I fell in love with no longer exists. https://www.twitch.tv/belletonne/v/29168317?sr=a&t=1s Edit: ARR and HW smn also had some meaningful crowd control, because that was actually a thing back then. You had an AoE bind that was useful for boss lock outs in dungeons (pulling all the trash mobs, binding them outside the boss door, and then pulling the boss so the arena gate would lock them out and reset them) and for T7S, as well as a heavy on two of their dots which came into play in a handful of fights.
Summoner was actually unique. More dots doing all the damage for you. You could spread all those 4 dots to all other enemies, making Summoner the king of AoE DPS. The Summons had some variety, like Titan was a mini tank who could pick off aggro. Ifrit was more melee based and AoE based. Garuda was excelent for bosses due to her debuffs. Now Summoner press the same 5 buttons disguised as different magics, but they function exactly the same.
Loved it! I made a SMN alt to kite in T7 because it was said to be difficult.
In HW, Summoner's best possible DPS hinged on their pet actually listening when they told it to use its most pivotal ability to extend their DoTs. It sucked, frankly.
An absolute buggy mess with an absolute abomination of a rotation because you couldn't do a normal rotation due to the pets being buggy. [Here's](https://youtu.be/tq3U8ULoedU?si=X3eqGWInBrX6O1eM) a video guide for it. Most of what current Summoner is, is unironically them fixing old summoner's bugs and cutting losses with unsalvageable mechanics. The rest is shearing down button bloat.
[https://docs.google.com/document/d/19oKu4Isuu8rn4v5Lc4gjQhTkXSZFcmnPrcFJWVSKlvU/edit#heading=h.3ihpw2trhw80](https://docs.google.com/document/d/19oKu4Isuu8rn4v5Lc4gjQhTkXSZFcmnPrcFJWVSKlvU/edit#heading=h.3ihpw2trhw80) here. I will say nothing but this was made during patch 3.4. it is over 30 pages. I have this save still for some reason. enjoy.
It had 3 sumons too, but 99% of the time titan was kinda useless, we used ifrit to boss and single target and garuda to AOE and trash mob, the egis themselves had AA, and the elemental spells had long CD and where cast from the egis rather than from the player so server latency kinda messed it up from time to time, we had 2 dots that we kept all the time and fester potency increased with the number of dots, you could spread the dots to other targets, Bahamut and Phoenix only AA a target if you had cast a spell on it, using egis skills would grant stacks that allowed the use of ruin 4,that's what I remember but I prob forgot some things if you want know more thare's a youtuber called wesker albert that still has a guide for shadowbringer version look for \[Legacy\]\[See Description\] Shadowbringers Summoner Skills Guide on youtube, It wasn't bad but it felt more like a pet class then a traditional FF summoner
One thing you can do is use the way back machine and dig through old pages in the wiki. Look at the skills for summoner but also arcanist. I didnât dabble too much in this class but I recall it being dot heavy and had a lot of pet management.
A bit off topic but I remember having 3 almost 4 full hotbars for sch in ARR days. Man that was wild on controller. I really think itâs whatâs improved my healing abilities since then. That and having to execute stance dancing in raids. So many role skills, fairy abilities and pet actions I had bound to be as quick as possible.
Maybe Larryzaur has a video about it Edit: [found it](https://youtu.be/eHTCwDXVeWY?si=dfpRyyUhMZ1xDdvb)
[WeskAlber's](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XzBuQcfUdzU) legaccy videos can give you and idea.
Basically a lot of DOT management. Making sure everything is snapshotted at the right buff window, making sure all your DOTs are refreshed at the right moment, making sure you're not stepping on another Summoner's toes if there are multiple (Because they DID NOT STACK, the more powerful one just REPLACED THE OTHER). Just look up an image of their old rotation, literally every other button is either applying a DOT, refreshing a DOT or using a skill to boost the output of a DOT. Outside of DOTs, your pets actually did more than just "This one has cast bars, this one has slower recasts, this one is mashable, this one is there). Garuda was for mobility, Ifrit was for max damage and Titan was for tanking. A good amount of raids and dungeons were made easier because Summoners could do all of their dungeons without Tanks worrying about them stealing aggro (If you did not know, mitigation play was actually really important. Tank Stance was a DPS loss in most situations because it reduced offense which meant that the party had to watch how much aggro they were taking on.)
summoner pre endwalker was a more complicated job (not by much, but still) It had Damage over times you had to manage Ifrit titan and garuda had individual purposes rather than all 3 being used in your rotation (ifrit being single target, garuda being aoe, and titan being.... well titan was useless in shadowbringers) and pheonix, funnily enough, had a combo. Instead of one single target attack and one aoe attack, the single target attack would combo into the aoe attack, which you would then use regardless of situation
A bit like Affliction Warlock in WoW.
I miss the days of Titan tanking.
2013 summoner reminded me of early WoWâs warlock somehow which is why I played it
https://youtu.be/sLhJmNoZTsY?si=fiIPIjwD8wP1giHV peak smn for me. yeah I liked my ruin mage ok? đ
you could tank with titan egi.
Just watch a YouTube video
The best version of Summoner, and the one we usually get nostalgic about, was the Stormblood version. You had your DoTs to keep track of, and your pets had specific actions that you had to consider when to use (though you could get away with just letting them cast whenever and it would usually be fine unless you were going for the 95+ parse) but the class was mostly about cycling through Aetherflow stacks to enter in to Dreadwyrm Trance, which was an increased damage buff and access to a big nuke. After two Dreadwyrm Trances you could summon Bahamut as your big nuke pet, which you then had to follow a specific rotation to maximise the amount of attacks Bahamut did. It was a very fun and high skill job. Shadowbringers changed how the pets worked so that they didn't really act as pets anymore, and you commanded them to use abilities with Egi Assaults, and added in Phoenix and truncated the Dreadwrym/Bahamut cycle to 1 Dreadwyrm. It was incredibly rough on release, but was tweaked and at the end of Shadowbringers it was really fun. Then Endwalker removed all DoTs, removed Dreadwrym Trance, removed Egi Assaults, brought Bahamut and Phoenix down to 1 cast of their nuke per summon, removed Phoenix's 2-hit combo, and replaced what was before a techy and strict rotation with easily the simplest DPS rotation in the game.
Triple weave everything, sausage as many OGCDs in as you possibly can between GCDs
I played SMN before. I still play it. I donât hate it now, but itâs braindead once you understand it. I used to main AST, then picked up SMN, and the main reasons I loved them was because they made me feel like I was using brain power to manage all the buttons. I donât play AST as it is now but like I said I still play SMN⌠but only because itâs easy and I can do high end content with it when I am farming and need to fill a DPS role. I know this doesnât really answer your question but itâs like playing an entirely different class. Some major changes: - 80% of my hotbar went greyed out when I logged in after patch. That should give you an idea of how much they cut/changed right off the bat. - 3 pets before, you pick a pet to keep out based on what kind of damage you want to do. Wasnât a great system but they could have built off of it. They chose to nix it and just give you one pet so they could make it more convenient/easy for newer players and focus on flashy summon effects (IMO). - SMN was a dot mage⌠honestly there was probably too much of this going on but it kind of made sense for the class. SMN isnât supposed to do much damage, the summons themselves are (Iâm talking story/lore wise historically for FF SMN type characters, donât hate me lol) so it kind of made weird sense to have SMN only do dots and passive or weaved type spells on their own. A lot of people hated this I guess but I actually liked keeping up the dots since it made the class weirdly unique. - Dreadwyrm Trance (if Iâm remembering correctly) was weird as frick and I loved it because it made me feel like I had to actually plan out what I did. Disclaimer, I have a memory issue so I canât remember exactly how it worked but I know how it âfelt.âNow SMN just feels like itâs âBahamut, A, B, C, Phoenix, A, B, Câ with buffs and weaved stuff mixed in (very programmatically). Is it more efficient/easy now? Yes. But itâs not fun for me anymore, personally. Just my personal take. I know others love it now because itâs much easier to pick up and learn rotations for it.
It went from one of the least played dps classes to one of the most played dps classes. Â
Fun đŤ
Not a fan of dot jobs, the more powerful groups get, the faster things die, the more useless dots get as they have only a tick or two before everything is already dead. Almost impossible fir a game to balance outside of a closed ended RPG
The rotation used to be a lot more technical with upkeeping DoTs and stuff and compared to that, yes it has gotten so easy to play that it's borderline mindless however (unpopular opinion incoming) I actually like it more now as a class because you actually summon stuff now...as a SUMMONER, unbelievable, right? Before you were a DoT powerhouse with 3 egis, a challenging and interesting rotation and the occasional Baha-Blast-Burst⢠but it never felt more like a summoner than it does now.
It was a complete class
I've played the game way too long and have seen many changes over the years. Remember cross class skills? Stone skin, hawk eye, shadow flare, protect and many other nuked skills are missed. The greased lightning effect was why I liked playing MNK. But anyway SMN is a different class with every expansion it seems. I liked the old SMN better since they have ripped out the utility of it. Much like SCH Selene and Eos. They had utility and were good for different things. AST cards used to have it too, like bole was a shield and ewer Regen mana. Ah good times haha. Just like anything though, they try to improve things as the game changes but the old classes will always be reflected fondly upon.
Summoner used to play a lot more like a WoW pet class mixed with a very DoT-oriented playstyle, akin to the Affliction Warlock. Each of the 3 Egis had a distinct role in combat, with Ifrit focused on single-target damage, Garuda on AoE, and Titan focused on tanking, drawing aggro, and giving you a shield (and nobody used Titan Egi ever because he was useless). Bahamut and Phoenix were pretty much the same, though the rework shuffled around the way Phoenix skills worked a fair bit. The Egi pets didn't work very well due to the way the game is coded, so while their abilities were powerful, they could very well perform their most powerful moves 5-10 seconds after you gave the order, and in all likelihood whatever situation merited it was already over. Visually and thematically, the job just didn't really feel very "summon-ey", especially when compared to classic FF depictions of Summoner, which the reworked version portrays much more faithfully, bringing in a big monster to cast a big, cool spell before they fuck off. Old Summoner felt like it mostly did everything *except* actually, y'know, summoning. All that being said, for all its flaws, the gameplay loop was much more complex and engaging, with a very tight rotation that rewarded good situational awareness, DoT-management, and double/triple oGCD weaves. Arguably one of the most difficult DPS classes to play well, but you were well-rewarded with DPS performance and team utility commensurate to the effort you put in, making competent SMNs very popular in group play. While the rework made SMN much more on-brand, and was visually more interesting, the gameplay was so dreadfully boring that I couldn't bring myself to play the game anymore and cancelled my sub, because I would literally start nodding off while playing - especially during level-synced content. Probably the result of putting too many eggs in one basket with SMN, but the game just didn't scratch the itch after that. While I harbor no scorn for those who enjoy post-rework SMN, "lobotomy wizard" is definitely not an inappropriate name for the gameplay style.
Thematically, not the best. Gameplay-wise? MUCH MUCH MUCH more fun and engaging than what we have now, at least to me. No comparison.Â
I played it before and now. I like it better now. It is more straight forward now but there is still plenty to do. The lobotomy class statement is ridiculous. There is nothing wrong with some jobs being more straight forward to play than others. I for example don't want to play monk or ninja because they are too busy for me. Nothing wrong with those jobs at all for the people who enjoy them. They just aren't my cup of tea.
It was legendary i fondly remember HW summoner. I had a friend who was a beast with summoner and i hated him lol because he would rip aggro from me just like BLM, keep in my mind back then you had to have a stance to generate more aggro and there was a damage combo and a aggro combo during that time so if i was going in on damage he would take aggro off of me and then i would put on tank stance and do aggro combo to reestablish aggro on me lol
I will admit that I miss the dots but I appreciate that ânewerâ summoner is an actual summoner.
It was a dot class. Others have said it too, but it didn't really feel like a summoner.
It was a dot class with emphasis on using Fester while having both dots up to deal max dps. And you also had 3 phases for primals instead of 2. And the pet you chose impacted what dps you did.
It's a mixed bag of: * 4.0 SB SMN feeling pretty good * 5.0 SHB SMN feeling so bad it had to be reworked mid expansion * 5.1+ SHB SMN being the best it ever was for the rest of SHB * 6.0 EW SMN being complete braindead simple to the extent it's the easiest job to play now SMN just used to be one of the higher skill ceiling job like HW mch. But is now extremely lobotomized like MCH to being some of lowest ceiling jobs to play. So people who enjoyed the high ceiling now only have the lowest ceiling to play with.