Random Thoughts.....What Are You Thinking?

I didn't like Dragoon in this game. Sure, Estinien was an A+ character, but I missed the awesome power of Drakesbane, plus a wyvern. The job just wasn't the same.

A crime what they did to Summoner

I played Summoner to 70 and don't remember a single thing about it. I don't even remember the summons, or even if there were any. Actually, potato man is jumping out at me as I type this. I remember now, they were baby summons. They felt more like minions.

DPS jobs on FFXIV are basically hitting a set of buttons in a cycle.

There is very little difference between the jobs, unlike FFXI.

Relative to FFXI, for sure. It's a trade off between uniqueness and balance, though. Despite balance being a Tanaka meme, FFXI never really had it. It would be nice to have an MMO with the widely varied jobs of FFXI and the balance found in more modern MMOs like FFXIV, but that might be a pipe dream at this point. Even if there were, I'm too deep into XI and XIV to take on another MMO anyway, so I guess the point is moot.

It works within the setting, and with the Demi-Primals now it feels very good.

Also, thank all y'all for the support. Sometimes this forum feels like the only sane place online these days.

Opinions etc, but i personally think it's the worst designed Summoner job in any FF game. The egi things are atrocious and the other two don't look cool at all. The DOT crap is silly for Summoner, Always felt like a failed job they had ambitions for but quit.

DRK is considered the main job for ShB but I imagine you could get away with BLM as well - something that channels "darkness" if you will would fit thematically.

I do like how they did SMN for XIV now since they can't make SMN like the traditional SMN from the other Final Fantasies due to how the combat is made. Now SMN has burst phases of the unique "big summons" in their kit and it feels more Summoner than ever before in XIV history, so I'll give them that.

But yeah, I'm with Ravael - I would like it if they could get XI's uniqueness with XIV's balance but unfortunately, that will never happen because even if there is a 0.0001% difference between jobs, people will clamor about imbalance and bandwagon onto the Meta job. That's just the nature of the beast.

*Stares at Healer 'balance' on XIV*

There is a little bit of XI's uniqueness with FFXIV though: Blue Mage.

Too bad you really can't use it for anything.

Yup. There is enough imbalance in FFXIV to screw with high-tier endgame stuff and lead to the creation of metas, but not enough that it really impacts anything else, thankfully.

On a related note, I'm not really a fan of strict rotations and positionals that most XIV jobs force you into, so I just play bard for (almost) everything whether it's the best job for any given patch or not.

Sigh...

Now that i got a reason to exchange my login points (grabbing shanks for dring for mules), i just missed by 1 day the deadline...

damn none warned me about this... i blame you all.

Even at endgame it doesn't matter. Xiv's homogenous nature is so strict that the difference between the best and the worst Dps is never significant enough that it will cause failure if you ring that job, it all comes down to the player. It is extremely boring for job and item design due to Yoshida wanting to cast a very wide net and catch every fish in the river.

Last time there was a serious meta was when you'd stack Dragoons, Bards, and Machinists to take advantage of Disembowel. SE's response to that 2as to remove resistance debuffs from the game completely.

Some groups are just finicky then, because I've still heard rumblings of certain jobs being "preferred" for burst synergy, though not to the extent that I'd seen in the past.

I'll probably just die my sam gear black and call it a day. I also have warrior, but half my toolbar is crossed out so I don't even know what changes they have made.

You can unlock that half of the toolbar by purchasing warrior crysta on the mogstation

It's under the "win" tab.

owlkitty on youtube. definitely worth checking out.

*works 64 hours this week instead of forty, mentally *** to self about how bad it is*
*looks at next week’s schedule of 84 hours*

Finally saw Wonder Woman 2: invisible boogaloo and was better than expected

Was nice to see my favourite game of thrones actor gettin’ work

dear diary,

today i spent my entire time killing crabs and pugils and it made me feel good. only a couple hundred JP to go

You're on the wrong server!

Really with how they made the Primals a monumental portion of the story vs. having a job that could summon them... it has to be the way it is, more or less. If it were rocking fully summoned Primals and controlling them, the story would have to be vastly different.

I can agree the Egis are sorta ugly, particularly Garuda Egi, but I like'em fine, and they can be turned into three flavors of Carby now. The Demi-Primals are literally just smaller versions of Phoenix and Bahamut, and really only barely. They look and feel great. Especially Phoenix.

As far as renditions of Summoners go, let's have a look at series history for a bit of insight on FFXIV SMN.

Summoner first appears in Final Fantasy III on the NES. There were three jobs that could summon, Conjurer, Summoner, and Sage. Only difference between them was the level of the summons they could use. You could buy almost all of the summons from shops, but Bahamut, Leviathan, and Odin all had quests/battles to obtain them. Though in the Eureka secret shop you could just buy them... Functionally, all of the summons merely dealt non-split damage to all enemies. This made summons functionally identical and mildly inferior to Black Magic. So its first appearance establishes it as a job for flavor.

It next appears in Final Fantasy IV, being the signature of Rydia. However, until acquiring Leviathan and Asura, most of the summons she has are inferior to Black Magic, particularly the spell Virus, later translated as Bio. Virus had a low cast time, middling MP cost, no monsters that resist it with some weak to it, and it inflicted HP sap. For these reasons it did better damage than Mist Dragon, Ifrit, Shiva, Ramuh, Titan, Chocobo, Sylph, and Bomb. Unless they were hitting an elemental weakness across all targets. Virus was even more cost effective than tier 3 Black Magic elemental spells, if they could not capitalize on an elemental weakness.

Next up is Summoner from Final Fantasy V. Here we have Summoner available after the second crystal, with summons once again purchased. This time, however, instead of just ultra powerful summons requiring a dungeon trek and boss fight against the summon, it's pretty much every summon outside of a couple obtained from random battles. Many summons in this game offer utility like status or damage protections. This is the first time Summoner's identity really shines.

In Final Fantasy VI, every character may summon using equipped magicite. Similarly, the class is reduced to equipment in FFVII as well. In FFVIII the summons had personality to an extent, and some of them acted as characters or NPCs, and they have major story significance, but they're universal and can be used by anyone again.

FFT - Big AOEs that take a mighty long time to cast, somewhat showy.

In FFIX we get a return to form, long showy animations and lots of style over substance. Both SMNs have white magic though, meaning for the first time, the games enforce a hybrid class of healing that has big damage, somewhat counter to previous incarnations.

FFX, the game story focus is summoning, and they are way more fleshed out versions of GFs from FFVIII. Complete with victory poses!

FFXI, you know more than I do probably.

FFXII, big back story, basically enslaved to glyphs by the gods. Beat'em, assign them to characters, keep them on said characters forever or whatever. No real SMN class again.

FFXIII, no SMN class, just personalized summons for each character.

FFXIV - ancient Allagans use their knowledge of Primals and arcanima to pit primal power back against primals, allowing them to fight without getting tempered. In addition to Egis, SMNs may channel the powers of primals directly in a, "Trance" that ups magical power and sharply reduces cast times.

FFXV - big story time, whiny gods with one baddie. Summoned only by Noctis with a quicktime hold down the button, button prompt. Or as the story demands.

So basically the series always flip flops between having just one or two SMNs, or letting the summoned monsters be a focus and letting everyone summon. FFXIV SMN clearly takes the most inspiration from early drafts of the class, where the SMN has other avenues of attack. Particularly calls back to Rydia. I wouldn't really consider it a travesty against the class, because the class itself is often dissolved entirely, but when it's not it's always different anyway. Personally I find the FFXV variation to be the worst,

The egis and those demi-primals are just really ugly imo. SMN in almost every FF game they were in was flashy and something seen as very powerful. They could have easily worked it into lore to have different versions of the primals, not the primals themselves. For a game that had so much graphical potential, they really dropped it on an important job or magic in a Final Fantasy game. You just seem like a big fan of the game but no matter how you spin it, almost 90%+ of fans of FF were disappointed in XIV's version of Summoner, its really lame.

I'm not sure why you decided to bring up the history in FF games, especially suggesting that summons were inferior to other magic or abilities. I was talking specifically from a design standpoint and visually. They could have reworked the abilities to be actual summons that appear and disappear or anything that even looked like a Summoner lol. The whole job just looks underwhelming, even the Limit Break is really lame.

No u

Yeah, im annoyed...

I made the newbs mistake... In a rush to make inventory space to convert spark/accolade, i hit the damned command to dropall inventory.

While i dont actually leave anything very valuable on my inv, my silver vouchers were there. So, around 300 silvers going poof because a couple of millions...

Never again gonna exchange it at sunday... gonna see if i can get done by wednesday next time.

The current burst damage phases of Summoner have them summoning Bahamut and Phoenix for a brief window of time to provide their firepower to the player before disappearing. Thematically, they are getting better at making a Summoner feel Summoner-ish - we just can't have big obnoxious summons that take up half the arena in a game where being able to see what is happening next is critical to surviving the fight.