A Summoner's Gear Guide

I'd probably...
* Make Shiva's Crystal Blessing TP Bonus +1000 instead of +250.
* Give Garuda Hastega III, which caps magic haste.
* Make Avatar's Favor a 10 minute AoE buff that uses the gear / avatar you have out when you use it (no potency building or avatar restrictions).

There are a bunch of things I would like to do for the job (you could pretty safely double favor potencies), but I think we would be able to responsibly start using summoners as buffers or healers in a lot of content if they made these three tweaks.

Just giving Siren march, would do it

Anything else would just be icing

Pretty much also where I'd start tweaking.
- Buff crystal blessing considerably. Maybe full potency for 1handers and 2/3 or 1/2 potency for 2handers and hand2hand
- Make Hastega II a separate buff so it stakes with Haste/II.

Crystal blessing should add enough fire power to make it attractive enough to consider it at least for 1hander DDs for BRD or RDM slot.
Making hastega it's own buff would open combos of SMN + BRD, RDM or BLU to cap party haste.

From there you can still tinker with favor changes and add buff/debuff scaling with SMN skill to bring them past the 75 era but that's just icing compared to the two changes above.

We need Bahamut and Phoenix.

I'm just going to put this here.

Sterk has already shown that 5man 9boss is doable meaning there's a slot for smn and Buukki did a nice write-up showing how synergetic the pair is. Papasse has also shared tons of stories over the years.

You can either stay mad "I'm not top pick anymore" or go carve out your own path.

GLHF

(A boost to crystal blessing would be nice though)

1k constant TP bonus buff is absurd imo, warcry is already a huge buff for everyone involved and that's on a limited timer. wouldn't push it past 500. Allowing the job to cap its own magic haste on the other hand would be nice though don't think it really shifts its place in content all that much.

Uh, where did i say they can't be applied? I said they wouldn't earn a spot in sortie. You wouldn't take a SMN over a BRD, COR, or GEO, with the buffs you listed. It still doesn't have gravity 2, so you ain't taking the RDM spot. It's not a tank, and it's not a DD.

Sure, if there's already a setup you can 9boss with 5, it can take the 6th leech spot, but it can already do that today, no buffs required.

Why do you need gravity? That's only for the DNC strat...

I am forever mad at Tenzen for hogging Phoenix.

Sorry again, none of what you're listing is needed for 9 boss sortie but okay.

K cool, I guess SMN doesn't need any fixing then because it's already welcomed with open arms to sortie 9 boss runs. Problem solved guys, we don't need a rework.

The entire premise for most of FFXI's history was that pet jobs were the super safe, super slow way to kill things. Melee was the riskier but faster way to do it.

We've only been talking about one side of the SMN nerfs which is the direct ones, the ones that prevent us from doing fast damage to keep up with fast content.

The other side is the content itself. They've axed the slow & safe method from even being a possibility in the latest content, it's all rush rush rush now. Odyssey has strict time limits and your speed directly impacts the outcome. Slow & safe doesn't just spend more time, it severely limits what you can actually accomplish. SMN is antithetical to the Sortie cadence as well, as Genoxd pointed out. 20 second BP timer and most fights are over in 30 seconds tops. After that it's 8 minutes of running to the next boss which means any Wards you apply will last 2 fights at best. And most Sortie groups aren't going to stand around waiting on your Ward timer so you can re-apply multiple buffs before a boss. So with Sortie being limited to one hour a day, and bosses being 8 minutes apart, along with pets not being able to perform several of the objectives, it's just not feasible to be productive in Sortie with SMN.

The last time pet burns were viable is when you could take your time with content if you so desired. The safe & slow method just isn't viable anymore. Except in Limbus but there's no advantage there because the fast & risky method isn't remotely risky. There's no advantage gained from taking it slow anymore.

The game has sped up, and that's the real reason SMN was left in the dust because our whole identity was taking it slow.

Edit: To be clear I'm not bemoaning that there's content which punishes being slow, just that there is basically no modern content which doesn't punish being slow. A mix would be nice. Imagine if there were a couple Gaol NMs that were easy to kill if you can actually survive them, like Xevioso or Ngai but even more so. Imagine if Sortie had a difficulty setting you could crank up to get more galli, but it was so hard that melees couldn't survive it anymore so you had to use a tank & ranged/pet burn just to take them down? You couldn't do 9 boss anymore but you could still earn respectable galli that way. Just a few random ideas that could make the content accommodate more possibilities.

Not only that but even our avatar favor mechanic is dead. Even if we did what Byrth and others suggested: double the potency and removed the ramp up time. Avatars die in sortie and other content in 5-10 seconds max (1-2 AoE hits). Our pets have no natural MDT and something like 1.5k or less HP. The gear for both max potency and DT doesn't exist. It needs a full rework honestly. Something they're actually good with.

What they did to COR and RNG for aminon is also disgusting. Nerfing ranged damage just to make you deal with bad mechanics is bad design.

Modern SE just doesnt know what to do with pet jobs in a faster pace battle system. The same problem is a thing on XIV too with the upcoming BST job being very limited.

With how old XI is now they should just remove the nerfs and add a third BP reduction to say Nirvana and Prime Staff to at least make SMN back into the DD it should be. Give SMN ~5 sec delay BPs... its not actually going to break anything really since melee DDs these days can WS every like 3-5 seconds at 2000 TP when fully buffed.

That's the friction point.

The game is considerably faster and there's no way for pets to match it.

This makes it so baffling that they still decided to nerf with blood pact wall, completely out of touch.

Avatars are squishy and can't be healed effectively during AC window, even if you'd spam mulsum the delay alone would cut DPS in half. They aren't immune to crowd control either.

There were plenty of tools already in game to keep SMN in check for fights where they didn't want AC spam to be effective. There was simply no need for the BP wall and I think it's obvious if you have a bit of understanding for the games mechanics.

Let's be very clear here. Even if the BP wall was removed and you had full time Astral Conduit on all fights I sortie, your damage would be comparable to a RDM. You wouldn't come close to a DD.

Just so we're on the same page about this "pet DD is too strong". That was true in 2015, it's not true in 2026.

Depends on the debuffs on the mob. On GF, the AFAC SMNs were doing 99k every 2 seconds, or nearly that (depends on the mob), so it's not unrealistic to think that it could be possible on a sortie boss with the right support and debuffs. That said, of course it requires a party completely built around the SMN (or an alliance).

I agree with the premise of SMN being a slow and safe strategy, but let's examine that. There are TONS of pieces of content where you can take it slow.

Omen, vagary, sinister reign, ambu, limbus, HTBF, gaes fete, UNMs, and even the earlier master trials.

Do people commonly do this content with pets? No. Why not? Because why do it in 45 minutes when you can clear it in 5 instead?

Limbus has no time limit, how many people do you see running around limbus with a SMN? For my part, I saw a bunch of SMNs at the limbus bosses (at first) because they didn't regen and were dangerous as ***, so SMN was a safe way to chip them down. Now that we've figured out how to handle them (reasonably well), on my server there are basically no SMNs at the recent bosses I've fought.

People don't want to play SMN because it's worse than other jobs. Even if SE gave you 5 hours to do sortie, nobody would be bringing a SMN because taking 5 hours to do something that you can do in 1 hour sucks.

Should that be fixed so that more people want to play SMN? Sure, sounds good to me. I love SMN. I also like BLM and RNG and I have all of them geared to a very high level. That doesn't change the fact that making them competitive or giving them a useful niche is insanely difficult and everyone acts like SE is missing some obvious way to fix the problem.

Until I ask them to fix the problem and their ideas all fail or break the game. And then they run and hide and stop posting. Or ignore everything I wrote and attack a strawman I didn't say.

You wsnt SMN to get some more useful gear? Sure. You want buffs to some of SMNs abilities? Sure, sounds great. It's still not gonna make it competitive with other jobs and the meta will not change 1 iota.

You want SMN buffed to the point of being in the meta? Show me how to do that without turning everything into a SMN show. It ain't happening.

There were suggestions at the top of page 35 from byrth that could make SMN attractive as a buffer for regular setups.

I also wrote at the bottom of page 34 why job adjustments aren't as difficult as they used to be simply because SE clearly doesn't aim for perfect job balance anymore.

You either didn't see them or you ignored them.

Whoops, looks like you aren't reading my posts again.

You're either making it a 100% required job because their Crystal's Blessing gives TP Bonus+2000, or you're making it not worth bringing because it's not as good as GEO (or BRD, or RDM, or COR, or whatever). There's no in between.

And as I said on the last page, if you make it as good a buffer as BRD COR GEO, people won't swap it out for BRD, COR, or GEO, they will add it as a 4th buffer. Why would you remove a buffer? Especially while 2-4 of your buffers are also contributing a significant amount of damage?

You're literally on the record, REPEATEDLY, complaining about how mandatory BRD COR and GEO are, and now you want to add another job to the "required jobs" list. Do you not see how these perspectives are contradictory? You think that people will swap SMN out for BRD, but don't recognize that nobody did that for COR or GEO? What makes you think SMN will be different?

More jobs on the required job list means more variety in the required jobs list.

At this point SE should try to make ***broken so people bandwagon something new.

There are 6 party slots. For most content you need a tank, a healer and a DD, leaves 3 slots max for support.

Now if you balance your game so that your supports for example deal so much damage that they start playing with the thought of ditching the DD slot for a 4th support, mind you in a game where the fast majority of jobs are DDs, then you *** up and a massive DPS nerf for the supports is over due.

It's not that complicated really. You look at the golden boys, figure out what made them so indispensable and then buff a underdog accordingly.

If you still didn't achieve your goal drop the nerf bat on the job/s you've decided to replace in the meta.

K no problem. Just make Avatars GEO bubbles that just stand there. Please give them the DT that GEO bubbles get and let me select what aura they give based on element and BP I perform. The BP does nothing but swaps the aura. Also give me nukes like GEO so I can nuke ***on SMN. Basically just skin GEO for me as a SMN. K thanks. Now you can bring GEO or SMN guys. They're the same job. Take your pick

Not sure if this was a response to me but I'm obviously not talking about a verbatim copy/paste, at that point people could just go play GEO.

As a example lets say you've decided BRD is out cause he had a good run. BRD primarily gets invites for ACC and ATT buffs, capping haste, raising PDL, AoE white magic sleep and adding decent melee damage. They have other strengths but those are afaik the primary reasons to bring BRD, they can keep a few niches.

SMN already has ACC+/EVA-, ATT+ and Haste buffs... they just suck and/or they share buff slots with other buffs.
Now you increase the potency and duration of existing buffs and debuffs, grant certain buffs like Hastega and Ifrit's Warcry their own buff slot and to compensate for the weaker damage output and +PDL you crank up stuff like crystal blessing and Ecliptic Growl.

10 mins of applause to Perg, I quoted this part but I meant the whole post.

I'm with Maletaru on at least one thing though: balancing SMN in current day meta would be very hard, clearly you cannot make SMN just as effective (or close to) to DDs, when they "risk" standing at distance and SMN can stand away.

Hard to debate that honestly. At the same time, SMN is full of things that no longer make sense and could be totally adjusted while mantaining his damage low.
No reason to nerf repeated BPs this hard when Astral Conduit isn't up, to begin with.
They could furtherly reduce BP timer by at least 5 seconds without changing much in terms of meta (but making SMN player feel much better), they could be buffing several BPs, removing stupid limitations in place that no longer make sense, give Avatars SLIGHTLY more survivability, adjust lotsa small stuff and SMN would still remain a secondary job that in no way can compare to DDs (as it should) but it would feel waaaay better for players.

I'm not even talking about some godlike balancing that is theoretically possible but realistically very unlikely and would take way too many resources on their side.
I'm talking about lotsa very small things. The fact they refuse and are (rightfully?) afraid to do it is honestly painful and I'm tired sick of the same old excuse of "old game, XXX limitations, not enough humans working on it".
GFDI those at the high floors should develop a bit more pride about FFXI and the small player base still paying a monthly fee each month.
But we're like addicted toxics. We shout and we whine but ultimately we happily take all the slaps SE throw at us, to the point that when we get a small caress it feels like pure extasy.
That's the state we're in and have been for so long.

The "need" for a tank has been heavily replaced with dds able to fulltime capped DT and "most" instances the support can be the healer (gaol being an exception because the removed subjob). And pld has also been used to cover the main healer slot.

If you buff smn to be an as strong or stronger buffer as the other 3, we will absolutely see composition shift to 2 dds 4 supports, and someone is subbing sch or whm to heal.

For example, dropping 1 or 2 brd songs to do something like minne in order to make the party sturdy enough and gain whatever new/enhanced buffs smn would bring, would be a net gain on kill speed.

It very much was not directed at you! I was poking fun at the idea that SMN is either the best at X and replaces some other job or it isn't and is worthless.

I'm honestly done with the conversation. The arguments are essentially "pet jobs should keep sucking because they'll replace xyz if they don't"

I gave summoner ATT+30%, ACC+100, Crit Rate+10% and TP bonus +250, all stats +15-25 in my post. That should be reasonably competitive in sortie. The ATT bonus could go to +50% but then you're encroaching on COR/GEO buff potency. Combo that with TP bonus+250 and ACC+100 letting you drop madrigal and the stat gains. Then I'd assume you'd be in potentially replacement territory.

As I said from the start. Ain't looking to kick out the precious GEO/BRD/COR trifecta. Just give alternatives that aren't a flat out "leech spot"

If that's what happens and you want to avoid that you can still nerf one of the old supports to oblivion. You have to nerf hard enough though so the support's support capabilities drop down to where SMN's are now, then people will avoid that job like they do with SMN now.

SE loves walls, right? Make a sub job ability wall, while more than 3 supports join a party spells and abilities past 49 sub lvl aren't available to party members anymore.

Smn isn't getting fixed.

SE had to nerf it hard after the great AFAC debacles, and with good reason.

No way back from that - see Ranger, bst.

Anytime SE has to nerf something, it stays nerfed.

Smn is now "Oh look a summon, how very Final Fantasy. Cute."

That's about it.

Ah yeah, it's real fun spending 20min soloing Lilith with Siren. Meanwhile a four person party can zerg her down in 1-2min.

Just being real, no hate. I love summons, they look cool. Just not that useful anymore.

I gave up on Cor getting nerfed long time ago. It's been that way since CoP. SE also has an irrational hardon for some jobs, like Cor, Sam, War, Pld, Brd.

I mean Brd was already ever present and their prime weapon gave them another must have unique song that gives PDL, a supremely useful stat in today's game.

Meanwhile Smn and Bst get pet level+ so they can.. solo some more ***I guess.

That should tell you everything you need to know.

Well... I dunno about that.
Or rather yes, you're absolutely on point on that.
Thinking about the Nerfs to Victory Smite and Ukko's Fury for instance, they're still active even today.
And yet, those two WS became relevant again through other means and through the years, because of buffs to other aspects of the game which ended up indirectly buffing the damage of those WSs.

So... I mean, who knows what could happen.

Goin back to the initial part of your post, I doubt anybody not even the blindest whiteknight of SMN would dare to say that AFAC didn't deserve that nerf, we all know SE had to do something about it.
The way they handled it ended up nerfing SMN even outside of AFAC and that's not exactly fair and, probably, something they didn't even meant to do and didn't immediately realize when they enacted that nerf.

I seriously doubt SE will do anything about SMN at all, but as I was saying before there's A LOT of things they could do which would still leave SMN in a secondary, non meta, position (and honestly I'm fine with that) and at the same point would make the job much more "fun" and effective to play.
They have so much room for that and it wouldn't require months of work on their side to enact. Just need the will to do it.