Dev Tracker - Discussion

Most of these people don't want the game as it was 15 years ago, they want the social experience. Today in all multiplayer games, it's hard to make friends or do content with people because everyone is afraid of instigating social interactions with strangers.

As such they effectively want a game that forces them and everyone else to do stuff together. Even for people who don't want classic, they still ask for alliance content and that's the same basic idea. They want forced social interactions with people outside their friend group, but they won't do that unless the game forces them to do it and gives them no option to not do it.

The main problem and why this isn't going to work and give people what they want, is we are not like we used to be anymore. So even if the game does force us all to play together, we are not going to make friendships the way we did when we were teenagers. We become set in our ways and resistant to fully embracing people with age, and that makes us not want to engage with people beyond the forced interaction as we used to.

Making friends as a teenager is easy, both sides are fully open to it and you can become a full proper friend you spend all your free time together every day from then on, over an zp party. As you get older, it becomes far less likely you'll do this, and so "classic" isn't going to give them what they think it will.

This is why calls for classic should be resisted, in favor of what is actually better for the games life span and the majority of the players.

This is a really neat idea, I like it a lot.

SMN definitely has a problem with trying to find a niche. It sucks as a DD, it's terrible as a healer, and it would struggle to be called the 4th (or worse) best buffer, TBH.

It's in a real ***place, especially when difficult content is limited to 6 slots which are extremely competitive. The nice thing is that in Ody, especially in multi-KI strats, it gets a lot of use because of the job limitations and the unique mechanics of the fights. We extensively use SMN for Mboze, Arebati, & Ongo.

Another reason why I think the game is at its prime. Everyone drools over "the 75 era" but TBH there were TONS of jobs that were not even remotely viable for any endgame content back then. In the modern age there's not a single job that isn't used for (at least some) fights. Some are more popular/useful than others, of course, but that's the nature of the beast if you want 22 unique jobs...it's much too difficult to have them all be competitive/similar and also be unique from each other, IMO. It's a game design nightmare and I'm amazed they even accomplished what they have.

Not quite true. I assume you haven't tried a private server. The forced interaction only really works when everyone feels the rules are in play. Sure, things have changed, but that doesn't stop people from making friends. They still chat like social media isn't around. It's all FFXI talk.

Classic isn't going to happen because it would mean SE has to actually enforce the rules.

Now this is an AWESOME idea, would love it in theory, but...
Aside from the fact that I can't really tell if 10 secs cooldown for Rage would be too much, maybe not but I'll leave the word to those with higher competence than me in the field.

Aside from that, I was saying, would it really be useful or even necessary if you're playing in Support role?
Would having 10 secs CD for support BP make any difference?
I mean, with the amount of time the buffs from a BP ward last (over 10 mins) you have plenty of time to cycle through all necessary avatars, give all buffs you want, and then swap back to the Avatar of choice to give the relevant Aura you want to give according to your party composition (DA+, Crit+, Mab+, all are very powerful).

In this scenario you would be able to be a decent healer with high ML and /WHM sub, able to use -na and single target cures and curaga3, all would be decently powerful thanks to the buff from Leviathan.

So really, again, would 10 secs CD instead of 20 make any difference in this scenario? Because I'm afraid it would change nothing in how good of a "support" SMN is.

If there ever was a point in time where vanilla servers could have worked for a while then it's gone imho.

Why would people forgo countless hours they've most likely already put in on a private server for free to fulfill their wet nostalgia dream just to start over on retail vanilla while beeing charged a fee?

The first step towards that direction would have to be to shut down private servers and I'm not sure the majority of people interested in vanilla retail would want that.

SMN will always and only be a second best alternative to cor brd geo, A 4th string healer and a bottom tier dps outside of 2hour

When you think about "what could we do to make this better" it doesn't work in a vacuum, it only works compared to what it's worse than. Zerosum, you must pick either this buffer or that buffer. You will always pick cor brd geo over smn, outside of sacrificing efficiency for a friend.

(unless smn gets something like haste3ga that would shift the meta) I'd drop both rdm and brd for haste3
I'd drop brd entirely for smn if Siren had 10 minute Victory March (*)When I don't need 4 minuets because frailty is nerfed

Honestly with it's current tool kit SMN isn't fit at all for healing. You'd need a potent regen similar or better than SCH or some sort of shield to make it work because with the constant avatar dieing or switching there is way too much delay for a short reaction task like healing. I haven't seen SMN healing since ~lvl 75 colibri camps and it was awfull back then, too.

If we get to see any job adjustments at all it will probably be for those 3 they specifically mentioned, everything else will continue to stay in the dust for multiple years.. Makes sense from SE's perspective because all of them are not a recent bandwagon so most people who'd jump on the obligatory bandwagon would have to start from the a low valley in terms of gear progression. All of them also have inventory clogging mechanics (pet jugs, nin tools, ammo) for more inventory strain and subsequent pressure to give in to wardrobes.

I dunno, "fixing" SMN as a buffer, making it a more viable (even if not on par) buffer with GEO, BRD and COR would be possible, but I don't think the solution would be reducing the timer of Wards.
Don't even need to increase the Rage timer as a compensation.
The idea of a stance is wonderful, but wouldn't work.

I mean, not like GEO, BRD and especially COR can't deal damage while buffing, right? So clearly that's not the problem.

I'd say SMN, while having viable alternative to some key buffs and some other unique and interesting ones, lacks options.
For instance, you have no real way to give a solid Acc/Racc buff.
Then there's the Att/Ratt thing. Sure there's Ifrit's buff, but it's a small bonus and it occupies the same slot as WAR's warcry.
Having more options for Att and Acc, even if with lower values compared to GEO, BRD and COR, would be a nice start.

Then there's the thing about melee haste. Hastega2 is nice but it doesn't cap haste, and you can't cap it with Haste1 either because they don't stack.
There's some ways I can think of to solve this, but I wonder if allowing SMN to cap melee haste on its own would be too much? I'm conflicted.
Maybe it would, maybe it wouldn't. I feel this aspect alone would make a big difference into making SMN as a buffer more viable that is now though.


It's also a matter of party composition though, if you have TWO buffers in your pt, SMN is already more than viable if the second buffer is BRD. But if the second is COR, nope. And if the second is GEO well, uhm, "viable" but kinda forces GEO to use Indi-Haste (when entrust is down) and that's quite a loss in terms of performance, so I'm not sure if we can consider it viable.
The fact SMN lacks options to adapt to these different situations I feel is the key aspect killing SMN's viability as a solid, even if inferior, buffer.

10 seconds cooldown on rage would be a bit much if it were putting out more damage than any other job does with weaponskills (it's not), if other jobs took longer than ten seconds to weaponskill (they don't), or if the summoner was putting out meaningful damage with their weaponskills too (not gonna happen.) Otherwise, it's... well, in a situation where the summoner can use this to skillchain, I can see it being kind of overpowered, but there isn't much content where you have a summoner meleeing to setup garland of bliss where astral flow/astral conduit isn't already a ridiculous option. Grown-up content isn't giving you time to set up skillchains with an avatar.

As for the buffs... yes, over longer content you can keep every available buff up full-time. If for some reason you're in an exemplar point part, for example. But in most fights, you do buffs up front, and with the roughly 29 second timer you get from your first use of each avatar, assuming you burn apogee... you can pick your top three before the card and corsair are done and everybody's running off to actually fight. At that point. you're done - either you have another job that's more important than getting the rest of the buffs on, or you need to keep one avatar out for the aura, or you're just filling a spot anyway and it doesn't matter what you do.

Being able to heal faster than once every 21 seconds (in optimal conditions!) might actually make summoner healing a little closer to viable too, Carby does a pretty good job when the timer's up but damage rolls out too fast these days for it to keep up.

... now, giving Siren, say, an aoe entrust indi-haste effect (it's a bit weird that they set Siren up as the source of all geomancy and then didn't give her any geomancy-like abilities) might make summoner a bit more appealing, two flavors of haste from one job, but hard to say if that would be enough to save it. Summoner really just doesn't thrive in competitive six-slot party compositions because yeah, it is basically fourth-best at anything it can do.

When I was thinking of the stance thing for SMN I wasn't thinking "oh, thank Altana now we can keep all our buffs up" I was thinking about
1.) Halving the CD on BP:R makes it a lot more competitive as a DPS
or
2.) Halving the CD on BP:W makes it a lot more viable as a healer

Sure, it can't heal as well as a SCH or a WHM, but if you don't need that level of healing, it comes with better buffs than a SCH or a WHM, and also has more useful 1hrs (potentially) and also has some DPS potential that WHM and SCH don't ordinarily have, and utility like Shock Squall, etc.

On top of that, Mewing becomes a lot more useful on a 10s CD instead of 20s.

BP:R at 10s can't keep up with a true DPS, sure, but also: BP:R give 0 TP, and melee give shitloads of TP.

I think it would at least increase the corner cases for SMN.

1. Avatar's Favor - Allow the ability to become a permanent buff(timed like any other buff ofcourse) but does not change when summoning other avatars until the job ability is reactivated. Many of the favors are similar to COR rolls, but are tied to the specific avatar being out which is not ideal in many cases. SMN in a magic composition and burst earth? great, put up shiva or leviathan's favor for MAB or MACC and having the ability to maintain that buff for the whole party while still utilizing Titan for instance is a great improvement on group utility. Or on the other side with a melee composition, want crit rate or double attack but you need to heal and support your party? activate ifrits or ramuh's favor and swap to carby. Anyways, you get the point.

B. Crimson Howl needs to be its own attack buff and not interfere with warcry, perhaps slightly enhanced potency.

Lastly. Give ability to cast spells manually with elemental spirits. Need dia? summon light spirit, cast, release (for example sake). Spells already exist... just assign a few to each associated elemental spirit and allow summoner to use with BP.

Since this is now the smn buff topic, like stated just make at least the aura buff of avatars favor either a lasting buff, or simply start at max potency, change the build up on that to BP ward duration or BP dmg for rages along with the already present BP recast reduction

Bring SMNs support wards up to par with other buffers, titans SS is near pointless, as is diabs phalanx, fenrir i havent seen a use for buff wise since he was added tbh, though the endrain thing had some neat applications from what i recall, then theres just letting them work without blocking other buffs such as shining ruby, winds belssing, or ifrits warcry as stated.

Then there's its kit as a healer which simply cant keep up with todays game speed, the powers there, but the recast is too long to be reliable as a main healer and im not sure how you'd address that and think that's its going to be relegated to a back up healer, what would be nice, though probably not able to be implemented is saving a BP that can be used anytime in place of another ward, that or storing one of the spirit spells to your spell list, just having an option to have curaga2-3 on the ready would solve much of smns ability to cure a party

lol well we had move on from it being the nin buff thread

Moving Hastega 2 and other similar buffs to the geomancy slot instead of the regular haste slot would help. They are both pet jobs, please put their pet buffs in the unlimited pet buff slots that entrusted lobby bubbles regularly occupy and are used frequently. We know this can be done even if there might be a limit.

There really isn't a problem with lower bp timers even if there was no stance and trade off because the BP wall is super harsh. 10 seconds between any 2 bp from any source means you can't even close a SC and burst it properly with apogee. 2 SMNs can't do anything back with each other. When you have all the buffs out for SMN, there aren't more buffs you'd want unless they rework a lot of the crappier buffs they can give.

I would take all of the plainly named nukes out of the rage category for SMN. All the IIs, IVs, and Tornado II as a bonus specific to Siren since she's the last one you get. You can make your summon quick cast them on a global cooldown so long as you have the MP for it. There is no conserve MP or Blood Boon to mitigate MP costs because it's not a BP nor are you casting it. Nukes would still hit the nuke wall.

Damage calculations comes from what the SMN is wearing as though they were casting the spells and the buffs the master is being affected by so they can be in a normal nuking setup. Pets are much harder to buff than their masters and I don't want the inventory clog of pet: mab and magic burst bonus gear that I won't use on any other job when SMN is already on Bunzi and Amalric and have access to bunzi rob and Mpaca staff. Prime Staff would be pretty sick for this.

SMN would become a more viable mage for nuking strats. Fights that let you use Shiva or Siren for Ice or Wind would be obvious specialties since you're either giving MAB to the other mages or SBII so the mob gets less TP. Extending SCH made SCs would become easier.

Mewling is still the only viable use of conduit. Barance.

SE's vision is 'Classic Summoner job'. Look at the cool summons with cool animations, so cool.

Reality is AFAC burn with a minor in mewing.

Ok the point about using multiple buffs for short fights like Ambu etc makes sense, I didn't think about that but yeah, even with Apogee you can use 3-4 buffs max before the BRD or COR are done buffing, indeed.
I still think it's a wonderful concept that wouldn't alas dramatically change SMN's status in the current meta but... it would be something for sure, and it sounds like it would be pretty simple even for their skeleton crew to implement.


Now I'm a bit confused by this message of yours and even Maletaru's.
You guys are speaking of SMN's healing capabilities considering just his BP heals.
But... why are you folks ignoring /WHM?
Once you've unlocked curaga3, SMN/WHM is an excellent healer for a wide range of content. You can get ~15% more cure potency than most other "healer" jobs for both single target and aoe heals, and you have all the -na /WHM grants you.
I mean, it's in a pretty solid position for healing.

Oh sweet Altana above, is that where we're at now, have we really come full circle to smn/whm main healer...

I guess summoner has access to raetic (for... some reason?) which makes it competitive with bard and red mage using kaykaus, but on /whm its MP recovery options become very limited - elemental siphon, Diabolos's favor if you're not using any of your actual summoner kit.

Obviously this isn't winning the summoner a slot in Odyssey Gaol. Might actually be viable in Sortie though?

If anyone thinks dropping the BP rage timer down to 10 seconds would make SMN OP and change the meta, you’re smoking something. Every single DD and their mom WSs every 3-4 seconds and with all the MEVA gear in the game now, there isn’t any drawback.

Also, if TP inhibition was the fad, which it is in some fights, SMN would only be complementary to MNK, not replace it.

It's true SMN has access to Raetic+1 but I honestly wasn't thinking about it simply because I doubt it would be very... efficient in terms of MP consumption. Especially while /WHM which means no self Refresh.

I was merely talking about Leviathan's BP which technically gives you 15% more Cure Potency for your heals beyond the 50% CP cap.

It's always with the caveat that the avatar is disposable, and unlike other pets can be called back out almost instantly at the minor cost of MP. With current player creep and current avatar power i dont think its a huge deal but if BP dmg is buffed then it can become one again.

That being said, going back to the whole stance thing i think that could work great if its something along this line
BP rage stance: Increases avatar offensive stats(atk, acc, mab, macc), lowers BP rage timer, gives a building bp dmg buff rages cost 2x more but wards stay the same

BP ward stance: Increases avatar defensive stats(def,mdef,meva,eva, some level of increased -DT), ward recast is reduced, favor aura potency is increased, wards get a duration/potency/accuracy buff(where applicable), wards cost 2x as much, but rages stay the same

Remove avatar's favor entirely and just make it built into avatars

Yeah you want Shiva out for MAB but if you can't nuke Ice then it's a mismatch. Favor is just the first Indi/Sphere. It does seem a little too inflexible that you can't designate it like you're saying when other buffers would never be restricted in the same way.

I agree with almost everything you're saying, but this one seems less vital since you can just... sub /WHM? Gating Curaga 3 behind ML10 (/WHM51) is mildly annoying if you're talking about SMN as healer prior to MLs, sure, but this doesn't seem like the worst of SMN's issues.

Love the rage/ward stance idea.

It was more just an easy example
Sleep/ga, dispel, stun from dark spirit
Silence, gravity from wind
Etc.

Just give the spirits some usefulness beyond siphon

Haven't played for a while. But, as someone who played whatever job was missing for the group for the majority of my time playing I am a bit surprised more people do not complain about PUP. In my opinion it is the worst job by a mile. The only reason people do not view it that way is the niche use of tanking

Most of the issues are obviously with the Automaton:
- It is a pet job, but it is overall a mess. Most of the frames are worse than trusts.
- The dps attachments basically do not work if you are in a group. Unless you play with a pet only group.
- You can't set the skillchain or STP attachments because the auto will just hold tp.
- You can't really swap into PetWs gear like the rest of the game functions without addons or sitting in that gear hurting your own damage.
- It is worse to run any sort of hybrid set, over just running a full dps set for the Master

That's all I can remember off the top of my head. So, unless you want to play completely solo, or with a pet only LS. It is pretty bad. For as long as I played it always felt like someone was doing me a favor when they let me come PUP lol

Personally i just think all the pet jobs need a buff(even drg, give the damn thing a back up summon) PUPs still got a niche like the rest, though probably even more minor as its mostly just ngai at a high level but DPS wise i and others i think said the STP attachments just need to be taken off its SC AI, better hybrid gear, and just a general dmg boost and itd be largely okay as a DD frame again.

The other frames i just dont see working very well these days without an AI overhaul which i think may be too much to pull these days but who knows, as is the whm frames too slow, the rdm frames biggest plus is it can keep H2 and phalanx on you better than some trusts, and the blm frames now fallen too far behind in INT and just general damage, before you could say "we'll it can only burst once but it does for more than a BLM" but now we're into 2-3 MBs on a nuker and atleast 1 of those can cap dmg too, blm aint keeping up anymore

Dont think any of these things proposed whether it be pup, smn, or nin will ever happen and at best you might get a small-medium dmg boost can call it a day

I think the ship has already sailed on my idea for fixing BST, but a hill I'll always die on is that they mismanaged the various in-game monster/player-adjacent subsystems.

Pankration, Monstrosity, Monster Rearing, Mounts, and BST could've all been tied together with a little forethought. There are still ways to combine them, but the dev effort is probably not worth it at this stage of the game.

Imagine raising a monster, unlocking it for use in pank/monstrosity/mount, then eventually unlocking it for BST as a job ability - either as a pet to summon or (if they wanted to be ambitious) to turn into, similar to Monstrosity.

It'd blow the possibilities for BST wide open to be able to become a monster. I'll always think it's a shame Monstrosity never found more use. It's fun to be a monster and it'd be fun to see what it'd do to the meta.

Do agree with that. But, think what differs PUP from the other pet jobs is the fact the Auto needs TP. And even then when you have TP the damage the skills do is pretty horrible. Guess best way I can frame it; it always felt backwards with PUP. To make PUP fit in a group, the whole group had to change for the PUP.

SMN and BST the pets are always useful, regardless of the situation. The Auto is basically useless most of the time lol

Always seemed to me that the puppets dmg(initially) was pretty respectable when paired with the masters, but as player creep increased the puppet continues to fall behind and eventually its either ignored or its a sc bot, which is cause pet dmg has barely improved, hell smn got most of the improvements since BP dmg was a given on just about everything until ody/sortie. Add in that like 90% of your hybrid gear is still stuff from adoulin and is more and more outdated, current gear all you basically get is pet: acc or the odd pet lvl+1, better than nothing but the players getting a shitton more AND buffs

Will agree with bst/smn though, pup always lacked a real utility role outside of being a tank, and not sure how you could carve one out for them beyond doubling down on the tank frame since that still works the best, just needs better hate generation

Bst was, initially, built around charm. Somewhere along the line that got changed into 'must call a beast' and 'must fight next to called beast', which could not be further from what bst was.

SE doesn't think bst needs adjustments, so nothing will change. I know how I would change it, I would make it possible to charm any family of monster that is of a type killer instinct applies to anywhere, at any point with no restrictions.

Charm adds in gaol? No problem. Charm apex mobs with no restrictions and no penalty with higher level mobs - same rules as call beast? No problem.

The drawbacks are the same as charming anything. It can fail, it's temporary, the pet can turn on you, you need to manage its health/when to release it, release it safely and so forth.

Those are the mechanics that were/are fun to everyone that experienced bst back then. Those are the mechanics now missing.

Jug pets were a band aid for when an area had no charm-able pets, and it's good there are now options there. But they are very limited compared to wild monsters.

Always felt to me that jug pets were added both in part cause players wanted to level bst in parties, rather than the solo job that SE saw it as, and cause bsts would "cheat" in sky and just throw birds at something nothing like genbu, and just general "griefing" that was common back in the day with some NMs around charmable mobs, so thats no good and now every important boss must be in its own arena or in an area where nothing is a "beast" mob to charm.

Then it just became easier to build bst around just being another job with a pet summon and so we go