Thread: 5.08 Summoner DPS Change

It's an extremely tiny buff in the grand scheme of things, to the first couple of gcds in the opener which land on a target with no dots. Also in cases where even in normal play you run into very short windows where dots fall off before your next dot reset and you're winding up a ruin. The reason is due to tri-disaster resets being tied to DWT/FBT, and the different positions that trances occupy in the new summoner's rotation compared to Stormblood.

However, it is far from a major source of 'clunk' in the current design, in fact it's probably one of the smallest. There are still far bigger issues that have yet to be resolved, let alone noticed despite the many threads that have been made on them. Many of these will likely not be fixed till next expansion, or possibly never (it's just gonna be how the job works now).

Major:
1. Energy drain and DWT/FBT are extremely punished by unlucky downtime.
If you kill a pack of mobs in a dungeon just before energy drain comes off cooldown, you become unable to press it and have no choice but to let it sit there, unused, as you run to the next pack. If Eden's adds get killed or Leviathan disappears just before one of your trance phases begins, you are forced to hold it till combat restarts. All these severely affect the rotation flow for the rest of the fight, in a way that is not recoverable. Aetherflow did not have this problem as you could press it anywhere to keep the overall structure intact. All the flexibility and agency this job had in Stormblood has been erased.

2. Demi summons no longer produce wyrmwaves from ogcd actions, only from spells.
You may think this makes the job simpler, but it also adds new clunk to the job that did not exist before. When ogcds could still produce wyrmwaves, by weaving actions between gcds you could keep wyrmwave's 1.5s recast timer cycling non-stop without any gaps. Not only did it make bahamut feel like a machine gun, spamming wyrmwaves also 'locks' bahamut in place and overrides the movement check that makes him stop attacking to follow you around. Now that only spells can produce wyrmwaves, it feels more like a gun getting jammed for 1s every gcd, and that gap in the gcd means bahamut is always checking his position relative to you.

Minor:
3. Egi assaults are just plain weak. Ifrit's egi assaults do 50 potency, and it costs 40 potency to downgrade a ruin3 to ruin2 in order to weave it. I hope I don't need to explain how ridiculously unexciting and unrewarding this skill is. This at least is getting some attention in 5.1, so we shall see.

4. Demi summons are unresponsive to wyrmwave cues shortly after they are summoned. Basically if you use your next spell too quickly after summoning bahamut or phoenix, they stand there doing nothing which can cost you a wyrmwave. To compensate for this you have to do a lot of unintuitive things like triple weave during the demi summon, or ensure that your first gcd is a ruin3 to give them time to wake up.

There are probably quite a lot of things I'm missing too. Frankly, I can't remember everything since I switched to black mage after week 1 of savage. Oh and the job just plain needs more damage, I really shouldn't have to say this since it should be obvious - all the non melee and blm jobs are in a terrible state from a dps standpoint.

Originally Posted by Taranok

Why else would the devs have buffed wyrmwave only to MASSIVELY nerf it the next patch to below pre-buff levels?

The unintended consequence of Wyrmwave being on oGCDs and GCDs, however, is that it meant the optimal rotation for SMN was using ruin 2, not ruin 3. And as it so turns out, demi-summons feel a lot better with instant casts than with cast bars. Though I personally feel they're at their best when the summon just does its own thing without respect for the SMN itself, just like automaton queen.

I mean, I get that the oGCD wyrmwaves were fun to some players, but it was a trick that a lot of players didn't even know existed and wasn't mentioned anywhere, and likely was not actually intended but just....existed anyways because of poor coding choices.

The patch that nerfed wyrmwaves also nerfed ruin3 by 10 potency, as well as tri-bind and painflare, so I'm unconvinced they were deliberately targeting demi-bahamut. In fact I'm starting to suspect that even in Stormblood, they intended to tune summoner at its current level all along, due to it having a rez. They just missed the mark due to aetherflow's miraculous ability of letting summoner tailor their rotation to any fight and punch above their weight as a result. Hence the countless tiny nerfs all through the expansion to try and nudge it back down without too much backlash. Well, aetherflow's gone now and we got clunky trances and ED instead, which will always be the number one issue I see with 5.0 summoner. Whatever the case, I'm just going to chill on black mage until such time they fix the job to an acceptable level.

I personally think demi summons are way more exciting and rewarding when you have some form of interaction with them. Making them something like queen or DRK's fray summon is the completely wrong way to go about it in my eyes. The entire appeal of a skill like wildfire, or our current demi-summons, is that they alter your gameplay and you have to play an active part in reaching their full potential.

If they're going to just do their own thing, then what purpose does the animation serve? You may as well just make them a 2000 potency dot debuff on the target. Like a super higanbana, just a dressed up flashy looking 'dot' that can walk around, all form but no functional difference. The level of mechanical execution they ask of the player is extremely basic so I would rather they not be simplified any further. Anyway, it's not like Yoshida told us himself whether ogcd wyrmwaves were 'unintended', so we will never know the truth. It's their problem to fix now, so if they address it with a different solution then so be it.