Can we please get a replacement for Astral Conduit?

I know more than a few career summoners are going to say "no, my Astral Conduit, I need it to be good", and I get it. It's a really strong job ability. Too strong. So much so that measures are being taken to reduce its effectiveness, which instead reduce the effectiveness of the entire job. That has to stop.

There's already content where you can't use Apogee, have to worry about your blood pact delay, and can't take a second summoner in no matter how useful it would be, because that's the quick fix for making Astral Conduit less overpowered.

While I don't think this is necessarily the best replacement, I don't want to come here without any ideas for what the new SP2 could look like, so I'd like to offer this and hope someone replies with something better:

Synchronicity
Duration: 180 seconds
While under the effects of this job ability, summoners gain Avatar's Favor +5 (as per Caller's/Beckoner's Horn, and cumulative with that piece of gear), Avatar's Favor is activated if not already in effect and its "warmup phase" is bypassed, and avatars receive Regain +200.

This would indirectly reduce blood pact delay, but not to zero, amp up whatever passive benefit the avatar of choice may have, and slightly improve healing and damage potential. It wouldn't be nearly as potent as Astral Conduit, but this may be offset by increasing its duration to be in line with Astral Flow.

Anyone in here feel like they can do better? Jump in with your ideas, let's give whoever's reading this a few different starting points to choose from, and see if we can't get summoner saved from this weird "too good to be okay" place it's in.

I'd rather just limit AC to a certain number of blood pacts or something like that. Or even just one, but substantially enhance it.

It is silly that they add abilities that let SMN use BPs back to back then nerf BPs so you can’t use them back to back. If that’s the way it’s going to be then they just shouldn’t have the abilities that let you use them back to back in the first place…

I’d say change astral conduit to remove cast times on summoning magic (so you can freely swap avatars quickly), maximise avatar’s favour effect for the duration (so you can swap avatars without losing any power) and make blood pacts free of cost for 3 mins, then you could combo it with astral flow for free AoE power that you could combo with apogee for some big explosion spam (obviously remove that stupid spam nerf). Or just swap out avatars and go ham on rage and ward pacts. In 3 mins you could get a good 18 blood pacts off in that time.

It’s not as powerful as astral conduit in the short term and it would allow for some more creative uses than just spam your strongest blood pact as fast as you can.

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It is silly that they add abilities that let SMN use BPs back to back

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Which is why I said limit it to just a few times, and then, obviously, remove the nerf.

Another option is put the individual BPs on cooldown, which means you can use all of them but you can't use the same one repeatedly.

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Originally Posted by Alhanelem

Another option is put the individual BPs on cooldown, which means you can use all of them but you can't use the same one repeatedly.

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Honestly I’ve wished we could just have this as standard for a long time, make SMN more about managing mp rather then managing 2 BP timers. Then free BPs would be even more valuable as we could just cycle our avatars throwing out everything.

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Originally Posted by Alhanelem

Another option is put the individual BPs on cooldown, which means you can use all of them but you can't use the same one repeatedly.

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Or make it a global cooldown per avatar. If you use Flaming Crush, you can wait 60 seconds to use Flaming Crush or Meteor Strike, or dismiss Ifrit and pull in Siren for some Hysteric Assault action. It would make the job handle closer to the original vision for it (calling your avatar for a big hit then letting it go) and encourage more use of the job's entire suite of abilities. If the cooldown was a bit longer than blood pact delay currently is (which it would have to be to make individual timers anything but a stealth buff to the job), it would make solo play a little tricker and a little more dangerous, but it would make the job feel a lot more dynamic.

Could just make conduit last 3 minutes and reduce the blood pact delay of the job by half after gear. Instead of spamming 0 second BPs it would encourage a SMN to provide support from wards and continually add to DPS over time instead of spamming until it wears off.

Rather than getting all fancy with new abilities or other changes.

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Originally Posted by Sp1cyryan

Could just make conduit last 3 minutes and reduce the blood pact delay of the job by half after gear. Instead of spamming 0 second BPs it would encourage a SMN to provide support from wards and continually add to DPS over time instead of spamming until it wears off.

Rather than getting all fancy with new abilities or other changes.

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It's still somewhat significant of a change, since Conduit doesn't really modify timers, it just ignores them completely. Which may be mechanically different internally from making the actual recast time 0.

That being said, this isn't a terrible idea, to make it mach up better with astral flow. But currently achievable BP timers are already pretty short, I'm not sure how much of a difference this would make.

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Originally Posted by Sp1cyryan

Could just make conduit last 3 minutes and reduce the blood pact delay of the job by half after gear. Instead of spamming 0 second BPs it would encourage a SMN to provide support from wards and continually add to DPS over time instead of spamming until it wears off.

Rather than getting all fancy with new abilities or other changes.

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That could work too, though it might call for reducing the potency of Astral Conduit job point perks? You get something like 8 to 15 pacts in very close succession now - I want to say I get about one every four seconds due to job ability delay, but I haven't really timed it to be sure of that. Halving delay for three minutes would give you a very comfortable 16, and a bit more time to handle MP management during it. Maybe half of those being attacks that just get 20% stronger and not being 20% stronger attacks with no time cost is enough mitigation, I dunno. Seems like something to look at in testing, if that's a part of the development process any more.

Not sure it'd really see any big improvement in support play though. An extra minute and a half on buffs would be neat, but the process of swapping and getting an avatar to the party to apply those buffs is just too slow if you're playing with a ten second window before you're wasting an attack opportunity. Be cool to negate that downside by making buffs and healing just automatically affect the entire party rather than just an area for the duration, but that seems like a big ask. Maybe if summoner didn't have the survivability of wet tissue paper, so it could just chill with the front line fighters and skip the positioning step entirely... but that's just not what the job's about.

Hm, I'd like the Astral Conduit/Apogee nerf deleted entirely, and AC replaced with something that force unsummon's the avatar but opens up all BloodPacts for individual use directly from the SMN w/o touching on the BP timer. Each BP only available 1x during SP2's 30s duration, SP2 also made to wear off immediately upon resummoning an avatar. Perfect for putting back up all your buffs mid-fight and doling out a few hits of your own before going back to Mewing.

That would be really annoying and clunky to do, even if you set cast times to zero you'd have to wait for the summon/unsummon animations and it just wouldn't feel good.

The convept of AC is fun it'd just like to see its power controlled in a way that doesnt compromise the rest of the job

Ya, it would be difficult to implement which is probably why they went with something easy like BP recast == 0. Done

I think the sad truth is rather than spend time and resources to properly balance it, it was easy for SE to just nerf blood pact damage and be done with it. It is sad, they not only nerfed conduit but the ability to play with multiple smn's in general. Combined with the mew nerf, I think smn might be the worst job in the game. At this point it is practically useless in any meaningful content.

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Originally Posted by Alhanelem

That would be really annoying and clunky to do, even if you set cast times to zero you'd have to wait for the summon/unsummon animations and it just wouldn't feel good.

The convept of AC is fun it'd just like to see its power controlled in a way that doesnt compromise the rest of the job

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Just picturing an implementation where you whistle up a ring of miniature versions of all the avatars you have access to, just so they're all at hand for their respective blood pacts... I think the way pets are programmed means that would be literally impossible without tearing out a lot of code and redoing it, so obviously that can't happen, but it's a nice mental image.