5.08 Summoner DPS Change

I don't do anything but 50 and lower dungeons so maybe I'm missing something, but were there a lot of summoners complaining about having to apply DOTS before Ruin did full damage?

Was this a major reason for the perceived clunkiness/low DPS of 5.0 summoners?

There was a small section of the rotation where your DOTs would fall off when there was ~5 seconds left before Trance came off cooldown. It was a DPS loss to reapply DOTs in that timeframe, but people didn't like using weak Ruin during it.

This was just a small QoL change. The clunkiness comes from a few places. We have too many oGCDs. Egi assault feels bad. You push a button, for basically no damage, just to proc ruin IV. We need potency increases as well, but that doesn’t have to do with the clunkiness of the job

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.

It's a very niche buff on higher levels of play.The ones who wil benefit the most are players who arent properly doting in the first place.

Myon, the only issue with your major problems are: Demi Summons benefitting from oGCDs was likely never actually intended behavior. The 1.5s recast is intended to allow you to go from cast bar to instant cast GCDs and not lose a wave while also letting you enkindle the pet. Why else would the devs have buffed wyrmwave only to MASSIVELY nerf it the next patch to below pre-buff levels? This dates back to Stormblood mind you.

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.

You're also forgetting: Aetherpact (Devotion) being on a 3m cooldown places its cooldown centered on different trances. With well-executed timing, you can avoid it being up during both DB and DP, but if DB/DP are up, you cannot fire devotion. Well, the "natural" rotation puts Aetherpact being used during DWT and FBT, but it can't be used during FBT, so good luck.

Then there's niggling wounds like Ifrit-egi not having a melee charge and its long re-engage time, Garuda-egi having 80% potency scaling but Ifrit and Titan are 50%, Earthen Shield not giving ruin 4, Titan being a dead pet that honestly could be deleted and most players who knew the class wouldn't know the difference (granted, some SMN class instances will need to be retooled a bit). The list goes on.

And for all of this effort, for all of these problems, SMN is one of the worst DPS in the game where most of its abilities feel like awful, pointless busiwork where I seriously wish some buttons would just press themselves because their damage is just that bad.

i really hope that at 5.1 the devs will give a kit that truly feel how a summoner should be.
top/low dps doesn't matter as long as they fix the kit and give not only a decent rotation but actually a kit that will truly represent the summoner and will feel that your actually playing summoner.

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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.

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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.

some adds (that die fast) or when bossed jumps

its not worth applying dots on them..

thats what the ruin buffs are fot

I just hit 70 on my SMN and got Bahamut. My FC mate said "Enjoy your final SMN skill". I know he was being a bit facetious, but is Phoenix really just a reskinned Bahamut with some minor potency increases to your combo and a crappy heal? That seems really underwhelming if true.

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Originally Posted by Ryaz

I just hit 70 on my SMN and got Bahamut. My FC mate said "Enjoy your final SMN skill". I know he was being a bit facetious, but is Phoenix really just a reskinned Bahamut with some minor potency increases to your combo and a crappy heal? That seems really underwhelming if true.

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Firebird Trance changes your rotation. Phoenix is part of Firebird Trance.

well bahamut and phoenix are the burst power summoner have so they should be similar on a base level only to play a different roll.
bahamut should be the damage and phoenix is a bit lower with hp recovery element but right now bahamut really is too weak in comparison to phoenix and what FBT bring to the table and i'm one of those that wish bahamut could get some changes to make him be more like phoenix and make his summon be on same level.

Was it a major perceived issue for the flow? No, not exactly. The previous incarnation of smn was fluent and the new rotation has multiple issues. I'm assuming they are probably taking a look at that now.

Overall, there was some dot falloff. It is annoying to savage players who have to deal with the timing being off. It's also annoying outside of that. A couple of examples: dot falloff on bosses that swap or odd phase changes, multiple healers dying forcing you to hard rez and then reapply dots, forced movement at an inconvenient time, quick add phases or mobs that die too quickly, low level dungeons or raids where trash dies quickly, etc. In those situations, our unimpressive dps drops even lower.

It was a bad choice to tie dots to Ruin damage and the change is one step in the right direction. However, summoner's flow still needs work. You feel it especially when you play other classes and go back to smn. So far I've leveled blm, rdm, whm, pld, and dancer (all heading towards 80) and they all feel like the function well. Smn will feel better with a lot of practice, but IMO it still lacks the fun factor that other classes have.

At this point, most of SMN's problems can be fixed if they brought back the old Aetherflow system. DoTs were a lot more manageable at that time and it gives control on its rotation.

Situations where festeruins screwed you up immensely:

1 - Adds with low health that die fast.

2 - 2-3 second frame where your dots fall off and your DWT/FBT is still 3 seconds away.

3 - Large scale boss fates or populated hunts where you can't downright apply your dots and your class instantly becomes a laughing stock.


Yeah, it was a welcome change. SMN numbers are still not that great, and personally, I'd bring back aetherflow and dump energy drain/syphon, but at the very least you no longer feel like you are playing a clown class.

To me, the bigger problem with SMN is the Tri-disaster reset mechanic in the first place. I would much rather have a second charge on it and have its cooldown reduced to 40-45s to achieve the same effect it has now. Trying to align the debuff in the TA window is what causes most of the opener and rotational issues so decoupling it from Trance would help address this, especially if SE added Base potency to Bio/Miasma to encourage Hardcasting them (mostly by way of mitigating the penalty for doing so).

I think SMNs biggest downfall is the Demi summons honestly, that’s our burst phase yet we have responsive problems, we have ghosting attacks, annoyingly following us around...just so many problems for our big dps phases just doesn’t sit well with me, and I agree tri-disaster cd bothers me but whatev

They should either put TriD on a 30 sec recast timer with 2 charges already without the reset shit, and give AF back, or if they won't, put triD effect on Energy drain to kill 2 birds with one stone : removing clunkyness from the reset, removing buttons to push.

Also have the egi assault only on a 60 sec but giving 2 stacks of Ruin 4 at a time (that way it should ease a bit the "business" of the job).

Oh, and that's just a wish, not everyone want it, but the only moment i feel a flow (the likes of HS) is with Phoenix and I'd like Bahamut trance to work the same but hey.