Summoner and the upcoming changes

[Bigcat9715]

My biggest problem with Smn as it stands is the Aetherflow lockout. I understand why the lock out is there, but slowing down Smn seems like a really bad design choose. Unless we were using the Job in a unintended way all along, and the expansion was their way of patching the job?

[ShaolinMike]

Unless we were using the Job in a unintended way all along, and the expansion was their way of patching the job?

You actually might be on to something here, cuz I remember when they first unveiled Dreadwyrm Trance, Yoshi-P was saying the idea behind it was to give SMN something to do while Aetherflow was on CD aside from just Ruin spam. Hmmm...

[Vallhallix]

Did some Susano extreme farms today and players seems to hate my Bahamut there because it is too big and players can not see mechanics. Is there any way hide that pet?

How is that even possible unless they have the camera close up on their arse. Sounds more like bad players making excuses lol.

[Brinzy]

Anyway, doing this pre-pull is completly doable and mostly free. If people don't do it, it's a clear and objective DPS loss for the group.

Assuming you get several ticks from it, then yeah. You need four to make up for an extra Ruin 3 under Dreadwyrm. Assuming you get about 15 seconds worth of the shield in this manner, you also need to add a bit of delay from Rouse (relatively minor), your pet starting its attack, and pre-casts. It's possible we open with Tri-Disaster at 0 seconds, thus eliminating pre-casting; I haven't thought about it yet. I'd say five ticks are the bare minimum you need to get from the shield for it to be worth it - even if you got four and got the 200 potency, you lose out on a bit to holding for Ruin 3 thanks to delays.

There are few bosses - none I can think of immediately - that will damage players five times in the first ~15 seconds of the fight. It's an option if such a fight exists, but I wouldn't say it's a clear and objective DPS loss.

[Len]

Finally Lv.70! Hurray.

Our egis need some kind of passive health regeneration. Something.

If our egi is going to be a core, integral part of our job then it needs to be kept alive

I'm NOT about to micro-manage my pet to pull it out of the endless circle, line, and sometimes a combination of both AoE markers.

I also hate the fact that on knockback, your egi's Enkindle and Aetherpact/Devotion will be interrupted.

[PotatoTree]

Today I was moving my pet while I was doing Aetherpact and the ability went off but the buff was never applied. WTF. This job is such a clunky mess right now.

Yes I know we can still do some decent damage with it, but it's like trying to hammer a nail with a bowling ball. You have to constantly wrestle with the AF lockout, bahamut locking AF (even though you can still use stacks if you used it before bahamut, like where's the consistency?), pet lag (try moving the pet to a player and doing Aetherpact, rouse, and contagion...), bahamut locking pet actions (rouse, enkindle), and bahamut is just a twitchy mess. Plus all the timings are now super tight, as in you will miss your deathflare if you try to cut it close like before, and you will defiantly miss bahamut's 2nd flare if you want to hold it for a few seconds at the end not because you ran out of time, but because bahamut sometimes takes it's sweet time to do your actions because it likes to twitch around and follow you. And if you ever mess up a single AF stack now you are screwed for the next two minutes.

It feels like SE just wants you to play SMN this specific way. You are not allowed to change the rotation. "You will use your AF and then use DW to fill the remaining time, no mixing the two, and you will like it" is what they would say.

[Caduagm]

They basic killed summoner.
"Ahh, but your AoE was so high".
AoE was all we had.
"Ahh, but you got Bahamut".
Which can be summoned each 2 MINUTES.
"Ahh, but contagion has raid utility now".
If Garuda AT LEAST responded faster to our commands would be fine.
The nerfs on Bane, Aetherflow lock on DwT, Ruin 3, Deathflare, Shadowflare, lost of Spur and lost of a third Dot basically killed our AoE and our single target damage.
Was running susanoo ex today and ALL of the compos with SMN/BLM, BLM was at least doing 800 dps more than us.
So what? Now BLM has the best single target and the best AoE?
Is that just because the director of this game has BLM as his main?
Summoner was amazing to play in 3.0 and now they simply killed it.

[GerrardCapashen]

I'll try to keep an open mind until I get to 70 and do some content, but I am concerned.

My concern is not about the DPS numbers. Those can be trivially fixed.

My primary concern is about the new design of the summoner class, as described to me, here and elsewhere. It seems that the class now resolves much more around ruin spamming, which is just super boring. It's not fun to play. I liked having to manage DOTs. It's way more fun than ruin spam.

I also just fundamentally disagree with design philosophy of making the game easier. The game was already pretty easy, and it was close to not keeping my interest. Making it easier still just means that the longtime players, who I assume are the majority of their money income, will stop playing. I don't know if I'm at that point, but I don't like where the game is heading.

Surely there is some way to throw a bone to the super casuals, without also destroying the fun for the hardcore players? Apparently the devs disagree. ~sigh~

[Talec]

I get the feeling, that SMN is not a very PS4-friendly Class. Managing the pet is so super hard on Controller. Moving it out of AoEs in time seems like impossible, moving him closer to a Person who should benefit from Aetherpact takes at least a couple of seconds for me. During this time I cannot do dmg, which is a huge DPS-loss.

[jlaul]

Just got SMN to 70. Definitely not anywhere near mastering the job but here are my thoughts:

-Lucid dreaming allows SB SMN to spam Ruin 3 much more than HW SMN
-Not being able to aetherflow during trance makes the class much less flexible and is very annoying, and you now have to trance ~15s before aetherflow comes back
-Devotion seems useless and I use it to simply fish for Ruin 4 procs
-Ruin 4 procs often enough, especially if you use your pet abilities on cooldown
-Bahamut tends to "miss" a lot of wyrmblasts. For example, hardcasting Ruin 3 into Ruin 2 + a fester halfway through the GCD would only yield 2 wyrmblasts while just using two Ruin 2's with a fester would yield 3. For this reason, it seems that Ruin 2 spamming with the occasional R4 proc is the way to go during the Bahamut phase
-Contagion is now a less braindead skill; timing it correctly for burn phases is much more rewarding than mindlessly hitting it after tri-disaster (although I really wish the duration was extended for a bit longer than 15s)
-The tri-disaster reset is definitely interesting. While I have mainly been using tri-disaster around once a minute, it may be worth it in certain fights to delay your trance timing in order to make full use of the tri-disaster reset.

Overall, I am pleased with the SMN gameplay at 70 and the job would be even better if they fix the pet responsiveness. Yes, SB SMN is less dot-centric than HW SMN. However, it's not like dot management in HW was difficult considering tri-disaster minimized dot hardcasting to once per minute. Bahamut adds to the complexity of the class because now you have to optimize another phase that only occurs once every 2 minutes (the Bahamut phase) in addition to dreadwyrm trance. Coming into SB, my biggest fear was that SB SMN would be even more braindead than HW SMN, however it seems that SB SMN will require much more fine-tuning in order to achieve the best result for different fights.