Summoner Over-Nered (and A few other Problems)

[TristanBlane]

There are some things that I like about the changes to SMN. Such as the Tri-disaster change and the Ruin 4 buff which makes it really fun. I am just so bummed about Shadowflare and bane nerfs. Though I still feel like I do pretty good AOE damage? I still feel very clunky, I got really use to SMN 3.0 and loved it a lot. I actually felt like it was smooth and fun to play and very active. Now I feel like I spend a lot of time twiddling my thumbs waiting for aetherflow stacks and stressing to make sure I don't mess up and waste a stack.


Does any one else feel like they spend some time waiting for aetherfloew to be off cooldown? Am I not maximixing my time in Dreadwyrm trance? I find myself often low on mana with no stacks and resorting to spamming Ruin 1.

Still only a 69 SMN tho. Excited to see how the gameplay changes when I get bahamut.

[Tsukino]

Does any one else feel like they spend some time waiting for aetherfloew to be off cooldown? Am I not maximixing my time in Dreadwyrm trance? I find myself often low on mana with no stacks and resorting to spamming Ruin 1.

Still only a 69 SMN tho. Excited to see how the gameplay changes when I get bahamut.

It has nothing to do with Dreadwyrm Trance - the cooldowns for the Aetherflow-based abilities were all reduced quite a bit, and so you can easily run through all three in only a few seconds if that's what you want to do. This is generally a good thing because it allows you to choose when to do that damage, instead of being a slave to the cooldown rotation, but it feels super awkward if you played a lot during 3.x. One thing to keep in mind beyond this though, just in case, is that because you can't use Aetherflow with full Aethertrail or during Dreadwyrm Trance, if you're not going into Trance around 16s before Aetherflow is up to make sure to do that.

Demi-Bahamut is...overall pretty great. You can use Aetherflow with it (like we used to be able to do during Dreadwyrm Trance) and so you kind of regain your ability to use a bunch of more interesting things and stop spamming Ruin for a bit, and the slight bit of extra freedom means during trash in dungeons or invincible parts of boss fights you can save it to unload when next able. However, because of its cost (two complete Dreadwyrm Trances) it creates an even bigger problem with having to build up than Dreadwyrm Trance ever did on its own. That is to say, if you die right before getting to summon Demi-Bahamut, you're going to feel incredibly useless tossing out some random Ruins while everything is on cooldown and you're two full Aetherflow rotations away from Bahamut again.