SMN - Most Glaring Issues

[Ariomi]

I only agree with point 2...and maybe 5.
Bahamut can be annoying, should be slightly shrunk.

Really? That so? Don't agree with Point 1?
Oh one more thing about Point 1. If you die, not only do you lose all your aetherflow/stacks, get weakness but your pet dies as well. Meaning you revive, and lose 20% more of your dps then any other class. 120 Sec punishment, + weakness + 20% damage loss till you spend 2400 mana to resummon your pet and however long that takes. Oh and your pet is also weakened from your death.

[Alisi]

Oh one more thing about Point 1. If you die, not only do you lose all your aetherflow/stacks, get weakness but your pet dies as well. Meaning you revive, and lose 20% more of your dps then any other class. 120 Sec punishment, + weakness + 20% damage loss till you spend 2400 mana to resummon your pet and however long that takes. Oh and your pet is also weakened from your death.

Yup. LOL. Have you experienced the fun of having your pet die right when you summon Bahamut? The animation takes long enough that it can happen and then you've just wasted a two minute set up. LOL. It's soul crushing to see the animation start and then ... go away. ;=; It's like "Imma gunna summon Baha -- oh wait, nevermind..."

I'm hearing that SMN's have a 4 minute rotation now? Seems like they're doing more work for a lesser reward. For that reason I just can't recommend this job now....

It's about 2 min 30 seconds but it can be less. Baha is summoned by using DWT twice and that requires consuming two full stacks of Aether (which has a minute CD to refresh) plus 15 seconds per DWT. It's less if you had previous stacks before the start of the fight.

[Delta041]

I have 3 main grievances with 4.0 SMN

1. Aetherflow and Aethertrail are now combined rather than being separate.
You will never convince me this is in any way, shape or form a good idea. SMN on the whole has become more obtuse since the systems it has to juggle (Aetherflow, Trail, Trance, Bahamut) constantly work against each other. However, it's especially egregious with Flow and Trail, since their tug of war can result in a SMN being penalized with the loss of up to 3 stacks of aetherflow and an entire Trance cycle. If they wanted to make trance stacks easier all they had to do was remove the timer. Even with the timer, SMN has effectively 90 seconds to enter dreadwyrm trance. That's a lifetime as far as regular encounters go. As it stands I've basically had to unlearn everything I learned in 3.0 to play what I consider an inferior version of the system as I can no longer have Aetherflow on cooldown while going through my trance.

2. Demi-Bahamut is too micro intensive
Stormblood was supposed to make jobs easier to play, yet here SMNs have been slapped with a micro management nightmare. Demi fires off Wyrmwaves every 1.5 seconds based on player actions. Players meanwhile are locked behind a 2.5 GCD. Demi then requires players to have at least 5 targeted off GCDs and very precise timing to be able to get the most out of their Demi's uptime. This decision however I can understand a bit. My though are that they wanted Ahk Morns to be more responsive than usual pet actions, so they bound Demi's auto attacks to player actions. In my opinion however this is far too strenuous on a class that already has 3 other now completely separate and competing mechanics to cycle though. Where it up to me, Demi would behave like a Rook auto turret, it would be summoned, stay in place, fire off its attacks on the last target its SMN attacked. This would likely result in Ahk Morn becoming more unresponsive (though I can't recall Wildfire having that issue) but I think it would be a worthy tradeoff.

3. Tri-Bind is still worthless
Why is this skill so bad? WHY? PvP and PvE actions are separate now, there is no reason why SMN should still continue to take this skill off their hotbars. Personally I love its cast animation but between the 3.0s cast time and worthless 30 potency damage, it simply not worth using in any situation. The skill needs to have its cast time knocked down to 2.5s and a potency boost. This would give SMN some much needed AoE sustain back while not touching SCH.