SMN 4.06 Changes

[TristanBlane]

I'm bummed they didn't say anything about changes they would make in the live letter last night. :/ I'd love to get a glimpse of whatever plans they have for SMN for 4.1 hopefully good stuff

[Len]

It's funny to see just how screwed up Summoner is and how unanimous the community is in saying that it needs huge changes when it wasn't that long ago before Stormblood's launch when the Lv.60+ ability/trait tooltips were revealed and people were being hushed for looking at SMN with doom and gloom.

[Karshan]

Well Len, the SMN pre 70 took a massive nerf (when the tooltips got out it was like what the hell ?) but many were hoping for errors in tooltips and the compensation from Bahamut at 70.

But the tooltips weren't false, except the mistranslation on fester (yeah) and the one on devotion (ouuuuuh), and Bahamut does the compensation job at the price of clunkiness of rotation so...Yes for some people it went from "it looks shitty but let's see and give it a chance" to "oooh man I suck now and the folks writing guides are a galaxy away, really ?" real fast.

Don't boost any potencies, just be done with the ludicrous lock out. Using aether abilities during transe or when we already have 3 stacks of aethertrail, but without throwing it out of the window, having contagion and stimulation available all the time when CD is up, with enkindle becoming enk Baha when needed, should be a great help to not needing a 3 minute rotation plan ahead (how do you expect us to have a 3 min rota preset in mind with several cooldowns in actual fights ? Or make it so that using one CD badly doesn't punish us so bad gosh I feel like misusing one contagion on a 3 minute dummy is a 400 DPS loss).

[Neela]

Well Len, the SMN pre 70 took a massive nerf (when the tooltips got out it was like what the hell ?) but many were hoping for errors in tooltips and the compensation from Bahamut at 70.

But the tooltips weren't false, except the mistranslation on fester (yeah) and the one on devotion (ouuuuuh), and Bahamut...

...Bahamuts potency is fucking laughable which can be beaten by deathflare which shouldn't be the case... they should keep mention that its just poor pet potency... : /

[Karshan]

...Bahamuts potency is fucking laughable which can be beaten by deathflare which shouldn't be the case... they should keep mention that its just poor pet potency... : /

Indeed, pet potency is only 80% of character potency : 100 for garuda is equivalent to 80 in "our" potency, 160 for Wyrmwaves is a 128 and 680 for Akh Morn is a 550.
If you use Garuda, and use Wyrmwaves correctly when Bahamut is up, you go from 80 pot every 3 sec to 256 (128 every 1.5 sec) about 5 times (6 if lucky but let's go for high latency figures) + 2 x 550, which is a 2000 potency boost while Bahamut is around (which is every 2 min) as compared to when he is not.

Which is a 17 pot/sec boost when you reach 70 compared to when you are 69. I believe that really compensates for the nerfs, considering how people reach 165-170 on O1S (and with current gear, a gain of 17 pot/sec is roughly 500 DPS).

HOWEVER, I agree that using him is a pain in the ass so we have a class with great theoretical pps BUT it requires way more monitoring and focus to reach it than other classes. A good class to farm a fight you know well, a very difficult class when it comes to progress so you just go RDM and that is just sad when it used to be your main.

[Neela]

HOWEVER, I agree that using him is a pain in the ass so we have a class with great theoretical pps BUT it requires way more monitoring and focus to reach it than other classes. A good class to farm a fight you know well, a very difficult class when it comes to progress so you just go RDM and that is just sad when it used to be your main.

I think this is what most of the smns did shortly after omega dropped.... me as well even I dislike RDM personally... trying to go with RDM in progress but couldn't get used to it changing back to smn on o3s progress what turned out as not the baddest idea - but yeah going with smn as main in unknown territory can be a bit of pain atm. I wonder what the devs have in mind for 4.1....

[Baka_Neko1]

smns do solid dmg and have battle res. what's the issue? you have to work for it? figuring out optimal rotations is part of the fun of difficult jobs. high skill floors are fun. git gud. also, i'm not a smn. lol

[Elkanah]

This is just... disappointing. Not really much to say.

I'm tired of hoping for improvements on this raid tier. I fear my static will soon ask me to change to RDM.

We already had ours turn to RDM, cause smn is basically the most useless of dps in all categories right now in content lol. It's the new loldrg of StormBlood. Most SMN's have already switched to RDM since it's a better job overall than SMN is. And until that changes, you'll probably see more RDM than smn, in which, SMN will follow its original storyline of being a extinct job according to lore lol.

[Aletin]

Cause smn is basically the most useless of dps in all categories right now in content lol. It's the new loldrg of StormBlood.

I'm sorry... What? Why do people perpetuate this lie? SMN performs absolutely fine in content and is actually superior to RDM in both Single Target and AoE Dps with comparable if not better support capabilities. The only thing RDM has over SMN is Vercure and Verraise which shouldn't even be needed.
The issues with SMN are programming issues that cause it to be clunky and being extremely punishing on death. Both can be fixed with QoL patches.
SMN DOES NOT NEED A DPS/UTILITY BUFF

[aldoteng]

We already had ours turn to RDM, cause smn is basically the most useless of dps in all categories right now in content lol. It's the new loldrg of StormBlood. Most SMN's have already switched to RDM since it's a better job overall than SMN is. And until that changes, you'll probably see more RDM than smn, in which, SMN will follow its original storyline of being a extinct job according to lore lol.

You're either awfully misinformed or averse to Googling or insistent in anecdotal bias.

FFLogs, currently the most objective way to measure DPS performance, ranks SMN as #2 or #3 DPS on savage raids, averaged out. Nevertheless, there are issues with this ranking as the sample size of SMN is small, but this is still the best statistical data we have at the moment, unless someone else can present alternative data. Meanwhile, RDM is consistently last or second last amongst DPS.

People, stop bashing SMN for its damage. SMN damage is great. SMN user-friendliness is not - according to popular opinion including my own. Complaining about SMN user-friendliness encourages devs to make changes hopefully for the better. Complaining about SMN damage encourages Party Finders to exclude SMN from groups.