[POLL] Do you think SE should remove the Aetherflow/Aethertrail Lockouts on Summoner?

[giantslayer]

My biggest issue in 4.0 was the lack of things to do in between DWT. We went from 4 DoT timers to manage down to 1. You have 30-45 seconds in the rotation where you're basically just spamming Ruin mindlessly while waiting for your next thing. To me, any change that makes that timeframe more boring (such as having to save your Aetherflow for DWT) is a step in the wrong direction.

The Ruin IV change is a good one. My complaint with 4.0 Ruin IV was that it required zero thought or action from the player. I would just be mindlessly spamming Ruin I/III and then a Ruin IV pops out every once in a while. Making it a proc on Ruin II instead means that it gives me something new to pay attention to (which we were sorely lacking with our DoT management cut down so far) and requires me to do something deliberately to activate.

Looking at the bigger picture, the Ruin I/III change was probably more intended to lighten the death penalty on SMN. This took the Ruin III potency out of DWT and spread it out over the entire rotation. It also removed the DPS penalty associated with losing all your MP and not being able to use Ruin III. If you look at the numbers I put up earlier, Bahamut adds about 1900 real potency worth of stuff, so the death penalty had increased rather dramatically in 4.0.

Of course, this change also reduced the non-Deathflare DPS of DWT enough to make it an easy decision to end DWT early to refresh Aetherflow. It doesn't feel like a perfect solution to the clunkiness of the opener, but it is a viable solution nonetheless. I totally understand how you feel your ideas would have been better, but if their solution is working reasonably well, the Devs are not going to backtrack on it to go a different direction. I think it is most productive to focus on what can be done going forward in light of the changes they've already implemented.


For the next round of SMN changes, I propose the following:

1. Make Wyrm Wave an auto attack.
This will fix the "why are we using Addle for DPS" issue and free up half of our Aetherflow from being pigeon-holed into Bahamut (which you correctly pointed out).

2. Make Bahamut take only one Bahamut Aether to summon and only able to do one Akh Morn per summoning.
The point of this is to lighten the death penalty and to reduce the amount of boring Ruin spam downtime.
This is how it works currently in PvP, and it's gotten rave reviews over there (I don't do PvP myself).

In terms of damage, combined with changing Wyrm Wave to a normal auto attack, this would be 7 Wyrm Waves and 1 Akh Morn per minute, but the opportunity cost of losing your normal pet's attacks doubles, so it would actually be a DPS loss of 223 potency over 2 minutes compared to 11 Wyrm Waves under current system. That would put the DPS output closer to what someone could currently do with 9 Wyrm Waves. They could adjust the numbers if that's too much of a DPS loss.
{[(11*160) - (7*110)] - 2[(7*160) - (7*110)]}/1.3 = 223