Shadowbringer: Summoner Changes Discussion

[Taranok]

I'm thinking it's not directly related to "going ham," so much as it's related to server tics. Even the best opener rotations I've seen would inherently put the egi at risk of dropping abilities, and it's basically impossible to account for without pacing out the oGCDs to be further apart.

And when designing these classes, you should basically expect that the player is going to fire off every oGCD in any order possible as fast as possible, I'm trying to find an optimal rotation but when I'm in a dungeon having gotten my 15th "Your pet cannot execute this action" error, in addition to tunnel visioning so hard I flat out cannot see bosses and their mechanics, and it makes me want to play a multitasking class that's easier like bard, there's a serious problem with the class design.

The issue comes down to a few specific points.

• The class has too many oGCDs
• Devotion, EA 1+2, ED, Fester, ES, Painflare, Bane are the oGCDs that cause major problems.
• The Pet oGCDs have a high chance of clipping each other and throwing away their effects either in part or entirely, including wasting the cooldown itself.
• The rotation outside of those specific problem oGCDs seems fine aside from having nothing to do on the back half of the rotaiton.
• Bane is an ability wanting for purpose, and exacerbates the oGCD issue, albeit only in dungeons against trash mobs typically. It's bar bloat, oGCD density, and just serves no purpose for an ability that I wish I could just set to autofire and pretend it doesn't exist (okay, not literally, but seriously the ability has no reason to exist).

Any change done should try to find a way to slow down the oGCD usage probably to about SB levels, especially in the opener (without micro-managing Contagion) and then find a way to distribute the abilities over more parts of the rotation more evenly.

The class needs work. It's not far, most of the changes need to be potency+cooldown changes, some can be resolved by deleting abilities and augmenting others, and others can be solved by just having one ability turn into another at a higher level. The class should not be a bard though, and it should not be more involved/harder than a bard to execute what is fundamentally the same style.

It shouldn't be too hard to fix, but I have a feeling if Summoner is not changed early, the class is going to end up with something akin to Machinist syndrome from SB where very few people actually play it because it has that many problems.