Summoner Early Post-Launch Feedback at level 80

[Angry_Evil]

I personally don't mind busyness after I beat both EX trials. It's kinda fine tho I guess doing everything perfect with no clipping and proper r4 alignments will be pretty difficult. My brain is overheating as it is... Tho on the "good part" it seems that EA damage is like ~3% so it literally doesn't matter...
Strongly agree on ES literally pointless skill, dunno why just not make ED AOE like OP described.
I think it'd be cool if they change bahamut to be morel iek phoenix too lol and give us something like R4 during it. Not sure if it make SMN a little overpowerd but would be cool nuking enemies just like with phoenix.
Also funny thing - I survived getting agro on titania cause I used titan's shield prior to phase change. Who knew it'll be useful literally 1 time I decided to use it for lols

PS
It's not that important or anything, but I think they should also add some proper indication that ifrit or garuda are summoned - return them to party list or add icon for gauges (kinda surprised it wasn't done tbh. Also surprising that they didn't add R4 stacks on a gauge too...)

[loreleidiangelo]

I'm cool with Physick being deleted from SMN for good but if we're being real here and all talking about "origins of the job" and stuff, SMNs in traditional FFs did have access to heal and support summons as well, not just damage ones. In that respect, Phoenix is a neat addition, just perhaps the heal is a bit poorly implemented ATM.

[Taranok]

I'm cool with Physick being deleted from SMN for good but if we're being real here and all talking about "origins of the job" and stuff, SMNs in traditional FFs did have access to heal and support summons as well, not just damage ones. In that respect, Phoenix is a neat addition, just perhaps the heal is a bit poorly implemented ATM.

The heal itself is "very" strong, its uptime is 20 of 120 seconds (approx) or 16% of the time, so it's not exactly the kind of thing that won't help on some party busters.

Its major failing, however, is that healing is so tightly tuned that either healers already have the ability to handle the fight in terms of the class design, or they literally shouldn't be in the fight, period. This happened to AST in HW until they buffed it so much that it could heal fights without WHM's or SCH's massive bag of tricks relatively speaking.

So it's a really strong heal that is literally useless because of how healers and encounters are both designed and interact with each other. It will be nice for struggling healers occasionally when it shows up in your rotation, but otherwise it's a flavor ability with no purpose.

[loreleidiangelo]

The heal itself is "very" strong, its uptime is 20 of 120 seconds (approx) or 16% of the time, so it's not exactly the kind of thing that won't help on some party busters.

Its major failing, however, is that healing is so tightly tuned that either healers already have the ability to handle the fight in terms of the class design, or they literally shouldn't be in the fight, period. This happened to AST in HW until they buffed it so much that it could heal fights without WHM's or SCH's massive bag of tricks relatively speaking.

So it's a really strong heal that is literally useless because of how healers and encounters are both designed and interact with each other. It will be nice for struggling healers occasionally when it shows up in your rotation, but otherwise it's a flavor ability with no purpose.

DNC's heal doesn't disrupt their DPS rotation, so even if it's not turbo strong a lot of players still use it (myself included). If Phoenix heal is/was designed the same way it would be a similar case, IMO. Abilities like that do have a niche in content where everyone doesn't perform 100% up to par, I think. Well, some won't like that I suppose, but I think it's a fair bit more interesting than just, "oh look, another raid DPS buff again". Maybe it would be more practical if it were a healing up buff like Nature's Minne on BRD, idk.

[Myon88]

Wellllllll..... if summon phoenix was separate to FBT like dreadwyrm trance is, or we still used the old aetherflow > trance > demi system where only aetherflow had a set timing, we might have been able to use it that way, as we'd have more freedom as to where we wanted to summon phoenix.

So yeah, what a shame because the old system was much better at accommodating use cases like that and letting you adapt. Sadly, there's no shortage of people who claim to prefer 5.0 summoner over 4.0, some of them even want DWT and bahamut combined like phoenix (you can see above why that's a bad idea). I hope these people are happy, because they've certainly lost the right to complain now. The super rigid gameplay of Shadowbringers summoner is directly a result of these changes, as I and others warned as early as a month ago during the media tour.

[Corosar]

I admit i am a summoner that likes having the ability to do other things should things go south. Just last night we were dealing with a trial and lost both our healers. The tanks can't res. and the DPS were bards or dancers. Me being the sole resser of the party immediately stopped my DPS to raise one of the healers and I doubt that we would have been able to get through it if it was not for that. It would have gone much smoother if i was just 1 level higher at the time for my pheonix or if i could have used physick while the healer was dealing with gaining their mana back to begin raising their co-healer. This is the kinda thing that i love that summoner and red mage are able to do. and why i am so for Physick actually being useful on the summoner grid. For those times where shit just hits the fan and you need to heal more than DPS. A safety net in my eyes. especially if the party is full of new players that have no idea what they are doing at the time and are trying to learn mechanics. I pride myself in catching onto them pretty quickly but i know alot of people have that issue.

Besides... if they do make it useful... its not like summoners are gonna HAVE to use it. Just like how Redmages out there NEVER touch Vercure. Its just another thing to change your style a bit more.

[Dyvid]

So I'm wondering it two changes would help with the flow of combat.

1) Make Energy Drain 60s recast time but give you all 4 Aetherflow at once. You would still have the same resources but wouldn't have to keep such a close eye on it.

2) Would decreasing the recast timer of Trance to 45s fix this downtime issues? Alternatively you could separate Demi-Phoenix from FBT but that would also mean you separate FBT fire spells from DPhoenix as well. Is that okay?

3) Lower Enkindle to 90s would place it right after Demi-Phoenix phase.

As for Everlasting Flight, congrats to everyone complaining about physick. You now have a potent heal for solo'ing.

[CecMiller]

So I'm wondering it two changes would help with the flow of combat.

1) Make Energy Drain 60s recast time but give you all 4 Aetherflow at once. You would still have the same resources but wouldn't have to keep such a close eye on it.

2) Would decreasing the recast timer of Trance to 45s fix this downtime issues? Alternatively you could separate Demi-Phoenix from FBT but that would also mean you separate FBT fire spells from DPhoenix as well. Is that okay?

3) Lower Enkindle to 90s would place it right after Demi-Phoenix phase.

As for Everlasting Flight, congrats to everyone complaining about physick. You now have a potent heal for solo'ing.

I personally would really like #1 and its something I thought about, but if they do this, they might as well remove the lock on DWT outside of combat and what not and tie it back into the cycle. This would result in a far more flexible DWT and even FBT. Use 4 stacks and then decide when to enter DWT instead of waiting 45+ seconds to enter DWT and FBT. If they do this however, I'd still like a way to generate AF without a target. Its immensely annoying to have a target die JUST as AF is about to be up. Our AF stacks feel like just a worse version of polygot in how we obtain them. At least BLM can maintain polygot via Transpose no matter if anything is targetable or not. I don't think I want polygot, but just a way to maintain AF even when we have no target really.

2) Reducing Trance CD would also speed up our rotation to 1 min 30s. It would boost our DPS as we got to our big payload sooner and I certainly would not mind it. That said, I dont think it would fix the downtime problems. The problem with giving Trance's their own cooldown and not basing it off AF is that we could previously hold AF and thus DWT/FBT through intermission/downtime. Hard cooldowns means we're gated somewhat. With it depending on AF, we had a bit more agency on when we decided to use the trances whether for movement or burst.

Example:

Currently: Boss is going away in 5s and you have the current version of FBT up. The intermission ended up lasting 20-30s. You ended up delaying your cycle by 25-35s as you had to wait to use FBT.

When it was behind AF: Boss is going away in 5s gives us 3 Choices:

1) Before reaching the intermission stage, you could have spent your Aetherflow stacks fast and "rushed" FBT for the full duration before the intermission. This is because Aetherflow was the only barrier to FBT and not a hard 60s cooldown.

2) Spend Aetherflow stacks and keep FBT until after the boss comes back. We wouldn't delay our cycle by 25-35s as Aetherflow would still be on cooldown and ticking during this time. We could just use it after those 25-35s pass aka use FBT to re-open on the boss. After we use FBT, AF would be back in 5-10s (Its been on cooldown for 25-35s, used 20s on FBT resulting in a total of 45-55s). The power of Aetherflow here was that the countdown would begin again after you used it to gain 4 stacks and so you never delayed the cycle as long as the stacks were spent and the trance was used before Aetherflow came back up.

3) Assuming we could use the new Aetherflow inside Trances, Do as #2 but don't re-open on the boss with FBT. Instead wait for AF stacks and then use FBT and AF stacks together by making use of the instant caste OGCD weave opportunities.

As you can see, old Aetherflow made you VERY flexible with how and when you wanted to use your trances. Right now, you're at the mercy of fight design really when before we were incredibly strong regardless of fight design. A complete 180 really. This is in contrast to what happened to a lot of other jobs which were made stronger in intermission downtime (additional polygot stack potentially + umbral hearts x3 during downtime). They can spend their stacks if any before a long downtime was to occur and then generate them again over the course of the downtime.

With regards to seperating FBT and Phoenix, my concern would be that phoenix suddenly becomes as awkward as bahamut where they are both just wyrmwaves and akhmorns with a different coat of paint. I wouldn't mind it, but I like my demi summons actually doing more actions that just akhmorn/revelation. I think current bahamut is pretty awkward and wouldn't want that to be the case for Phoenix. Part of me wants the OGCD interaction back so bahamut would wyrmwave more often and doesn't look like he's afk for half the time he's out.

3) I haven't observed this just yet personally, but I will check as to when my Enkindle comes up!

[babizokahh]

I'm not a pro player by any means, but as a main smn since I've began playing, I'm quite frustrated and having imense trouble with the new rotations. The new/reformed skills feel very punitive if you delay them, so synergizing with the rest of my party is becoming a true nightmare. I feel like I've lost mobility, also bahamut feels boring now, the pet skills basically becoming smn ogcd was my worst fear and the new aetherflow doesn't allow for me to burst like I used to. Having to completely forget the rotations I used to do with my eyes closed is proving to be very difficult and I feel like I'm missing something about the new gameplay but I can't figure it out what I'm doing wrong. I'm genuinely worried about how smn will play out in raiding, which is what I focus on the game.



My thoughts and personal opinions so far, pros and cons :



1 - Aetherflow should be allowed to be cast outside combat, at the very least. If you lose the small frame between a pull or a boss phase, you are punished a lot.

2 - Bahamut feels clunkier than ever, because now he seems to do nothing for half the summon time.

3 - Phoenix skill everlasting flight is... I can't even... why? just why? they really missed the chance of something useful, giving a small damage party buff or something like that.

4 - Ruin 2 is taboo now.

5 - SMN feels like it lost a bit of mobility.

6 - Immortal pets with insta cast are great
7 - Phoenix, apart from everlasting flight, feels nice to play in general.
8 - I kind of miss having mana shift as a role action, it helped in desperate situations.
9 - Having pet skills as smn skills instead of separate skills feels worse because before I could do many things at once.

[Taranok]

DNC's heal doesn't disrupt their DPS rotation, so even if it's not turbo strong a lot of players still use it (myself included). If Phoenix heal is/was designed the same way it would be a similar case, IMO. Abilities like that do have a niche in content where everyone doesn't perform 100% up to par, I think. Well, some won't like that I suppose, but I think it's a fair bit more interesting than just, "oh look, another raid DPS buff again". Maybe it would be more practical if it were a healing up buff like Nature's Minne on BRD, idk.

I don't recall ever saying you should disrupt your DPS rotation for the phoenix heal.

Wellllllll..... if summon phoenix was separate to FBT like dreadwyrm trance is, or we still used the old aetherflow > trance > demi system where only aetherflow had a set timing, we might have been able to use it that way, as we'd have more freedom as to where we wanted to summon phoenix.

Please no, Demi-Bahamut already feels awkward summoning it separately, even though the opening rotation would go completely to hell if DB worked that way.

So I'm wondering it two changes would help with the flow of combat.

*snip*

As for Everlasting Flight, congrats to everyone complaining about physick. You now have a potent heal for solo'ing.

1 won't fix the issue because you'd still have serious problems dumping the stacks. You've only reduced oGCD bloat by 1 oGCD per minute so you've not actually addressed the problem of bloat or watching bars because you still have to spend everything on a 5s timer. It's not a good change.

2: Lowering the Trance timer would kinda work, but in reality you're making the rotation busier while not addressing the problem of oGCD bloat, in other words the situation is being made worse. If Trances were to be sped up, 5 seconds is all it needs. Plus, if you used a 45 second trance timer, you're literally going to DWT for 15 seconds, DB for 20 seconds, and then have a mere 10 seconds of downtime to spam out EAs before DP comes up for 20 seconds and you have another 25 seconds of downtime before DWT. It's too compressed.

3: 90s enkindle timer would horrifically break the rotation just like Devotion being a 3m timer causes issues. You're guaranteeing it will come up during Phoenix and possibly during DWT very easily, whereas the current timer of enkindle places it squarely during DWT, always, provided DWT always is used as it comes off cooldown.

The easiest way to fix (most) of SMN's problems is to straight up delete energy drain/energy siphon and shift the damage into EA, and then probably drop Devotion's timer down to 2m from 3 and rebalance as necessary. That alone would massively drop out the skill floor and make SMN more approachable.