Alot of hate on new job iterations o.O

[Myon88]

I'm saying they could make that change tomorrow, and we'd get by, like we always did. Fairweather blackmages would go back to whatever DPS is 'the best' and those of us on still on it would adjust.

That's fine, it's good to be resilient. There are more than a couple summoner players I know who are sticking with the job too, despite this being the second expansion in a row the job has launched in an unfortunate state.

I am more concerned with the premise that the degree to which changes to job design succeed exist on a spectrum, and that you can objectively say that some are better than others. If you can see that my example of black mage is inferior to what we currently enjoy, then I think that demonstrates that premise. So I will continue to advocate for summoner, for the benefit of other people who are put off from playing a job they would otherwise want to play.

do you think we would be better off add Bahamut to DWT or separating Phoenix from FBT? Meaning that you use Trance, recast timer start and Demi-Primal is available right after trance end. In this way Trance would always be rolling like AF was in 4.0 and you could use Demi whenever you need rather than when FBT was back up. Seems like SE gave us two choose on how to make Demi summon work.

From a standpoint of designing a job to be tolerant toward combat downtime, there's no question that splitting up FBT and phoenix so that it matches DWT, is better than the reverse - merging DWT and bahamut so that it matches FBT. It is true that it will mean one extra button to press, but it would at least not be a new button since 'summon bahamut' could just transform into 'summon phoenix' after FBT ends.

As long as the trances share a button and the cooldown does not start again until you use the current one, there will always be pressure to activate DWT/FBT on cooldown to maximize damage. If you're in the DWT half of the rotation, then you only lose the deathflare at worst as bahamut is safely contained to a separate button. It's not even a guarantee that you'll lose that deathflare either, as you have up to 15s to stall for time while DWT is active. If it's phoenix, you're forced to enter phoenix trance and summon phoenix at the same time, so the potential loss is greater if the time is not convenient.

And as it happens, there are examples of both these cases in the current extreme primals.

1. In innocence ex, if you are on schedule with your trance timings, the 2nd phoenix trance of the fight happens halfway through the adds phase when innocence's ultimate is charging. If your group has high dps, they will die before you get your 2nd revelation off, and you will lose half the scarlet flames as well. Once upon a time you would just hit aetherflow there, and only summon phoenix after that phase is over and innocence returns, unfortunately we no longer have that option.

2. In titania ex, after the big adds die, there is a period of downtime while she plays out the animation for her ultimate. Dreadwyrm trance comes off cooldown just as this begins, and the correct move here is to use it now even though there's nothing to hit. Luckily, the transition is shorter than 15 seconds so you can quickly deathflare her once she returns without losing anything. If, by pure chance, it was FBT instead of DWT that aligned with this part of the fight, you would stand to lose a lot of damage from nothing but bad luck. It's not fun having it come down to luck as to whether fight timings will be kind to your rotation or not, but that's life for summoner now.