Summoner Early Post-Launch Feedback at level 80

[NovaBismarck]

Honestly FBT feels good to me too. It's the one sigh of relief in this rotation. I think if you are going to run a frantic rotation there should be at least two good comfortable pauses. R3 phase doesn't feel like a pause, still a lot of timing and tedium. Precast feels frantic, bahamut clunky a bit.
The bahamut rotation doesn't feel bad on the dummy but get it into real content where movement is required and it seems to throw things out of alignment. It does feel clunkier the FBT. I still say there's one ball too many to juggle, too many buttons. It's fine when things are going right but when things go wrong everything becomes problematic. Overall, on the dummy the rotation is busy but doable with enough practice (a lot of practice), but trying to learn content on this job is not particularly fun. I'm very much not a fan of the tight rotation timing now and how when I have to slow cast rez a second healer when things go bad so the whole party doesn't wipe, that my whole rotation gets mucked up. Recasting dots (when tri is down) to do anything is never fun.

I'm in favor of doing something better with egi assaults too. Either that or deleting something else. While I'm reaching for the 20 keys I have to press in the first 16.5 seconds of my rotation I get agitated by something that just feels like busywork. Maybe they could delete something else, I don't know, but with ED, Dots, Fester/Painflare, four ruin 4 procs to track and six pet buttons (with 2 additional spam buttons every 30 sec), on top of DWT, FBT, Bahamut, and R3 phases that require turreting and then forcing movement as needed seems excessive. The job just requires too much visual tracking for me to find it fun.

[Taranok]

We need the Trance phase to weave most of our oGCDs (Devotion, Egi Enkindle, Energy Drain, Egi Assaults, etc).

If during Bahamut they increase Ruin II potency to Ruin III potency or allow free Ruin IV casts (as it is with PvP SMN, like dinner said), then it will improve a bit that phase.

Merging DB with DWT would give us plenty of time for weaving ED/ES and Fester/Painflares. But it would break Devotion, Egi Assaults 1 and 2, and Enkindle. Which, in my opinion, is a good thing to have happen specifically because those abilities are some of the worst designed pieces of button bloat in the game. By forcing the dev's hand of merging DB with DWT, the devs will also be forced to fix the fact that SMN has 4 separate abilities that cannot be used during FBT, which is already a major design flaw to begin with considering how easily the cooldowns can get desynced from each other through no fault of the summoner's actions.

If we avoid this outright, and stick to DB being desynced, then there's another option. Upgrade Ruin from ruin 1 to ruin 2, to ruin 3, and finally ruin 4. As of ruin 2, ruin will no longer be a cast and SMN would "officially" be a castless caster outside of literally miasma, which could be turned castless easily without consequence, and Raise, which could also be made castless trollface.jpg.

By doing this, you abandon all pretenses of Summoner being a caster to begin with, and basically turn it into a caster doing its best impression of an rDPS. The oGCD problem won't be fixed, but it will be heavily mitigated and what little is left to smooth over would be relatively small compared to the hot mess that exists now.

[Dyvid]

Well the reason I wanted raiders opinion on this was because they are the ones really maximaxing the job; lining up group wide and such. Another thing to consider is if they merge DWT with Bahamut, what is the mechanic to get there and what fills the gap for 40s until that point. Also is the fact is if SE is actually willing to do a overhaul to make it work, which i don't based on their track record. I agree FBT + Phoenix does feel good and i'm very annoyed SE didn't really think Summoner through during the design for 5.0. They had a lot of good idea but just toss them all together assuming it would work. Instead we got a clunky Frankenstein of a monster.

[HeulGDarian]

Well the reason I wanted raiders opinion on this was because they are the ones really maximaxing the job; lining up group wide and such. Another thing to consider is if they merge DWT with Bahamut, what is the mechanic to get there and what fills the gap for 40s until that point. Also is the fact is if SE is actually willing to do a overhaul to make it work, which i don't based on their track record. I agree FBT + Phoenix does feel good and i'm very annoyed SE didn't really think Summoner through during the design for 5.0. They had a lot of good idea but just toss them all together assuming it would work. Instead we got a clunky Frankenstein of a monster.

I'd say give it some time till like 5.1 that was when 4.0 smn surprised and became the most busted job in the game . Good times

[HeulGDarian]

Btw am i the only one who would like an overburst equivalent to ruin 2 and a better sounds effect than tribind could be like 40 potency .

[Angry_Evil]

After hitting dummy for several hours I want 8 r4 stacks instead of 4... Just make EAs give 2 stack(ON USE too). 4 is not enough for nothin'...

[Taranok]

Btw am i the only one who would like an overburst equivalent to ruin 2 and a better sounds effect than tribind could be like 40 potency .

Honestly, if the devs wanted to very lazily "fix" the class, making every single spell short of Raise instant cast would go a long way towards alleviating most of the issues it has. I've often described SMN as busier than BRD (It's not if you go by raw APM, but it feels busier), and using parallels like the class being a caster doing its worst impression of an rDPS. So if that's the direction they want to take it, just literally turning the class into a wannabe rDPS would fix a lot of its problems. It will still have terrible flow, but in practice it won't be as bad because you at least will have unlimited instant casts to get everything out reasonable.

They could even copy Bard (a bit) and turn Tri-disaster into an anytime usable GCD that always applies ruination and Bio/Miasma (and, you know, remove Bio/Miasma) and it will be somewhat homogenized with Bard and won't feel like a Caster, but it can limp along in this weird state for a pretty long while until the devs can properly fix the rotation and turn it back into a caster.

[Dyvid]

Honestly, if the devs wanted to very lazily "fix" the class, making every single spell short of Raise instant cast would go a long way towards alleviating most of the issues it has. I've often described SMN as busier than BRD (It's not if you go by raw APM, but it feels busier), and using parallels like the class being a caster doing its worst impression of an rDPS. So if that's the direction they want to take it, just literally turning the class into a wannabe rDPS would fix a lot of its problems. It will still have terrible flow, but in practice it won't be as bad because you at least will have unlimited instant casts to get everything out reasonable.

They could even copy Bard (a bit) and turn Tri-disaster into an anytime usable GCD that always applies ruination and Bio/Miasma (and, you know, remove Bio/Miasma) and it will be somewhat homogenized with Bard and won't feel like a Caster, but it can limp along in this weird state for a pretty long while until the devs can properly fix the rotation and turn it back into a caster.

Well it is a caster, SMN has to cast something lol. Out of the 3 summoner is still the most mobile of the Magic DPS group.

[Sequora]

Well it is a caster, SMN has to cast something lol. Out of the 3 summoner is still the most mobile of the Magic DPS group.

Do you mean least mobile? RDM is infinitely more mobile than SMN. BLM has also become more mobile than SMN.

[dinnertime]

Well it is a caster, SMN has to cast something lol. Out of the 3 summoner is still the most mobile of the Magic DPS group.

To be honest, it's not. Well, technically SMN is mobile than the other casters but right now it comes at the cost of its DPS because using Ruin 2 is more punishing than ever, DWT only happens once per cycle now and moving during Demi Primal phases might delay or even outright erase commands/actions because they haven't been fixed in place yet. BLM is actually the most mobile now because it has the ability to move around without DPS loss with Triplecast, Xenoglossy and for proc-ing more frequently with enhanced Sharpcast.