Quote Originally Posted by Gallus View Post
I just don't understand why they always make SMN so complex and convoluted... just when you think it cannot get worse.
The issue is that the devs had 1 of 3 things happen:
  1. The abilities were designed in a vacuum without respect for how it all meshed together.
  2. There were several devs working on the class, not properly communicating.
  3. The devs were given marching orders on what they could remove, what they could not, what they had to keep around, get rid of, and so on.

That last one is, by far, the most likely, because it makes sense for someone on high to give a general opinion of "You need to keep these things around," but doesn't realize that in saying that, the other changes they want to implement don't mesh well.

Ultimately, the class just flat out needs a rework like what Machinist got. It's no longer even an option to consider letting the class stay as is, it needs to have its entire core defined from an early level and the class designed around the core. Even if the class loses some fun/good things, it NEEDS to happen.

Quote Originally Posted by xicious View Post
It would just be nice to have a use for the other pets. Yeah I'm not a huge fan of adding more buttons but if it means more deeps than I'm in, it sucks being so weak for such an intricate rotation at least some potency would justify it. There's a whole slew of other issues I'd like to see adjusted or at least officially acknowledged by SE.
The problem is Contagion created more problems than it solves, and the pet swap is a clunky system to begin with. To put it another way, there were times where I went "I have an EA1 charge, and I need titan's barrier." And every single time I just died because I couldn't swap the pet out fast enough. You lose DPS to pet swap, period. And Contagion, both iterations of the ability, have broken the class in a way only Ninjas can understand. The problems are Snapshotting and general clunkiness of pet commands, which still exist, just are massively mitigated now. I've still seen things like having Aetherpact completely dropped before. It just happened to me earlier today in a dungeon, so these are not idle concerns.