Quote Originally Posted by Atamis View Post
Aetherflow can't be deleted right now as its a core mechanic of how SMN currently works. Yes i would like it to disappear, but until 6.x this isn't likely to happen. That is why i said just make it usable out of combat to give stacks, no waiting for it to cooldown, just cast it and go.
Aetherflow isn't core to Summoner right now. It's core to the damage but the mechanic itself has no interaction with any other mechanic short of how it applies damage.

What makes it "core" is class lore combined with it being 1400 potency every minute, which could easily be shifted to other mechanics while Aetherflow itself was disabled.

What you want would make the class worse, you'd exacerbate every problem the class currently has. When the biggest complaint generally falls into the category of "There's too much to do and too many oGCDs to press," adding more oGCDs won't fix the issue.

I have a laundry list of "easy to implement" changes to SMN that I'd like to see, but the change to Aetherflow I want to see would be buffing Fester to 470 or so potency, buffing Painflare to 215 or so, increasing the charges to 3, removing energy drain and energy siphon, and making it so the trances themselves gave you 3 charges. This is a net-neutral change to the opener, considerably thins out the mid downtime phase where the class can't spare instant casts to throw out more festers, and will help with the flow issues because of that. The potency values are to try to align Fester to about 1400 potency/minute, and Painflare to about 640/minute. The damage will be very bursty, but over a long fight it should even out.

Going back to SB's solution won't fix anything, it's better to anchor the mechanic to trances and even though you won't be able to cast it during downtime, it will also never desync slaving it this way.