Summoner Early Post-Launch Feedback at level 80

[Flana]

RE: Aetherflow as in your post.

I definitely want to use this outside of combat. You talk of needlessly spammy openers, but the current opener is worse. I just checked my logs from logs via CPM requirements - the only difference was Aetherflow actions were considerably stronger back then and so much better to have "spammed" and the current one requires more CPM. Right now, they're not too far off egi assault power levels who's ruin 4's are used further into the opener inside bahamut as a requirement for 8 WW.

If you want to reduce the "spammyness" of openers, consider deleting egi assaults in general. Further, the ability to refresh Aetherflow outside of combat increase our downtime power when looking at things from an AOE standpoint in a dungeon as you gain access to more painflares. The opener is already busy and I would personally trade egi assaults for Aetherflow actions in a heartbeat.

Just making Aetherflow stacks obtainable out of combat will make the opener worse. Even if you completly deleted Egi Assault as a compromise youre only losing 2 ogcds. That's a single gcd's worth of weaving. That would change nothing about the 'spammy' nature of the opener.

There is also the considerable difference between SB and ShB design in Dreadwyrm Trance. You still had to ram everything out as fast as possible, including dumping Deathflare and the entire opening Trance after only 2 gcds to get rolling for the fight. If you continued to use it you were screwing yourself out of damage. This is not a problem with Shadowbringers's Summoner, as you can comfortably fit every ogcd you need to cast into the Dreadwyrm Trance and opening Demi-Summon. I find it far more easy to deal with just because everything neatly fits into that first Dreadwyrm Trance.

It is clear that this SMN iteration is not popular as it is the least played job in normal eden and trials after ninja

This is irrelevant to my point. I don't play Summoner because it is or is not popular. I play it because I like what it is. That's my feedback to the developers.

Stormblood SMN was a far superior version of SMN than shadowbringers.

I would hard disagree with that statement. I would be comfortable calling Stormblood's iteration the worst caster job I have ever played in an MMO because of how broken it was. Egi's and Bahamut were riddled with command latency. Bahamut could literally not Ahk Morn sometimes. You are required to waste your raid utility to reach maximum damage because Addle procs wyrmwave, if it actually addled anything important you were lucky. Let's not forget that despite needing to spam Ruin II, Demi-Bahamut was actually the least mobile phase just because of how bad his AI could get if you moved away from him. Devotion was a sad mess of buffs that you never used 'optimally', just mash it on cooldown because damage is king. Dreadwyrm Trance and Aetherflow's interactions where such a cluttered mess the most optimal way to open a fight was to spam everything, go into Trance just for a maximum of 2 gcds before dumping the rest of a 10% damage buff because you needed to use Aetherflow that badly. It was a complete mess of backwards logic and fighting against sluggish pet AI no matter what you did. I would never call 4.X Summoner good. I would call it tolerable at best. Summoner is still dealing with issues that Stormblood introduced. Demi's still follow you around and still cause ability ghosting. Because of the Bio/Miasma and Tri-Disaster changes, DoTs involve basically no decision making, have no mechanical impact on any part of the kit outside of the dummy check, and are trivially easy to manage despite still taking up a noticeable part of the power budget.

These are the reasons why I do not think Stormblood's design was good for the job. If you enjoyed it despite these, or because the things that I take major issue with just weren't a big deal, we'll just have to agree to disagree. You're not wrong for liking Stormblood's iteration, I'm just explaining why I think it was terrible for the job. At least we can agree that HW Summoner was best Summoner.