Summoner Early Post-Launch Feedback at level 80

[NovaBismarck]

Not too sure why they added more DoT dependency on SMN in the first place. Nobody asked for SMN to be more DoT-focused at all, and SMN became less DoT dependent as expansions go, but ShB reversed that for some odd reason.
And to be honest I never understood the Raise tax. Revived players already get temporarily penalized for getting raised, so I don't understand why RDM and SMN should be permanently penalized for just having it.



If that's true, I find that pretty hilarious because BLMs before ShB were complaining about having no utilities and demanded they should have Raise, while MNKs were going through things about being inconvenient to play. Now that BLM and MNK are in a good spot (MNK arguably being busted) as the highest DPS jobs in the game, you'd think they'll support the DPS jobs who are struggling right now for going through the same thing before.

Yeah I agree. Tying dots to ruin just makes us a ruin class. I thought they were wanting us to focus on pets. I understand pets are glitchy and they have trouble getting them to work the way they want, but the ruin thing feels like a step in the wrong direction. I am still hoping they remove the dependency there.

Raise tax feels so stupid. The only people who I see argue that we should have it are non rezzers. Devotion is a dps gain for the party. I see that counting against our overall dps. We give up a little damage to help everyone. Rez is a dps loss for us, a distraction from dps and a burden we carry for the sake of making sure the group succeeds. Feels dumb to count that against us.

I'm still hopeful that a rebalance is coming. I've played around with a lot of other classes, many feel easy to play and easy to do damage on. Even whm can do respectable dps even though they aren't supposed to be a damage class anymore. Meanwhile, I need a chart and graph to play smn, must pop foods and pots, and sacrifice a porxie to the dark lord Zodiark to not sit low in the dps pool. I've been leveling other classes and playing smn minimally so my muscle memory isn't so hard locked in that I have trouble changing when they update us.

[RadicalPesto]

The entire aetherflow system feels entirely vestigial on summoner right now. The fact it's not tied to the trance rotation at all makes it feel wholly disconnected, like it should've just been done away with and become solely a Scholar mechanic. Fester was never thematically very Summoner-y (being tied to the Poison mage identity that they've been gradually abandoning), and at this point it feels that, if Egi Assaults weren't so clunky, they should just completely replace Aetherflow as Fester as far as APM filler and potency goes.

[Flana]

Not too sure why they added more DoT dependency on SMN in the first place. Nobody asked for SMN to be more DoT-focused at all

I did. It shouldn't come as any surprise that I actually like this incarnation of Summoner. Far more than Stormblood's at any rate. I think it's a pretty good starting point but very obviously needs some work. Since this thread is already very established I'll just condense my feedback here to prevent cluttering up the forums any more than I already have in the past.


Trancing

Mechanically Firebird Trance is phenomenal. It has a great cadence to it of bouncing back and forth between single- and multi-target hits with great damage. The problem I have here is that it's rendered Dreadwyrm Trance and Summon Demi-Bahamut to be extremely bland. While they both boil down to a lot of ruin spam, Dreadwyrm Trance can at least be livened up a little bit by the Egi Assaults. Bahamut is just uninteresting now (which is still an improvement over him being massively frustrating) and there isnt anything you can really do to liven it up.

Personally I'd like to see them roll DWT and Demi into the same button and come up with a dreadwyrm gimmick for the trance. Firebird Trance has you going between Fountain of Fire and Brand of Purgatory. Maybe have some kind of ramp up phase for Bahamut to cast something. Give him gigaflares or flattens. Something to make the phase more engaging.

The real problem is that I find Dreadwyrm Trance un-engaging and kind of lacking after Firebird Trance. Combining DWT and Demi-Bahamut would also get rid of at least one unneeded button, so that's nice.

Egi-Assaults

Decent idea that doesn't have a lot of depth just yet. While the reclassification of the egis into niche's was great, I don't feel like they hit the mark with anyone except Garuda. Titan's shield is nice, but his other ability and enkindle just being aoe damage is rendered pretty irrelevant by Garuda. If they want this to continue to be a sort of personal pet then his other Egi Assault needs to be reworked into something more useful. Maybe a single target stun or some kind of push. His Enkindle needs to be... something, though what I couldn't say. Maybe give it the Slow from old shadowflare and a Heavy?

Ifrit has another problem of his kit being functional but very flat. Garuda you have to manage Slipstreams and have knowledge of incoming damage to get the most out of Titan's shields, Ifrit is a very static push button do damage. Nothing to track, nothing to really be aware of, very little room to optimize. I would like to see at least one of these skills reworked to be more engaging in some way. Personally I'd like to see some more DoT integration but I feel like I might be in the minority on that. Also I'd like to see his Enkindle get a small damage buff and be turned into a single target hit to better suit his niche.

To be honest my pipe dream here would have these be reworked to provide some kind of back and forth between pet and Summoner, and then have Egi Assaults be used to break up the 40 second downtime between trancing. Give them more of a purpose and tie back into the kit. So you'd go Trance -> Egi skills and management -> Trance -> Egi repeat. I personally think that would be a nice continuation of the base they've provided here.

Demi-Summons

These still clash hard with the egi's and result in some extremely frustrating moments. They also have the same problems from Stormblood. You can still lose Devotion to your pet dying, even though the ability goes on cooldown and the animation goes off and you will need have both firebird trance and devotion line up at least once a fight. They still incessantly follow you despite having four times your maximum range and they can still rarely have their commands gummed up by autos + moving. Despite not having a very deep toolkit they continue to have incredibly frustrating moments.

My ultimate pipedream would be the above and these things stop killing the egi's when they spawn. That solves half the problem and prevents them from interfering with normal pets ever again. If they're so afraid of the extra pet uptime just give the pet a damage down debuff while the demi is out, but please stop killing them. Demi's will continue to cause problems as long as this keeps happening.

Aetherflow

Do not let me use this out of combat. I do not want needlessly spammy openers again. What I want is just to be able to use it in combat but without a target so this ability isnt wasting time when it comes off cooldown during boss jumps or intermissions. That and Energy Siphon is extremely redundant. Those are my only two problems with Aetherflow.

As for the abilities, I would like to see Fester and Painflare reworked to better incorporate them into the kit. Despite needing your dots up to do damage, Fester doesn't actually do anything with them. It's just a dummy check to see if you forgot. I would like to see both Fester and Painflare to be reworked to better interact with either your DoTs or with the Egis. Perhaps having Fester extend the dots by so many seconds, or having a reworked egi ability debuff the boss and then allowing Fester to detonate the debuff for damage. Now that you don't need Aetherflow to actually force the job through its stages there is a lot of room for creative changes. Go wild, have fun.

The End

Those are my main problems with Summoner as it stands now. Overall I'm quite happy with the Shadowbringers changes to the job, but I still think there are a few areas that can be improved on.

[CecMiller]

I think Shadowbringer's iteration is the worst I've seen of SMN after 4.0 SMN issues. I started playing since HW and I loved that SMN. I played SB SMN and it grew on me after the 4.1 changes.

I condensed everything and made sure to give even more feedback here: http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/t...r-for-5.08-5.1

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.

"The tag of “cannot be used outside of combat” feels bad in every situation. Too bad that add pack died before you could refresh Aetherflow. I don't see why we shouldn't bee able to use this when Sharpcast (BLM), Acceleration (RDM), Standard step (DNC), Mudras (NIN) all can be used out of combat. These can all be used pre-pull in some fashion and require some form of countdown. We don't have to wait if we're given something akin to what ninja has in the form of "hide".

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.

It is clear that this SMN iteration is not popular as it is the least played job in normal eden and trials after ninja:
(Sort by parses via clicking on parses column name at the bottom)

Eden Normal

Trials

It is carried in the savage logs by players who thought it was a safe option for progression via a raise. I suspect those numbers will also fall in time.

Stormblood SMN was a far superior version of SMN than shadowbringers. Shadowbringers did some things right, don't get me wrong. But it got a LOT of stuff wrong in the process. I'm not happy with the shadowbringers iteration at all.

[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.

[CecMiller]

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.

You say this and yet our opener is still "spammy". At least you acknowledge it would be less spammy were egi assaults to be deleted in trade of it - you would weave less thereby making it less "spammy". No matter what you do, summoner openers will be like this due to the amount of OGCD's we have and reducing it only helps. If you're playing Summoner properly, you'd also know you have to cut DWT short for bahamut, outside of the opener, to get it under buffs due to the 1 min cd of DWT which aligns with buffs in general and trick attack when its relevant again. You are still screwing yourself out of dps by not dumping it early. Previously it mattered more, specifically for the opener, because Aetherflow was the cog in our rotation and mattered the most and its why we wanted to exit DWT. Even if you had to deathflare early, you were still weaving with Ruin 2's. You talk as if somehow ending DWT early makes everything feel significant worse and yet its the same as we do currently just trading the Ruin 3's in DWT with Ruin 2's outside of it - same number of weaves just one button is different. I have never found this an issue.

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.

My feedback to the developers is that the current iteration is seeing the 2nd lowest play rate of all the jobs from the casual playerbase. It was more a statement that, overall, most people who play the job have gone elsewhere as they are not satisfied with the job. I'm glad you're enjoying the job, but we can see more positive changes in the future.

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.

Stormblood's iteration was not by any means "broken" - calling it that is incredibly disingenuous. Me and many others enjoyed the "flow" of the kit in all areas of content. Calling it broken just says to me you werent very good at it. It was one of the strongest jobs in all areas of content and I enjoyed it in particular in ultimates where it shined the best.

Its true that there was a delay in commands for garuda with regards to contagion due to her cast times - getting ifrit egi to do his moves was more responsive as he did not have to "cast". Bahamut works the same as now (actually he got worse with regards to the first wyrmwave) so its arguablly worse. Akhmorn works in the exact same way. if you move after pressing Akhmorn and bahamut is following you, he will not cast it until you cast Ruin 2 or Ruin 3 to trigger a Wyrmwave and thus telling him to stand still.

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

Yes, you could "waste" addle (its really a tradeoff) for a wyrmwave instead of mitigation, but it was not neccessary to achieve maximum wyrmwaves depending on your GCD recast timer and if your healers asked for you to save it, you save it. Though I do agree here - it was a bad call to make Bahamut respond to addle in particular. Bahamut responding to Aetherflow actions only would have been better.

As for the Ruin 2 comment, yes, if you moved a lot you could lose a wyrmwave or even 2 or even ghost akhmorn. Nothing has changed for this in shadowbringers - it is the exact same even now. It is even less mobile. The reason we now choose to cast Ruin 3 by default due to the potency difference of Ruin 2 and Ruin 3 and we're forced to use 4 instant casts during it anyway to achieve maximum wyrmwaves whether thats through 4 Ruin 2's or otherwise.

If you used devotion like this, you weren't very smart. It provided a 2% damage up and 5% healing up benefit and 2% damage taken redction. If you're talking about not using it "optimally" its because you in particular didnt as it paired well with scholars chain. It has become a bit harder to use at this moment due to the way it lines up with phoenix and we're forced to delay phoenix for devotion party buff. This needs to be fixed. This is worse in shadowbringers easily as we now have 20 less seconds in a 2 minute time span where we can use devotion due to FBT. It is also arguably the weakest 3 minute cooldown out there. Monk has a 90s version for physical only and can get 2 uses in the time we get 1 making it easily stronger due to just how many jobs use physical damage.

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.

Trance and Aetherflow didnt even interact. You couldn't even use aetherflow actions inside trance as it was a pre-requisite to use them. Though this could easily have been rectified by removing the lockout and would have been a nice return to HW era of optimization.

You keep mentioning this point about "spamming everything" when you still need to have a spammy opener due to the nature of SMN being an OGCD caster and "2 gcd DWT" and yet you spam everything even now and you cut short all your future DWT's after the opener to align for buffs as its more optimal to get akhmorn and wyrmwaves under buffs than more ruin 3's under DWT which no longer provides a 10% buff.

There was nothing wrong with how it worked back then and you will not convince me that ending DWT at every point outside of the opener due to buffs like litany, chain, trick, voice etc is somehow better than ending it early once in the opener.

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.

No it wasn't a complete mess of backwards logic - you just didnt like it. Yes, pet AI was sluggish with regards to garuda because of her cast times though you could work around it with smart play. If that was made responsive, most of my complaints went out of the window as it was an important party buff that wasn't responsive enough. Pet's being more responsive in Shadowbringers is a welcome change, but there is more to be done here. Ruin 4's should be given instantly and devotion should be cast instantly to prevent ghosting issues. Further, fix bahamuts AI for the first wyrmwave.

It's fine if you disliked the iteration in Stormblood. I know myself and many others enjoyed it and would very much welcome a return to that era over Shadowbringers SMN which is provably unpopular with the masses. I'm not sure what to say if you think dots are trivial to manage. Yes, 30s made them easier to apply but we require far more rigid timing to get them on our target due to the way the trances work. Our dependency on them works against us on fights like E4 Savage mode when the jails appear. Dots have a massive impact on all our GCD's and it feels bad. There is never a situation I say, "boy, I'm so glad my GCD's are stronger due to dots", but there are plenty of situations in fates/hunts/low hp adds/boss transitions 5-10s after your 30s dots expire where I think to myself, "boy, I absolutely hate this change".

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.

Thats fine, but I just want to point out the areas where you were exagerrating or how your argument about a "spammy" opener being a large complaing completely falls apart when you consider what Shadowbringers is. Spammy openers is part of SMN at this point due to the plethopra of OGCD's it has. The only thing I ask from SE is to make them meaningful ones and one way to do that is to improve the general damage of Egi Assaults. Some people like the increased CPM requirement from Stormblood, some don't. Shadowbringers SMN is if far worse than Stormblood SMN in 4.1+ and its why many others, not just myself, are hoping for positive changes that bring us back to how things were before rather than the "rigid" structure everything follows now.

Being able to use trance and aetherflow actions smartly, timing your own usage around movement, add phases or quick bursts was an example of player skill and the flexibility felt really really good. Right now, not only is it brain dead on cooldown usage, but not doing so is extremely punishing. It just feels a whole lot worse.

[Taranok]

Not too sure why they added more DoT dependency on SMN in the first place. Nobody asked for SMN to be more DoT-focused at all, and SMN became less DoT dependent as expansions go, but ShB reversed that for some odd reason.
And to be honest I never understood the Raise tax. Revived players already get temporarily penalized for getting raised, so I don't understand why RDM and SMN should be permanently penalized for just having it.



If that's true, I find that pretty hilarious because BLMs before ShB were complaining about having no utilities and demanded they should have Raise, while MNKs were going through things about being inconvenient to play. Now that BLM and MNK are in a good spot (MNK arguably being busted) as the highest DPS jobs in the game, you'd think they'll support the DPS jobs who are struggling right now for going through the same thing before.

Funnily enough, I'm maining a Black Mage right now because of how massively disappointing and frustrating Summoner has been in ShB. BLM was a main of mine in SB and at the tail end of HW as well. I can't say for certain if BLM is OP, but it's a strong candidate for it. Meanwhile I'm a strong proponent for fixing SMN, fixing latency issues affecting DPS on MCH and NIN, and I want to give a massive overhaul to SMN and at least a minor rework to NIN because neither is in an especially good place right now design wise. And basically as I play every combat class to 50, I'm compiling a mental list of every issue I have with the class that I'd like to see smoothed over just to make it in my opinion more fun to play, and can make a laundry list of most classes where they could or should be improved.

Then feel free to share. That is the point of this thread. I for one only feel busy on SMN when forcing the Egis to do things, the whole aetherflow thing doesn't bother me. I say it is core because its the resource we have to use, yea its as pointless as MCH's battery guage, but it is a core mechanic even if you don't like it. they will not get rid of it without a rework, so once again its not feasible to just get rid of it right now. Nevermind if theres something forcing it to be linked with SCH as well.

I have in other threads and earlier in this one but, at risk of being redundant, here we go:

Short Term Changes. By definition, these are things that are relatively minor changes at a coding and class design level of the game that have examples of being done this way already either on this class or other classes, that can therefore be reasonably implemented quickly.

1. Reduce or remove the damage increase from DoTs being up on target for both Ruin and Fester (Ruin being the more important one).
2. Remove Energy Drain and Energy Siphon, give 3 stacks of Aetherflow from entering Trances, redistribute lost potency from ED/ES and Fester/Painflare into Ruin(s) and Outburst.
3. Remove ruination, redistribute lost damage directly into Ruin(s). Alternatively, allow Ruination to be cast by hardcasts of Miasma. Alternatively, allow Fountain of Fire and Brand of Purgatory to directly benefit from Ruination.
4. Increase DoT duration to 33-35 seconds. Alternatively reduce trance cooldown to 55 seconds. Alternatively reduce Tri-Disaster cooldown to 25 seconds or lower (Which would also double as a massive QoL improvement in more repeatable content including dungeons, especially if the cooldown is made something like 10s). If T-D is reduced in cooldown, take that into consideration for any ruination adjustments because that will be a bit redundant then.
5. Merge Demi-Bahamut with Dreadwyrm Trance, just likw how Demi-Phoenix and Firebrand Trance currently works. Remove Summon Demi-Bahamut as an ability, increase DWT duration to 20 seconds, and make the act of CASTING DWT require a target, which will automatically be hit by Death Flare on entering DWT. At level 70, make DB only summon every other DWT to keep consistency, whereas +5 seconds of free movement with no actual DPS gain should be minimal in all content at level 70 and prior.
6. Remove bane, make all DoTs/Ruination naturally spread just from being up on targets OR make all DoTs and T-D AoE to begin with. Notes: This might cause issues in some content where you flat out wouldn't want to AoE, such as the first boss of Tam-Tara Deepcroft Hard Mode, handle with care if done. Might not be necessary as the number of oGCDs decreases just from the AF Changes alone.
7. Merge Egi Assaults 1 and 2 together, adjust potency and procs accordingly, can keep 30s cooldown.
8. Make devotion cast by the summoner, centered on the summoner, and not interact with the pet in any way. Alternatively, let it be cast while a demi-summon is up,
9. Make all Demis stationary. Alternatively, make them operate like Machinist's Automaton Queen, fully autonomous outside of Enkindle Bahamut/Phoenix so they always do their full rotation and don't lose damage from shenanigans such as movement.
10. Merge Enkindle Bahamut/Phoenix with Enkindle, but keep them as separate abilities (shared button like the trances). They're mutually exclusive already, why not just combine them already since they "function" similarly?
11. Consider upgrading ruin 3 into ruin 4, and ruin 2 into ruin 3, change ruin 4 procs to be a damage increase and upgrade ruin 3 into ruin 4 as well, instant cast, etc.
12. Make Ifrit-Egi's auto attacks and egi-assaults charge the enemy like Automaton Queen does.

From doing all of this, there's basically only 2 or 3 oGCDs you will need to cast between phases. Tri-Disaster, Egi Assault, and Devotion. Everything else will be relegated to when Trances are up, but still heavily thinned out which will help the opener. The class will certainly get a bit repetitive during the downtime, but this is to make the class smooth and functional while not its best gameplay experience. Anything that says "consider" is something that doesn't need to be done, but I feel could be done and might be nice if done, but its impact is going to be a bit...weird. Obviously this will require potency changes, but since nothing is being added, only removed or merged, this is all reasonable with a relatively small amount of time.

Long term changes: By definition these would be things that would take a significant amount of effort and functionally require a redesign of the class, and as such would be expected no sooner than 6.0 if done.

1. Remove DoT maintenance gameplay, this class is no longer a poison mage, stop designing it like one.
2. Remove Egis as permanent pets, permanent pets are frustrating to design around and work with and aren't working with the current summoner.
3. Maybe remove Aetherflow, maybe not. If we add enough fun things outside of Aetherflow, it will be a redundant mechanic, kind of like how it is with Egi-Assault and the current Aetherflow rotation
4. Turn Egis and Carbuncles into "Arcanist's First Summons." Summoned when the class goes into a trance.
5. Make trances a primary part of the class rotation, comprising of easily half of Summoner's overall rotation. They can be 20 of 30 seconds of gameplay or 30 of 60 or some other arbitrary number, the more the better.
6. Give the class a lot of dummy abilities that do nothing or are somewhat basic outside of trances, but in trances they are augmented into unique, but simple abilities. Think how Enkindle Bahamut/Phoenix or EA 1/2 and Enkindle change depending on trance/egi. Use these abilities to make every trance feel very unique and wildly different from each other, themed to what is currently being summoned. Rotations can be 1 repeating like DWT but with a lot of oGCDs to push, can be 1-2 with fewer oGCDs, more complicated like 1-1-2-1-1-3-1-1 or 1-2-3-1-4-5-1-6. They can borrow from other classes, use DoTs, use oGCDs. The point is to vary the rotation to thematically fit which summon is out, and this should be what makes the summoner feel like a summoner.
7. Summoned entities can either use everything currently in existence, or new things. They can include Emerald Carbuncle, Topaz Carbuncle, possibly Ruby Carbuncle, a new Demi-Ifrit, Demi-Titan, Demi-Garuda, and eventually Demi-Bahamut and Demi-Phoenix, and any other new summons wanted.
8. All summoned entities should be entirely autonomous, but "impart" their power to the summoner. Exceptions can be made for ultraflashy abilities like Akh Morn or Revalation, but make those just automatically cast by the pet so that the pet is consistent.
9. Aim for 2-4 separate trances and rotations, and any early ones can upgrade into later ones with the rotation either not changing much or changing only marginally.
10. Keep abilities like Enkindle and Egi-Assault to be used when trances are or aren't up, but make them summon temporary pets, such as the carbuncles or current egis (not to be confused with E.G. Demi-Ifrit). They can be one-off attacks of random summons, or summon the pet. If it's a one-off attack, it can be flashy such as Odin running up and doing a Zantetsuken, whereas if it's a duration, it can be something smaller sticking around for longer.
11. Rework ability names, artwork, and potency to fit this massively reworked class, re-using old abilities where thematically appropriate.

That's really it. It's a tall order and I'm certainly not expecting these, but short term is mostly about making the class flow regardless of if it's boring at the end of the day while trying to maintain that this is a caster, whereas long-term is based on designing the class around what makes the class thematically feel like a summoner and reworking everything else to fit around it regardless of lore. Lore can be corrected later, but the class should play and feel like a summoner at the cost of everything else. With a proper redesign, the class will be thematically stable going forwards and will only need minor updates as time goes on, such as adding new summons to replace old ones. But it will at least be coherent and consistent.

[Flana]

You talk as if somehow ending DWT early makes everything feel significant worse and yet its the same as we do currently just trading the Ruin 3's in DWT with Ruin 2's outside of it - same number of weaves just one button is different. I have never found this an issue.

Because it was worse. You were throwing away a 10% damage bonus and the ability to freely weave to be forced to weave with Ruin II because of how important Aetherflow was to the rotation. It was always a bad design decision because actually using the buff as intended cost you dps by delaying aetherflow, and it took away your ability to freely weave while still forcing you to Ruin II to ram out all the ogcd's in the opener. It wasn't that much worse because of the low the potency difference of Ruin II and III, but it was still completely asinine that the tools they gave you to solve the inefficiencies of the job were themselves completely inefficient in the opener and after any prolonged boss jump.

Being completely unable to realize that just tells me you were probably not any good with Stormblood Summoner.*

Besides, the damage it dealt is irrelevant. They could make a job with three buttons that is still perfectly balanced, or even completely unbalanced and dealing massive damage. Number tweaks are easy, you can always glue 300 potency to something and people will love it. Summoner is still well represented in savage content even four weeks in, and just like Stormblood the casual playrate will continue to increase as long as potency buffs roll out future patches.

As for the Ruin 2 comment, yes, if you moved a lot you could lose a wyrmwave or even 2 or even ghost akhmorn. Nothing has changed for this in shadowbringers - it is the exact same even now. It is even less mobile. The reason we now choose to cast Ruin 3 by default due to the potency difference of Ruin 2 and Ruin 3 and we're forced to use 4 instant casts during it anyway to achieve maximum wyrmwaves whether thats through 4 Ruin 2's or otherwise.

Actually a lot has changed now, because of the introduction of Firebird Trance. They already came up with a solution to getting all your gcd wyrmwaves and as a bonus effect in my experience it drastically reduces the instances of ghosting with enkindled demi. Seriously, combining Trance and Summon makes controlling pheonix much easier and less stressful than trying to control bahamut while maintaining damage. Why they didn't just merge DWT and summon bahamut is a mystery. It mitigates pretty much every other problem except for pet ability ghosting.

Dreadwyrm Trance and Demi-Bahamut no longer exist in a vacuum. They can be compared to Firebird Trance and Demi-Pheonix.

If you used devotion like this, you weren't very smart. It provided a 2% damage up and 5% healing up benefit and 2% damage taken redction. If you're talking about not using it "optimally" its because you in particular didnt as it paired well with scholars chain.

Scholars/ninjas/etc generally don't just sit on their buffs unless the boss is about to jump incredibly soon. It was next to impossible to use "optimally" for it's design because there was never a time where you'd have it off cooldown and think "oh there's some big raid wide damage coming up in 40 seconds, I better hold Devotion for that 5% healing buff". The damage down bonus was even more superfluous and I'm willing the bet the majority of what it blocked was a mere 2% on auto-attacks. You have all these support effects tied to a raid dps increase which were largely useless because damage is king and you just hit it on cooldown like all the other raid dps buffs unless there was a jump coming. The ability was at best confused for what it wanted to be and at worst wasting the power budget on barely noticeable secondary effects.

Trance and Aetherflow didnt even interact. You couldn't even use aetherflow actions inside trance as it was a pre-requisite to use them.

Yes, that was the point. You couldn't use aetherflow while Trancing. Their interaction was that the two abilities are mutually exclusive and led to frustrating moments. You had to "waste" the majority of the first trance. You were left with extremely awkward timings if the boss left for a prolonged period of time like for Grand Cross Omega. It wasn't a common problem, but it shouldn't have been a problem at all.

You keep mentioning this point about "spamming everything" when you still need to have a spammy opener due to the nature of SMN being an OGCD caster and "2 gcd DWT" and yet you spam everything even now and you cut short all your future DWT's after the opener to align for buffs as its more optimal to get akhmorn and wyrmwaves under buffs than more ruin 3's under DWT which no longer provides a 10% buff.

And this is the major difference. Dreadwyrm Trance no longer provides any damage bonus. It's only use now is to freely move and/or weave. If you don't need to do either of those then you don't have a reason to need to stay in Dreadwyrm Trance. You could easily make an argument here about them removing the impact of DWT, but its purpose has completely changed. Personally this is why I would roll demi-bahamut into dwt, to give it more of that power back and to give you a reason to stay in as long as possible. Of course that would necessitate reworking Egi Assaults and demi-bahamut, but pretty much everyone wants to see some level of change in Egi Assaults so that's a bit of a moot cost.


*Do you see how pointless insults are and how little they accomplish in a conversation? They add nothing and accomplish nothing, unless you want to get really creative and call someone a ham sandwich or something.

Make devotion cast by the summoner, centered on the summoner, and not interact with the pet in any way. Alternatively, let it be cast while a demi-summon is up,

Why not have it be instant cast by the Summoner but still radiate from the pet? This effect is already present in the game from Deployment Tactics. It's instant and radiates from the target, and this way still retains the flavour of being a pet influenced ability without the cast time jank. Also just stop killing the pet for the demi summon, that'll work great.

[Taranok]

Why not have it be instant cast by the Summoner but still radiate from the pet? This effect is already present in the game from Deployment Tactics. It's instant and radiates from the target, and this way still retains the flavour of being a pet influenced ability without the cast time jank. Also just stop killing the pet for the demi summon, that'll work great.

This solution is a bit two-fold. The first is to make it so it doesn't cast from the pet at all, so it doesn't need to be expanded to other pets or have any alterations to the current mechanics of how the ability is targeted. Technically it could be cast centered on the egi or the demi or what have you, but this isn't necessarily a good thing or easy to implement in this fashion.

The second is to offload abilities from the pet. The game constantly throws errors if you throw more and more pet abilities at the pet too quickly, and it's possible on some abilities, such as Devotion, to rebound the actual cast of devotion. The interaction of commanding the pet to do something and the pet doing something is still slow and frustrating, and it's still prone to errors and delays just as it was before, it's just not as obvious since there's a somewhat poorly written queue system thrown onto it.

This is one reason why I'm a proponent of turning demi-summons into a pet that operates functionally identically to Automaton Queen in the sense that you fire the pet, and the pet does its own thing without respect for what you, the player, are doing, while the player has an augmented rotation, kind of like the difference between DWT and FBT, even though this is a very basic difference.

So making Devotion just cast centered on the summoner is the quickest, easiest, dirtiest solution that accomplishes the goals of offloading it from the pet and also making it no longer dependent on an egi being out OR a demi-summon moving/being out/competing with its own casts. Or needing to redesign pets to constantly stay out like you suggest, which we technically don't know if that's actually possible within the limitations of the game's code. It would require relatively the least amount of work and while it thematically destroys the ability as it was originally implemented, it can just be called Aetherpact anyways and say it's a bond between SMN and others at that point and they can make it thematically appropriate later.

[CecMiller]

Because it was worse. You were throwing away a 10% damage bonus and the ability to freely weave to be forced to weave with Ruin II because of how important Aetherflow was to the rotation. It was always a bad design decision because actually using the buff as intended cost you dps by delaying aetherflow, and it took away your ability to freely weave while still forcing you to Ruin II to ram out all the ogcd's in the opener. It wasn't that much worse because of the low the potency difference of Ruin II and III, but it was still completely asinine that the tools they gave you to solve the inefficiencies of the job were themselves completely inefficient in the opener and after any prolonged boss jump.

Being completely unable to realize that just tells me you were probably not any good with Stormblood Summoner.*

That 10% Damage bonus ONLY affected your OGCDs that were not Aetherflow actions (Outside of Ruin 3, Tri-bind and Deathflaree) as they were locked out. That means shadowflare, enkindle, tri-disaster which were used. If it was bad design to cut short DWT now, then it is even worse to cut short DWT after your opening DWT when you still have OGCD's to weave which IS the case in Shadowbringers if you're playing it properly. It made our opener incredibly bursty and I enjoyed a big opener. You are also missing the impact of trick attack in the design decision to have it this way even though I would probably cut short DWT regardless. I do not think it was bad design unless you think the ability to end DWT whenever you want via deathflare is bad design. It was used as intended - smarter players knew when to end it early based on the timings of their cooldowns or how fast an add pack was dying. This is true for other jobs when you time certain abilities to come back later on - "Why did he use his battle litany for only 10s when it lasts 20?!" - Because he gets more usages. Sometimes not using abilities for their entire duration is the correct thing to do and you have to accept that. It was the case in Stormblood and it is the case now.

And I can assure you - I was far better at Summoner than you were and still am. You just need to accept that, sometimes, not getting the maximum usage out of something can be optimal given the circumstances and the rest of your kit. This is true for many jobs.

Actually a lot has changed now, because of the introduction of Firebird Trance. They already came up with a solution to getting all your gcd wyrmwaves and as a bonus effect in my experience it drastically reduces the instances of ghosting with enkindled demi. Seriously, combining Trance and Summon makes controlling pheonix much easier and less stressful than trying to control bahamut while maintaining damage. Why they didn't just merge DWT and summon bahamut is a mystery. It mitigates pretty much every other problem except for pet ability ghosting.

Dreadwyrm Trance and Demi-Bahamut no longer exist in a vacuum. They can be compared to Firebird Trance and Demi-Pheonix.

You specifically talked about Bahamut. We all know FBT is good - the only complaints about FBT I've heard is about interchaning Ruin 3 and Outburst for commands. Nothing has changed in regards to bahamut. People have already noted this in their feedback too. However comments like: "Bahamut could literally not Ahk Morn" and " "Demi-Bahamut was actually the least mobile phase just because of how bad his AI could get if you moved away from him" is true even now if not more so.

Scholars/ninjas/etc generally don't just sit on their buffs unless the boss is about to jump incredibly soon. It was next to impossible to use "optimally" for it's design because there was never a time where you'd have it off cooldown and think "oh there's some big raid wide damage coming up in 40 seconds, I better hold Devotion for that 5% healing buff". The damage down bonus was even more superfluous and I'm willing the bet the majority of what it blocked was a mere 2% on auto-attacks. You have all these support effects tied to a raid dps increase which were largely useless because damage is king and you just hit it on cooldown like all the other raid dps buffs unless there was a jump coming. The ability was at best confused for what it wanted to be and at worst wasting the power budget on barely noticeable secondary effects.

I have no idea what you mean by the scholar/nin comment - This was the same for summoner with regards to devotion. The only time you used it earlier is if you had to bahamut instantly after. I said, when used optimally, it is paired with Scholars Chain which is also a 120s CD so it lines up with burst of every job as job rotations are planned around burst windows. Optimally it was used as a damage buff for everyone's burst window when all the other buffs were out. Any other utility it had outside of that was just a bonus. I don't think anyone cared where healer GCD's could be saved by using it as defensive mitigation. The only case I can think of where it could possibly have been better is in UWU during orb soaks for Aetheric Boom. I do think Devotion is better now as a singular % damage buff, but I never once cared about getting maximum usage outside of the components that weren't damage buffing anyway.

Yes, that was the point. You couldn't use aetherflow while Trancing. Their interaction was that the two abilities are mutually exclusive and led to frustrating moments. You had to "waste" the majority of the first trance. You were left with extremely awkward timings if the boss left for a prolonged period of time like for Grand Cross Omega. It wasn't a common problem, but it shouldn't have been a problem at all.

You could say this about many things. Why does Bahamut/Phoenix move? Why didn't we get Aetherflow 3 Stacks after every wipe as the solution to waiting for Aetherflow? Why were pet abilities not instant? Why don't we get Ruin 4 stacks instantly on button press than having to wait for their animation? Why can abilities ghost? They all should never have been problems and yet they were/are. I always wanted to be able to use Aetheflow actions inside trance and there is a solution for that. Calling things "too spammy" as you did for having in Stormblood, but enjoying the way it is in Shadowbringers is ridiculous.

And this is the major difference. Dreadwyrm Trance no longer provides any damage bonus. It's only use now is to freely move and/or weave. If you don't need to do either of those then you don't have a reason to need to stay in Dreadwyrm Trance. You could easily make an argument here about them removing the impact of DWT, but its purpose has completely changed. Personally this is why I would roll demi-bahamut into dwt, to give it more of that power back and to give you a reason to stay in as long as possible. Of course that would necessitate reworking Egi Assaults and demi-bahamut, but pretty much everyone wants to see some level of change in Egi Assaults so that's a bit of a moot cost.

How is that a major difference? We did the same with DWT regardless inside Stormblood. What drastically has changed with how we use it in Shadowbringers? We cut it short when we thought it was optimal to do so as it was in the opener. DWT was just, better, in general in Stormblood and wasn't tied to a 60s cooldown. Any movement it offers you is purely coincidental with fight timings and let me emphasize how you cut the ability short in shadowbringers everytime after the opener to stay in line with raid buffs.

I think that DWT and bahamut can be combined as is one of the many suggetions given by a number of people over this thread and the other one. I'm unsure if they would do that change right now due to how it is problematic with job quests unless they simply introduce a trait at level 72 that combines them. You could further have it so that you could have Bahamut available as soon as you cast DWT trance making it optional to use so there is optimization possible with it still and you're not forced you to use it at the same time as you press DWT. There are many suggestions for this and I'd be happy with most. I personally want Bahamut to have more movies similar to FBT, but I don't think that would be implmeneted anytime soon.

*Do you see how pointless insults are and how little they accomplish in a conversation? They add nothing and accomplish nothing, unless you want to get really creative and call someone a ham sandwich or something.

Don't make ridiculous comments like:

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.

Calling a well functioning and popular job "broken" just cause you didnt like it tells me you "werent very good at it" on that basis alone. That was my comment to you. There was nothing inherintly "broken" about SMN. If you're going to call a job "broken" which was one of the strongest jobs and loved by many, you're going to get called out for it. My advice would be to play a job well before calling it "broken" and try to understand that things DON'T have to be used for their entire duration for them to make sense. There are cases in other jobs when you cut things short to make a gain - the same was true in SMN with regards to DWT.

I think you just need to accept that when its optimal to do so, players WILL cut the duration of burst phases or other abilities. There are numerous examples of this in fights like missing a holy spirit inside a requiscat window for paladin. It just so happened with SMN, to align with buffs (aswell as being optimal in of itself until you figure until you figure out the latest aetherflow you could achieve with your team) you cut the opening DWT short. This was just smart play.

As for suggestions, I posted some of my own in the other thread:

http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/t...=1#post5131945

I think we agree on some ideas but I will never believe that the way DWT is now is better than how it was before.