Summoner Early Post-Launch Feedback at level 80

[Flana]

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.

While I agree with you that casting from the Summoner prevents problems down the road, this one isn't actually a problem with the option I proposed because the pet doesn't actually do anything. It's why I compared it to Deployment Tactics, deployment doesn't care what the target is doing. They could be afk or a 1.5gcd memespeed monk, their actions don't impact the cast because the spell is cast by the Scholar.

This way it still looks the same but eliminates any action on the pets part and should (theoretically) reduce the cast delay to nothing. That said demi's still exist and kill the pet, so just centering it on the Summoner would make it the most future-proof solution.

There was nothing inherintly "broken" about SMN

It's interesting that you say that after saying this:

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.

(Underlined emphasis mine)

Ghosting was not a problem in HW. Laggy pet AI was always a problem but way less of an obnoxious one when you had a minimum 15 second window (old Contagion only had to hit before your dots fell off) for the pet to respond. This is why I say Stormblood broke Summoner, because it introduced failure points all over the place.

You needed to (new) contagion before Bahamut for the best results, oops the pet died just short of applying the debuff. Contagion didn't apply and went on cooldown anyways. Over a year ago I called that Demi summoning would have ramifications down the line, and here we are with Devotion lining up on top of Pheonix and the pet dying rears its ugly head again. I'm absolutely positive people would be (at least) more receptive to Egi Assaults if the pet didn't die during Demi-summons, because then you could freely weave with Ahk Morns and the entirety of Firebird Trance.


Even in a vacuum the Demi mechanic introduced failure points for itself. Demi-Summons don't auto-attack without being forced to and so just follow the summoner around when given the chance, to the point where they could outright ignore commands until catching up to you. Or you could ram too many Wyrmwave commands down Bahamut's throat and he'd just auto for the last ~6 seconds of time and ghost his own Ahk Morn.

There are still problems they need to fix and they absolutely should have with the launch of Shadowbringers. But that does not absolve Stormblood for having introduced some of those problems in the first place. The Demi summon mechanic will always represent a potential problem in its current form. They can't expand on or change regular pet abilities without potentially running into this same problem again.

People can like it all they want. I will freely admit I wasn't very good with SB Summoner. But that doesn't change the fact that I consider the above to be objective design flaws with long-reaching effects that should never have happened. We're still dealing with problems created in Stormblood, and unless they change that design it will continue to create problems down the road. Just like we now have to deal with Pheonix and Devotion, and both Demi's with movement.

I personally want Bahamut to have more movies similar to FBT, but I don't think that would be implmeneted anytime soon.

Just out of curiosity, what would you be looking for here? You mentioned in this post and your other thread that you were open to the idea of fusing DWT and Bahamut together, so do you want to see DWT follow in a similar trail to FBT (ex: single - aoe - single -aoe - etc), or would you rather see something else to differentiate them?

About Titan Egi

Would you like to see Titan-egi's other Assault turn into a skill like this and just have him be the 'shield pet', or would you still want to see him interact with the enemy and have abilities centered around dealing damage?