Summoner is doing too much in 5.10

[Myon88]

Can we please dispense with this flawed mentality? The only insistence should be proper balance between all jobs, and to point out when any one job is too weak or too strong.

No. I may call it reparations in jest, but there is a very real dps penalty that the Shadowbringers version of summoner incurs.

Consider a fight like ucob where the boss constantly disappears and becomes unattackable. If aetherflow came off cooldown just as it happened, you could still use it and just save your aetherflow charges and trances for when the fight resumed. Now think about what happens in the current system if something like firebird trance comes off cooldown at the same point. If you use it now, you'll basically waste it because there's nothing to hit, but if you hold it, you will delay all subsequent trances for the rest of the fight. This is a massive loss to flexibility and adaptive play and it has a real impact on dps. A summoner that got, say, 7 uses of dreadwyrm trance and bahamut in the old system, might only get 6 now in the same fight if timings are unkind. This is not about being petty or taking revenge, it's a real dps loss, how is the job being compensated for this?

If you slapped current potency numbers onto Stormblood summoner's rotation flow, oh boy then we'd all see what summoners outdamaging black mages really looks like. It'd be the seventh umbral calamity for blms all over again. If you don't like the idea of summoner putting out strong numbers, take solace in the fact that it's more like the other way around, their flawed design is keeping these numbers in check.

[Galvuu]

snip.

Alternatively, it could also happen that the downtime coincides with the period between the Demis, so you're almost always in Trance/Baha/Birb.
I tried SMN on UCoB in 5.0 and it felt surprisingly comfy...

Either way, your point is a bit dubious. It means that either the job is broken and unfun and that "balances out" their dps potential, or, in some fights, they don't have that issue and put out ridiculous numbers. Which shouldn't happen or be a factor in anything.
Plus, most jobs have limitations in some fights. That'd be like a melee qqing that they have to disengage for some mechanic or a BLM complaining that they have to move. This kinda limitation is an inherent part of melees/casters.
UCoB is also a very unique example in downtime. Most fights aren't like that at all.

[Myon88]

And that's before we even get to talking about how the community develops narratives which systematically lock people out of statics or PUGs. This is where BLM has wound up during Ultimates in the past, where groups just wouldn't take you. ShB's changes did help mitigate some of the issues that caused this, but those are pretty much negated by the overtuning of SMN. Why bring something that does less DPS, is less mobile (and thus dies more), and doesn't have a rez to the hardest content in the game? For me, what's worse is the feeling of forcing a group to bring something that I know is inferior. It really sucks the fun out of it, because you're bringing nothing else to the table.

Also, there's something I think worth clarifying about the relationship between smn and blm and how welcome they are in raids. By and large, summoners doing high dps are not the reason black mages aren't taken to progression, the reason black mages aren't welcome in prog is because they don't have a raise. This may sound like I'm just saying the same thing in two different ways, but it's actually two separate issues.

The thing is, there is no amount of dps you can give a black mage that will make people bring it as the only caster to prog as long as they don't have a raise. That's just how good raise is. The first time my group got to see octet in ucob, it was because I managed to raise a healer who got to lb3. All because of 1 button press, we got valuable practice on a new phase instead of throwing 15 minutes of work away and staring at twintania again.

No amount of buffing black mage could allow them to pull that off. With SE's current fight design, access to raise is a qualitative advantage, while potency changes will always only have a quantitative effect.

Yeah, we had eden Titan week 1, but in many regards that was an outlier due to that fight being mechanically easy but numerically (tuning wise) difficult. It won't happen in ultimate, and I guarantee you groups that switched to blm to make the dps check still brought in rdm/smn for the learning pulls before they reached the enrage. As long as raise exists, you will never escape the need to know how to play rdm/smn for progression. You'll never avoid situations where your group is thinking "Maybe we wouldn't have wiped here if we had a rdm/smn".

If it's about stereotypes, if anything we should be asking why people are so fixated on 2 melee 1 range 1 caster, when you can do 1 melee 1 range 1 caster and still bring a black mage in the flex spot. Addle is very strong, nothing has changed about black mage that made it so strong in eden 1-4. The 1/1/1 party buff setup in Shadowbringers is explicitly designed to allow for compositions like this. While the casters are squabbling, the melees are laughing all the way to the bank. In many ways, it's almost more about how people view blm vs melee, and involving summoner in the dispute is kinda like involving an unrelated party. They are not mutually exclusive picks. You could delete summoner now and people will still choose red mage instead. As long as you don't have a raise, you are competing with the melees/ranged and not the other casters for a spot.

[Nemekh]

Saying most fights aren't like UCoB when the point is SMN is at its worst incarnation ever for downtime flexibility is doing a disservice to what Myon was trying to convey.

UCoB and Uwu are most definitely not comfy fights when you have variable nonsensical pushes from party dps variance that can make the fight go from tolerable to having barely anything for the phase. This can be experienced with Nael and trios+, this can be experienced with Primals - but at least there's the Ultima Weapon intermission to act as a grand reset and correct all of the timers for that reopener. We were incredibly fortunate that the first raid tier was fairly light in awkward jumps.

If we want to get particular, every expansion since Heavensward has been several steps backwards in downtime flexibility, from Aetherflow lock and the inability to have Stacks with Aethertrail on the same gauge slot, to rigid 60s Trance Timers and target required 30s Aetherflow stack generators. This is why the 55s Trance change, while a bit of a trap for the inexperienced, is huge just for having a bit of flexibility brought back to the job, just as instant Egi Assaults did with being able to use Ruin IV more flexibly and have more options for mobility. Now we can counteract and adjust for Trance drift whether forced or from downtime instead of only drifting forward.

Can you imagine how awful Polyglot would be if stacks had to literally be used on a target on cooldown the moment they became available or else the timer would freeze in place and forcibly drift? Things like that are not fun for any job.

[Kabooa]

Can you imagine how awful Polyglot would be if stacks had to literally be used on a target on cooldown the moment they became available or else the timer would freeze in place and forcibly drift? Things like that are not fun for any job.

You really don't have to imagine it with Polyglot, given that all cooldowns work in this manner.

[Dahlinea]

Also, there's something I think worth clarifying about the relationship between smn and blm and how welcome they are in raids. By and large, summoners doing high dps are not the reason black mages aren't taken to progression, the reason black mages aren't welcome in prog is because they don't have a raise. This may sound like I'm just saying the same thing in two different ways, but it's actually two separate issues.

The thing is, there is no amount of dps you can give a black mage that will make people bring it as the only caster to prog as long as they don't have a raise. That's just how good raise is. The first time my group got to see octet in ucob, it was because I managed to raise a healer who got to lb3. All because of 1 button press, we got valuable practice on a new phase instead of throwing 15 minutes of work away and staring at twintania again.

No amount of buffing black mage could allow them to pull that off. With SE's current fight design, access to raise is a qualitative advantage, while potency changes will always only have a quantitative effect.

That is why Raise should have never been a responsibility given to specific DPS jobs in the game. This is a too heavy resposibility to give only to specific jobs outside of healers. It's better that all party members carry it equally, maybe in the manner of using specific items that can be crafted or bought with GC seals or whatever, with cooldowns high enough that allows only one use for each player, same range of the spell, instacast, oGCD. Having 8 raises plus the original Raise spells pertaining to healers only are good enough for progression and the responsibility evenly distributed.

This "Raise Mage" thing (for SMN and RDM alike) needs to end.

[Nemekh]

You really don't have to imagine it with Polyglot, given that all cooldowns work in this manner.

They don't all require an enemy target to be used, but the ones that do, sure enough. I bring up Polyglot because it's directly comparable at 30s, but having the extra stack and the timer not freezing when max stacks are gained. Many Summoners have talked about the idea of Aetherflow being gained passively over time at 2 stacks/30s while in combat given that SE seem against the job ever getting the original Aetherflow back (which I would happily take over energy drain and siphon in a heartbeat).

The matter at hand is that SE went out of their way to make aspects of certain jobs more flexible with regards to downtime and with Summoner they went overboard in the other direction, for whatever the reason was. I for one am glad they've loosened that vice grip and admitted in previous discussions that they had gone about it wrong, in particular with how cooldowns would converge in a suboptimal manner. That is what lead to the cooldown adjustments with Trance.

[Nemekh]

That is why Raise should have never been a responsibility given to specific DPS jobs in the game. This is a too heavy resposibility to give only to specific jobs outside of healers. It's better that all party members carry it equally, maybe in the manner of using specific items that can be crafted or bought with GC seals or whatever, with cooldowns high enough that allows only one use for each player, same range of the spell, instacast, oGCD. Having 8 raises plus the original Raise spells pertaining to healers only are good enough for progression and the responsibility evenly distributed.

This "Raise Mage" thing (for SMN and RDM alike) needs to end.

Months ago in The Balance I talked about the concept of such a consumable combat-only raid item and called it a Phoenix Pinion to separate it from Phoenix down. Phoenix Downs and Pinions are an incredibly flavoursome Final Fantasy way to raise, it removes the vice grip if everyone can use them once per encounter, or once per long cooldown which effectively becomes once, sometimes twice per encounter. It even means if all healers and current-raise-casters are dead the run isn't over as a tank or anyone else could raise a healer to help recover.

[Kabooa]

They don't all require an enemy target to be used, but the ones that do, sure enough. I bring up Polyglot because it's directly comparable at 30s, but having the extra stack and the timer not freezing when max stacks are gained.

Just a weird distinction to make it sound like a Summoner only problem. Polyglot specifically mostly isn't comparable because everything a Black Mage does is tied to the GCD, so everything's relative strength is based on the average value of that GCD. I would think it more comparable to use AF/UI, because if we can't hit a thing, that hurts us much more directly given that everything is GCD based - Whether or not Polyglot stopped 'stacking' doesn't matter as much in this scenario. We're losing GCDs just like the Summoner loses potential Trance uses, but the difference is we can never get the GCD back, where as a Summoner both isn't always losing uses, and because it's OGCD, loses less for losing the GCDs since not everything is tied to it.

Anywho, I'm wondering what happens in 5.11's patch. Do Summoners lose the Raise, or do Black Mages get 20 potency on Fire 4?

Taking wagers!

[Marianno]

Hoping it’s 20 potency too Fire 4 or 20 potency to despair, 20 potency to Fire 4, and 20 to Xenoglossy. Maybe the last part is too much...but definitely 20 potency to Fire 4.