Quote Originally Posted by Taranok View Post
My contention with this is, there is 1 (one) skill that is time sensitive that senior buncle needs to handle in a snappy manner. The replacement for aetherpact. If it's anything less than press oGCD->acquire buff, it will be a serious design flaw of the class considering the next thing you want to do is cast summon demi.

I can understand the disappointment of the pets not doing anything, but there's a lot of problems with the pet design that the current version exemplifies. But the biggest entirely revolves around it being desummoned to bring out the demis, allowing for skills to be clipped and effects thrown away while being put on cooldown, especially important skills like aetherpact or enkindle (which as far as I know, the latter won't exist in 6.0).

If it's sitting there, minding its own business, that's fine. If it can do player commands while a demi is out, I wouldn't mind bringing it back. But if it exists even remotely like ShB's carbuncle, hard pass.
I disagree with this assessment only because the job really hasn't altered the AI in a significant manner throughout its lifetime, just how we interface with it. Because of this it is not only reasonable, but expected that when we encounter any significant period of downtime with new Summoner we are left vulnerable to a situation where you have two back to back ghosting instances, specifically Summon Egi Avatar into Devotion into Summon Bahamut/Phoenix. It's a big reason I want at least Bahamut to remain as an oGCD so you can space it out with a lateweave. Even if the avatars had to remain a GCD in that situation you could space it out with Avatar -> Ruin IV (early weave Devotion) -> Ruin II (Lateweave Bahamut) at worst. It could be worse than that but SE doesn't let you use back to back Avatars unless you have zero Attunement stacks. Whether it's even worth spending your last stack on each phase remains to be seen, but the likely scenario this is a problem in only needs about...12 seconds of downtime? It's really small and clunky.

Functionally back to back Avatars and new Devotion is the exact same ghosting issue we have with current Devotion on Carbuncle, apart from the lack of auto-attacks -maybe- making it more responsive. I'm not expecting that to actually work as intended. I am expecting to need to early-weave it to account for GCD Bahamut as the current opener late-weaves both to intentionally avoid this problem. I can say that because that's how little SE is willing to change things regarding pets. Demi-Egi took three expansions to get Egi Auto attacks added to their rotation. If the Avatars were at least oGCD I think they would be way better, though that comes at a potency cost most people really don't want to accept. I think the flexibility and downtime gains outweigh it enough to matter.