Summoner rework is a huge dissapointment

[Dahlinea]

...But they went a little too far and stripped so many other things. It's very unnecessary. Still hoping they look back into SB SMN and revert Aetherflow into something you spend to build up into summoning Bahamut/Phoenix.

This is spot on. If you compare current SMN and 5.x SMN, you see the rework is just a lot of trivializations of the previous SMN mechanics.

- Removing DoTs made Fester potency standalone.
- Merged DWT with Summon Bahamut, no more Ruin II as it used to be, free Ruin IV's (now named Astral Impulse) and Bahamut auto attacks. Merging was fine but Astral Impulse being "free" combined with no Ruin II and Bahamut auto makes that phase extremely basic (same for Phoenix).
- Garuda, Titan and Ifrit replaced that preparation phase we had between Bahamut phases to keep dps up and gather Further Ruin stacks. But now we don't have to manage anything, just raw damage.

We can't deny that the visuals are good and we have more summons at hand now but the rework feels unfinished in gameplay department, rushed at some point.



On a more personal note, something that really bugs me about SMN is the fact that you have to use Bahamut/Phoenix to access G/I/T when it would make more sense to be the other way around. Even the gems near the gauge feels like it would make more sense if they filled as you used G/I/T and when the 3 are filled you get access to Bahamut/Phoenix.
I wonder if one of the reasons for this is to keep Bahamut as the opener like it was before, though stripped of everything else.