Summoner rework is a huge dissapointment

[Oextra]

There’s no strategy in how the bardsong buffs themselves work so it wouldn’t change your priorities. Bard does have strategic concerns with its personal DPS effects from their songs but that’s purely from repertoire. The way those buffs are tuned on Bard would be how they’re given to us on Summoner and it would be equally if not more lacklustre as a result.

Sure if that's how it was with Bard and they did that same thing with summoner, you'd be right. However you don't know what they would do if they chose to implement this idea. No one does....

[Flana]

I've always been vocal on how poor I thought the direction for Summoner has been going since Stormblood, but Endwalker is what finally made me drop the class entirely. Squeenix gave themselves a complete rework of the job from the ground up and somehow only managed to fix the most surface level problem (thematics). In fact they made the mechanical problems that already exist even worse! Unless you roleplay a melee sub-90 ghosting is the worst its ever been because Ifrit and Titan have to physically walk up to their target to enkindle, and if that dies good luck with them swapping to a new target. Yeah you can roleplay a melee with unlimited instants but why is this even a problem in the first place? This can still happen even after 90, I had it happen in Atiascope and during the crystal phase of EX2 where they just stood around because the target died and didn't bother swapping to a new target before despawning.

Demi summons killing carbuncle have a knock-on effect of making the defensive a total pain to use and can still cause neu-Devotion to either ghost or completely desync from raid buffs because you can't use it when Carbuncle is dead, which it is for nearly half your rotation because of Demi summoning. Demi AI can still freak out and randomly follow you wasting autos, and while the issue is significantly reduced it still happens. This rework didn't actually fix anything, and that's ignoring how boring it feels to play. Ironically outside of Titan the job feels painfully slow because you have a ton of instant GCDs but basically nothing to fill them with. Demi phases also feel extremely lackluster due to being 1 gcd spamfests. At least the old FBT had a 1-2 cadence to it, even if it was simplistic.

I don't even consider this a good starting point because the job has a rigid cycle already with 1 free gcd. While it desperately needs something to fill in all the dead time you can't just load all the instants in 90-w/e the new cap is two years from now. Replacing the entire gem cycle defeats the point of making it a good 'starting point' because you just threw out the thing you were supposed to build on (and doesn't fix the old gem cycle's problems if they remain after either Demi phase). That's also ignoring how Reaper and Sage are complete out of the gate and very fun to play. They don't need to wait 2 years for an expansion to fix the problem, so Summoner shouldn't have to either.

And yes, I am extremely bitter they removed the DoT caster (even if the DoTs did literally nothing to the rotation and were trivially easy to maintain starting in Stormblood) while adding nothing to replace the missing niche. I fell in love with Summoner back when I started playing in Heavensward because the DoT playstyle, and every expansion has taken that away without adding anything to replace it. Give me a dot mage SE.

To say I am very disappointed with this rework is putting it mildly. But at least it looks cool, I guess. Silver linings and all that. Maybe 6.1 will do something but I doubt it will be more than potency buffs to quiet the complaining.