Which part of summoner's rotation am I meant to find satisfying?

[Kolsykol]

Anyone else feel like Energy Drain and Aetherflow just feels out of place with current SMN?
Like they're just kinda weird thematically?

They rly feel like the black sheep to me in the rotation.
Not saying they should be removed but maybe reworked somehow to be more thematically consistent and also offer more choice, maybe a way to generate Aetherflow outside of Energy Drain.
Perhaps a way to spend them to extend a summon ( with a cd ).
Fester is just very strange currently and feels out of place, it made sense with the dots but I don't think it makes sense now.

[fulminating]

Are people just upset that more people are actually enjoying it and that special feeling of being one of the few to tolerate it is now gone?

Here is a non-comprehensive list of my grievances:

• The unenjoyable rotation- it has no build up, no thought, no anything but recoloured gemshines.
• The complete lack of “weight” from the summons. Casting 3 and a demi every minute rapidly erodes any sense of specialness about them.
• How few hardcasts there are/minute. I’m a caster, not a physical ranged.
• This is a bit more nebulous, but the loss of identity. It doesn’t feel like an alternate branch to scholar in any way beyond rotational complexity. It also doesn’t feel like a ff summoner either.
• The fact that for this, a job I quite liked was sacrificed.
• What exactly is the point in the pet? Nothing is cast from it anymore.
• The near-unchanging rotation. I’m at level cap, but I really pity anyone leveling from arcanist to 90.
• The complete lack of room for further development. While this is an issue with a lot of the reworks - see drk, war, mch, whm, ast, sch and kind of sage since it’s just a scholar with a new coat of paint.

[tearagion]

Are people just upset that more people are actually enjoying it and that special feeling of being one of the few to tolerate it is now gone?

This is the stupidest shit, why do I have to read it so often? No, it's not about being special or being loud about "oooh I love self flagellation soo much"; we just liked the job, and the job we liked was replaced with something not only borderline unrecognizable, but also comparatively mind-numbing to play. Why is that so hard to understand?

Your comments don't apply because you didn't like the job gameplay-wise or thematically. Spreading DoTs was cool, I liked doing it because it was a cool way to apply AoE damage. I liked Titan-Egi because he had a distinct purpose he was good at; it didn't matter so much that it was niche. Trances having a "gap" created a swell to the rotation, part of the reason SMN is boring as sin now is that there is no crescendo to the rotation. It's just big boring boss models every ~15s while you spam the same button. What's the point of using "all summons" if it requires that they're all the same? It doesn't even require this, just another way the rework is lazy. You straight up lack the mindset and preferences that old-SMN players have.

[MilkieTea]

Currently a smn main, and honestly before the rework I dreaded leveling it to 90 (before we got a glimpse of what it was going to look like.)

I played it from 70-80 (After leveling SCH from 1-70 and finding it thoroughly unenjoyable) and found myself playing one of the most unsatisfying jobs I'd ever played - second only to Bard. I leveled it to 80 and didn't touch it again. Now I find it satisfying to play. But that's just my opinion /shrug

[fulminating]

Can you say what it is you find satisfying about the current incarnation?
I imagine that having 40 levels of scholar after arcanist didn't help much with your experience with the previous version? I'm not sure any dps is particularly easy to jump right into at such a high level.

[Dahlinea]

We're better off just doing straight AoE damage and always using our full kit (all summons) and having full control of our DPS. I'm not saying it's perfect. There's definitely room for improvement, but it's way better than what we had before.

Are people just upset that more people are actually enjoying it and that special feeling of being one of the few to tolerate it is now gone?

EW SMN is far from perfect. We're now set in a position that we don't "use" our summons, they are just a flashy AoE ability that replaced Egi-Assaults and after that we're left with one single spell a limited number of times and an ability that should come from the summon instead of the SMN. Not to mention we get our burst for free regardless of what we do during gem summons, which, I already said it before, is stupid as far as EW SMN goes.
Structure-wise EW SMN kit is so simplistic and rigid at the same time that saying we have full control of our dps feels like a bad joke. We have control of our dps when we have a choice in what spell we use at any time during a fight and how that choice weights on your overall dps. Right now, the SMN's overall dps is just given to him with the way it is designed, you simply don't have meaningful options.
Best example of having control of your dps is HW SMN, despite the pet AI problems. Lots of freedom with spells, different types of abilities doing different things and not tied to specific windows. The way we achieved DWT making Aetherflow meaningful... still can't understand why they removed this mechanic. EW SMN pales in comparison with HW SMN in terms of rotation flexibility and DPS management.

Actually, during HW a lot of jobs had interesting abilities but everything went downhill from Stormblood onwards, maybe excluding one or two jobs. Game been getting better at presenting story and casual content but the jobs gameplay wise just got worse every expansion from there. /shrugs

[Deveryn]

This is the stupidest shit, why do I have to read it so often? No, it's not about being special or being loud about "oooh I love self flagellation soo much"; we just liked the job, and the job we liked was replaced with something not only borderline unrecognizable, but also comparatively mind-numbing to play. Why is that so hard to understand?

Your comments don't apply because you didn't like the job gameplay-wise or thematically. Spreading DoTs was cool, I liked doing it because it was a cool way to apply AoE damage. I liked Titan-Egi because he had a distinct purpose he was good at; it didn't matter so much that it was niche. Trances having a "gap" created a swell to the rotation, part of the reason SMN is boring as sin now is that there is no crescendo to the rotation. It's just big boring boss models every ~15s while you spam the same button. What's the point of using "all summons" if it requires that they're all the same? It doesn't even require this, just another way the rework is lazy. You straight up lack the mindset and preferences that old-SMN players have.

It's hard to understand because after a while I looked at the job in ShB and I saw that it was clearly broken. I very much enjoyed the concept and the theme. I heard about how it used to be and that sounded nice, but that just didn't exist anymore. You ask what's the point of having all summons if they all do the same thing? What was the point of having them if you didn't use them all? Don't even try to argue about my mindset like you even know me. You have no idea what I'm like and what I did beforehand. I'm just trying to understand what people saw in it and what could possibly come back in some way. Quit being so goddamned defensive over some simple questions. I could care less how much you've heard them. I'd like to know for myself.

[tearagion]

It's hard to understand because after a while I looked at the job in ShB and I saw that it was clearly broken. I very much enjoyed the concept and the theme. I heard about how it used to be and that sounded nice, but that just didn't exist anymore. You ask what's the point of having all summons if they all do the same thing? What was the point of having them if you didn't use them all? Don't even try to argue about my mindset like you even know me. You have no idea what I'm like and what I did beforehand. I'm just trying to understand what people saw in it and what could possibly come back in some way. Quit being so goddamned defensive over some simple questions. I could care less how much you've heard them. I'd like to know for myself.

It's hard to understand because you're being obtuse, or you're just stupid. They didn't fix SMN, they replaced it. This would upset anyone who liked something despite its flaws.

I did use them all, Titan-Egi in ShB did more damage on an Egi-Assault 2 vs. 2 targets than Ifrit-Egi, so I used it.

You clearly don't give a shit about anyone's answers to your "questions" otherwise you would have responded to the post above mine. You're not trying to understand anything, successfully.

[aveyond-dreams]

This conversation continues going in circles meanwhile it is still inexcusable that after 8 years of not knowing what to do with this job that at level 90 it is missing half a typical FF summoner's pantheon and associated abilities. The people who wanted dot gameplay should not have been deceived into thinking Summoner was the class for them, they should have had another class to suit that fantasy better. A time mage who could stack and spread multiple dots, triggering bursts with "Spell-in-Waiting" mechanics maybe. I don't know. But Summoner was not the job to co-opt for this.

The Summoner of Shadowbringers was not working well for either group. The Summoner of Endwalker is not working well for either group. Which is why I find myself playing a lot more FFXI these days where I can use Shiva and Fenrir whenever I want. If they had simply used the FFXI model as their base when making this job then none of this would have happened and gameplay styles wouldn't need to be deleted this late into the game. Unfortunately they chose to course correct at the absolute last minute.

The current state of things is difficult if not outright impossible to defend any longer especially when Dragoon and Astrologian are about to receive "changes" by the same people who thought removing Kaiten was a good idea. Summoner needs an expanded kit to work with. Not reversions. What little worked of previous iterations need to go to Necromancer or Time Mage - assuming that another caster is even an option given that we have the problem of Blue Mage taking up a slot. They could announce 7.0 will have a scouting and physical ranged dps and the community would justify such a decision by pointing to another job with massive controversies over its implementation, and the problem would go unresolved.

Goodness, they'd probably also argue against the addition of Shiva as a summon citing lore so precious to them that it cannot be touched despite the fact that we call up Phoenix every other cycle of the rotation. We need more gems, we need those gems to actually do unique things, we need an Elder Summon to build up to, and we need for this job to get the attention and love it deserves.

[fulminating]

After 8 years why does ff14’s summoner not count as a valid incarnation?