Summoner and the upcoming changes

[Dyvid]

I get the feeling, that SMN is not a very PS4-friendly Class. Managing the pet is so super hard on Controller. Moving it out of AoEs in time seems like impossible, moving him closer to a Person who should benefit from Aetherpact takes at least a couple of seconds for me. During this time I cannot do dmg, which is a huge DPS-loss.

Don't do either. Unless they change devotion, just cast it and let the cards lay where they may. No matter what you are help the party with a buff be it dps or healers. As for AoE, when you "de-summon" Bahamut you should have a fresh new Egi with full health again.

[Feves]

Today I've been farming Susano and Lakshmi extreme with summoner. It's a lot more.. interesting in 8 man content, but my FC mates complained a lot about Bahamut being too large and making it hard to see mechanics. Playing with a Bard is fun because you can just Ruin III spam all day with proper usage of Lucid Dreaming + Refresh.

We need changes to Contagion and Devotion immediately. Devotion only gives itself to healers and trying to get Contagion to go off when you want it is just so difficult that I use it whenever and don't care anymore.

[SyraLeo]

Was running susanoo ex today and ALL of the compos with SMN/BLM, BLM was at least doing 800 dps more than us.

800 more? if you are using the new ACT FFXIV plugin, you should note it's in beta and a lot of DoTs from summoners and some healers are not detected.

It's also having a host of other issues, I suggest waiting til the official release before wondering if our dps is truly that bad.

[jmdude]

I think this job needs a complete overhaul after these changes. They deleted so many skills and gave us two in return, one of them is a buff that's not interesting. I'm glad we got a new summon but it doesn't make up for everything else we lost. They should just make summons more like bahamut, you summon them for a short time to do their ultimate ability and you rotate between them, have them require less mangement and let bahamut do autos on his own.

Also lore wise why bahamut? We already have deathflare in the form of DWT, we didn't we learn a new trance? Instead we got an overglorifed egi to do the same thing we've been doing.

[Cherub]

Snip.

I pretty much agree with all of this.

I had feared SB SMN would be braindead ruin 1 spam but keeping aetherflow apart from DWT is keeping me on my toes while making the best out of tri.
As for Demi Bahamut, remember that wyrmwave has a 1.5 second recast. It might be better to just go into melee range and auto attack while ruin II spamming. Having Bahamut summoned doesn't warrant Ruin III or Ruin spamming in anyway. If you have a Ruin IV it should still be cast however because of Enkindle.
I keep using 1 OGCD (3 Festers, 1 Addle) between the Ruin II's while auto attacking. And yes it is absolutely worth Auto attacking, it can trigger wyrmwave and it'll be an additional 160 potency if Bahamut responds.
I think the maximum might be around 10-13 wayrmwaves per summoning since Akh Morn also takes up time to use.

Pet responsiveness needs to get better. Especially now where timing your pet is way more crucial than it ever was. Garuda at least that is. I absolutely hate how much I need to spam Contagion before it goes off.

It'd be nicer if we would still get Aethertrail attunement even if our attacks miss because if we do miss an attack, we're effectively locked out for 2 mins. This is way too punishing and I think this is the only job that is this unforgiving.

And don't trust parsers. DoT's aren't being tracked yet. I was 1000 DPS behind the BLM in our Susano farm. In fact, I was also way behind other jobs. Even the offtank at some point.

Aetherpact needs a buff, it's pretty terrible as of right now. I keep using it from start to finish but I'd lie if I said it's not for Ruin IV proc fishing. 5% for 15 seconds every 90 seconds and then you can't even control which person should get it....

[SoloWingMetatron]

I haven't gone into the EX trials of Stormblood yet, so do not know what the actual numbers are. However if it is true that our DPS output is lacking somewhat, then I hope that gets addressed in a future patch. Having said that though, whilst leveling and running lvl70 dungeons I didn't feel like my DPS output had been gimped all that much. The one thing I did notice however, whilst leveling. Is how much I miss Sustain. It was a great way to keep the Egi alive enough in tight situations. Now we have no way of keeping our Egi's HP up ourselves.

In terms of Demi Bahamut blocking mechanic telegraphs. I'm not sure how much of that is actually Bahamut's fault vs the player in question's fault. During the final MSQ trial I completed that alongside another SMN. So we had double Demi Bahamut out for the entirety of that fight and everyone was able to see and dodge the mechanics just fine. Of course the mechanics of an EX trial are more unforgiving usually. But the aforementioned example makes me wonder how much of that is just players making excuses for dying or failing to dodge a mechanic on a fight that they barely know, considering it's only been out for about a single week.

However I think visually SMN is in a great place! I love Demi Bahamut! He's very reminiscent of the Avatars we used to have in FFXI and is a proper Summon in every sense of the word! Definitely a step in the right direction in terms of SMN identity! So in that regard the 4.0 changes to SMN were very much needed in my opinion.

[Nerisu]

During the XXXXXXX trial

Hmmm...didn't expect to see a spoiler on a SMN gameplay topic. Should have just said something like "during one of later trials" or something. Oh well.

[SoloWingMetatron]

Hmmm...didn't expect to see a spoiler on a SMN gameplay topic. Should have just said something like "during one of later trials" or something. Oh well.

Ah crap, my apologies. I didn't think about that whilst posting. I have now fixed that, thanks.

[CodeAscalon]

Also lore wise why bahamut? We already have deathflare in the form of DWT, we didn't we learn a new trance? Instead we got an overglorifed egi to do the same thing we've been doing.

These were my concerns from the day we saw the ability preview.... I guessed that the only thing we will get is a small version of bahamut for a few seconds and thats it. I mean come on, my f**ing Ruin IV procs seldom, sometimes not even once, 64 skill is kinda trash atm and the only thing we got is better version of our dots. All in all I was kinda thrilled by the footage, but my dreams got crushed by bare hand. Having Bahamut is kinda nice but nothing really new, you know what I mean? and making your most powerful single target GCD rng by 15 ridiculous percent, seems very unsatisfying..

However that being said, I just love the pose whilst casting and executing Ruin IV. My SMN looks so badass with it, letting his weapon float for a few moments and taking it back in his hands like a really cool bastard. This is made really great. I want more of these. The only thing I wish now are some tweaks to some actions.

[DkDerek]

I can live with every change, except for aethertrail and aetherflow being on the same bar. If for some reason I lose a stack (missed bane) and end up with two stacks of aethertrail and no aetherflow, i now WASTE 2 more stacks when using the next aetherflow,

I can't even just get rid of aethertrail stacks. Let me click them off or something. Its actually brutal. As long as these two are combined on the UI bar, this class is going to have some serious problems.