Why did they make SMN harder to play?

[Chimiko]

I think SMN dps is pretty good tbh.
So before you start shouting that SMN is fine these are simply thoughts on what i think could be done better with the job.

What i don't understand is why they increased the skill gap between good players and mediocre players.
When they we're developing SB they told us they wanted to shrink the gap between good players and bad players, thats why they removed or merged some abilitys. Not only for making our hotbars less crowded but to make it less intimidating for the new players.
What they failed to do is shrink the gap between the good SMNs and the average summoner. The gap between good players and "bad" players are larger than ever. SMN has a potential to do alot of damage but it requires a high skill cap and near perfect rotations and proper timings.

Most current summoners needs to plan in advanced when to use his cds when to not use them etc. That itself requires you to know the encounter almost flawless. Failing to do this result in a massive dps loss.
The summoner class is punished pretty harshly for failing to a missed fester and there is not a damn thing you can do about it.

I don't think we need a potency increase in our spells but rather an easier way of dishing out the damage we were supposed to do and make it less punishing.
A good start to mend the whole punishing aspect is to change how fester works:

If you have no dots up on fester it will not use any Aether but it will go on cooldown.
If bane has no enemys around its target it wont use any Aether but obv it will go on cooldown.

This will give new players and the mediocre player a chance to do things properly again without having to wait for Aetherflow to come off cooldown again and your entire rotation wont get pushed up another minute. Its still a dps loss since you messed up but it wont punish you that you're not really doing anything for a minute.

The other part is our pets, i'm sure tons of you have pressed 'Akh Morn' with only 1 second left on bahamut. This normaly leads to bahamut trying to cast it but disappears before it finishing the cast, in some instances you can even see the animation go off but the damage isent there. I'm sure alot of it has to do with latency. But a good way of dealing with this would be to make usable pet abilitys cancle when you use an ability and make all pet abilitys. For example when you use enkindle it tends to finish its cast then it uses enkindle on the boss. What if when you press Enkindle you will automaticly cancle the current pet action and cast it directly? That would make the pet way more responsive than they are currently. I'm sure there is some macro for it somewhere but I dont have it currently and we shouldnt need a macro to properly control our pets.

It this isent possible then i'd suggest you put all major cooldowns for our pets off global cooldown so even if the pet is casting Wind Blade it can still use Contagion this will smooth out our rotations a lot and it would feel alot better to use.

The other part is the ruin spam we're been going through. I'd love for some more engaging way of spaming ruin. The R4 was a step in the right direction but we need something else to make it engaging to actually play the job. BRD is an excellent example of looking at engaging gameplay. Sure we are not BRDs but it could be anything. Right now between Aetherflow cds etc we're just spaming ruin. Thats all we're doing. If you have enough mana: R3 if not R1 if movment R2 and R4 on procs. Its to much ruin. It would be great if casting a ruin could maybe proc Miasma to be instant off global CD or maybe give us back an Aether stack. Something to look forward to when spaming ruin.


I know a lot of people wont agree with me and think all of this is absolute horse shite but from my perspective this is just a fix to make it slightly easier to play SMN, i'm not suggesting potency buffs to our spells but rather an easier way of dealing with the tools we have.

[Chimiko]

I'm stupid.

[Leigaon]

You can bypass the character limit by hitting the edit button.

[Chimiko]

You can bypass the character limit by hitting the edit button.

That made it alot easier on the eye, thank you.

[Galvuu]

I said in another thread that, on a deep level, SMN and BLM are very similar if you want to execute them well.
What I meant was something you highlighted- you need, on both jobs, to have an extremely precise planning of your cds to do well in a fight. We're talking down to two seconds or so here. Further, both jobs might need to adjust their rotation in advance due to upcoming mechanics.
SMN has the added issue that a critical failure is much more punishing (death), where BLM can still somewhat recover within 15ish seconds (although that's painful too).

Pets are, as you said, a clunky, unresponsive mess (3.4 Garuda flashbacks for me).
Why? I think they just don't understand casters very well.
I know this is a painful answer- painfully useless too- but given this whole BLM and SMN fiasco in 4.0... I just think these jobs are a bit too complex when you min/max them for the dev team to see these things coming :/
I'm sure they dummy parsed this and went "great!" and failed to predict what issues would be hampering all this in an actual raid.
(Heck, they probably didn't even parse BLM, because they come out the same).

[Claviusnex]

What I meant was something you highlighted- you need, on both jobs, to have an extremely precise planning of your cds to do well in a fight. We're talking down to two seconds or so here. Further, both jobs might need to adjust their rotation in advance due to upcoming mechanics.

Good point. Planning can work out well with a static where you can begin to anticipate how the other members will react on certain fights. However it becomes nigh on impossible when you PUG as you have no idea how the other players will react as events unfold.

[Galvuu]

Good point. Planning can work out well with a static where you can begin to anticipate how the other members will react on certain fights. However it becomes nigh on impossible when you PUG as you have no idea how the other players will react as events unfold.

Planning for pugs = plan for worst case scenario. I've grown rather adept at that xD
I even plan my Lucid/Diversion usage to avoid getting tankbuster'd in the face
(Then a healer dies and we wipe, but hey, I ain't tanking that).