Thread: SMN 4.1 = Plenty of Mana but Net Dps loss single target :-(

I find it really hard to feel bad for you when you now get a free foe req for the whole party now including yourself.

Originally Posted by Llugen

I find it really hard to feel bad for you when you now get a free foe req for the whole party now including yourself.

As a former SMN main and BRD main now, please kindly stop. SE hasn't addressed the major issues with SMN's clunkiness at all with these changes. These were simply the things that were the easiest to fix in the short term for them. Also Foes does affect your damage. The issue with it is even though it's a boost it's not enough to make up for the GCD you used. Thus it is DPS loss for you but a net gain for the whole raid if handled properly.

Originally Posted by Music4Therapy

snip.

You never played HW SMN, did you? Otherwise you might get it.


It's not a case of me not understanding the class. It's me understanding it all too well, and watching it get completely gutted due the devs not wanting to find a better way to handle the problem DWT was originally designed for. Just because it has good numbers doesn't mean it's design isn't horrendously flawed now compared to back then, either.

HW SMN by its nature is a decision based class. You choose your filler, you choose what to spend Aetherflow on, when to use it, and you choose when to use DWT. The thing is, DWT wasn't filler then. It was a beautiful accident. In HW all of your major cooldowns were multiples of 60s. Raging Strikes, Rouse, Spur, Tri-Disaster, Contagion, Aetherflow. Everything fed into that. Those cooldowns plus DWT, Shadowflare, Miasma II, and two Aetherflow abilities got pressed within a roughly 20-25s window with 35-40s of downtime. And provided you managed Aethertrail correctly, you could flex about 20s of where you needed to keep it all looping perfectly without sacrificing anything. Not a good time to pop DWT cause you have to move? Just wait. Jump coming soon? Pop DWT early and get the value you can out of it while your cooldowns keep ticking down. It's similar to how MCH plays now with Overheat/Wildfire, but with more flexibility, that was instantly made better from even more self-synergy. One of the major things was all of your AoE could fit in the DWT window if you wanted it to. And snapshotting all of your buffs (and your target's debuffs) on your DoTs, made spreading them with Bane absolutely insane.

But in 4.0? None of that happens. You simply had no choice when you do things. You can't even change the order. It doesn't require thought, it's on rails, and that's a problem because those rails aren't smooth, fluid, and interesting the way BRD's are by contrast. The game's engine literally has animation lock and server delay combine to make one of the most clunky implementations of pets ever, and you are stuck waiting on Contagion to go off before Bahamut, which meant delaying DWT, which if you wanted to maximize that, meant losing a bit of Rouse in 4.0 cause you didn't want to clip your GCD in DWT to use it.

Bahamut may not be implemented well, but I have far more issues with specific aspects of its design that clearly are oversights. He lets you use oGCDs that have a target to trigger Wyrm Wave, which would normally be an auto attack. And you have to fit in Akh Morn during all of that without disrupting your flow, leading you down a path of all sorts of clipping, only it's pet clipping, which you have even less control over. I can chalk that up to SE attempting to fix problem only to create another, but I take issue with the idea that it's somehow okay for Addle to be one of these abilities. Fester? Fine. Bane? Sure, even if it seems stupid to some, it's technically a damage ability that happens to have a target. But Addle? Why???? SE specifically stated they were trying to eliminate utility being used as a DPS increase! So why is this in here? More over, why is Bahamut on a separate CD? They easily could have integrated it into DWT and not done the lockouts and only made him trigger on spells, thus saving themselves two buttons without causing any of this to happen. Did they not want any more GCD clipping from Festers? Well too bad they just implemented that change this patch cause mobility was an issue. Why? Oh, right. Aetherflow Lockouts.

This one change in 4.0 is the reason all of the above is an issue, by the way. All of those problems are nitpicks, but they're compounded by this one thing: Aetherflow and Aethertrail stacks and DWT are now all consolidated into one gauge, and none of these formerly separate effects are allowed to exist independently of one another at any point. This forces the rotation on us, fine, but this creates the scenario where we're essentially using one of our pet abilities (Contagion is just that good on single bosses, sorry. As long as one of your healers can get in some dps alongside you during it, it beats radiant shield) to do the same thing that DWT did before to buff our damage during Aetherflow, our largest spike. DWT accomplished this fine, so what was the point of the lockout in the first place, then? Filler. It's not even interesting filler though. It's the same filler that we're already doing either way. Filler that SE has been actively trying to stop us doing by nerfing Ruin III over and over, except whooooops Lucid Dreaming/Refresh made us spam it and effectively took the choice of when to do so away from us during the rest of our rotation! So now SE finally relented and merged Ruin and Ruin III to put an end to us emptying our MP bars for more damage because there was literally nothing better to do. They've removed the choice we had in when to add extra burst during a fight by gradually making it static, except for our mobility.

They only added the mobility factor to DWT because players were complaining they couldn't use all of DWT. Except in HW you could plan it out so you were only moving outside of DWT, easily. Now, you've literally been given a mobility cooldown, and the flexibility to use it when you need to cause Rouse and it still pair so well together. And now you can use it without clipping. So why do we have Ruin II, then? In case we mess up or need to activate Aetherflow. Which doesn't contribute much of anything when DWT Ruin III just does it better, so people are going to use DWT like we used to use our time out of DWT before, only there's less of it to go around without sacrificing DPS. But it's fine, we have Aetherflow still, there's no way they couldn't screw that up, right?

Oh, wait. Why are you allowed to press an off-cooldown Aetherflow at any point when you have full Aethertrail or are in during DWT? I know why. They couldn't get to it. You want the lockouts to remain? Fine, fix that so fat fingers don't kill a whole minute of your rotation. Cause they invariably do happen to people. But you know what also happens to people in this game. They die on progression. A lot. And doing so completely undoes your progress towards the one thing everyone wanted in Stormblood.

Yes, SMN is better now than 4.0, but you have to have played it during HW and use a modicum of imagination to extrapolate that the best of HW's iteration and this iteration of SMN could have easily been put together. Had the devs not been stubborn about DWT, had they paid more attention to how Bahamut operated, and had they paid attention to the players who loved the class in HW; they could have left what was already working there, while still implementing all the QoL that was necessary. Thus not alienating so many HW SMN players while still making the class more accessible for newcomers.

Don't believe me? Look at my poll. 2 to 1 odds says there's a problem here.

Originally Posted by Grimoire-M

Snip.

Sounds like you can't enjoy 4.x SMN because you miss 3.x SMN. I can relate, I used to main MCH. I love burst classes in games, but I also love playing classes/jobs/characters that require thought... and a monkey can play 4.x MCH. Its nigh impossible to "accidently overheat" now, making "managing" the heat gauge a joke, the rotation itself is relatively braindead until Wildfire phase but after some time wacking a dummy its muscle memory. It went from a class that required the stars aligning to maximize those burst windows, to wack-a-mole.

4.x SMN appeals to me because it does things 3.x SMN doesn't. I can understand your frustration about them changing the identity of your class, but what they have is something powerful and well-thought out imo but people refuse to accept it because 3.x SMN was great as well. It flows extremely well through phases and feels like 3.x MCH only with much more Wildfire phases.

Pre-pull Aetherflow>>Rouse+Burn through stacks>> DWT>> Aetherflow>> Burn through stacks > DWT >> Rouse >> Aetherflow+Bahamut >> DWT >> Rouse >> Aetherflow >> DWT >> Rouse >> Aetherflow+Bahamut >> DWT >> Rouse >> etc...

And unlike other classes that go through phases, you can easily fix/align your timers on the fly. Delay in the fight and Aetherflow is up while DWT is up? End DWT early, use Aetherflow.. if Bahamut is ready enter Bahamut then enter DWT directly afterwards and make use of the tri-disaster reset because your dots will be falling off soon. Bahamut wasn't ready? Just burn through your stacks and enter DWT again. The class is extremely fluid and can adjust any situation on the fly.