Summoner Early Post-Launch Feedback at level 80

[SchrodingersWaffle]

The current system has undeniably been comprimised in many ways flexibility being just one aspect. Their solution for Aetherflow no longer being a stress point was to make DWT the exact same thing whilst somehow still making Aetherflow/Energy Drain even more stressful even after it has become detached from the cycle.

If they wanted to reduce the wait time before pulls in raids, the solution was simply to give Summoners full stacks after every wipe similar to how "charged" actions retain full stacks after every wipe. I'm disappointed that they have not done this, but even if you started at 0 stacks, the system with the old Aetherflow dictating the our cycle was far better.

I hope they're able to go back to the drawing board and see where they made erred with the design of the new Summoner. The new "busy work" or Egi Assault OGCDs combined with the 30s Aetherflow has been highly polarizing. I myself definately prefer having 4 stacks every 60s as opposed to 2 stacks every 30 as it allowed us far more downtime power. The Egi Assault OGCDs I don't mind as much but I'm well aware others dislike them. I wish they were more potent and more meaningful even if they had a longer cooldown to compensate.

The only thing we can do really is discuss and hopefully our voices are heard and hope for the best. I trust the team to fix our problems!

Ultimately what I think they need to do is just get rid of DoTs and Aetherflow entirely. Put in an ability that enables Trance instead of it being it's own CD and just rip the damage from DoTs and Ruin potency increase right out and put it into DWT, most likely by making Deathflare have mutliple uses during DWT, 4-5 by my calculations, with a new "Trance ender" with potency on par with or higher than Xenoglossy (Megaflare anyone?). And potentially upping the number of Enkindle Demi-Primal per phase from 2 to 3.

[Incision93]

Also, hoping that ACT is broken more than i see, SMN got the short stick on the dps side. Is clunkier, i can deal with it. Still unforgiving on death, a bit less. We were at the 3rd spot before when played proberly, also conserving A LOT of utility. Now we have res and devotion, a BAD devotion. If you want to go asap for trances, you will Ruin3/ruin2 tridisaster DWT and ED devotion at best. Which means what? Devotion is up again in phoenix and it won't align ever again with other buffs. Also 5%, not counting burst phases or buffs, on a 180s windows with 15s duration means that you will bring:

- 0,416666666 % RaidDps contribution

Just leaving contagion was better than this. We lost utility and dps, buff won't align or you will lose even more dps. You hardly can align dots in buff windows, Bahamut rotation is turret mode to get 8WW and:

- Sb combined damage from garuda + bahamut was like 27%. Now, with phoenix, sicfrit+bahamut+phoenix is just 28%

Pet damage is ridiculously low, like you crit 25k and ifrit crits 3k at best. Inferno is horrible, if the initial it does 50 your total dot does 25. There is no autoattack, just a spammed low damage ability that "seems" an autoattack.

i will still play it, BUT i am pretty pissed that with perfect rotation and food and dancer i can hardly mantain a mch or drg dps. I would be MUCH MORE pissed in reaching an enrage just cause i could do 3k more with blm.
NO, THE RES IS NOT WORTH 3K DPS AS THE ACTUAL ONLY UTILITY WE HAVE NOW!
Smn is the new selfish dps job, that doesn't do selfish dps standards

[dinnertime]

The more I read this thread, the more I find out how bad the new SMN is. I was right in feeling very concerned after trying the new SMN even when people told me "It'll get better". Now that we have an idea of much damage and utility does (or lack thereof), there needs to be a change.

Yet again in another expansion, they messed up with SMN. It's clunkier, a lot less flexible, chaotic and suffers from more button bloat which is pretty backwards from what the devs intended for the battle system. Some people like it and that's okay, but the amount of effort it takes just to have less DPS than a RDM, who arguably has better utility now, isn't okay to me.

I'm hoping they do another great re-rework like SMN from 4.0 to 4.1, I really do.

[Taranok]

i will still play it, BUT i am pretty that with perfect rotation and food and dancer i can hardly mantain a mch or drg dps. I would be MUCH MORE pissed in reaching an enrage just cause i could do 3k more with blm.
NO, THE RES IS NOT WORTH 3K DPS AS THE ACTUAL ONLY UTILITY WE HAVE NOW!
Smn is the new selfish dps job, that doesn't do selfish dps standards

You shouldn't be matching a Machinist. MCH is a selfish DPS and should enjoy all the perks of being a selfish DPS, including being one of the top 3 DPS in the game (it's not). DRG, on the other hand, you can and should get mad about.

Ultimately what I think they need to do is just get rid of DoTs and Aetherflow entirely. Put in an ability that enables Trance instead of it being it's own CD and just rip the damage from DoTs and Ruin potency increase right out and put it into DWT, most likely by making Deathflare have mutliple uses during DWT, 4-5 by my calculations, with a new "Trance ender" with potency on par with or higher than Xenoglossy (Megaflare anyone?). And potentially upping the number of Enkindle Demi-Primal per phase from 2 to 3.

At this point, Summoner reasonably could have its DoTs and Aetherflow mechanic removed, but unfortunately that constitutes a minor-major rework by itself and won't happen until the next expansion most likely. That said, getting one of the mechanics removed is likely possible, since Aetherflow itself is flat out standalone and not tied into other mechanics in any meaningful way. Reworking how Aetherflow works is also possible, as well as possibly merging EA1/2 since that's minor by minor standards.

Any changes that we as a community push for should likely be focused on EA1/2 and ED/ES/Fester/Painflare specifically otherwise there's no hope of it being done before whatever expansion comes next.

[HeulGDarian]

iit's pheonix a ress effect would be busted so a hot should do no pun intended, summoners are not healers i agree but summoning different creatures for different situations was and forever will be the appeal of it . they could make it instead of automatic it's own button during the firebird trance after all smn has ogcd space there. though even like it is currently if they go through with the promise of more aoe dmg then it could be a factor the healers would think about like ok smn is about to do pheonix here so i don't need to heal . i agree about everything else though, we really got riped off.

[Zyneste]

Also, hoping that ACT is broken more than i see, SMN got the short stick on the dps side. Is clunkier, i can deal with it. Still unforgiving on death, a bit less. We were at the 3rd spot before when played proberly, also conserving A LOT of utility. Now we have res and devotion, a BAD devotion. If you want to go asap for trances, you will Ruin3/ruin2 tridisaster DWT and ED devotion at best. Which means what? Devotion is up again in phoenix and it won't align ever again with other buffs. Also 5%, not counting burst phases or buffs, on a 180s windows with 15s duration means that you will bring:

- 0,416666666 % RaidDps contribution

Just leaving contagion was better than this. We lost utility and dps, buff won't align or you will lose even more dps. You hardly can align dots in buff windows, Bahamut rotation is turret mode to get 8WW and:

- Sb combined damage from garuda + bahamut was like 27%. Now, with phoenix, sicfrit+bahamut+phoenix is just 28%

Pet damage is ridiculously low, like you crit 25k and ifrit crits 3k at best. Inferno is horrible, if the initial it does 50 your total dot does 25. There is no autoattack, just a spammed low damage ability that "seems" an autoattack.

i will still play it, BUT i am pretty pissed that with perfect rotation and food and dancer i can hardly mantain a mch or drg dps. I would be MUCH MORE pissed in reaching an enrage just cause i could do 3k more with blm.
NO, THE RES IS NOT WORTH 3K DPS AS THE ACTUAL ONLY UTILITY WE HAVE NOW!
Smn is the new selfish dps job, that doesn't do selfish dps standards

As a RDM player, with the severe limitations from placed on MP for both SMN/RDM, they should both have similar DPS. We both have similar raise sustain. Embolden vs Devotion have the same cool down 2 mins vs 3, but are near equal in dps utility as is. Embolden averaging a 6% physical dps only gain, while only affecting 80% of RDMS damage for 20 seconds, vs 15 seconds of affecting everyone. SMN has no party lockout with BLM, but RDM does [with smn too for that matter. ] SMN should be on top, but not by much. They should be right next to each other.

Rezzers are just on the mid bottom of the totem pole. We wont be near the low utility classes or even most melee.

Edit: imma actually math it out, but you're right its 3 mins vs 2.

[Taranok]

Embolden is a 2m Cooldown, Devotion 3m. Devotion is 5% flat, Embolden 6% average over 20 seconds (but obviously it's more complicated). Embolden only does physical damage and personal, devotion is all damage. And obviously Embolden is 20 seconds, Devotion 15.

Embolden is flat out the better buff unless you're running more than 1 caster DPS right now, and the fact that embolden is still physical only for support is kind of a problem due to how it enforces group composition.

So no, Summoner should not be equivalent to rdm on damage, because smn has vastly lower group utility.

[HeulGDarian]

now that I've read every post here's what i think o/.


1) I'd love to have bahamut and trance be one button cause it really feels bad to get 8 wyrmwaves . what id like to see is make wyrmwave and maybe akhmorn give ruin4, that way we don't have to hoard ruin 4s for bahamut to not lose potency . that wouldn't need much work to implement . as for deathflare they could just give a 3rd akh morn. I'd wish for an outburst upgrade if that's not too much to ask.

2) At this point smn feels so much better when they don't cast so they might as well remove ruin 2 and make ruin 3 instant and ruin 4 proc from ruin 3 again. we already have a different ruin 2 from sch anyways. if that happens manually reapplying dots would feel awkward and is basically giving us less stuff to do

3) Make overburst look and sound crispier

4) balancing department pls give us our aoe king status back (/TwT)/. i was reading the changes when they came out and i was devastated to seee all those potency nerfs nor could i see the reason 50% down to most of aoe bane 60% less dmg. didn't they say that massive pulls wouldn't be a thing? so where the fck would we get 7 adds . i played the dungeons, some people still do it but some also go 3 at a time in fear.

5) i dont mind the high apm if the work is complex and rewarding then i Don't see any reason why it should become more straightforward . rdm exists for that reason not everything needs to be for everyone.

6)Don't remove the dots i understand its from an era long past but it's also our link with arcanist and at this point miasma bio and ruin is associated with smn . people have used the title ruin mage in 4.0 to laugh at smn but it honestly sounds like an awesome title

7) miasma should give ruination at this point

8) giving the old aetherflow system back sounds like the best option. yes death sucked but the pros of it make up for all the cons . it also makes sense story wise now that they made trance and summon be the same thing.

9) make the egis be better. just making their abilities like they were before, not counting as ogcd but something you can weave while casting, would be great but if it created a big void were we just spammed ruin then id rather the current one . also why did we lose all those buffs but only got a 3min devotion? I'm not counting everlasting flight because as much as i like this spell to death unless they fix its problems its just another 4.0 devotion.

10) level 100 ultimate trait Unleashed : every dmg reduction per enemy removed from smns spells OwO

[dinnertime]

Even though I want it gone, I don't see DoTs getting removed from SMN unless a miracle happens. It's been SMN's most basic form of damage since launch. What they should do however is make it LESS reliant on DoTs. The Ruin spells needing both DoTs to do max potency is absolutely annoying when the job is already riddled with these damage modifiers like Ruination, DWT/FBT's magic potency buff, Egi Assaults needing to proc Ruin IV etc.

I'd love to see DWT combined with Demi-Bahamut like a few suggested. It might make SMN less punishable by death, make summoning more frequent, and cut down on the amount of time it takes to do a full rotation. I'm surprised they didn't do that when they've done it already on Demi-Phoenix.

[Taranok]

5) i dont mind the high apm if the work is complex and rewarding then i Don't see any reason why it should become more straightforward . rdm exists for that reason not everything needs to be for everyone.

The issue is that RDM was the high-apm caster. SMN was never really that busy. Tedious, micromanagey, but not super busy. You spent more time setting up for contagion than actually doing your burst window. RDM exists to be the high-APM finger-walking caster, and is very well set up to accomplish this role, whereas SMN is not set up to be a high-APM class, never has been, and doesn't feel especially good being a high-APM caster.

You can have complexity in a simple rotation as well. BLM exemplifies this key. Casters in general tend to be complex, even Red Mage has to make some pretty complex decisions, just not to the same degree a Black Mage does, which is fine. BLM specializes in long-term complex decisions, whereas RDM is all about rapid-fire short-term decisions that weave into a complex tapestry by the time it's all said and done.

SMN was ever somewhere between these. Any weirdness it had outside of this was basically due to exploiting mechanics (snapshotting) or micromanaging pets that are difficult to use or unresponsive for no real reason. If you stripped out micromanaging contagion due to poor pet interactions, SMN's SB rotation was fairly simple and straight forward, with a bit of flexibility thrown in.

This is what drives the divisive nature of SMN in ShB. The class is definitely improved, but they took the class, plucked it from the middle ground between BLM and RDM where it existed, and threw it up above Bard. A lot of people coming to the class for the first time like it, a lot of SMN mains from SB found the transition jarring because the class functionally plays very differently with how it feels almost exclusively because of how busy the oGCDing is. And those oGCDs aren't complex. There's very little real decision making to make on a SMN. You basically choose to hold devotion if the phasing lines up weird, and you can choose when to spend festers. You basically have no choice on every other mechanic, they either need to be spent as quickly as possible, or you're not punished for spending them quickly so there's no real reason to hold onto it, especially given how clunky the rotation gets once it does start bogging down with too many oGCDs.

The current SMN isn't that complex, it's just stupidly busy, and you can reintroduce a lot of complexity by actually removing that business.

...the job is already riddled with these damage modifiers like Ruination, DWT/FBT's magic potency buff, Egi Assaults needing to proc Ruin IV etc.

DWT/FBT don't buff magic potency. They removed that as part of ShB. I actually just tested it to confirm it by spamming my ruin 3, which does anywhere between 4300 and 4700 damage per hit, went into DWT, and it likewise did 4300-4700 damage without crits/direct hits. There is no advantage to staying in DWT outside of having instant cast spells (mostly) right now.