Summoner Early Post-Launch Feedback at level 80

[CecMiller]

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.

Just want to clear up some misconceptions.

SMN absolutely was the highest APM caster in Stormblood no contest. Furthermore, our pet actions with using obey were hidden from our CPM count - so every contagion and every aerial slash and shockwave did not count towards it regardless if you used obey and or not (and obey was used many times over in ultimates by myself for example). As a result our CPM is actually higher than what is shown in our logs aka it would be easily be above 40.

SMN in Stormblood (O9s): 39.2 (without pet actions).
https://www.fflogs.com/reports/6BmdK...ht=7&type=cast


RDM in Stromblood (O9s): 37.1
https://www.fflogs.com/reports/R7YPH...=24&type=casts

There is no doubt over which caster had the most buttons to press and SMN was busy if you were playing it well, but felt easier the better you were at it. Furthermore, I'm certain that I spent more time doing my burst than setting up contagion which is mostly a 3 button thing: Set on sic, then after bahamut, set on obey and wait for a 5 second difference between contagion and aerial slash before putting it on sic again. Thats about the extent of garuda contagion work I did and I had really good results for it.

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.

SMN does have access to ruin 2 which is why the myriad of OGCD's hasn't really been detrimental unless a large enough potenct difference of ruin 2 and ruin 3 is generated. Further, we had 2 16(?) second trances a minute to weave any ogcds that weren't Aetherflow actions. It felt better back then as we didnt have to keep double weaving as much as Fester's were always single weaved and you mostly double weaved to rush stuff.

*snip*
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.

I would say the class was improved in the pets/egi department and thats about it. (Bane was improved however too! Welcome change).

Its GCD's are now far more annoying. They do not have a base potency but are reliant on your dots existing and thus are worse for it as this only opens up opportunities to punish you whenever your dots do drop (as they eventually do for ticks)

Its OGCD's are worse as there are more of them and at a rate of 4 a minute, the Egi Assults are a bit pathetic in their own personal contribution outside of generating you a Ruin 4 stack. However, the main reason these are worse to me is that in 4.0, you could use these same abilities whilst casting Ruin 3, they had varying cooldowns and sic was offered.

Aetherflow has undeniably been made worse. It now requires 2 uses per minute and mandates that we be in combat AND have a target as a cherry on top. Its de-linking from the cycle has caused knock on effects to downtime and dots dropping without considering the reduced flexibility. If Aetherflow was the sole 60 second cooldown that we could use whilst not in combat and not requiring a target which kept our cycle flowing as it was in 4.0, a lot of our problems would be instantly solved. This was a great mechanic and extremely underated in what it could. Its power was clear to those that raided with SMN and had full knowledge of how to abuse it with respect to downtime. The changes done were to reduce wait times pre-pull and its my hope that Yoshida corrects this and does the smarter thing - give us full stacks after every wipe instead and re-introduce the old system with some changes if necessary. Even if we're forced to start at 0 stacks, it is still far better than what we have now.

The abilities that keep the rotation going are far worse. Comparing Aetherflow linking our cycle together and DWT/FBT embarasses the latter. We were far better off with the previous system. The good change here is being able to use Aetherflow actions inside trances (though the cycle could have easily been altered to allow you to do so whilst keeping all flexibility). However, with no magical bonus to now offer, the only reason for doing so is using it as a weave window which may be good enough in itself.

Dots are also worse now as a result of the DWT/Aetherflow change. You are forced to drop dots for ticks and have unbuffed ruin 3's just due to drift and how things work. The change to dots buffing your ruin spells has been extremely annoying and punishing for seemingly no reason. Imagine if Fire 4 only did half its potency if you didnt have thunder up - it would feel terrible when those situations were to occur especially when its a question of eventuallity rather than an individual mistake. Further, they do less damage via bane in AOE situatios which is another contributor to our low AOE dps.

Bahamut assuredly feels worse and has less interaction than before - I don't think much has to be said here. Without his OGCD mechanic, he flaps around and doesnt really do a whole lot and still follows you around after you command him to akhmorn (something that was present in 4.0). He just feels bad in general now besides being made weaker.

The main improvement for SMN as a whole is definitely the changes to pets not dying and so we dont have to micromanage their positioning as much as we did before (though they now like to despawn - please someone speed up their god damn movement speed)

Further, as a raiding SMN main in 4.0, I can deal with the Pet OGCDs (though I do agree that it feel like some unnecessary busy work). Thats not the most jarring thing for me. The worst feeling is absolutely Aetherflow and Trances and how they now function. Both are very clearly worse off from 4.0. Aetherflow and Trances and how they function together with respects to the cycle is what needs to be changed. The previously incarnation of SMN flowed extremely well - this one is awful in comparison. But I agree with your other points, these OGCDs are not really complex. The current optimization of SMN comes from being BLM with Ruin 3 whilst also using Ruin 4 stacks in place of Ruin 2 when possible. I'd argue the current SMN is harder than BLM to maximize damage with as BLM got a lot of comfy tools to use with xeno being instant.

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.

I am in agreeement here. The optimization is now minimizing R2 and maximizing double weaves. Aetherflow/Festers optimization is linked to the latter, but every 60s you want it to line up with trick attack and/or chain and other buffs. But these are further than 30s apart so you will have 2 stacks of Aetherflow every 60s which aren't as optimizable as the other Aetherflow stacks. As you said, the other abilities are used on CD with some intial wait on FBT for your second devotion (if mechanics allow). If there is something more than that then it escapes me.

This differs from 4.0 where there was optimization in "rushing" the cycle itself, pairing trances with movement phases, timing deathflare/bahamut to akhmorn a set of adds at some moment, good use of contagion and other pet abilities (though for most SMNs, this was on sic). There was a lot more to consider and more, in my opinion, fun things to consider. These were all removed due to the changes in how our cycle now functions as we can no longer use trances and, therefore, rush bahamut on demand.

If I had to describe the two SMNs to someone, I would say 4.0 SMN was flexible and about maximizing gain, (rushing cycles and aetherflow when necessary, timing trances for movement and big AOE moves for add phases) where as 5.0 SMN was rigid and about minimizing loss (changes to Ruin vs. dots, minimizing R2 over R4, using trances immediately or risk losing dps from delaying). Yes, minimizing loss is maximizing gain, but the former allowed you to make the necessary decisions to maximize gain where as the latter is all about minimizing drift and unecessary ruin 2 casts over ruin 4. I personally found the former far more fun to do - I don't think I like this new "rigid" SMN.

[Incision93]

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.

Drg is broken and will be fixed.
Cannot agree in the slightest with mch. Mch, aside old vuln, was already selfish enough. Now it is more? fine.
We were number 3 in savages: https://www.fflogs.com/zone/statistics/25#dataset=99
We were more mobile, with more utility, and probably is still hard to die as it was before, the 30sec aether won't change much (enjoy dying at 1 min from the pull, rip phoenix).

SMN is so selfish now that even the shield of the BLM is broken compared to devotion, and they have addle too. The res is just cause others fckup. Is not prevention utility, is just because of the other dying. If that means we loose 3k they can remove res for what i care. We are a turret, and mch bard can move totally free. You can preposition, but moving is still a huge potency loss, especially if you are forced to stop your ruin3 cast cause you get unlucky rng aoes on you.

Mch can be punishing from dying too, we still mantain a 2 min rotation, that to be honest is really strict and makes a difference between orange and grey summoners.
It was soooooooooooooo hard for a dps to go toe to toe with a perfect SB SMN, unless played the same perfect way, that now is just embarassing to see that a full 10 min fight where you adapt your rotation to every scenario makes you barely pass 10k in bis with no buffs.

I may just say that monk should be slightly over us, but after i just think they still have some utility that is not just pure glamour

[Lenarr]

This seems pretty decent, but my SMN is currently only level 70, so can't comment on any details.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v_6i2Pbb0zs

[Zinnin]

I would like to see Ifrit actually be a single target pet. Currently his auto attacks are the only thing that deals more damage than Garuda, but if you are spacing Garuda's slipstreams correctly, overall Garuda does about the same (if not slightly higher) single target damage than Ifrit.

I like the idea of pet twisting based on combat state, but currently I see really no reason to pull out Ifrit, other than wanting to be lazy and not having to play around slipstream, and even then the overall difference in damage if you don't play around slipstream is like 1%.

[CecMiller]

I've seen a few already comment on this but i wanted to add my take on the subject of Ressurection.

If the spell "Ressurection" is causing our DPS to be dwarfed by so much, I think its time that we make it a healer only spell and be done with it. If both RDM and SMN are taxed with this burden, it makes them more unlikely to be picked post prog and the main job that would be considered for the caster slot would be BLM depending on how big the difference was as faster killer times usually equate to better dps for most jobs. Though this is dependant on the mindset of the community in general and mostly just conjecture as I have no idea how it will go in all honesty as SMN and RDM would still have party buffs.

For this reason, if such a "Ressurection Tax" exists as some believe it does, I would sooner make it a healer only spell than create such a large difference betweeen the jobs that have the spell and those that don't. There is precedent for this in the fact that threat management is now SOLEY a tank job. There is nothing we can do as a dps to manage our emnity or prevent us from dying first after the tank dies anymore. I suggest we go the extra step and outright remove the ressurection spell from DPS if this contributes to a forced large gap between the 2 raising casters and ther other jobs (not just BLM).

That said I know that this would be extremely polarizing. I know lots of casters, me included, like to have the ressurection spell to help raise people in a pinch. Removing it from casters would create more difficult raids and do away with any idea of a "Ressurection Tax". Further still, as threat management is now soley a Tanks job, so should be ressurecting the dead for healers (in my opinion). As I said, I would personaly only want this if a "Ressurection Tax" existed which results in the discrepency we now see today between jobs that do and dont. I would argue the same for healing abilities - if they don't result in a dps reduction for their utility, I'm all for them. The second they do, I'm against them.

[Taranok]

J*snip*

So that's what it's like to be on the receiving end of a wall of text. Interesting.

SMN wasn't as busy as RDM, RDM may have had fewer buttons to press but SMN was the more laid back class in SB. The buttons more or less pushed themselves and you didn't need to make billions of micro-decisions like you do on Red Mage over which spell to use next. Which is fine. You could argue it's busy, I would argue it wasn't as clunky outside of micromanaging the pet because the pet wasn't responsive with abilities like contagion, and the less clunky a class is, the less busy it ultimately feels, which is what one of the major complaints with the current summoner is.

Ruin 2 is a massive DPS loss over the course of a fight with high movement, which is why it doesn't have the tools to really do this. It cannot simultaneously weave the sheer amount of oGCDs thrown out in addition to movement without giving up several hundred if not thousand of potency during the course of an entire fight. That's why the class doesn't have the tools to handle the rotation. You'll notice that even during SB, SMN had to drop fewer oGCDs during times when they weren't expected to be throwing out instant casts because you basically needed to ruin 2 your way through DB to get full damage out of it whereas now you're expected to hardcast as much as possible, creating that terrible feeling of not having the tools required to handle its own oGCDs. RDNs have nearly 50% uptime of instant cast abilities, SMN is down closer to a third and is punished whenever it touches ruin 2 for movement, mechanics, or otherwise. 6 GCDs 1 minute, 8 GCDs the next, and 4 every minute. 10-12 GCDs it can spare without punishment of 24 GCDs, and it cannot pace these out reliably in a way that allows the class to feel good because, let's face it, giving up damage for any reason doesn't feel good, and SMN gives up a lot to accomplish required mechanics of merely playing the job.

Bane was not improved. It went from an actual (albeit braindead) choice to spend a resource to accomplish a task to a button that exists to insist upon itself and makes an already insanely clunky aoe rotation even clunkier because it's just one more oGCD you need to push in a sea of oGCDs.

Aetherflow was sidegraded. It had its overall number of uses upped by 50% (4 to 6 per minute), needing a target is an okay change, you can love or hate it for different reasons, and allowing more uses can feel good if we didn't also have Egi Assault. The issue with its change is that it can desync from Trance if Trance is ever required to be held, which is a real problem on Titania, but not on Innocence. The desync causes an issue, the lack of charge causes issues that aetherflow had. The real advantage the old SMN had is that Aetherflow was your only clock. Everything revolved around aetherflow. In ShB, you have 2 hard clocks, a hard clock that you don't necessarily care if it desyncs, and a soft clock. Trance, New Aetherflow, Enkindle, and EA1+2 combined, respectively. All of these can desync because you are forced to hold onto Aetherflow or Trance, and once desynced, it makes the problem of casting these abilities without using ruin 2s even harder, if not impossible, which contributes to the clunky feeling of the class and it not having the tools it needs to weave everything effectively. Since, again, every ruin 2 cast is a failure of the job unless you literally cannot optimize it out of the rotation, but that doesn't mean it will ever feel good.

Using aetherflow in trances was never an intended way to use the old Aetherflow system, and indeed contributed to a lot of what broke Summoner in 3.0 at a design level, making the gap between the worst and best players the absolute largest skill gap in the game a class could offer just due to how much you could break the game by eeking out Aetherflow charges inside Trance. Now, with the new aetherflow, it's just damage cooldowns to be used in trance, which is okay but without personal buffs, except Devotion, it's kind of a moot point outside of breaking or improving the flow of the class, and there's something to be said about that.

Bahamut feels better in 5.0. The 4.0 bahamut revolved around exploiting a poorly designed mechanic to eek out 3 extra wyrmwaves in a system that did not give any indication it could do this. What makes DB worse is that you're not expected to ruin 2 during it just to maximize DPS from it, but you still have a ton of oGCDs to cast during it, and as I established earlier, every ruin 2 you cast is a failure unless you flat out cannot optimize it. Well, DB forces you to ruin 2 like mad during it because of ED/ES desyncing from Trance in the rotation, as well as needing to just get more ruin 3s out.

I agree mostly on pets, please give Ifrit a charge to run across the arena to adds faster though. Something it autocasts. Or just delete the egis and focus the class around demi summons entirely, the egis are feeling like a very archaic system despite the massive improvements to them.

I also agree on everything about DoTs and how Egi Assault feels better (when it doesn't error, at least) than Aetherflow. If I had to rip one system out between EA and Aetherflow, it'd be Aetherflow. The current summoner is also definitely harder than BLM, and I don't think it can ever realistically be optimized because, if Titania and Innocence are anything to go on, fights will just have way too much movement to ever avoid ruin 2 casts. The idea is to make it so Summoner doesn't need to use instant cast ruins while at rest as much as it does now, which would at least give it more "free" movement.

I'm also a fan of taking and merging DB into DWT and extending DWT to a 20s duration, deleting deathflare, but possibly adding another DB attack to the mix in lieu of Deathflare just to let us interact with the primal more.

At the end of the day, the one thing the class needs is to be smooth. I'd argue it should have fewer double weaves because double weaving does not feel good on pings as low as even 100, and no class feels good double weaving a lot in general, and it just needs to start flowing again.

I hated 4.0's SMN because bane was a pain to use and contagion doubly so, it had a weird aoe rotation that flowed poorly as well due to relying too much on time-gated mechanics and the like, but if you ignored the parts that were truly awful about the class, such as manually controlling contagion, then the class flowed very nicely. Well, contagion isn't a problem anymore, it's time to drag the summoner back to flowing nicely.

[Incision93]

SMN wasn't as busy as RDM,

*Triggered

[Nezia]

When they announced the changes for summoner I was 100% into it, I even thought of maining a summoner for the expansion.

But after playing it for a bit... well... pet management is way better now but... I don't know how to describe it properly, it feels like the class design is all over the place.

Back in stormblood every single button you pressed made sense, each and every one of them worked to build up into the bahamut phase, but not anymore.

Aetherflow stacks feel like they are just there, they no longer really interact with anything nor serve a purpose other than dealing X damage. The same can be said of the pet actions, they are just a button that you press every Y seconds in order to deal X damage, not really having any interesting interaction or anything.

I feel like if they wanted to go for this Summoning identity then they should've get rid of either aetherflow stacks or dots(or maybe even both) and then focus more on the pets and summons. The way it's now it feels like summoner's playstyle was built by 3 different guys that didn't really talk or interact with each other and on the final day they each put their disconnected pieces together in order to build the class.

[CecMiller]

So that's what it's like to be on the receiving end of a wall of text. Interesting.

It wasn't a personal shot against you and still isn't. It's just me being overzealous in correcting bad information and going in depth to avoid misunderstandings.

SMN wasn't as busy as RDM, RDM may have had fewer buttons to press but SMN was the more laid back class in SB. The buttons more or less pushed themselves and you didn't need to make billions of micro-decisions like you do on Red Mage over which spell to use next. Which is fine. You could argue it's busy, I would argue it wasn't as clunky outside of micromanaging the pet because the pet wasn't responsive with abilities like contagion, and the less clunky a class is, the less busy it ultimately feels, which is what one of the major complaints with the current summoner is.

If you look carefully, I never once claimed SMN was as busy as RDM (I didnt even compare the "busyness" of the two). I was correcting the misinformation the RDM was the "highest APM caster". SMN was the highest APM caster in Stormblood when you said it was RDM. Whether a job is busy or not mostly come downs to the player with some objectivity to it. If SMN wasnt busy, I would argue you weren't playing it as well as you could have been. For RDM's playstyle, I do think that you have to actively look for if a proc is available vs. the more "planned" playstyle of SMN. Further, I wouldn't exaggerate and say there were billions of microdecisions to be made for RDM. Ultimately, the decision is mostly whether you want to press the optimal white magic button or the optimal black magic button for the situation you're in. You do have to think a few GCDs ahead and account for fight design, but that is true for most jobs played at a high level.

Bane was not improved. It went from an actual (albeit braindead) choice to spend a resource to accomplish a task to a button that exists to insist upon itself and makes an already insanely clunky aoe rotation even clunkier because it's just one more oGCD you need to push in a sea of oGCDs.

This only needs to be brief - previously Bane cost us one of our 3 Aetherflow Actions. Now it costs 0 of our 4. Further, it now spreads ruination when it previously didnt. This is the improvement I'm talking about. The downside is the fact that it is now weaker for 1-7 mobs but stronger above that amount. I'm not sure what argument you're trying to make to justify that the current Bane is not an improvement over the 4.0 design, but it is not a very convincing one.

Yes, we have a lot of OGCDs to press. No, that doesn't mean Bane hasn't been improved. It has been made more usable, but less potent in the majority of scenarios.

Aetherflow was sidegraded. It had its overall number of uses upped by 50% (4 to 6 per minute), needing a target is an okay change, you can love or hate it for different reasons, and allowing more uses can feel good if we didn't also have Egi Assault. The issue with its change is that it can desync from Trance if Trance is ever required to be held, which is a real problem on Titania, but not on Innocence. The desync causes an issue, the lack of charge causes issues that aetherflow had. The real advantage the old SMN had is that Aetherflow was your only clock. Everything revolved around aetherflow. In ShB, you have 2 hard clocks, a hard clock that you don't necessarily care if it desyncs, and a soft clock. Trance, New Aetherflow, Enkindle, and EA1+2 combined, respectively. All of these can desync because you are forced to hold onto Aetherflow or Trance, and once desynced, it makes the problem of casting these abilities without using ruin 2s even harder, if not impossible, which contributes to the clunky feeling of the class and it not having the tools it needs to weave everything effectively. Since, again, every ruin 2 cast is a failure of the job unless you literally cannot optimize it out of the rotation, but that doesn't mean it will ever feel good.

Needing a target is a very large downgrade from 4.0 as is requiring us to be in combat. This causes you to lose total aetherflow uses very easily especially when the cooldown has been halved. When compared to Aetherflow of 4.0, it is very clearly worse in its usability. Yes desync can cause issues with a loss in weaving ability over using the superior Ruin 3 in trance vs. Ruin 2 outside, but that is not the main problem with the new Aetherflow. The problem is how it has been removed from the cycle as the clock which as a result, loses you uses of trances, aetherflow and demi summons over the cause of fights. I'm pretty sure most summoners would lean towards more demi summon usage over less, but thats besides the point.

These hard clocks drifting ARE a concern. Previously, we didn't really drift them anywhere close to the manner they drift in now. They were "on demand". We could Rush out demi summons and trances before a fight ended to prevent them from being "wasted" due to downtime. Now we have to wait on a cooldown. This is a step back from 4.0.

Ruin 2 is our weaving tool of choice when we are not in trances. Its how it has been designed. We've been using it for a long time now as a weaving tool. There is nothing clunky about it to me. This has felt perfectly fine to me and I'm honestly not hearing any arguments about ruin 2 feeling clunky with regards to being forced to use it for weaving outside yourself.

Using aetherflow in trances was never an intended way to use the old Aetherflow system, and indeed contributed to a lot of what broke Summoner in 3.0 at a design level, making the gap between the worst and best players the absolute largest skill gap in the game a class could offer just due to how much you could break the game by eeking out Aetherflow charges inside Trance. Now, with the new aetherflow, it's just damage cooldowns to be used in trance, which is okay but without personal buffs, except Devotion, it's kind of a moot point outside of breaking or improving the flow of the class, and there's something to be said about that.

Oh my god. This is wrong on so many levels. I'm sorry, but it is. It sounds like you never really played SMN in Heavensward with this paragraph if I'm being honest. I played SMN at a high level even in Heavensward as did many of the players I talk with on the regular.

This is me in Heavensward:https://www.fflogs.com/character/id/...ed#partition=5

This is an example of a log from a top SMN that shows you Aetherflow and DWT usage which you can CTRL + F to look through: https://www.fflogs.com/reports/MY8g4...ents&source=40

My count is at 1 Fester inside DWT during the entire duration of the fight with a 99 parse.

I don't want to delve into this too deply but: Most logs from top SMN players contain 1-2 Festers inside DWT. 30 to 60 potency gain will never be "a large contributor" to the skill difference between Good and Bad SMNs. Considering no party buffs, the differene between Good and Bad SMN was managing our mana resource whilst maximizing Ruin 3. However, the REAL reason there was such a stark difference was due to the prevelance of strong party buffs. You weren't going to parse as high as a SMN with a bard with magical foe requiem and an astro padding them with 20% balance. I'm not sure how you drew the conclusions you did about Heavensward but it is evidentally wrong from my own experience and other SMNs.

Bahamut feels better in 5.0. The 4.0 bahamut revolved around exploiting a poorly designed mechanic to eek out 3 extra wyrmwaves in a system that did not give any indication it could do this. What makes DB worse is that you're not expected to ruin 2 during it just to maximize DPS from it, but you still have a ton of oGCDs to cast during it, and as I established earlier, every ruin 2 you cast is a failure unless you flat out cannot optimize it. Well, DB forces you to ruin 2 like mad during it because of ED/ES desyncing from Trance in the rotation, as well as needing to just get more ruin 3s out.

For me and many others, Bahamut definitely feels worse to me - you're free yo have your opinion on things. There is no doubt he does less damage and actions than before leading him to feeling really flat especially in the face of Phoenix. You are free to feel that Bahamut is better, but it is a fact that the demisummon himself does less dps and performs less actions (wyrmwaves) than before and would be better'd by increasing our interaction whether it be by oGCD or by moves similar to phoenix. Many of us have tried our best to optimize SMN in the fights already in the new EX and in so doing, identified the glaring issues in our toolkit irrespective of the Ruin 2 minimization goal we have. This is what we are trying to fix. If you do not like Ruin 2, you will use them less when we have better control over when we want to use trances. I say this as someone who has perfomed well in both current EX fights.

At the end of the day, the one thing the class needs is to be smooth. I'd argue it should have fewer double weaves because double weaving does not feel good on pings as low as even 100, and no class feels good double weaving a lot in general, and it just needs to start flowing again.

If you are in favour of less double weaving, then having control over when we want to enter our trances aka flexibility serves your interests aswell as others. In order for this to take place, the best solution is to go back to a tried and working solution aka the 4.0 SMN cycle based off of 60s Aetherflow. You can make adjustments to this but it is undoubtedly the quickest fix towards doing so as it maintains the 2 minute cycle whilst improving various other aspects as SMN.

I hated 4.0's SMN because bane was a pain to use and contagion doubly so, it had a weird aoe rotation that flowed poorly as well due to relying too much on time-gated mechanics and the like, but if you ignored the parts that were truly awful about the class, such as manually controlling contagion, then the class flowed very nicely. Well, contagion isn't a problem anymore, it's time to drag the summoner back to flowing nicely.

Thats fair enough. Like with most things, some like it, some hate it. Bane exists and didn't really have a lot to do with our cycle in a raid format - this is a dungeon thing. SMNs 4.0 AOE rotation was more involved/more complex than a straight forward 1-2 spam and its something that differentiates it from the other jobs and I would very much like it to to remain that way personally speaking (especially when it means we got to use more Trances/Demi summons than we do now). Whatever your feelings or however you want the job to be fixed, its clear that SMN needs changes and my argument is that the easiest, fastest and personally, best, solution is to re-implent the 4.0 SMN cycle with its dependance on 60s Aetherflow.

[Miralyth]

Couldn't a lot of the flexibility problems for summoner be alleviated by allowing trance to stack up to 2 charges (and reducing its cooldown to 30s)? Tri-disaster could similarly carry 2 charges (with trances restoring one charge), but I'm not sure what a good cooldown would be. Of course, you'd still have to cycle through Bahamut to gain access to Phoenix. I think this would be a good compromise between people who like the current system and people who want to see the flexibility of aetherflow return.

I agree that summoner AoE being complex is enjoyable, but I don't like its current incarnation. If outburst was an instant spell and did not rely on ruination, I think summoner's AoE would be much more fun, still be pretty interactive, and wouldn't interfere with switching back to single target as much.