Summoner Early Post-Launch Feedback at level 80

[CecMiller]

I personally will never understand the obscesion the forums have with physick on summoner.

I understand people want some tools for solo play survivability, or help out in a pinch. What we have to understand is that we are not healers, and RDM is unique in respect to white magic. The only reason we have physick is due to our link to arcanist and our brother job, Scholar. SE has made an effort to further split the class and they are 90% of the way there. I personally dont understand why they introduced the abilities like everlasting flight as the response from the forums would almost certainly be asking for an int scaling physick.

So why don't I like it?

The obvious first off - we are a DPS class. The less obvious fact would be that our dps would end up being brought even lower for the additional utility we have. This is the kind of price I would not be willing to pay. We are a dps class first and foremost and losing dps power for added utility in the form of a targetable heal, to me, is unacceptable due to its mostly niche uses (It would be really strong in POTD/HoH Solo). Blackmage has made do with a defensive barrier. Its in flavour for us to have a shield of our own as we are linked to scholar. Titan egi with a defensive earthern element providing said shield also feels more flavourful to summoner. Further still, we'd be stepping on Red Mage's toes. They have mastery over white magic where as summoner has no such thing. I dont believe summoner should have access to any healing magic of any form. I'd prefer us to be more like BLM in the defensive utility department.

I can see how having a healing spell would be appealing, but the cost of having one is not something I want to deal with. It would be better for me if the heal was to not exist and get deleted like sustain did so these conversations would never occur.

With regards to Everlasting Flight - Why not make it a damage buff instead akin to DWT's old 10% magic buff? Have it buff your damage during Phoenix by 10%. This is more in flavour with Phoenix's Blessing from UCOB which provides a large damage % increase buff. It would be FAR more useful as we'd be buffing all of our phoenix moves. A heal that is locked behind our biggest burst move has a number of problems:

Heals and/or mitigation is a planned affair with regards to mechanics or optimally, they should be.

The problem here is that, you simply press phoenix on cooldown to maintain your dps. Holding it will end up creating further frustration down the line and be a DPS loss in the grand scheme of things as you are delaying your cycle. So, it is instead pressed on cooldown to make sure you do not drift from your summoner cycle. This results in a heal that generates you aggro(?) and most likely is simply overheal as it would have to have come up when a raid wide AOE had occured. Even then, the resultant heal is not large at all. It also has this really weird 20s duration where you could get an odd 7 tick now and then vs. 6 ticks as most regens have a duration that is a multiple of 3.

Better to have it provide you a damage boost which will ALWAYS be useful vs. something that, very rarely, MIGHT be useful.

[Gallus]

I agree with everything except point 11. Let me have control over my aggro so that when my tank dies I can reduce my enmity and let another DPS take the hit xD.
There are no aggro problems right now, a tank can sneeze at a boss and go take a nap and you won't steal the aggro even if they afk for the next 30 minutes. Tank shouldn't die in the first place.

[NovaBismarck]

Honestly, I was really excited about Shadowbringers, but what was done to summoner made the whole experience a let down for me. Let's put damage aside, because they can buff the numbers there. The two biggest issues for me is the stupidity of the way the egi functions work in conjunction with our rotation. However the biggest issue is flow. The flow of the class does not feel good, which is depressing considering we came from SB where at the very least the class had fluidity. The rotation is so rigid and slightly clunky. It does not easily allow for holding for phase changes and there is very little flexibilty.

I've seen a handful of people who do like the busyness of smn now but overall it's just too much for most people, especially considering the payoff. At least from what I'm reading from the Balance discord, the forums, and a reddit thread for 5.0 FFLogs DPS, which I won't post since it deals with parsing.

I've played smn since 2005, I've seen it in many iterations. I'm imploring SE to really think about what can be done to fix this unpleasant experience. I may not play savage and cannot comment to the extent of how it plays there, but as a dedicated casual player, there are huge gaps.

[xicious]

Reducing Trance cool downs(slightly)and having bahamut auto summoned(losing a button would be so nice) when DWT is active so ruin 3 is instacasted would be enough of a fix for me personally. Granted there's a whole boat load more of fixes needed but that's a start.

[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.