Summoner Early Post-Launch Feedback at level 80

[CecMiller]

So I'm wondering it two changes would help with the flow of combat.

1) Make Energy Drain 60s recast time but give you all 4 Aetherflow at once. You would still have the same resources but wouldn't have to keep such a close eye on it.

2) Would decreasing the recast timer of Trance to 45s fix this downtime issues? Alternatively you could separate Demi-Phoenix from FBT but that would also mean you separate FBT fire spells from DPhoenix as well. Is that okay?

3) Lower Enkindle to 90s would place it right after Demi-Phoenix phase.

As for Everlasting Flight, congrats to everyone complaining about physick. You now have a potent heal for solo'ing.

I personally would really like #1 and its something I thought about, but if they do this, they might as well remove the lock on DWT outside of combat and what not and tie it back into the cycle. This would result in a far more flexible DWT and even FBT. Use 4 stacks and then decide when to enter DWT instead of waiting 45+ seconds to enter DWT and FBT. If they do this however, I'd still like a way to generate AF without a target. Its immensely annoying to have a target die JUST as AF is about to be up. Our AF stacks feel like just a worse version of polygot in how we obtain them. At least BLM can maintain polygot via Transpose no matter if anything is targetable or not. I don't think I want polygot, but just a way to maintain AF even when we have no target really.

2) Reducing Trance CD would also speed up our rotation to 1 min 30s. It would boost our DPS as we got to our big payload sooner and I certainly would not mind it. That said, I dont think it would fix the downtime problems. The problem with giving Trance's their own cooldown and not basing it off AF is that we could previously hold AF and thus DWT/FBT through intermission/downtime. Hard cooldowns means we're gated somewhat. With it depending on AF, we had a bit more agency on when we decided to use the trances whether for movement or burst.

Example:

Currently: Boss is going away in 5s and you have the current version of FBT up. The intermission ended up lasting 20-30s. You ended up delaying your cycle by 25-35s as you had to wait to use FBT.

When it was behind AF: Boss is going away in 5s gives us 3 Choices:

1) Before reaching the intermission stage, you could have spent your Aetherflow stacks fast and "rushed" FBT for the full duration before the intermission. This is because Aetherflow was the only barrier to FBT and not a hard 60s cooldown.

2) Spend Aetherflow stacks and keep FBT until after the boss comes back. We wouldn't delay our cycle by 25-35s as Aetherflow would still be on cooldown and ticking during this time. We could just use it after those 25-35s pass aka use FBT to re-open on the boss. After we use FBT, AF would be back in 5-10s (Its been on cooldown for 25-35s, used 20s on FBT resulting in a total of 45-55s). The power of Aetherflow here was that the countdown would begin again after you used it to gain 4 stacks and so you never delayed the cycle as long as the stacks were spent and the trance was used before Aetherflow came back up.

3) Assuming we could use the new Aetherflow inside Trances, Do as #2 but don't re-open on the boss with FBT. Instead wait for AF stacks and then use FBT and AF stacks together by making use of the instant caste OGCD weave opportunities.

As you can see, old Aetherflow made you VERY flexible with how and when you wanted to use your trances. Right now, you're at the mercy of fight design really when before we were incredibly strong regardless of fight design. A complete 180 really. This is in contrast to what happened to a lot of other jobs which were made stronger in intermission downtime (additional polygot stack potentially + umbral hearts x3 during downtime). They can spend their stacks if any before a long downtime was to occur and then generate them again over the course of the downtime.

With regards to seperating FBT and Phoenix, my concern would be that phoenix suddenly becomes as awkward as bahamut where they are both just wyrmwaves and akhmorns with a different coat of paint. I wouldn't mind it, but I like my demi summons actually doing more actions that just akhmorn/revelation. I think current bahamut is pretty awkward and wouldn't want that to be the case for Phoenix. Part of me wants the OGCD interaction back so bahamut would wyrmwave more often and doesn't look like he's afk for half the time he's out.

3) I haven't observed this just yet personally, but I will check as to when my Enkindle comes up!