Summoner Early Post-Launch Feedback at level 80

[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.