Summoner Early Post-Launch Feedback at level 80

[Taranok]

There's another option available. You can also just tie aetherflow directly to trance, and make trance the 60s cooldown, possibly allowing spillover along the lines of a BLM's Foul charges. Having cooldowns get disrupted by boss mechanics is fine, as is strategically saving them. But this way, you can only get Aetherflow when you can reasonably spend it in a block of guaranteed instant cast GCDs, which will free up ruin 4s for movement expenditure instead of for nothing but oGCD usage most of the time.

I'd also turn DWT into spawning DB directly instead of summoning DB as a separate action, and then just buff the damage of everything else to compensate for the lowered use of aetherflows.

For low level, they can keep energy drain combined with energy siphon (one button), but once you hit 58, it upgrades drain/siphon directly into trance instead. I don't even care if they add damage to the trances since it's being combined with ED under such a scenario and force it to only be castable when a boss is active, hell, they could save Deathflare this way by making DWT -open- with deathflare and summon DB during it as well. The point is you keep the 2 mechanics tied together and it eliminates a major source of the clunky business between burst windows. The opener will still be a mess, but even removing a single oGCD does wonders for smoothing it out.

There was zero reason to change trances from being aetherflow-charged to hard cooldowns. The progression of trance from HW to the mid-SB changes was logical, following the trend of making classes less punishing, and the final result was well designed. I will never understand the decision to change this when it was lumped in with MCH and BRD in that live letter as classes that needed major changes. It makes no sense.

This was done for several reasons, actually. One, Aetherflow being usable out of combat created situations where players wanted to stack up the mechanic before pulling else it would really mess up the opener. Two, in HW, players used the mechanic in a way flat out not intended by the devs, which was pacing Aetherflow charges to be able to spend 2 of them during DWT for +10% damage. The devs got rid of this in SB, much to the chagrin of the playerbase. The devs desynced it entirely in ShB because in ARR and HW, Aetherflow was your primary mechanic. In SB and ShB, trancing is the primary mechanic, so keeping it tied to a mechanic players don't really use anymore primarily is a strange problem.

The issue is that the redesign is redundant with EA, easy to miss, desyncs easily and, once desynced, causes issues, in addition to just making the mid-trance rotation really awkward for no reason.

Trance being a primary mechanic? Sure. 1m rotation? Sure. Can't bank it? Sure. Okay, why is another major source of damage in the same boat, on a faster rotation, and massively clutters the rotation?