Summoner Early Post-Launch Feedback at level 80

[Flana]

You talk as if somehow ending DWT early makes everything feel significant worse and yet its the same as we do currently just trading the Ruin 3's in DWT with Ruin 2's outside of it - same number of weaves just one button is different. I have never found this an issue.

Because it was worse. You were throwing away a 10% damage bonus and the ability to freely weave to be forced to weave with Ruin II because of how important Aetherflow was to the rotation. It was always a bad design decision because actually using the buff as intended cost you dps by delaying aetherflow, and it took away your ability to freely weave while still forcing you to Ruin II to ram out all the ogcd's in the opener. It wasn't that much worse because of the low the potency difference of Ruin II and III, but it was still completely asinine that the tools they gave you to solve the inefficiencies of the job were themselves completely inefficient in the opener and after any prolonged boss jump.

Being completely unable to realize that just tells me you were probably not any good with Stormblood Summoner.*

Besides, the damage it dealt is irrelevant. They could make a job with three buttons that is still perfectly balanced, or even completely unbalanced and dealing massive damage. Number tweaks are easy, you can always glue 300 potency to something and people will love it. Summoner is still well represented in savage content even four weeks in, and just like Stormblood the casual playrate will continue to increase as long as potency buffs roll out future patches.

As for the Ruin 2 comment, yes, if you moved a lot you could lose a wyrmwave or even 2 or even ghost akhmorn. Nothing has changed for this in shadowbringers - it is the exact same even now. It is even less mobile. The reason we now choose to cast Ruin 3 by default due to the potency difference of Ruin 2 and Ruin 3 and we're forced to use 4 instant casts during it anyway to achieve maximum wyrmwaves whether thats through 4 Ruin 2's or otherwise.

Actually a lot has changed now, because of the introduction of Firebird Trance. They already came up with a solution to getting all your gcd wyrmwaves and as a bonus effect in my experience it drastically reduces the instances of ghosting with enkindled demi. Seriously, combining Trance and Summon makes controlling pheonix much easier and less stressful than trying to control bahamut while maintaining damage. Why they didn't just merge DWT and summon bahamut is a mystery. It mitigates pretty much every other problem except for pet ability ghosting.

Dreadwyrm Trance and Demi-Bahamut no longer exist in a vacuum. They can be compared to Firebird Trance and Demi-Pheonix.

If you used devotion like this, you weren't very smart. It provided a 2% damage up and 5% healing up benefit and 2% damage taken redction. If you're talking about not using it "optimally" its because you in particular didnt as it paired well with scholars chain.

Scholars/ninjas/etc generally don't just sit on their buffs unless the boss is about to jump incredibly soon. It was next to impossible to use "optimally" for it's design because there was never a time where you'd have it off cooldown and think "oh there's some big raid wide damage coming up in 40 seconds, I better hold Devotion for that 5% healing buff". The damage down bonus was even more superfluous and I'm willing the bet the majority of what it blocked was a mere 2% on auto-attacks. You have all these support effects tied to a raid dps increase which were largely useless because damage is king and you just hit it on cooldown like all the other raid dps buffs unless there was a jump coming. The ability was at best confused for what it wanted to be and at worst wasting the power budget on barely noticeable secondary effects.

Trance and Aetherflow didnt even interact. You couldn't even use aetherflow actions inside trance as it was a pre-requisite to use them.

Yes, that was the point. You couldn't use aetherflow while Trancing. Their interaction was that the two abilities are mutually exclusive and led to frustrating moments. You had to "waste" the majority of the first trance. You were left with extremely awkward timings if the boss left for a prolonged period of time like for Grand Cross Omega. It wasn't a common problem, but it shouldn't have been a problem at all.

You keep mentioning this point about "spamming everything" when you still need to have a spammy opener due to the nature of SMN being an OGCD caster and "2 gcd DWT" and yet you spam everything even now and you cut short all your future DWT's after the opener to align for buffs as its more optimal to get akhmorn and wyrmwaves under buffs than more ruin 3's under DWT which no longer provides a 10% buff.

And this is the major difference. Dreadwyrm Trance no longer provides any damage bonus. It's only use now is to freely move and/or weave. If you don't need to do either of those then you don't have a reason to need to stay in Dreadwyrm Trance. You could easily make an argument here about them removing the impact of DWT, but its purpose has completely changed. Personally this is why I would roll demi-bahamut into dwt, to give it more of that power back and to give you a reason to stay in as long as possible. Of course that would necessitate reworking Egi Assaults and demi-bahamut, but pretty much everyone wants to see some level of change in Egi Assaults so that's a bit of a moot cost.


*Do you see how pointless insults are and how little they accomplish in a conversation? They add nothing and accomplish nothing, unless you want to get really creative and call someone a ham sandwich or something.

Make devotion cast by the summoner, centered on the summoner, and not interact with the pet in any way. Alternatively, let it be cast while a demi-summon is up,

Why not have it be instant cast by the Summoner but still radiate from the pet? This effect is already present in the game from Deployment Tactics. It's instant and radiates from the target, and this way still retains the flavour of being a pet influenced ability without the cast time jank. Also just stop killing the pet for the demi summon, that'll work great.

[Taranok]

Why not have it be instant cast by the Summoner but still radiate from the pet? This effect is already present in the game from Deployment Tactics. It's instant and radiates from the target, and this way still retains the flavour of being a pet influenced ability without the cast time jank. Also just stop killing the pet for the demi summon, that'll work great.

This solution is a bit two-fold. The first is to make it so it doesn't cast from the pet at all, so it doesn't need to be expanded to other pets or have any alterations to the current mechanics of how the ability is targeted. Technically it could be cast centered on the egi or the demi or what have you, but this isn't necessarily a good thing or easy to implement in this fashion.

The second is to offload abilities from the pet. The game constantly throws errors if you throw more and more pet abilities at the pet too quickly, and it's possible on some abilities, such as Devotion, to rebound the actual cast of devotion. The interaction of commanding the pet to do something and the pet doing something is still slow and frustrating, and it's still prone to errors and delays just as it was before, it's just not as obvious since there's a somewhat poorly written queue system thrown onto it.

This is one reason why I'm a proponent of turning demi-summons into a pet that operates functionally identically to Automaton Queen in the sense that you fire the pet, and the pet does its own thing without respect for what you, the player, are doing, while the player has an augmented rotation, kind of like the difference between DWT and FBT, even though this is a very basic difference.

So making Devotion just cast centered on the summoner is the quickest, easiest, dirtiest solution that accomplishes the goals of offloading it from the pet and also making it no longer dependent on an egi being out OR a demi-summon moving/being out/competing with its own casts. Or needing to redesign pets to constantly stay out like you suggest, which we technically don't know if that's actually possible within the limitations of the game's code. It would require relatively the least amount of work and while it thematically destroys the ability as it was originally implemented, it can just be called Aetherpact anyways and say it's a bond between SMN and others at that point and they can make it thematically appropriate later.

[Flana]

The second is to offload abilities from the pet. The game constantly throws errors if you throw more and more pet abilities at the pet too quickly, and it's possible on some abilities, such as Devotion, to rebound the actual cast of devotion. The interaction of commanding the pet to do something and the pet doing something is still slow and frustrating, and it's still prone to errors and delays just as it was before, it's just not as obvious since there's a somewhat poorly written queue system thrown onto it.

While I agree with you that casting from the Summoner prevents problems down the road, this one isn't actually a problem with the option I proposed because the pet doesn't actually do anything. It's why I compared it to Deployment Tactics, deployment doesn't care what the target is doing. They could be afk or a 1.5gcd memespeed monk, their actions don't impact the cast because the spell is cast by the Scholar.

This way it still looks the same but eliminates any action on the pets part and should (theoretically) reduce the cast delay to nothing. That said demi's still exist and kill the pet, so just centering it on the Summoner would make it the most future-proof solution.

There was nothing inherintly "broken" about SMN

It's interesting that you say that after saying this:

You could say this about many things. Why does Bahamut/Phoenix move? Why didn't we get Aetherflow 3 Stacks after every wipe as the solution to waiting for Aetherflow? Why were pet abilities not instant? Why don't we get Ruin 4 stacks instantly on button press than having to wait for their animation? Why can abilities ghost? They all should never have been problems and yet they were/are.

(Underlined emphasis mine)

Ghosting was not a problem in HW. Laggy pet AI was always a problem but way less of an obnoxious one when you had a minimum 15 second window (old Contagion only had to hit before your dots fell off) for the pet to respond. This is why I say Stormblood broke Summoner, because it introduced failure points all over the place.

You needed to (new) contagion before Bahamut for the best results, oops the pet died just short of applying the debuff. Contagion didn't apply and went on cooldown anyways. Over a year ago I called that Demi summoning would have ramifications down the line, and here we are with Devotion lining up on top of Pheonix and the pet dying rears its ugly head again. I'm absolutely positive people would be (at least) more receptive to Egi Assaults if the pet didn't die during Demi-summons, because then you could freely weave with Ahk Morns and the entirety of Firebird Trance.


Even in a vacuum the Demi mechanic introduced failure points for itself. Demi-Summons don't auto-attack without being forced to and so just follow the summoner around when given the chance, to the point where they could outright ignore commands until catching up to you. Or you could ram too many Wyrmwave commands down Bahamut's throat and he'd just auto for the last ~6 seconds of time and ghost his own Ahk Morn.

There are still problems they need to fix and they absolutely should have with the launch of Shadowbringers. But that does not absolve Stormblood for having introduced some of those problems in the first place. The Demi summon mechanic will always represent a potential problem in its current form. They can't expand on or change regular pet abilities without potentially running into this same problem again.

People can like it all they want. I will freely admit I wasn't very good with SB Summoner. But that doesn't change the fact that I consider the above to be objective design flaws with long-reaching effects that should never have happened. We're still dealing with problems created in Stormblood, and unless they change that design it will continue to create problems down the road. Just like we now have to deal with Pheonix and Devotion, and both Demi's with movement.

I personally want Bahamut to have more movies similar to FBT, but I don't think that would be implmeneted anytime soon.

Just out of curiosity, what would you be looking for here? You mentioned in this post and your other thread that you were open to the idea of fusing DWT and Bahamut together, so do you want to see DWT follow in a similar trail to FBT (ex: single - aoe - single -aoe - etc), or would you rather see something else to differentiate them?

About Titan Egi

Would you like to see Titan-egi's other Assault turn into a skill like this and just have him be the 'shield pet', or would you still want to see him interact with the enemy and have abilities centered around dealing damage?

[CecMiller]

Because it was worse. You were throwing away a 10% damage bonus and the ability to freely weave to be forced to weave with Ruin II because of how important Aetherflow was to the rotation. It was always a bad design decision because actually using the buff as intended cost you dps by delaying aetherflow, and it took away your ability to freely weave while still forcing you to Ruin II to ram out all the ogcd's in the opener. It wasn't that much worse because of the low the potency difference of Ruin II and III, but it was still completely asinine that the tools they gave you to solve the inefficiencies of the job were themselves completely inefficient in the opener and after any prolonged boss jump.

Being completely unable to realize that just tells me you were probably not any good with Stormblood Summoner.*

That 10% Damage bonus ONLY affected your OGCDs that were not Aetherflow actions (Outside of Ruin 3, Tri-bind and Deathflaree) as they were locked out. That means shadowflare, enkindle, tri-disaster which were used. If it was bad design to cut short DWT now, then it is even worse to cut short DWT after your opening DWT when you still have OGCD's to weave which IS the case in Shadowbringers if you're playing it properly. It made our opener incredibly bursty and I enjoyed a big opener. You are also missing the impact of trick attack in the design decision to have it this way even though I would probably cut short DWT regardless. I do not think it was bad design unless you think the ability to end DWT whenever you want via deathflare is bad design. It was used as intended - smarter players knew when to end it early based on the timings of their cooldowns or how fast an add pack was dying. This is true for other jobs when you time certain abilities to come back later on - "Why did he use his battle litany for only 10s when it lasts 20?!" - Because he gets more usages. Sometimes not using abilities for their entire duration is the correct thing to do and you have to accept that. It was the case in Stormblood and it is the case now.

And I can assure you - I was far better at Summoner than you were and still am. You just need to accept that, sometimes, not getting the maximum usage out of something can be optimal given the circumstances and the rest of your kit. This is true for many jobs.

Actually a lot has changed now, because of the introduction of Firebird Trance. They already came up with a solution to getting all your gcd wyrmwaves and as a bonus effect in my experience it drastically reduces the instances of ghosting with enkindled demi. Seriously, combining Trance and Summon makes controlling pheonix much easier and less stressful than trying to control bahamut while maintaining damage. Why they didn't just merge DWT and summon bahamut is a mystery. It mitigates pretty much every other problem except for pet ability ghosting.

Dreadwyrm Trance and Demi-Bahamut no longer exist in a vacuum. They can be compared to Firebird Trance and Demi-Pheonix.

You specifically talked about Bahamut. We all know FBT is good - the only complaints about FBT I've heard is about interchaning Ruin 3 and Outburst for commands. Nothing has changed in regards to bahamut. People have already noted this in their feedback too. However comments like: "Bahamut could literally not Ahk Morn" and " "Demi-Bahamut was actually the least mobile phase just because of how bad his AI could get if you moved away from him" is true even now if not more so.

Scholars/ninjas/etc generally don't just sit on their buffs unless the boss is about to jump incredibly soon. It was next to impossible to use "optimally" for it's design because there was never a time where you'd have it off cooldown and think "oh there's some big raid wide damage coming up in 40 seconds, I better hold Devotion for that 5% healing buff". The damage down bonus was even more superfluous and I'm willing the bet the majority of what it blocked was a mere 2% on auto-attacks. You have all these support effects tied to a raid dps increase which were largely useless because damage is king and you just hit it on cooldown like all the other raid dps buffs unless there was a jump coming. The ability was at best confused for what it wanted to be and at worst wasting the power budget on barely noticeable secondary effects.

I have no idea what you mean by the scholar/nin comment - This was the same for summoner with regards to devotion. The only time you used it earlier is if you had to bahamut instantly after. I said, when used optimally, it is paired with Scholars Chain which is also a 120s CD so it lines up with burst of every job as job rotations are planned around burst windows. Optimally it was used as a damage buff for everyone's burst window when all the other buffs were out. Any other utility it had outside of that was just a bonus. I don't think anyone cared where healer GCD's could be saved by using it as defensive mitigation. The only case I can think of where it could possibly have been better is in UWU during orb soaks for Aetheric Boom. I do think Devotion is better now as a singular % damage buff, but I never once cared about getting maximum usage outside of the components that weren't damage buffing anyway.

Yes, that was the point. You couldn't use aetherflow while Trancing. Their interaction was that the two abilities are mutually exclusive and led to frustrating moments. You had to "waste" the majority of the first trance. You were left with extremely awkward timings if the boss left for a prolonged period of time like for Grand Cross Omega. It wasn't a common problem, but it shouldn't have been a problem at all.

You could say this about many things. Why does Bahamut/Phoenix move? Why didn't we get Aetherflow 3 Stacks after every wipe as the solution to waiting for Aetherflow? Why were pet abilities not instant? Why don't we get Ruin 4 stacks instantly on button press than having to wait for their animation? Why can abilities ghost? They all should never have been problems and yet they were/are. I always wanted to be able to use Aetheflow actions inside trance and there is a solution for that. Calling things "too spammy" as you did for having in Stormblood, but enjoying the way it is in Shadowbringers is ridiculous.

And this is the major difference. Dreadwyrm Trance no longer provides any damage bonus. It's only use now is to freely move and/or weave. If you don't need to do either of those then you don't have a reason to need to stay in Dreadwyrm Trance. You could easily make an argument here about them removing the impact of DWT, but its purpose has completely changed. Personally this is why I would roll demi-bahamut into dwt, to give it more of that power back and to give you a reason to stay in as long as possible. Of course that would necessitate reworking Egi Assaults and demi-bahamut, but pretty much everyone wants to see some level of change in Egi Assaults so that's a bit of a moot cost.

How is that a major difference? We did the same with DWT regardless inside Stormblood. What drastically has changed with how we use it in Shadowbringers? We cut it short when we thought it was optimal to do so as it was in the opener. DWT was just, better, in general in Stormblood and wasn't tied to a 60s cooldown. Any movement it offers you is purely coincidental with fight timings and let me emphasize how you cut the ability short in shadowbringers everytime after the opener to stay in line with raid buffs.

I think that DWT and bahamut can be combined as is one of the many suggetions given by a number of people over this thread and the other one. I'm unsure if they would do that change right now due to how it is problematic with job quests unless they simply introduce a trait at level 72 that combines them. You could further have it so that you could have Bahamut available as soon as you cast DWT trance making it optional to use so there is optimization possible with it still and you're not forced you to use it at the same time as you press DWT. There are many suggestions for this and I'd be happy with most. I personally want Bahamut to have more movies similar to FBT, but I don't think that would be implmeneted anytime soon.

*Do you see how pointless insults are and how little they accomplish in a conversation? They add nothing and accomplish nothing, unless you want to get really creative and call someone a ham sandwich or something.

Don't make ridiculous comments like:

I would be comfortable calling Stormblood's iteration the worst caster job I have ever played in an MMO because of how broken it was.

Calling a well functioning and popular job "broken" just cause you didnt like it tells me you "werent very good at it" on that basis alone. That was my comment to you. There was nothing inherintly "broken" about SMN. If you're going to call a job "broken" which was one of the strongest jobs and loved by many, you're going to get called out for it. My advice would be to play a job well before calling it "broken" and try to understand that things DON'T have to be used for their entire duration for them to make sense. There are cases in other jobs when you cut things short to make a gain - the same was true in SMN with regards to DWT.

I think you just need to accept that when its optimal to do so, players WILL cut the duration of burst phases or other abilities. There are numerous examples of this in fights like missing a holy spirit inside a requiscat window for paladin. It just so happened with SMN, to align with buffs (aswell as being optimal in of itself until you figure until you figure out the latest aetherflow you could achieve with your team) you cut the opening DWT short. This was just smart play.

As for suggestions, I posted some of my own in the other thread:

http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/t...=1#post5131945

I think we agree on some ideas but I will never believe that the way DWT is now is better than how it was before.