Summoner Early Post-Launch Feedback at level 80

[Flana]

Make Titan's a strong AoE Raid Shield.

Honestly this doesn't really accomplish anything unless massive aoe's are going out at 120s intervals. No one is going to want to sit on Enkindle just waiting for a raidbuster, and it will never be needed unless something has gone horribly wrong since healers have so much mitigation and healing now. If they're going to make Titan any kind of niche its only chance is probably severe personal support. Mountain Buster should be single target and at least have an interrupt on it if not a stun (preferably both, since monsters can be immune to stun and still have interrupt-able spells). His Enkindle is always going to be awkward, but something like an aoe buff area for you or a heavy+slow for enemies caught in it might help him eek out a niche.

Sure you're never going to take him into raids, but you weren't going to do that anyways. This way he'll at least have more use soaking damage for solo shenanigans in old content or greater control in future exploratory content where individual mobs can be more threatening.

I feel like Demi summons should be fire and forget like Auto Turret/Queen and be more cinematic and deal huge bursts of damage. I'd love summons to get back on that massive attack status. Give appropriate cooldowns and watch your Dragon throw out 100k on the boss.

I agree, Bahamut should never have done anything more than show up and cast Teraflare for huge damage. It would have been thematic and avoided so many problems that the brain dead lizard still has.

[CecMiller]

Personally I'd love Aetherflow available pre-pull back if the alternative is our current energy drain.

That said, improvements to the old system are always possible whether we had a "hide" ability from ninja to reset our Aetherflow button or we were just naturally given 3 stacks on death.

I'd personally love if deathflare was Direct hit Crit to make it feel more "potent". I also whish our demi moves had "higher potency" abilities potency and trade damage elsewhere. The main argument against this is how dependant we would become on getting those demi-summons out, but would it hurt to have higher than effectively 520 potency on SMN? Especially for our demi summon super moves which are weaker than Fire 4's. Through 2 usages, they total around 1040 potency but that's less than 2*300*1.8*1.15 from 2x Fire 4. Further on this line of thought, I always though that the "Akhmorns" from both demisummons could be a bit different. Bahamut could do the "spam" version (see nidhogg/or ucob bahamut) at reduced potency after the first one, where as Revelation from Phoenix could be more powerful but also only go off once (like morn afah but with 2 charges).

I don't think it would OP to give bahamut a damage up buff for the SMN only. I think its problematic if its suggested it was a party buff. I think 1 is more than enough personally and we're not exactly a job focused around delivering party buffs. A DWT 10% magic bonus like effect would be good however.

Rather than physick, I think drain as a defensive tool might be more in theme with a job like SMN if we were wanting more defensive capability (titan egi shield is ridiculously strong).

I just think egi assaults in general should be more meaningful than "just" ruin 4 generators than they feel like they are now.

[RadicalPesto]

The entire aetherflow system feels entirely vestigial on summoner right now. The fact it's not tied to the trance rotation at all makes it feel wholly disconnected, like it should've just been done away with and become solely a Scholar mechanic. Fester was never thematically very Summoner-y (being tied to the Poison mage identity that they've been gradually abandoning), and at this point it feels that, if Egi Assaults weren't so clunky, they should just completely replace Aetherflow as Fester as far as APM filler and potency goes.

[CecMiller]

I think Shadowbringer's iteration is the worst I've seen of SMN after 4.0 SMN issues. I started playing since HW and I loved that SMN. I played SB SMN and it grew on me after the 4.1 changes.

I condensed everything and made sure to give even more feedback here: http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/t...r-for-5.08-5.1

RE: Aetherflow as in your post.

I definitely want to use this outside of combat. You talk of needlessly spammy openers, but the current opener is worse. I just checked my logs from logs via CPM requirements - the only difference was Aetherflow actions were considerably stronger back then and so much better to have "spammed" and the current one requires more CPM. Right now, they're not too far off egi assault power levels who's ruin 4's are used further into the opener inside bahamut as a requirement for 8 WW.

"The tag of “cannot be used outside of combat” feels bad in every situation. Too bad that add pack died before you could refresh Aetherflow. I don't see why we shouldn't bee able to use this when Sharpcast (BLM), Acceleration (RDM), Standard step (DNC), Mudras (NIN) all can be used out of combat. These can all be used pre-pull in some fashion and require some form of countdown. We don't have to wait if we're given something akin to what ninja has in the form of "hide".

If you want to reduce the "spammyness" of openers, consider deleting egi assaults in general. Further, the ability to refresh Aetherflow outside of combat increase our downtime power when looking at things from an AOE standpoint in a dungeon as you gain access to more painflares. The opener is already busy and I would personally trade egi assaults for Aetherflow actions in a heartbeat.

It is clear that this SMN iteration is not popular as it is the least played job in normal eden and trials after ninja:
(Sort by parses via clicking on parses column name at the bottom)

Eden Normal

Trials

It is carried in the savage logs by players who thought it was a safe option for progression via a raise. I suspect those numbers will also fall in time.

Stormblood SMN was a far superior version of SMN than shadowbringers. Shadowbringers did some things right, don't get me wrong. But it got a LOT of stuff wrong in the process. I'm not happy with the shadowbringers iteration at all.

[Flana]

RE: Aetherflow as in your post.

I definitely want to use this outside of combat. You talk of needlessly spammy openers, but the current opener is worse. I just checked my logs from logs via CPM requirements - the only difference was Aetherflow actions were considerably stronger back then and so much better to have "spammed" and the current one requires more CPM. Right now, they're not too far off egi assault power levels who's ruin 4's are used further into the opener inside bahamut as a requirement for 8 WW.

If you want to reduce the "spammyness" of openers, consider deleting egi assaults in general. Further, the ability to refresh Aetherflow outside of combat increase our downtime power when looking at things from an AOE standpoint in a dungeon as you gain access to more painflares. The opener is already busy and I would personally trade egi assaults for Aetherflow actions in a heartbeat.

Just making Aetherflow stacks obtainable out of combat will make the opener worse. Even if you completly deleted Egi Assault as a compromise youre only losing 2 ogcds. That's a single gcd's worth of weaving. That would change nothing about the 'spammy' nature of the opener.

There is also the considerable difference between SB and ShB design in Dreadwyrm Trance. You still had to ram everything out as fast as possible, including dumping Deathflare and the entire opening Trance after only 2 gcds to get rolling for the fight. If you continued to use it you were screwing yourself out of damage. This is not a problem with Shadowbringers's Summoner, as you can comfortably fit every ogcd you need to cast into the Dreadwyrm Trance and opening Demi-Summon. I find it far more easy to deal with just because everything neatly fits into that first Dreadwyrm Trance.

It is clear that this SMN iteration is not popular as it is the least played job in normal eden and trials after ninja

This is irrelevant to my point. I don't play Summoner because it is or is not popular. I play it because I like what it is. That's my feedback to the developers.

Stormblood SMN was a far superior version of SMN than shadowbringers.

I would hard disagree with that statement. 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. Egi's and Bahamut were riddled with command latency. Bahamut could literally not Ahk Morn sometimes. You are required to waste your raid utility to reach maximum damage because Addle procs wyrmwave, if it actually addled anything important you were lucky. Let's not forget that despite needing to spam Ruin II, Demi-Bahamut was actually the least mobile phase just because of how bad his AI could get if you moved away from him. Devotion was a sad mess of buffs that you never used 'optimally', just mash it on cooldown because damage is king. Dreadwyrm Trance and Aetherflow's interactions where such a cluttered mess the most optimal way to open a fight was to spam everything, go into Trance just for a maximum of 2 gcds before dumping the rest of a 10% damage buff because you needed to use Aetherflow that badly. It was a complete mess of backwards logic and fighting against sluggish pet AI no matter what you did. I would never call 4.X Summoner good. I would call it tolerable at best. Summoner is still dealing with issues that Stormblood introduced. Demi's still follow you around and still cause ability ghosting. Because of the Bio/Miasma and Tri-Disaster changes, DoTs involve basically no decision making, have no mechanical impact on any part of the kit outside of the dummy check, and are trivially easy to manage despite still taking up a noticeable part of the power budget.

These are the reasons why I do not think Stormblood's design was good for the job. If you enjoyed it despite these, or because the things that I take major issue with just weren't a big deal, we'll just have to agree to disagree. You're not wrong for liking Stormblood's iteration, I'm just explaining why I think it was terrible for the job. At least we can agree that HW Summoner was best Summoner.

[CecMiller]

Just making Aetherflow stacks obtainable out of combat will make the opener worse. Even if you completly deleted Egi Assault as a compromise youre only losing 2 ogcds. That's a single gcd's worth of weaving. That would change nothing about the 'spammy' nature of the opener.

There is also the considerable difference between SB and ShB design in Dreadwyrm Trance. You still had to ram everything out as fast as possible, including dumping Deathflare and the entire opening Trance after only 2 gcds to get rolling for the fight. If you continued to use it you were screwing yourself out of damage. This is not a problem with Shadowbringers's Summoner, as you can comfortably fit every ogcd you need to cast into the Dreadwyrm Trance and opening Demi-Summon. I find it far more easy to deal with just because everything neatly fits into that first Dreadwyrm Trance.

You say this and yet our opener is still "spammy". At least you acknowledge it would be less spammy were egi assaults to be deleted in trade of it - you would weave less thereby making it less "spammy". No matter what you do, summoner openers will be like this due to the amount of OGCD's we have and reducing it only helps. If you're playing Summoner properly, you'd also know you have to cut DWT short for bahamut, outside of the opener, to get it under buffs due to the 1 min cd of DWT which aligns with buffs in general and trick attack when its relevant again. You are still screwing yourself out of dps by not dumping it early. Previously it mattered more, specifically for the opener, because Aetherflow was the cog in our rotation and mattered the most and its why we wanted to exit DWT. Even if you had to deathflare early, you were still weaving with Ruin 2's. 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.

This is irrelevant to my point. I don't play Summoner because it is or is not popular. I play it because I like what it is. That's my feedback to the developers.

My feedback to the developers is that the current iteration is seeing the 2nd lowest play rate of all the jobs from the casual playerbase. It was more a statement that, overall, most people who play the job have gone elsewhere as they are not satisfied with the job. I'm glad you're enjoying the job, but we can see more positive changes in the future.

I would hard disagree with that statement. 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. Egi's and Bahamut were riddled with command latency. Bahamut could literally not Ahk Morn sometimes.

Stormblood's iteration was not by any means "broken" - calling it that is incredibly disingenuous. Me and many others enjoyed the "flow" of the kit in all areas of content. Calling it broken just says to me you werent very good at it. It was one of the strongest jobs in all areas of content and I enjoyed it in particular in ultimates where it shined the best.

Its true that there was a delay in commands for garuda with regards to contagion due to her cast times - getting ifrit egi to do his moves was more responsive as he did not have to "cast". Bahamut works the same as now (actually he got worse with regards to the first wyrmwave) so its arguablly worse. Akhmorn works in the exact same way. if you move after pressing Akhmorn and bahamut is following you, he will not cast it until you cast Ruin 2 or Ruin 3 to trigger a Wyrmwave and thus telling him to stand still.

You are required to waste your raid utility to reach maximum damage because Addle procs wyrmwave, if it actually addled anything important you were lucky. Let's not forget that despite needing to spam Ruin II, Demi-Bahamut was actually the least mobile phase just because of how bad his AI could get if you moved away from him. Devotion was a sad mess of buffs that you never used 'optimally', just mash it on cooldown because damage is king

Yes, you could "waste" addle (its really a tradeoff) for a wyrmwave instead of mitigation, but it was not neccessary to achieve maximum wyrmwaves depending on your GCD recast timer and if your healers asked for you to save it, you save it. Though I do agree here - it was a bad call to make Bahamut respond to addle in particular. Bahamut responding to Aetherflow actions only would have been better.

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.

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. It has become a bit harder to use at this moment due to the way it lines up with phoenix and we're forced to delay phoenix for devotion party buff. This needs to be fixed. This is worse in shadowbringers easily as we now have 20 less seconds in a 2 minute time span where we can use devotion due to FBT. It is also arguably the weakest 3 minute cooldown out there. Monk has a 90s version for physical only and can get 2 uses in the time we get 1 making it easily stronger due to just how many jobs use physical damage.

Dreadwyrm Trance and Aetherflow's interactions where such a cluttered mess the most optimal way to open a fight was to spam everything, go into Trance just for a maximum of 2 gcds before dumping the rest of a 10% damage buff because you needed to use Aetherflow that badly.

Trance and Aetherflow didnt even interact. You couldn't even use aetherflow actions inside trance as it was a pre-requisite to use them. Though this could easily have been rectified by removing the lockout and would have been a nice return to HW era of optimization.

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.

There was nothing wrong with how it worked back then and you will not convince me that ending DWT at every point outside of the opener due to buffs like litany, chain, trick, voice etc is somehow better than ending it early once in the opener.

It was a complete mess of backwards logic and fighting against sluggish pet AI no matter what you did. I would never call 4.X Summoner good. I would call it tolerable at best. Summoner is still dealing with issues that Stormblood introduced. Demi's still follow you around and still cause ability ghosting. Because of the Bio/Miasma and Tri-Disaster changes, DoTs involve basically no decision making, have no mechanical impact on any part of the kit outside of the dummy check, and are trivially easy to manage despite still taking up a noticeable part of the power budget.

No it wasn't a complete mess of backwards logic - you just didnt like it. Yes, pet AI was sluggish with regards to garuda because of her cast times though you could work around it with smart play. If that was made responsive, most of my complaints went out of the window as it was an important party buff that wasn't responsive enough. Pet's being more responsive in Shadowbringers is a welcome change, but there is more to be done here. Ruin 4's should be given instantly and devotion should be cast instantly to prevent ghosting issues. Further, fix bahamuts AI for the first wyrmwave.

It's fine if you disliked the iteration in Stormblood. I know myself and many others enjoyed it and would very much welcome a return to that era over Shadowbringers SMN which is provably unpopular with the masses. I'm not sure what to say if you think dots are trivial to manage. Yes, 30s made them easier to apply but we require far more rigid timing to get them on our target due to the way the trances work. Our dependency on them works against us on fights like E4 Savage mode when the jails appear. Dots have a massive impact on all our GCD's and it feels bad. There is never a situation I say, "boy, I'm so glad my GCD's are stronger due to dots", but there are plenty of situations in fates/hunts/low hp adds/boss transitions 5-10s after your 30s dots expire where I think to myself, "boy, I absolutely hate this change".

These are the reasons why I do not think Stormblood's design was good for the job. If you enjoyed it despite these, or because the things that I take major issue with just weren't a big deal, we'll just have to agree to disagree. You're not wrong for liking Stormblood's iteration, I'm just explaining why I think it was terrible for the job. At least we can agree that HW Summoner was best Summoner.

Thats fine, but I just want to point out the areas where you were exagerrating or how your argument about a "spammy" opener being a large complaing completely falls apart when you consider what Shadowbringers is. Spammy openers is part of SMN at this point due to the plethopra of OGCD's it has. The only thing I ask from SE is to make them meaningful ones and one way to do that is to improve the general damage of Egi Assaults. Some people like the increased CPM requirement from Stormblood, some don't. Shadowbringers SMN is if far worse than Stormblood SMN in 4.1+ and its why many others, not just myself, are hoping for positive changes that bring us back to how things were before rather than the "rigid" structure everything follows now.

Being able to use trance and aetherflow actions smartly, timing your own usage around movement, add phases or quick bursts was an example of player skill and the flexibility felt really really good. Right now, not only is it brain dead on cooldown usage, but not doing so is extremely punishing. It just feels a whole lot worse.

[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.

[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.

[Shougun]

I've played some more summoner and just wanted to add some more opinions / feelings.

Although with a tl;dr- I think so long as they keep emphasis and or increase emphasis on primal related content while making the job mechanically smoother and fun then it's good. Any change that lowers the emphasis of primals (without replacing it with another, even if the emphasis is purely visual) I think would be a not good change for summoner.

Some random maybe semi-reasonable and vague desires:

• Would like to see egi weaving become smoother where possible, and I'm sure there are many ways to do that including not even touching the egi system and doing stuff to other parts of the job- so I don't have a huge preference. One thought was that they have a minor cooldown but can be cast even during the cast of another spell. In this way you could be casting ruin and get off an egi assault, but you'd only do one (as cooldown would prevent you from triple lol). Cooldown can also act as a means for more damage on the egi attack and a literal stop on how much weaving you could be expected to accomplish lol. Just having goals that there is little (preferably no pause) / delay / stuttering, but I do like the idea of egi assaults .
  
• Summoning Titan egi gives the caster a shield (without delay, or at least very very short delay), this allows summoner to shield themselves with the titan theme on demand even when they're without egi assault. This effect can be on cooldown to prevent spamming (effect triggers once every 30 seconds or something, or whatever else to manage spam like egi costing mp to summon if you spam the summon in a short interval- also keeping in mind spam summoning would drop your dps too). I would suggest that perhaps the other egi also have some sort of bonus idea too, to encourage some cycling but this is not needed (could just be a special of titan egi). Now you can change Titan egi's secondary assault or just leave it similar, I was thinking it could be cool to have it be a shield built from your damage (while the buff is active). Like damage dealt while earthen shield is up turns into a shield on summoner (X% damage converted to a shield for Y seconds, refreshing of course on cast). It would be exciting, I think, if the effect looks a bit like cover (Paladin) and you give Titan-egi that shielded Hp. This would make it feel like Titan is taking the damage for you, a bit like how it felt before (rather than you're taking it yourself, which feels a bit less magey). This would allow Titan to "tank for you" like before but maintain the fact it doesn't really (there is no enmity or titan to heal, it'd be untargetable bar of hp that's covered you).
  
• All of egi's (specifically Ifrit's and some demi moves) attacks and spells cause them to lunge forward to connect their attack [if they need to]. A boss running around shouldn't be able to outrun ifrit unless that's part of the mechanic of the boss (being so fast you can't chase). Egi/Demi should initiate what they're told to do successfully asap, at any point and placement in the arena. One idea mentioned below was that if too far away the Egi will turn into a ruin like projectile of the color of their element and launch themselves at the target and explode out of that projectile with whatever skill you queued (for times when your target is like halfway or more across the room).
  
• Combine buttons that cannot be possibly used outside of each other and match in theme. Like some of the demi/enkindle of stuff doesn't really need to be separate. (cooldowns of combined abilities don't need to be shared, where important, but the slots themselves could take great advantage out of this).
  
• It's nice that the skill tells you that the egi will cast it, but I don't think that is a good reason not to show what the skill does on your tooltip. So it should say that egi casts it and then it should tell you what it does. "casts enkindle, does 800 potency". I feel it's unnecessarily hidden/tucked away information, I hope this can be adjusted so the skills don't feel like a secret you have to look up and memorize.
  
• Devotion can be "cast" by the egi but that the aoe is around yourself (like a cure III on white mage is cast by them but the aoe is around the target). Massive range (to prevent ifrit from running back to target you).
  
• Increase reliability and speed at which damage from egi assault is applied (less often/no casting egi assault to see the boss vanish the skill go on cooldown but no damage triggers).
  
• Aethertrail regenerate outside of combat. If both then over an interval of time (like mp), and if only one then perhaps instantly at the end of combat you regenerate up to one and only one.
  
• Physick has a moderate cooldown, maybe no cast time (depends on cooldown/potency/cost), scales with intelligence, and heals more than a vercure but cannot be used as often (at all). Still has a mana cost (maybe make it cost more too, such that using it too often, like Resurrection, will put you into negative mana upkeep). May also consider themeing it, so Titan has a shield and cure that totals more than Ifrit's strong cure (but the cure alone is lower), and Garuda has an aoe cure (obviously weaker in potency than ifrit or titan's but AoE means potentially stronger).

Experimental / disruptive / pipe dreams (many conflicts):

• Make Resurrection instant cast, remove swiftcast, and give Resurrection a cooldown of however long swift cast cooldown is perhaps +/- (still has mana cost).
  
• Keeping the job mechanically the same.. change the theme of all the spells to primal. Visually everything is primal related, and perhaps specifically relating to what you've got summoned. For example the visual / name and concept of bio / miasma changes to something else.

Random rework idea:

1. Change bio and miasma to like spur and rouse sort of concept named spells that you cast on your egi, buffing them (no target spell, they're just cast). May have some play with the spur and rouse buff mechanic (replacing the dots) by having certain abilities remove certain buff's duration and other abilities increase it, making it a sort of black and white magic balance act to keep your egi full powered.. but this experimental idea is experimental so.. lol.. /shrug
2. Ruin now triggers attacks for your egi (like painting the target), some damage can come from the painting of target but a lot of it will come from each egi's unique response to the attack. Ifrit will do strong single target attack, Garuda an AoE, and Titan can do less damage than Ifrit but adds a short shield on you (like Garuda tier damage but it's single target). Egi Assault animations might be used for this ruin attack, in that case new egi assault attacks might need to be added. If the ruin target is too far away for the egi to reach (attack) then the egi will turn into a ruin like sphere projectile and launch themselves at the ruin'd target and appear there (mostly for Ifrit and Titan).
3. Outburst like the above but adjusted for AoE.
4. Bane will name change and cause each egi to do something different in an aoe, ifrit will cause high damage in a very low radius, garuda moderate damage in a very large radius, and titan will moderately damage everything in a moderate radius and apply a light shield to allies based on each enemy hit (so large trash packs would be a large shield and a boss would basically be a very small shield).
5. Fester and painflare may be changed to act as different types of baby enkindles or they can remain as is.
6. Like Pheonix Bahamut will have new Ruin / Outburst.
7. [So nearly everything is coming from egi, the structure if vaguely similar (though dots have been changed quite a bit), and ideally egi respond exceptionally reliably for this lol]

Experimental Continued:

• Even more pipe dream- move away from dots and scholar structure entirely and into everything primal related. Disconnect the two jobs, so that arcanist moves into scholar but summoner only uses arcanist as a quest requirement like paladin uses white mage. Making the job like a combination of dissida Yuna and FFXI summoner (no subjob).
  
• Look more into that Tempus idea Dyvid had, I imagine some really goofy (in a good way) could be put in that for future expansions. Alexander come down here and do something ridiculous lol.

Minor QoL:

• When you get too far away from your summon the summon should be dragged to you, whichever egi is active should be dragged around through instances and other content walls (doesn't unsummon). If possible, this is just a QoL but I'd like it - whichever egi is up is up at all times and is never unsummoned and is dragged to you.
  
• The icons for each egi being changed to represent who they are (rather than carbuncle, carbuncle, ifrit, which feels a bit funny that one has a proper icon and two don't lol).

Anyway, like the above tl;dr so long as they keep adding primal elements (I don't care for the arcanist side of things, but don't want people to feel like the job abandoned them either lol), and more points if it's grandiose primal elements, and the job gets tuned to be even more fun and smooth / that work in and pay off is fair then I think they're doing really well. Whatever that is. I've seen a lot of cool ideas in the thread too, and I'm aware some of what I said is basically some of that, but just having started leveling it up again those were some of my thoughts.